Battleground Blitz Realm Event: Final Event Data (lots and lots and lots of data)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,693 Guardian
Due to technical reasons (BG rank reward delays) and some human issues (jetlag) I was only able to finalize my analysis, or rather my initial analysis of the Battleground Blitz today. So a day late, here's where we ended up.
Final score: 1,193,487,854, just short of the 1.2 billion milestone, about where we were projected to land. If we eliminate the Stark donations, actual player effort looked like this:
Adjusted final: 1,023,487,854.
I should say, that removes the 170 million donations that were obvious: according to Kabam Crashed, there were 200 million total donations. I have a hunch where they are, but they are small enough that it would be difficult to prove where they were injected, and this is compounded by the fact I spent half the event in Japan, so the gaps in my data due to sleep encompass the entirety of when donations would be made (if you don't collect data bracketing a donation closely enough and the donation is small enough, it can get "averaged out" of the data). But if we remove an additional 30 million points from the player total, we get a final player contribution of 993,487,854, just under one billion points.
Here's approximately how many points we put up per day:
Day 24 is when we reached the one billion milestone. On average, points per day trended upward until that day, then dropped off somewhat. I think if those other 30 million points were not included, players would have still reached one billion given that. Whether players would have reached one billion with *none* of the donations is harder to say, because the donations did not just add points, they improved sentiment. We can see how player activity jumps upward dramatically in the lead up to one billion on days 22, 23, and 24.
Because daily activity bounces up and down it can be difficult to see overall trends. One thing we can do is remove one source of daily fluctuation: objective reset days. On days where BG objectives reset activity was always higher on average than on the alternating days. We can calculate the average improvement in scores and remove it from the data to try to see what the overall trends were outside of that signal:
Some interesting patterns emerge. We see a relatively low level of activity in week one, until there's a sudden dramatic jump upwards in activity. Then things settle back down more or less in week three, with scores slowly trending upwards, and then another jump upwards peaking on day 24 when we hit one billion, then a significant drop off again. My guess is that we're seeing four separate things going on here. First, an overall slow rise in activity from week one to near the end of week four, corresponding to roughly how most BG seasons go, with activity rising throughout the season. Second, a big burst of activity in week two as players start accumulating large amounts of elder marks from unlocked milestones they want to burn off, that lasts until most players have used most of them. And then a big push near the end when the one billion milestone is in sight. And finally, once it is achieved, players start slowing down or coasting from that point as they reach the 5k minimum to unlock all of the milestones.
So just exactly how many players participated overall? Well, I specifically put up 4 points (the bare minimum) on an alt to try to get the lowest possible rank. That rank was: 314500. That implies at least 314500 players participated (here I'm using "players" and "accounts" interchangeably for reasons I've discussed previously). It could be slightly more, because it is possible there were other players who scored 4 points and ranked lower than my alt, but I doubt it was many of them. This number is slightly higher than what I believe to be the previous highest participation level in BG (~300k).
Of these, at least 119,723 players scored at least 5k points and earned all of the unlocked milestones (5011 points received that rank). That's way more than I thought would score that high, and implies that it wasn't that hard to so do: even lower progress players had to be doing it, because I don't think we have 120k Paragons and Valiants grinding out BG. Especially considering how many players made it to GC this season:
98311.
The number of players in Uru 3 at the end of the season was 89611. As there are 8500 players in the ranks above that, this means 98311 players made it to GC. As far as I am aware, this completely blows away all previous GC brackets. I don't recall seeing more than 40k in GC ever, and it is typically closer to 30k. And from my experience in GC with both main and alt, it was a wide range of account progress in there. My main made it in about half way through the season, and my TB alt marathon grinded into it from zero in the last week, getting in two days before season end. I'd say the average account in Vibranium and Uru 3 was somewhere around mid tier Cav strength.
There was some discussion on the forums if people would continue to grind in GC, or if they would grind in VT and then just park in GC. We can actually determine to some degree if that was true or not by looking at ELO distributions:
This shows how many players had each ELO rating in the lower tiers of GC: mainly Uru 3 and a bit in Uru 2. An interesting thing to note is that when a player promotes from Vibranium 2 to Vibranium 1, they actually have to play at least one match in GC to qualify for Uru 3 rewards. So one is the minimum number of matches a player should play in GC (some do play zero, but then they don't qualify for GC rewards, so most don't make this mistake). If you play exactly one match, there are only two possibilities for your final rating: zero, or sixteen. So of course, these are the two highest ratings populations. The next most common rating is 32, which most players get for two wins in a row.. Then 48, and then it quickly gets blurry because some wins don't generate exactly 16 ratings points and some losses don't cost that amount, and the scores start to smear out as players play lots of matches.
But the number of players who play exactly one match *must* be less than the total number of players with zero and 16 rating. In fact, it must be less than that because there are more ways to score 16 than just win one (as well as zero). If we look at all the ratings around 16 we see there's a bump at 17 and 18 with about 2300 players in each bucket. They are players that won two and lost one, or similar, and ended up off by one or two ratings points. We can assume that there are probably a similar number of players who arrived at 16 by similar multiple matches, which means of the 7086 players with rating 16, about 4700 got there winning one match and the rest got there by more complicated paths. We then assume that for every one of those winners there was a loser at zero, and we end up with a rough estimate of about 9400 players that played one match in GC and then quit.
9400 out of 98000 means only a tiny fraction of players did this. Probably because many of them were not at 5k points yet, so had to keep grinding, but the implication is the playerbase did benefit significantly from the GC point bonus, because there were a significant number of matches being played in GC. In fact the rate at which the ELO curve quickly smooths out suggests the average number of matches being played by GC players was not small. The more matches being played, the more quickly ratings peaks get smoothed out in the data. And in fact by ELO 64 - roughly equivalent to four wins - the "resonances" around 16 basically disappear:
Overall, the data allows us to answer some basic questions about participation.
Did the realm event encourage more players to participate in BG? Yes, it seems so. But probably only slightly more than has participated in the highest participation seasons to date. Regardless, 314500 players is a lot of players, especially considering the game has perhaps just under a million players, and fewer than 700,000 players are likely to qualify to play BGs (you need to be uncollected or higher, and we have on the order of 785k players Proven and higher). Out of all the players currently playing the game about two thirds qualify to participate in BG, and the event drew in about half of them. We may simply be running into the practical limits of how many player Kabam can encourage to do anything. We have a diverse player population, they aren't all going to want to do the same stuff, and some will actively refuse to do certain things.
Did it encourage participants to play more? Yes, a lot more. More than twice as many players entered GC than at any time in the past as far as I am aware, and that's a strong proxy for overall playing and scoring. The average player scored 3159 points. This is a pretty high level of activity compared to previous seasons. Even if we hand the average player all 700 points from 48 hour objectives, that still is about 55 matches in VT at 50% win rate (2/3rds of the players remained in VT for the entire season).
It is interesting to me that the average player scoring can be replicated by a player playing about four matches every other day and scooping up most or all of the periodic objectives. I'm not saying the average player did that, just that such a player would fall about where the average player performance was. The average player performance also did not come close to exhausting elder marks: 3159 would have unlocked milestone 13, and with it 5200 elder marks. That's enough for about 58 matches. This is more than the average matches played. This suggests to me the bottleneck to increasing player participation is not rewards, but time. Players were spending only so much time on BG, even to the point of throwing free marks - and free rewards - away.
Would I consider the event a success? Ah, that's the question. But the real question is: success at what? What was the event even trying to do? We can't judge if the event was a success or not, without first answering the question: what was it trying to do in the first place. That's not a data question, so I will leave that one for another post.
Final score: 1,193,487,854, just short of the 1.2 billion milestone, about where we were projected to land. If we eliminate the Stark donations, actual player effort looked like this:
Adjusted final: 1,023,487,854.
I should say, that removes the 170 million donations that were obvious: according to Kabam Crashed, there were 200 million total donations. I have a hunch where they are, but they are small enough that it would be difficult to prove where they were injected, and this is compounded by the fact I spent half the event in Japan, so the gaps in my data due to sleep encompass the entirety of when donations would be made (if you don't collect data bracketing a donation closely enough and the donation is small enough, it can get "averaged out" of the data). But if we remove an additional 30 million points from the player total, we get a final player contribution of 993,487,854, just under one billion points.
Here's approximately how many points we put up per day:
Day 24 is when we reached the one billion milestone. On average, points per day trended upward until that day, then dropped off somewhat. I think if those other 30 million points were not included, players would have still reached one billion given that. Whether players would have reached one billion with *none* of the donations is harder to say, because the donations did not just add points, they improved sentiment. We can see how player activity jumps upward dramatically in the lead up to one billion on days 22, 23, and 24.
Because daily activity bounces up and down it can be difficult to see overall trends. One thing we can do is remove one source of daily fluctuation: objective reset days. On days where BG objectives reset activity was always higher on average than on the alternating days. We can calculate the average improvement in scores and remove it from the data to try to see what the overall trends were outside of that signal:
Some interesting patterns emerge. We see a relatively low level of activity in week one, until there's a sudden dramatic jump upwards in activity. Then things settle back down more or less in week three, with scores slowly trending upwards, and then another jump upwards peaking on day 24 when we hit one billion, then a significant drop off again. My guess is that we're seeing four separate things going on here. First, an overall slow rise in activity from week one to near the end of week four, corresponding to roughly how most BG seasons go, with activity rising throughout the season. Second, a big burst of activity in week two as players start accumulating large amounts of elder marks from unlocked milestones they want to burn off, that lasts until most players have used most of them. And then a big push near the end when the one billion milestone is in sight. And finally, once it is achieved, players start slowing down or coasting from that point as they reach the 5k minimum to unlock all of the milestones.
So just exactly how many players participated overall? Well, I specifically put up 4 points (the bare minimum) on an alt to try to get the lowest possible rank. That rank was: 314500. That implies at least 314500 players participated (here I'm using "players" and "accounts" interchangeably for reasons I've discussed previously). It could be slightly more, because it is possible there were other players who scored 4 points and ranked lower than my alt, but I doubt it was many of them. This number is slightly higher than what I believe to be the previous highest participation level in BG (~300k).
Of these, at least 119,723 players scored at least 5k points and earned all of the unlocked milestones (5011 points received that rank). That's way more than I thought would score that high, and implies that it wasn't that hard to so do: even lower progress players had to be doing it, because I don't think we have 120k Paragons and Valiants grinding out BG. Especially considering how many players made it to GC this season:
98311.
The number of players in Uru 3 at the end of the season was 89611. As there are 8500 players in the ranks above that, this means 98311 players made it to GC. As far as I am aware, this completely blows away all previous GC brackets. I don't recall seeing more than 40k in GC ever, and it is typically closer to 30k. And from my experience in GC with both main and alt, it was a wide range of account progress in there. My main made it in about half way through the season, and my TB alt marathon grinded into it from zero in the last week, getting in two days before season end. I'd say the average account in Vibranium and Uru 3 was somewhere around mid tier Cav strength.
There was some discussion on the forums if people would continue to grind in GC, or if they would grind in VT and then just park in GC. We can actually determine to some degree if that was true or not by looking at ELO distributions:
This shows how many players had each ELO rating in the lower tiers of GC: mainly Uru 3 and a bit in Uru 2. An interesting thing to note is that when a player promotes from Vibranium 2 to Vibranium 1, they actually have to play at least one match in GC to qualify for Uru 3 rewards. So one is the minimum number of matches a player should play in GC (some do play zero, but then they don't qualify for GC rewards, so most don't make this mistake). If you play exactly one match, there are only two possibilities for your final rating: zero, or sixteen. So of course, these are the two highest ratings populations. The next most common rating is 32, which most players get for two wins in a row.. Then 48, and then it quickly gets blurry because some wins don't generate exactly 16 ratings points and some losses don't cost that amount, and the scores start to smear out as players play lots of matches.
But the number of players who play exactly one match *must* be less than the total number of players with zero and 16 rating. In fact, it must be less than that because there are more ways to score 16 than just win one (as well as zero). If we look at all the ratings around 16 we see there's a bump at 17 and 18 with about 2300 players in each bucket. They are players that won two and lost one, or similar, and ended up off by one or two ratings points. We can assume that there are probably a similar number of players who arrived at 16 by similar multiple matches, which means of the 7086 players with rating 16, about 4700 got there winning one match and the rest got there by more complicated paths. We then assume that for every one of those winners there was a loser at zero, and we end up with a rough estimate of about 9400 players that played one match in GC and then quit.
9400 out of 98000 means only a tiny fraction of players did this. Probably because many of them were not at 5k points yet, so had to keep grinding, but the implication is the playerbase did benefit significantly from the GC point bonus, because there were a significant number of matches being played in GC. In fact the rate at which the ELO curve quickly smooths out suggests the average number of matches being played by GC players was not small. The more matches being played, the more quickly ratings peaks get smoothed out in the data. And in fact by ELO 64 - roughly equivalent to four wins - the "resonances" around 16 basically disappear:
Overall, the data allows us to answer some basic questions about participation.
Did the realm event encourage more players to participate in BG? Yes, it seems so. But probably only slightly more than has participated in the highest participation seasons to date. Regardless, 314500 players is a lot of players, especially considering the game has perhaps just under a million players, and fewer than 700,000 players are likely to qualify to play BGs (you need to be uncollected or higher, and we have on the order of 785k players Proven and higher). Out of all the players currently playing the game about two thirds qualify to participate in BG, and the event drew in about half of them. We may simply be running into the practical limits of how many player Kabam can encourage to do anything. We have a diverse player population, they aren't all going to want to do the same stuff, and some will actively refuse to do certain things.
Did it encourage participants to play more? Yes, a lot more. More than twice as many players entered GC than at any time in the past as far as I am aware, and that's a strong proxy for overall playing and scoring. The average player scored 3159 points. This is a pretty high level of activity compared to previous seasons. Even if we hand the average player all 700 points from 48 hour objectives, that still is about 55 matches in VT at 50% win rate (2/3rds of the players remained in VT for the entire season).
It is interesting to me that the average player scoring can be replicated by a player playing about four matches every other day and scooping up most or all of the periodic objectives. I'm not saying the average player did that, just that such a player would fall about where the average player performance was. The average player performance also did not come close to exhausting elder marks: 3159 would have unlocked milestone 13, and with it 5200 elder marks. That's enough for about 58 matches. This is more than the average matches played. This suggests to me the bottleneck to increasing player participation is not rewards, but time. Players were spending only so much time on BG, even to the point of throwing free marks - and free rewards - away.
Would I consider the event a success? Ah, that's the question. But the real question is: success at what? What was the event even trying to do? We can't judge if the event was a success or not, without first answering the question: what was it trying to do in the first place. That's not a data question, so I will leave that one for another post.
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Comments
Final score: 1,193,487,854
Points scored by the players: 993,487,854
Points contributed by the Stark Foundation: 200,000,000
Total participants in the Blitz: 314500
Total players that achieved 5k or more: > 119723
Total players that made it to Gladiator Circuit: 98311
Average points per player: 3159
Average matches per player: in the vicinity of 55 matches.
Also, congratulations to Jacques Pain for becoming the second Bastion in MCOC with a final score of 193,869. Based on my calculations, this took over twelve hours per day every day, and a minimum spend of about $1946 USD, assuming he started with max inventory of Marks, plus the maximum 2100 season seeding bonus, plus the 6000 marks in milestones, and he bought units in the webstore using the most efficient path (the $200 USD package). The $1946 number is of course prorated.
Interesting coincidence: both Bastions managed to score about 200k points, both times with almost ludicrously bonkers levels of activity. Says something about how in demand that Bastion title is, to at least one of us every cycle.
This is what the second bastion guy has said in Line
Most will be around 5k- 6k my guess
Although I’m not sure I could afford the hospital bill if I went to Japan with my wife and then spent it in the hotel room grinding out Battleground matches.
I will say, however, there were a ton of scores clustered close to 5k. My main scored 5415 and landed in 43245 place. I’m aware of someone who scored 5460, just 45 points higher, that landed in 39283 place. Those 45 points separated us by almost 4000 places. Below me someone scored 5235 and landed in 62772 place. That’s a displacement of almost 20,000 spots with just 180 fewer points.
Between 5527 points and 5011 (the closest I have to 5k) there were at least 84480 players. So of the about 120k players that scored 5k and higher, over 70% of them scored within about 500 points of 5k. I don’t have an exact number, but I believe somewhere around 11k points would have probably put you in the top 1000 players. Anything above 10k and you’re in very rarified air. Someone posted on the forums placing 103 with a score just under 21k points. Between 21,000 points and 193,869 were only about one hundred players.
In Crystal Cleanse, the top four players were separated by 50% in total scoring (I was in fourth with about 120k, while Vern went over 180k). In open ended races like this, it is often the case that someone runs away with it, because usually no one knows precisely what the others are doing and thus cannot gauge how much effort is required. When I was asked how much points would be required to get Bastion in the Blitz I said 200k, kinda half joking, based on the idea that someone could spend about half the time grinding non-stop with a bottomless barrel of marks. Then I figured that was too unrealistic and revised my guess downward. But in fact, that wasn’t unrealistic at all. It is a ludicrous level of effort, but it only has to happen once.
As always @DNA3000 thanks for the analysis.
Whether we would have been sufficiently motivated to actually do it is a separate question, but that’s always the question with things like this. If it is doable, it’s up to the players to do it. You can say the game developers didn’t motivate you enough, but while there is some game design responsibility for managing expectations and motivations, ultimately we get what we strive for, and if we collectively decide not to try hard enough, that’s on us.
It can simultaneously be true that the game designers take responsibility for designing something insufficiently motivating, and yet still be 100% the responsibility of the players to fail to achieve the achievable. You can blame your teachers for not motivating you enough in school, and it can be true that some teachers are better at motivating students than others, and yet it can still be 100% true that if you don’t put in the effort you have no one to blame but yourself. Teachers can do better, but they are responsible to their employer, not the students. Students can also do better, and if they choose not to their failings are ultimately their own fault.
I personally am gonna skip the next BG season (including daily objectives) after I do the play 5 matches to get the backdated rewards, but I have never been one to play BG religiously..
It will be interesting if overall there is a significant amount of people who stop playing, especially for players who normally play every season.
Another interesting thing to note, but will be difficult to measure, is if this season encourages more lower progress players to participate. When they do, as this season they did, it collectively makes it much easier to progress, because when they flood the mode they start matching with each other, with all that implies. It’s a virtuous feedback loop, but it requires them to jump in en masse.
I’ll try to keep an eye out, although collecting data at this level of detail is a bit of an effort unto itself.
The 1B milestone was not realistic and barely achievable, irrespective of how it looks now with all the interventions. On top of this, it has created an expectation that the team will intervene in events if the players aren't trying enough. They should have let crystal cleanse event end normally and it would have been better if they had set original milestones up to 1B points with titan at around 750M.
In that context, it is disheartening to see one of the most influential voices in the game give an impression that the original milestones were reasonable. If that's the feedback going back to devs, it is inevitably going to lead to future events continuing to be overtuned and eventually a couple of failed events because expectations were too high from both sides (there won't be special crystal or Stark donations in every event). It might be better for everyone concerned to avoid that by setting realistic targets.
The two big donations, the noticeable ones, had two different effects. They had a subtle effect on encouraging players, which the data doesn't show because it is probably small, but it is probably there. But they had the cumulative effect of getting us close to one billion sooner, maybe five days sooner, and that effect was definitely noticeable. Our activity kicked into high gear on day 23. Without those donations we'd have been cutting it very close, and then the open question becomes: would we have begun pushing sooner to catch up, or too late to reach the finish line. We'll never know.
This is actually the primary reason why I'm not entirely happy with the Stark donations. They create this uncertainty in what the players can actually do. We can never know with certainty how things would have gone. I know why they did it, and in their place I might have done something similar, but I also know that the donations were a kind of compensation that our playerbase tends to get addicted to very fast.
I don't know how much the alliance milestones helped in the grand scheme of things. They were a nice to have, sure, and you could argue every little bit helps, but to be frank I barely noticed they were there. I'll take them, but I wasn't explicitly working towards them, and I'm not sure how many players were.
There's no question though that it all came down to how many players a) thought we would get to the Titan and b) were in a position to grind to 5k to get it. As I mentioned, at least 84480 players get to 5k and then more or less coasted there, stopping within about 500 points of that. That group of players right there were responsible for over 400 million of the ~one billion points we scored. The "5k-ers" were 27% of the total participants and ~43% of the total score. Both numbers are very big chunks of the total.
2. The statement you're quoting is in regards to whether it would be the player's fault *if* we didn't reach the one billion milestones, and I said that since it is clear we could have and would have the milestone clearly wasn't outside our reach, so in an alternate reality where we are the same players in the same situation but just didn't do it it would have been our fault. Because we did do it, we can't fault the devs for making it impossible to have done.
You are hung up on this idea that a "realistic" milestone is one that is so trivially obvious to hit that it is impossible for us to miss. In the other thread when you said "I don't think anyone is arguing milestones to be lowered to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players" and then you said "This could have been avoided by setting a realistic target. 800M would have been a tough but achievable target" I honestly stopping treating that like a serious discussion. Before the event started, it was a theoretical discussion whether one billion was a realistic target. But when reality speaks the rule is: reality is always realistic. The players scored 993.5 million on their own. We almost certainly would have scored more if we didn't unlock the one billion early. Reality says one billion was achievable. That should be the end of that particular line of discussion for any serious thinker.
As per originally intended scoring, we achieved somewhere around 800-850M on our own. In what was, in your own words a blockbuster season and participation exceeded all previous records. 750M as an original target with 1B as a stretch target, would have got us exactly same rewards as we did this season with the Stark donations and bonus objectives. It would have in no way been a trivial target.
I don't believe I have to say this out loud, but that completely misses the point of the event.
Second, the 50 points added to the win one objective was announced on September 24th, a full week before Season 22 started. Any changes made to milestone points or scoring before the event starts has to be counted as part of the event as implemented. The Stark donations were clearly altering the terms of the event after it launched, but the milestone realm points were there before the start of the event and thus part of the original design, before anyone had any data about the event. They were not reactions to game play or player scoring: they were not some admission the event was improperly tuned, they were just the devs changing their minds about points, and reacting to the discussion surrounding the event before it started.
Saying the devs made a mistake with the milestones because they "had to" add the objective points is like saying the milestones were too high because they "had to" add so many marks to the milestone rewards. That's not how these things are designed. We have to judge the fairness and reasonableness of the milestone points relative to the scoring of the event as it launched, not as it was first announced. Otherwise, the devs shouldn't announce anything until the day it launches, and quote this discussion as the rationale.
The performance should not count against the players is precisely what I'm saying. You are looking at record breaking engagement and saying that should serve as a barometer for event design. Saying the threshold should be slightly lower does not immediately make the milestones trivial. There is a big gap between overtuned to trivial, and reasonable is somewhere in between.
Also, saying the event performance was an outlier is precisely the point. We know, or at least Kabam knows, what participation actually looks like (I know they track it carefully). They know how participation rises and falls with differing season rewards and incentives. They can make reasonable predictions on how much higher participation is likely to go.
Yes, this was a blockbuster season in many respects, but not in all respects. As mentioned in my original post, while scoring was much higher, actual overall participation numbers in terms of total numbers of players participating, was not much higher than other high participation seasons. The highest previous season was probably around 300k-ish, and this season had 314500 players participating. So the *number* of players participating was predictable, insofar as it did not wildly exceed the envelope of BG player participation.
Scoring went up quite a bit per player, but a huge chunk of that were players shooting for 5k, and in concert GC. That was farr higher than in previous seasons, but that was the intent: to draw in a lot more activity from a lot larger pool of players that ordinarily don't push as hard. The rewards were not just juicy for players who normally reach GC, they were absolutely astounding for lower progress players less likely to push.
If you're saying Kabam should not have counted on all that extra play, then you're saying Kabam should incentivize a lot more play and then presume they are going to fail completely at actually generating more play.
And again, I'm just going to keep repeating this: we could argue if Kabam's guesses were right before the season started, but we have the data now: in retrospect, their guess was dead on. You can say they got lucky, but that's irrelevant. You can say they influenced the game play with Stark donations, and I concede that is a potential and ultimately unknowable effect. But what you can't say is that the goal was not a credible goal to expect the players to achieve, because they actually achieved it. *How* they were incentivized to achieve it is immaterial. They did it, and because they did it, no one can argue it was not doable, period.
Your definition of reasonable appears to be: if I want to try to push someone to do better, the reasonable expectation is they won't. Kabam assumed the realm event would cause players to do a lot more than normal and they were right. We will never know what would have happened if they hadn't added the Stark donations. We will never know what would have happened if they hadn't changed the design a week before launch. But what we do know, for certain, as an irrefutable fact, is that the players *could* have reached one billion points, because they all but did. They were incentivized to do it, they were psychologically encouraged to do it with the Stark donations, but they still did it.
They did it, so the goal of doing it was both achievable and reasonable.
You can argue that even if we did it, it wasn't reasonable to assume we were guaranteed to do it. But no one is saying that, because "reasonable" does not mean "guaranteed to do it." You yourself said no one is asking for it to be obvious, but that's what guaranteed means: that it is obvious. A reasonable goal is not one where it is obvious we are going to make it. It is simply a goal that we know is achievable if the players want it enough, and does a level of effort that is within their ability to do within reason. I don't think anyone would say that the effort put in by the players overall was completely unreasonable. It was just very good effort.