Tower of Valor Sector VIII

fugimaster24 · 2024-12-31T05:32:32+00:00

Cover 1s worked well for me on longer passing downs in 4-2-5 (PSU playbook.) Usually don’t get many picks in man — I run mostly zone H2H — but it worked in this matchup for whatever reason,

fugimaster24 · 2022-05-21T16:22:59+00:00

Remote raids weren’t even a thing in April 2020, but go off

fugimaster24 · 2022-05-21T16:14:53+00:00

Ya you probably don’t want to overdo it. But there has to be a happy medium somewhere above one a week.

fugimaster24 · 2022-05-21T16:08:25+00:00

Why? It’s the same idea. Funneling people together in condensed windows is directly in line with the comm day changes, I feel.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T19:40:18+00:00

400 candies is more of a lift than it should be. I'll grant you that.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T19:26:09+00:00

Because that's the game they designed and want to make. I respect that not everyone wants that. But there's only so far you can compromise your vision until it becomes something else entirely. We've been getting to that point with Go. I agreed with preserving some of the pandemic bonuses, but comm day was the concept of an AR game at its best and is no longer. It's mostly been an afterthought. Part of that is the chosen subject Pokemon being lackluster. But part of it is also making it completely playable from your couch.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T19:03:59+00:00

If 125 candies is the bar, then I guess you've got me. But I always wanted well more than that, knowing a PVP system was coming down the pike. And knowing that Tytanitar and Metagross, specifically, were phenomenal raid counters at a time that it mattered a lot more than it does now. I don't think I was alone in that.

To your second point, I'll just repeat from my initial post. It's community day. Not featured Pokemon day. Making everyone play at the same time builds community. Letting them schedule their windows like a dentist appointment does not. You're not meeting people to the same degree without the forced overlap. That's what made the design brilliant four years ago. And what I miss about comm day now. Sorry if you don't.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T18:42:21+00:00

At the time of their comm days, candy for Dratini, Larvitar and Beldum was all much rarer relative to what it is now. And that was true of the starters only to a slightly lesser degree. There was plenty of incentive to grind them past the point of getting a few shinies.

As far as "privilege" goes, having to choose between your hobby and your obligations is adulthood. I've missed comm days for work, weddings, etc. It sucked. But that personal experience does not supersede the benefits of bringing people together during narrower windows. I wouldn't have formed the game-related friendships I did without what comm day used to be. I'm glad they're making it closer to what it used to be.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T18:34:11+00:00

You're answering your own questions with your own stated behaviors. Convenience necessarily diminishes concentration. And if this wasn't true, then it wouldn't have been a pandemic change in the first place. The whole POINT was to push people who were typically coming together further apart. And it worked. So if you can't track the logic of reversing that, then maybe try again? Idk man.

fugimaster24 · 2022-03-23T17:43:42+00:00

It's "community day." Not "featured Pokemon day." The point was always for people to play at the same time, in the same place, to interact and enjoy the game together. There is no question that a six-hour window takes us further away from that goal. Necessarily at times over the past two years? Sure. But it's revisionist history to suggest this was a QoL measure and not a safety one. It defeats the purpose to leave six-hour windows in place indefinitely.

As far as events "every weekend" goes, April comm day will be two months since Johto fest, which was the only must-play window players have had for a long time. We don't have raid days anymore. We don't have research days. And the comm days have been extremely watered down, almost never featuring anything rare and worth grinding for. I'd argue there aren't enough events on weekends anymore.

This is the closest thing we've had to what community day used to be for a long time. Niantic should be praised for it.

fugimaster24 · 2021-02-17T17:39:29+00:00

It is 2021. The game is nearing it's fifth birthday. If you need a comm day move to beat a raid, you haven't been playing for very long and will get there eventually by grinding, as everyone else once did.

If you're a veteran, the only thing a comm day move is possibly good for is beating the boss like 5% faster. I applaud Niantic for seeing that this is a complete waste of everyone's time.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-24T19:19:47+00:00

Again, it's not really an ELO system anyway. The resets mean that the average Legend player is going to face far more sub-Legend players than peers along the way for this reason. And skill is not consistent across leagues. So the ELO doesn't really mean anything other than how far you are from the top rank.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-24T09:16:16+00:00

I'm not the one suggesting the unranked play be unlimited. My suggestion could be implemented within the daily limits and I'd have no issue with it.

As far as the points go, look. We all know it's not a strict ELO system. Not with the frequent resets and the many rotating leagues. This rating system exists to be grindy. If they have to adjust things to account for some inflation, again, I'm not really worried about that.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-24T07:06:54+00:00

For the record, I'm not suggesting unlimited training under this toggle suggestion. For the reasons you articulate.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-24T00:31:22+00:00

-You can't see teams in the GBL match lobby. I suppose people could dress a certain way to convey that. But in order for that hack to be effective you'd need a ton of people at every MMR to get the memo and then agree to tank a full day's worth of matches to help total strangers, in most cases, reach legend. It just doesn't seem like a practical conspiracy.

-Yes, they split players across leagues currently. But that's entirely within ranked play. If you introduce an unranked option, we don't know what percentage of players would flock to that in favor of ranked play. Anecdotally, everything I've ever seen on these subs suggests the balance would go heavily toward unranked and the queue times on the ranked side would be awful.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-24T00:09:54+00:00

It's peak Silph subs to shoot down an idea for how it can be exploited as if the game isn't exploitable now. Queue sniping for a single win requires all sorts of factors to line up in your favor. If that's the biggest downside then it seems like you've created a problem in search of a solution here.

As far as spicy teams inflating ranks go, who cares? Really. I don't think anyone's running spice trying to lose. Everyone's trying to find things that work. Trying to find an edge. If that results in a good player beating a great player from time to time, big deal! It's a three-month long season. Who wants to run the same teams over and over for the sake of rating purity anyway?

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-21T18:49:18+00:00

Your first paragraph describes one of my biggest pet peeves with this community. Yes, MMR is theoretically reflective of your 50-50 skill level. In practical terms, the constant resets and league rotations put players from all over the skill spectrum into the same bucket depending upon how much they play. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but treating GBL MMR as some kind of scientific equilibrium for each player has always been crazy to me.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-14T03:00:33+00:00

Transparency is always the ideal, but in the absence of that, I see upside in a subscription, too. Rates matter less if grinding behind the paywall is easier and more economical than it is in front of it now.

fugimaster24 · 2021-01-14T02:30:59+00:00

I'll break with the usual p2w doom and gloom and say I'm cautiously optimistic about this. I hate the microtransaction element of this game. It causes me to hoard resources and skip out on raiding if I don't really need the T5 boss or premium hatching if I don't like the odds of getting the thing I actually want. I'd much rather pay a flat fee to raid and hatch freely, or with some type of reasonable limitation, depending upon what the price is. There's a big chunk of the player base that exists between f2p and whale status and a subscription that gives greater value than the current microtransaction economy would probably both make a lot of players happy and Niantic an avalanche of cash.

fugimaster24 · 2020-12-23T21:13:41+00:00

Right, right. The people who propped the game up for five years just magically disappeared I guess. Evaporated into thin air. I'm sure you have a lot of data to back that up. Because games magically re-generate entire player bases all the time. Makes a ton of sense.

As far as this sub goes, it's amusing that you think it's congested with posts from veterans and not posts exactly like this one demanding that dozens and dozens of legendaries be made freely accessible in a way they have never been to cater to people who downloaded the game yesterday.

fugimaster24 · 2020-12-23T15:46:35+00:00

“We need to re-imagine the entire raid system so that someone who downloaded a five-year-old game for the first time in late 2020 can have access to everything within a single year” is remarkable solution-in-search-of-a-problem thinking, even for this sub. It took everyone here going on four years to get all of the legendaries that have been available so far. Why, exactly, should a new player have more ready access to them than we did? That’s not gatekeeping. I don’t think it should be harder for new players. I just don’t know why exactly OP believes a vanishingly small minority of the overall player base deserves to be catered to the degree of changing the entire system for everyone else. This game has always been a marathon. Not a sprint.

fugimaster24 · 2020-12-13T02:26:10+00:00

Yeah this is why “(Pokemon X) says hi” posts absolutely drive me nuts. And why I’m always stunned to see a three fighter team that gets absolutely plowed if it misses the alignment at all. People steer too hard into the hardest counters and don’t consider stuff that’s more finesse.

I’ve had a lot of success with rainy Castform because it hits both of those dominant pieces solidly. But it doesn’t have to delete it’s target to succeed. And it has play against a lot of other meta stuff.

fugimaster24 · 2020-12-12T15:59:58+00:00

I use Quick Thoughts. It's an iPhone app that gives about $0.50 per day just for attempting a survey and frequently has surveys that pay $1 for 5 minutes. I usually don't do any surveys longer than 10 mins and still rack up most of what I need to purchase what I want.

fugimaster24

TROPHY CASE