6/29/2014 Metropolis (2 Hour)

[The_Revelation]

Tournament will be held from 12:00 - 2:00AM Eastern/Ontario time zone.

#1: The Revelation XVI (The Revelation)
#2: NATION (ASCENDANCY / PD3.0)
#3: Sam Seaborn

[The_Revelation]

I am going to play the first 45 minutes to an hour. If I am not captain within the first hour, I am calling it quits and getting my butt to bed, where it belongs at these kinds of hours.





EDIT: Was fun, but I remembered at the half way marker why I dont like 2HR tournaments in the middle of the night, Im half asleep lol. Ima post tomorrow with my perspective.

[The_Revelation]

13-14 minute fill which seemed awful because many people had <9 fills at the beginning. Looked like Jax had a 3.5 minute fill, but I dunno if he was full or not. I was getting notthhhinnngg. Siphox had a ferry on the water, kept my eye on him and he filled and left it - thank goodness because I was not even half full at 8 minutes.

Made Sergeant as #22 or so, and I figured leaders had about 10k on me. I kept this in mind, but I was not interested in going all out in PPH - I wanted to keep an eye on weaker players and the mobs. I made captain and then immidiately tried to snag a LT kill in the same screen, but to no avail. Eventually was able to snag Torture after he got a little to low and was stuck, which got me to the first major spot at around 1:20. At this point I know that there will be more majors, and my PPH is "OK". The top three have separated themselves on the PPH scale so I could either put my head down and go hard for PPH and catch the top three ( -CopperheaD-, Inbred Beaver, Sam Seaborn) within the last 15 minutes and have a PPH battle at the end - or continue to focus on vulnerable targets.

So I quit, took a bathroom break and grabbed a coffee since it was 1:20AM

Came back and decided to try and balance both. I figured if everyone was looking for kills then their PPH rate may decline so even if I could keep a steady PPH rate, I might catch them and could still make colonel. At this point I was fighting parallax pineapple quite a bit, since he was trying to catch the top PPHers too. I kept trying to get -CopperheaD- low so he might go insuff and therefore stuck, but he kept managing to thwart my plan.

Eventually I noticed some action top right, landed to find a random mob, but I focused on kylepoody, after a few screens he couldn't find fuel and went insuff. At this point a mob formed of about 4-5 people and just as kylepoody was about to place an obstacle on fuel, we burned his shields and I got my colonel kill.

Awesome finish between the top four majors. I was fighting with Siphox and he worked his way from #4 to #2 but he ran out of duals with about 7 minutes left. He slowly got repassed by the other three, but overall the top 4 majors must have all been within 2-3k of each other. Really awesome to have exciting finishes like that in a two hour tournament.

Random notes...

- I wish -CopperheaD- would have made Major, I was interesting in seeing his points. He was likely the top PPH.
- NATION really popped up out of nowhere. He pulled out his LT late and was competitive with his points.
- Sigma was constantly shooting people also, although he was only LT - I bet he kept his points up there.

More stuff I wanted to say, but this is getting TLTR...

[LastSingularity]

Slow start for me.

You think your fill was bad...I went 60-60-60-60-5 at 7:40, and I couldn't get my ER's above 50 until 10 min mark.

I also had a brush with death at 25 min, when I was serg searching for a bot corp to kill. I got insufficient and got quadruple-teamed by Challenge, mylodical stasis, YNWA, and -BxOxOxGxIxExMxAxN- where I literally drove across 3 screens, ran over some of their mines, burned my shields down to 7, before I found a 400 barrel and teleported away. That did a lot of damage in terms of my flow. I found a ferry in the North, and did a water fill to get me back to 84-84-84-84-80

From there on, I just couldn't get kills. I tried to deactivate a lot of people: Thundercracker (what the hell was I thinking on this one?), YNMA, Gene, VITALITY, War Beast, Cracki3, and Michigan Wolverine. Either they got low multiple times / lost shields, but didn't die (like Thundercracker and War Beast, who fought very well 3v1), or they died to someone else (I know that Cracki3 died to parallex pineapple)

Because Metropolis is dry (and I got mobbed early on), I got careful not to get too low. Didn't let fuel fall below missile when fighting 2v1, and don't let fuel fall below duals when fighting 1v1 (unless I KNOW there is real fuel on the screen). But not getting too low often leads me to miss kills. I see raiders get low often, turn on their shields, and just hound their target. Sometimes their target dies, and the mob turns on them because they're low, and they come out of the raid with a rank kill, but a loss of 30-50 shields, and a significant chance of dying themselves. I always chase, get low during the chase, and leave the raid for one screen to fill myself up back to bright color, and then re-join the raid. Seems often that whenever I decide to fuel is when my target dies to the raid

My PPH was okay, not as good as the Levels tourney. I think -CopperheaD- and NATION were outstanding in PPH this time.

I think the tournament boils down to three skills:
1 - Equipment management (when to fill, where to fill, how to manage ER's)
2 - PPH
3 - Getting rank kills
And out of those, I am getting a better hang of #1 and #2 now, but I really need to work on #3 (it's not that apparent in a 1-hour tourney when you need to only get one rank kill - to get to captain - for a chance to cup, but it's really obvious now in a 2-hour tourney when you need 2-3 rank kills). Revelation has a superhuman ability to stag kills, even when the target is raided by 3-4 people at once and you'd think the chances of landing the kill are 20-30%. Gotta learn that...

[silientsnake1124]

Slow start for me.

You think your fill was bad...I went 60-60-60-60-5 at 7:40, and I couldn't get my ER's above 50 until 10 min mark.

I also had a brush with death at 25 min, when I was serg searching for a bot corp to kill. I got insufficient and got quadruple-teamed by Challenge, mylodical stasis, YNWA, and -BxOxOxGxIxExMxAxN- where I literally drove across 3 screens, ran over some of their mines, burned my shields down to 7, before I found a 400 barrel and teleported away. That did a lot of damage in terms of my flow. I found a ferry in the North, and did a water fill to get me back to 84-84-84-84-80

From there on, I just couldn't get kills. I tried to deactivate a lot of people: Thundercracker (what the hell was I thinking on this one?), YNMA, Gene, VITALITY, War Beast, Cracki3, and Michigan Wolverine. Either they got low multiple times / lost shields, but didn't die (like Thundercracker and War Beast, who fought very well 3v1), or they died to someone else (I know that Cracki3 died to parallex pineapple)

Because Metropolis is dry (and I got mobbed early on), I got careful not to get too low. Didn't let fuel fall below missile when fighting 2v1, and don't let fuel fall below duals when fighting 1v1 (unless I KNOW there is real fuel on the screen). But not getting too low often leads me to miss kills. I see raiders get low often, turn on their shields, and just hound their target. Sometimes their target dies, and the mob turns on them because they're low, and they come out of the raid with a rank kill, but a loss of 30-50 shields, and a significant chance of dying themselves. I always chase, get low during the chase, and leave the raid for one screen to fill myself up back to bright color, and then re-join the raid. Seems often that whenever I decide to fuel is when my target dies to the raid

My PPH was okay, not as good as the Levels tourney. I think -CopperheaD- and NATION were outstanding in PPH this time.

I think the tournament boils down to three skills:
1 - Equipment management (when to fill, where to fill, how to manage ER's)
2 - PPH
3 - Getting rank kills
And out of those, I am getting a better hang of #1 and #2 now, but I really need to work on #3 (it's not that apparent in a 1-hour tourney when you need to only get one rank kill - to get to captain - for a chance to cup, but it's really obvious now in a 2-hour tourney when you need 2-3 rank kills). Revelation has a superhuman ability to stag kills, even when the target is raided by 3-4 people at once and you'd think the chances of landing the kill are 20-30%. Gotta learn that...

Nice try! I was not trying to snag any kills just looking to shoot a bit

[JDK]

I played as Michigan wolverines. I was so mad about that tourney. My Pandora stopped playing music due to "inactivity". So I go to my other screen to turn on Pandora again and all of sudden, a blue mob comes out of nowhere. I press 1 to turn on my shields, but I'm still in my Pandora browser. Revelation gets the kill with me dying with full shields. Only thing that was good about that is I didn't need to play the 2nd hour of the tournament.

[PD3.0]

8 minute fill. Crappy refills really, but I'm guessing everyone had these troubles.



Going back to my comp sci days using a FILO strategy. 1st to Captain and last to Major.



Killed Lochness really early in a small melee, then got YouAreKilledMan very late when he was running around insuff.


Clean tourney, seemed more like 3 hours to me.

[HurleY]

revelation is such a luckbox able to get kills to col

[The_Revelation]

revelation is such a luckbox able to get kills to col

I agree with you that luck is definitely a big part of the equation. But you can look back to when PPH showed and I was often the guy stuck at LT with top PPH and no kill. Plan and simple, the more "death screens" you can expose yourself to, the higher your chances of actually scoring one of those kills is. Then of course strategy to actually get the kill. But in a group of 4+ people, luck is a huge piece of the pie.

It hit me a while ago when SW made this comment to sean...

» Sun Nov 10, 2013 5:06 pm

Sean spends far too much time (pretty much the whole tourny) getting points instead of trying for kills.

IMHO this is simply a case of bad tournament strategy.

I read this and at first kind of thought less of SW since Sean987 is/was such a beast... but then over time this stuck with me. Finally it changed my opinion, SW is right - it is just bad tournament strategy to ignore the map while you drain inventory after inventory of duals without keeping tabs on the deaths. I know that you can PPH and still sort of watch the mob, and low people. But lets be honest, the best PPH comes from focusing on one tank ignoring everything else. It still is a strong mentality that PPH is all that matters, but apart from a pat on the back - we still lose the tournament.

I am not trying to say I have some special ability or skill, I am saying I've changed my approach from PPHing 95% of the tournament. I just see some players who spend massive amounts of time in the water, or in the corner of the map PPHing and then complaining they couldn't get a kill.

[Jordann]

to me its the fact that getting to captain and not cupping is a complete waste of a kill. therefore, you ensure that you have top pph before focusing on a kill. of course theres the obvious choices in the beginning of the tourny to stick near by. but when everyones searching for a kill it makes it very easy to make multiple passes.