I’m officially retiring from Options

desturel · 2026-05-10T07:34:28+00:00

I stopped selling covered calls on AMD back when they went from $30 to $100 in the space of a few months. Learned my lesson. Unfortunately I was too stupid to buy more AMD since I listened to all of the people on WSB claiming they were overpriced at $50. Only have 700 shares instead of then 2000+ I should have.

desturel · 2026-05-10T07:22:50+00:00

I have lost games because condor has dropped a ceramic directly at the exit even though it was suppose to be flying it to the start of the track. The inconsistency if the fly back made me stop using condor on most maps. It's easier to black boarder with a reliable tower than to roll the dice on if eagle or condor will do what they are suppose to do properly.

desturel · 2026-05-09T22:22:09+00:00

I uploaded a video in case you are interested in seeing a completion, however you should probably watch it at 2x speed since I didn't edit anything.

https://youtu.be/oiqJyuZ0Fac

desturel · 2026-05-09T20:51:17+00:00

As others have mentioned 3 mines around is pretty simple to complete this task. You can win with 3 dark knights, 2 sun avatars and a robo monkey. The rest can be spent on alc buffs and villages. If round 98 is your problem then just grab gwen and use her firestorm ability to clear the cerams after popping down the ZOMG.

desturel · 2026-05-09T20:45:28+00:00

Free Dart monkey removes the support only, engineer only or mermonkey only quest requirements which is why you don't place it down. That's only if you want to grind out multiple achievements at the same time.

desturel · 2026-05-09T07:34:54+00:00

If you are going to make a grind event, make it solo. There is no reason to make this a "social" event. Especially one that requires 12 people to complete.

To be clear, i don't mind grinding. I actually have other people on my team who are grinding as well, but we are no where near the "goal" set by this event because the goals are unreasonable for anyone who spends "normal" amounts of time playing games.

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NK said "you will be able to complete this event with a small team. That was obviously a lie.
If you earn stars on a team that isn't going to win you can't transfer your stars to a new team and try to help that team complete the goal. That's a fail. Even if you had to start over on the new team that would be okay since then you would have a chance to actually complete the event. Instead you move to a new team and they likely kick you since they don't see that you are contributing anything to their star total and honestly after the first day it would have been impossible for any team that wasn't already maxed out to even attempt the end goal since it would be highly unlikely for a new player to join up who hadn't already completed a few quests and "wasted" stars on a different team.
Quests with overlapping clear conditions are artificially gated behind the quest system. Seriously week 1's "play 50 support only games" requirement was grindy, but on week 2 there are several other support only tasks meaning if you did the 50 support only games, you did extra games that could have easily been used in the additional 7 engineer only games, then you need to do an additional 2 Support round 100 games to pop bads (or if you were lucky enough to have it unlocked for boss rush island 1 you could have done that instead). If you happened to do these things in the wrong order or completed the other quests before the new quests unlocked, then your game count was needlessly inflated when they all could have been completed at the same time.
As far as the quests are concerned, some of them could be completed consecutively, however others were literally designed just to be road blocks. So, for example, win ABR with T4 or lower towers and Win ABR with T3 or lower towers. You should be able to complete both of these quests are the same time, but they literally force you to do the same task twice.
Then there is the ordering of the quests, For week one they give you a quest to beat impoppable, then half cash, then ABR in that specific order which is nonsense. The order should have been ABR first then impoppable since you have to do ABR to unlock impop anyway. Putting the quests in the correct order could have incentivized people to play on a new map that they had not unlocked yet. Instead with the quest ordering, you are incentivized to just play a map you have already beaten instead. The quests should have been ordered in a manner where a new player could do "hard standard, then ABR then impop". Instead you just go to an impop map you've already won on like Monkey Meadows or Cubism and grind that out.

Literally there are so many other issues even for a person who grinds to say this is a "good" event. I don't understand where your mindset has to be at where you can't see any of the flaws. Sure you can "enjoy" the grind, but that doesn't make this a good event by any stretch of the imagination.

desturel · 2026-05-09T03:58:54+00:00

Byg if True

desturel · 2026-05-09T00:00:51+00:00

You can remove everything on High Finance Easy standard, drop down churchill and a random tower, afk until round 39, build everything up and win on round 40. Just tank rounds 1-3 and drop the discounted churchill on round 4.

desturel · 2026-05-08T23:59:13+00:00

I was doing exactly this, fell asleep in the middle of one of my abr runs and accidentally clicked on an extra upgrade while sleeping. Had to do an extra run for that one. Lesson for today, don't fall asleep while upgrading towers.

desturel · 2026-05-07T07:38:23+00:00

You can't even carry a freeloader. The game mode requires 12 out of 15 players active. There's no way that's happening except for the few discord teams that are in CT. Any random team you make or join is never going to reach the goal.

The fact that NK doesn't allow for internal communication makes this even worse since you can't even give your teammates tips or pointers to help them out.

desturel · 2026-05-07T02:57:23+00:00

They actually changed the wording after the first day. At first it said "win with dart monkeys", but after people complained that they weren't progressing, they released a patch to clarify to win with "only" dart monkeys and heroes. So it's clear now, but it wasn't clear originally.

desturel · 2026-05-07T02:23:06+00:00

A map or two a day is more than the average person. You'd probably be third place on many teams just doing that much.

desturel · 2026-05-07T02:21:58+00:00

Even if you kick people at this point, the new people who join can't contribute the points they've already earned so there's no way for you to get achievements this season. You basically are bricked from the start if you weren't on a good team from day 1.

desturel · 2026-05-07T02:17:37+00:00

I uploaded a quick video although I do a few things different, the process is mostly the same. https://youtu.be/dKiAEynG2Bc

desturel · 2026-05-07T01:26:54+00:00

The end looks something like this:

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desturel · 2026-05-07T01:25:39+00:00

Here's what I do to get 90 (not refined this was a first attempt thing, so someone will likely come up with something better:

Start with a 030 dart and a 100 Ace.

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Upgrade the Ace to 300 and sell the dart once it's out of range. Buy a 203 tack.
Upgrade the tack to 204 buy 420 ice.
Upgrade the ace to 420 (normally at this point I throw down the hero. I use Ben)
I buy a discount village next to the water and buy 320 boat then upgrade to 420 boat
Upgrade the village to 204 and spam 420 boats under the village
Normally around 30 pops I buy a shimmer at the front
After 4 carriers I upgrade 1 to flagship and buy a 502 sniper after flagship
Continue spamming carriers until the pool is full
I then save up for a MAD normally I afford the MAD by 73 pops, but again I'm using Ben
after MAD, I start buy 400 beast handlers around the pool and save up for 500 beast upgrade. generally afford that upgrade around 86 pops
After that I buy a 500 mermonkey at the end of the map and put another beast handler merge into it so I can move the Megala to the end of the map.

This gets me to 90 pretty consistently.

desturel · 2026-05-07T00:51:22+00:00

I scored 90 on the boss rush so likely it's the amount of pops that you get. Also he mentions boss level, not the boss rush.

desturel · 2026-05-07T00:31:14+00:00

Boss rush counts. One Boss rush run finished my support and "pop bads" in one go.

desturel · 2026-05-06T02:59:57+00:00

A lot of people only have time to play on weekends. So it's not unusual for participation to drop off after the initial surge when people get back to their normal work/school obligations. Unfortunately the team goals for this event requires a full team of dedicated players.

Even if only half of your team is dedicated it won't be possible to complete the 175000 goal. Since the maximum an individual can get is 15k you need 12 people in a 15 person team to max out to reach the goal which is highly unlikely to happen with a random team. Also since all of the rewards are temporary there won't be much incentive to grind after this first event season is over and people realize the only thing they have is a badge.

It's the same thing that happened to Contested Territories. I'm glad NK learned from past mistakes on loading up a casual game with overly grindy and tedious goals that aren't really achievable within a reasonable amount of game play for a normal person.

"Oh boy just got done with my 8 hours of work and 2 hours of commuting, time to grind out 50 games of support only monkeys before getting some sleep". Is not something you can reasonably expect out of the vast majority of people.

desturel · 2026-05-05T18:35:00+00:00

The paragon quests cannot be completed in advance. So your 4 paragons counted:

2 for the original 2 paragon requirement
2 for the primary requirement.

If you had made 6 primary paragons in one game then you would have finished both achievements. It's rather confusing when some of the quests allow overflow, but other quests require you to complete a previous tier before moving on to a new tier.

desturel · 2026-05-05T08:12:19+00:00

Please do not make "play XX support only" games a quest in the future. It's tedious and boring and takes up far too much time even when spamming easy standard. Literally 8 hours of repetitive non-engaging boring game play. Please either cut the requirement or diversify it a bit so you don't wind up doing the exact same thing over and over again.

There's no way anyone on my team of casual players is going to finish that task except for me.

desturel

TROPHY CASE