With Crystal Cleanse now more or less wrapped up, its time to move on to the next Realm event: Jack's Battleground Blitz
Here's where we are:
And if we extrapolate:
The pace line aims for one billion points as the target by the end of the season.
So we're below the pace again. Are we going to fall short again? Actually, I think this is much more encouraging than Crystal Cleanse. With Crystal Cleanse, there was a big burst of effort and then a drop off to a much lower rate of openings, which would be consistent with the most enthusiastic players opening a ton of crystals early, and everyone else opening at a much slower rate throughout the event. That wasn't necessarily what had to happen, but it isn't entirely bonkers to conceive of either.
Battlegrounds is different, both in concept and in the data. The data does not show the same burst followed by drop off. Instead it shows a relatively stable point earning rate throughout the first week. Well, stable in a daily sense. In an hourly sense, BG activity is very spiky:
It is interesting to see most of the BG matches taking place in the mid day (relative to the continental US), not at night, although that actually explains a lot of my experiences finding matches in Battlegrounds (as I'm -10 GMT). But yeah, it does bounce all over the place. So let's look at points per day, and superimpose a trend line in there. With so little (daily) data it isn't terribly useful as a predictor, but it can at least tell us in which direction the trend is going overall, since that's kinda difficult to eyeball in the hourly rate graph:
Slightly upward. And with Battlegrounds, this makes sense. For one thing, we should expect participation to increase as the season goes on, because many players - including many of the lower progress players - wait until later in the season to start playing, to allow VT tiers to shake themselves out. Second, with each passing day more players are entering GC, and GC points are substantially higher for every GC match. So we should actually suspect that the first week point earning rates are the floor, not the ceiling as they were with Crystal Cleanse.
Given that, the analysis suggests that our current season trajectory puts us somewhere *higher* than 800 million points for the event. That is well within striking distance of one billion, and we should see that trend line move upward with each week. *If* participation increases over time like I believe it normally does and *if* activity continues to maintain similar levels to previous high volume seasons, then I think one billion is a viable target for the Battleground Blitz.
It is really up to us to do what we have been able to do in the past, keep up participation, keep up activity, and not get caught up in the naysayers that somehow have become convinced the targets are impossible. They aren't impossible. In fact, so long as we don't collapse in a manner unusual relative to previous seasons, I'd say we have a 75% chance to exceed one billion at our current extrapolated pace.
In summary: Crystal Cleanse week one
BGBlitz week one
That's the difference in this event. Keep doing what we're doing, and we go up from here. We'll see where we are in week two.
