Options
Fantastic Force Recruitment Midpoint analysis
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 21,044 Guardian
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.
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.
7
Comments
I have not gotten it yet, but I’ve been pretty close several times.
From my experience the worst part about Kabam RNG is that the most you play the lowest is the probability you can get the two higher scoring hands, which is crazy. I have scored around 1M points during this event in almost 3 weeks time and numerous hands and have not got the cards which give you the legend title.
I do not know if it is true but it seems from youtube videos, it is better to play 10 energy and quit several times without getting any points as this might enhance your chances to get the legend title than playing 30 energy.
Just do a quick youtube search on videos where people record their tactics to win the legend title.
I play 30 energy because i want high scores, but if the above is true, does not seem like statistically fair RNG to me....
I like this new mode, but the RNG looks terribly designed...
I believe there is a lot of room for improvement and should be a way to acquire the legend title based on how much you score which could cover the gap with the RNG failure to deliver results which could be mathematically closest to real statistics.
Similar to what Kabam has recently implemented with the premium crystals where you get a guaranteed 7 star featured after opening a specific amount of crystals.
I placed #168 week one (around 320k points, didn't take a screenshot) and #80 on week two. I doubt I'll be getting top 100 again this week (running out of resources, big time) but we'll see... With my luck I'll end up in the 1% bracket somehow.
Good luck, bud 🤞
Well, plot twist: the moment I stopped caring about the title, it fell into my hands.
Out of hundreds of games (over 1 million points) I've only gotten Super Suits once (and have been 1 card off from Certified Force 4-5 times)
Point is... it's 99% luck.
Hope i get it soon as well 😃
That of course doesn't mean you'll get it after a thousand hands either, just that statistically that's probably close to the average across all players. I would imagine many players getting it in hundreds of hands, and others taking tens of thousands of hands (if they even play that many).
No matter how much we like it or hate it, it will be gone next month. It isn't intended to hold our attention continuously. But for years players have been complaining about how boring side quests are, and how repetitive they are, and often how difficult they are when they are different (think Rifts). If this is the sort of thing that can come in periodically to mix things up in the meta quests, and players generally engage with it more than they do the standard meta (side) quests, that's overall a good thing.
I would certainly want to see it as permanent content with some improvements
I'm in the shallow end of the pool with 50 or 60k but I'm only using available energy and expiring refills that wont carry over until next EQ, not particularly fussed about the title nor investing any grinded units into it.
Not bad for some mindless zero consequence fun.
1 in 76k hands in real poker, but you can only change your cards once. I don’t have the mathematical ability to find out how much better the odds gets by having the opportunity to change cards 3 times…but I got it.
…and I got it by only changing my cards once, so 1 to 76k odds 🥳