With two weeks of the Fantastic Force Recruitment event now in the books, I've had a chance to analyze the data I've collected up to this point. Here's basically what I have.
First of all, here's a tabulation of all the hands I've recorded. I accidentally lost the data from day one and a bit of day two, so week one contains one fewer day of data.
My overall scoring average has been hovering around 1150 points per match, which due to the fact I've been playing consistently at 30 energy per match equates to about 383 points per match in raw scoring. This is about the value of the Double Trouble score (aka two pair). This score depends on my playing strategy which centers on one specific decision: what to do in round one where have one pair. In round one I always discard the pair in favor of keeping the two (or more) recruits of equal type ("suit"). The reason is due to the two scoring combinations that do not have analogs in standard poker: four to the straight and four to the flush. In particular, four to the flush is relatively easy to draw into and scores a significant amount of points: 300 raw points, which is very close to the long term average of my overall scoring.
As you can see with my scoring data, more than a quarter of all my matches ended up scoring Odd One Out (aka four to the flush), and an additional 87 matches scored Faction Reaction (aka flush). Together, they represent 43% of all my matches. Based on my testing, this appears to be close to the optimal strategy, although I would be curious to know if anyone else has what they believe to be a better scoring strategy.
I've been playing three accounts in this event: my main has been doing the bulk of my scoring, but I have also been doing matches on two alts. I've been burning units on my main, but not on my alts: I've just been burning energy and any free refills that drop for those accounts. Here are my results so far:
My main has scored in the 100-200 bracket in both weeks. I had attempted to cross 400k points to see if that would bump me up a bracket but I have been travelling for the past two weeks and didn't have enough time. It does appear that the cutoff for 100th place was very close to 400k, and the cutoff for 200th place was close to 300k, assuming both weeks scored comparably on the leaderboards (which seems to be very roughly the case). Based on my alts' performance, the 5% cutoff appears to be near 70k. The reason why the points scored are flipped between alts was due to where I spent my time burning energy refills in inventory and stash.
I did not track the total number of energy refills I used in each account. I do know all the refills I used in alts were not purchased with units or cash (both alts are F2P). My main spent about 900 units in week one and about 2400 units in week two. But that's on top of a ton of energy refills I've gotten from other sources in-game. My guess is that I've probably burned on the order of 70 refills per week. If I had to buy them all with units it would have been about 2000-ish units per week. That's not too bad: an F2P arena grinder that is scooping up all the milestones can earn about 1500 units per week from that alone. And landing somewhere between 6% and 20%, and probably with some effort consistently in the 2%-5% bracket with no spending of any units at all is not bad.
On a subjective note, I'm finding I like the overall idea of the mechanics of the mode. I know there's been a lot said about bringing a mini-game that is essentially video poker to MCOC, but that concentrates too much on the specific details of the appearance of the mode, and not the mechanics. For example, I find it to be actually much more fun to grind it than arena. And it would not take much to make it an arena replacement. In particular, one advantage it has over the arena is all attackers and defenders are curated: unlike the arena, it is possible to eliminate weak attackers or overly strong defenders. Players are in general on a more level playing field competitive (although whether that's actually desirable in an arena replacement is a separate question).
I think the technology has a lot of promise. People have told me they wished it implemented other scoring systems, or contained more meaningful matches, and all of that is theoretically possible. We could see a variant where the goal was actually to build the strongest possible team to beat a particularly strong boss, for example, rather than the kind of poker-style scoring currently implemented. This contrasts a lot with the Arcade mode, which while I applaud Kabam for experimenting and also has the potential to evolve into something different and better, I personally think has less overall potential than the technology in the Recruitment Event.
