Best Of

Why was it low key animated like that one gif of Spiderman and lizard

yea its extended. i wish they didnt extended it tho.

@DNA3000 just want to say thank you (again) for a great coverage of the banquet…

I’ve to say, although I’m glad the event was a blast, worry about the spending (hope it’s a waste o brain cell)… anyway for the rest of us happy new year…

Okay, back to grinding in the arena I go

You wish other players weren’t able to get rewards they earned because it’s bugged?

BTW op it is against forum tos to post screen shots of ppl you are accusing of cheating let alone naming them in forums just fyi

It looked like a chewed up Bazooka bubble gum ..

love the empathy for players that are affected by a bug that would otherwise potentially see them lose out on realm milestone rewards 👍

Last update for January 1:

We're just over 8 million away from milestone 63. Our scoring rate has dropped to its typical overnight pace of about 9 million/hour. Estimated time to reach milestone 63: 3am Pacific.

The next milestone is 76 million beyond that. To reach it in seven hours would require about 11 million per hour. We do not normally score that high between 3am and 10am Pacific when the event nominally ends. So at the moment it would be a stretch to reach it before the end of the Banquet. Our most likely trajectory ends up around 7.28 billion, 13 million short of milestone 64. But that's small enough that it is still within the realm of possibility to hit. It would just take out of the ordinary scoring in the middle of the night when that rarely happens.

Of course, whether anybody cares will depend on what it is.

So the person I was thinking of when I wrote this was actually Crashed, who when we were discussing banquet milestones on the CCP server said words to the effect of "there's a reward I really want [in those top milestones] but I don't think we will actually reach." I'm pretty sure it was this milestone they were referring to. He wasn't the only one: a couple other devs echoed that sentiment. Because they just design them, but they have no control over whether we reach them. No Stark Foundation bail outs this time (or likely ever again). This was all on us.

Which we actually pulled off. Even I was skeptical until we had the double track bounce, and then the SBC offer bounce, and then the radiance bounce. Three days in a row of exceptionally high scoring put us in range of milestone 63. We scored so high, in fact, that we came very close to reaching the absolute highest stretch milestone Kabam initially planned for. We came this close to forcing them to convene a design chat to sketch out more milestones. Or maybe they did and I just don't know about it. We must have been giving them a bit of a scare there in the end. Compared to last year, scoring stayed strong throughout the last week:

And if there was any doubt we're a player base of procrastinators:

Who waits until the last hour of the event to open a ton of crystals? Actually, my guess is that giant spike of points right at the end is in large part high scorers jockeying for position by waiting until near the end to blast open a ton of crystals, just in case their alliance has scoring moles leaking data. You can see that unlike every overnight period in the last eight days (and throughout the event actually) the first half of the day has more points, then it slows down at night (each vertical line represents 10am Pacific on successive days). So every day, the second half of the day is low. Except last night, when scoring went up, and by a lot. And then it reached a crescendo this morning about an hour before the end.

Some of those are almost certainly stragglers, but there's too much points for all of it to be procrastination. I think we're seeing the last enthusiasm signal: the big spenders, and even many medium spenders, going down in a blaze of glory units. My guess: you're looking at about $300k USD of spending in just the last 45 minutes of banquet. This did not happen last year - at least not to this same degree as far as I am aware.

I guess the biggest problem for Kabam now is how to at least match this level of energy next year. Everyone is going to be looking forward to banquet 2026. I mean: check this out:

This thread has 116k thread views and counting. The only thread I'm aware of that has more is the old school Meme thread (which has about a million thread views). This thing has been attracting some serious eyeballs (which I can't monetize, darn). Popular I may be, but not this popular. That's all you guys. Your enthussiasm. Your attention. And yes, your spending. You guys were really interested in the banquet this year, and my occasional Tom-foolery. I do appreciate all the kind words of support, but I do this for all you guys. If it made banquet just a little more fun for some of you, that's all I need to hear to pencil my laptop in for 2026.