@Milk said in Arks League:

I just didn’t care ... 1st place in my league beat everyone by a landslide

To make an obvious point, it might be easier to not care when you keep getting uncompetitive leagues and trucks full of easy SG.

Me, I keep finishing 21st to 39th in the weekly TA rankings, permanently locked out of the top 20 by elite players I will never have any hope against. I'd wanted this format that let me compete without being limited to 10 SG as the highest possible prize for months, and then they give us non-competition supernatural leagues and I keep getting 10 SG anyway while watching others get 100 SG without trying twice a day.

I hope you can understand that's painful?

@Miraglyth

Of course it’s painful, my first ever League I placed 10th and it felt pretty bad. I just didn’t care today because I’m sick in bed, I could’ve still used the 100SG but I didn’t have the energy to compete and because I was so late there would be no way to catch up anyway. First place more than earned his win, he was 4x the kills of everyone else. I probably would’ve had a hard time beating him even I was healthy and on time, he was really gunning for it.

The first was from an alliance party running VH BW for almost the whole time, including some PSE Bursts. The second was from Harukotan TA, solo and on normal difficulty, but I started with about 20-30 minutes left in the League.

It's easy to see how unfair this ARKS League can be if you don't get a good party, bursts, etc. Also Hero TMG was pretty overpowered for this. And when you have an alliance full of people who are mostly using it, you'll plow through enemies on a Burst with ease.

I honestly think ARKS League is just badly designed. At least this type was. Getting lucky by being put into a bracket of people who aren't trying, having people to play with, getting RNG PSE Bursts, etc. It just really wasn't very fair. There should be some hefty changes to it. I'd like to see a difference in points based on difficulty level. Or perhaps limit which quests can be done for it. I don't know what all would be good to change, I just know that as it is it wasn't really balanced and quite easy to cheese.

@IronTsunami23

I agree. It should’ve been planned around skill, not luck. The parties I joined didn’t even know what League was, they just wanted to farm for items so they were ok with it. You shouldn’t have to be lucky to win.

@Miraglyth I took first in a Supernatural League even though I was in second at the start of my last BQ and had to stop ~5 min before the end for irl stuff, surprised the heck out of me though. At the same time I agree that the Leagues could have been done better.

Ended up in the same league with a few alliance members, synched our kill count and won 1st

@Milk said in Arks League:

I just didn’t care today because I’m sick in bed ... First place more than earned his win

Oh! My apologies, I had completely misread your last post!

I thought you were saying you didn't care, only played a few minutes and still won lol.

I see that's not the case now. Please disregard that part of my post.

@IronTsunami23 said in Arks League:

The second was from Harukotan TA, solo and on normal difficulty, but I started with about 20-30 minutes left in the League.

Notably that screenshot also confirms it was a falspawn league, for the benefit of everyone wondering if that might've been supernaturals again.

@IronTsunami23 said in Arks League:

Getting lucky by being put into a bracket of people who aren't trying, having people to play with, getting RNG PSE Bursts, etc. It just really wasn't very fair.

Honestly, I don't think that's so much of an issue? I must confess to some extent I wanted that.

There being ~20 people (depending on the TA) that I simply cannot (and will never be able to) compete with means the whole concept of TA rankings where the same tiny handful of people win 50-200 SG week in week out while I'm invariably getting a measly 10 gets tiresome. Any format that keeps those people away from me so I can compete with people that are possible to beat if I do well sounds more engaging, you know?

But these leagues weren't a time attack (and I understand ARKS League never is). They were accumulation rather than performance, and 60% of the time it was accumulation of something that had too little variety in the kill rate. The chance at worthwhile competition was wasted IMO. I can say this on the basis of having outright won two of the three falspawn leagues I was in (despite being denied the prize for one of those) purely on merit. Nothing about the supernatural leagues felt like merit was involved.

@Kodiakmax-101 said in Arks League:

@Miraglyth I took first in a Supernatural League even though I was in second at the start of my last BQ and had to stop ~5 min before the end for irl stuff, surprised the heck out of me though.

Surprised is right! That means you were less than ~250 kills behind 1st before your last BQ and up to 250 kills ahead after it. Add the ~5 minutes you stopped to the time that BQ took - let's say ~7 minutes - and that gives the person you overtook ~12 minutes to get at most 250 kills and they didn't? You got away with one there!

I never saw anything like that, and if I had I would have concluded that person either had an RL interruption like you or simply wasn't trying to win the league in the first place. Neither of those possibilities really make the contest itself any less badly designed.

@Miraglyth said in Arks League:

I've been bedridden all day. Just dragged myself out to eat. Missed the league entirely, making it the only one I missed. Ah well, recovery is more important than a handful of SG, even if it was a falspawn one I would have had a realistic chance of winning unlike garbage supernatural ones.

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@TEN-SQUARE-3 said in Arks League:

It is entirely possible to catch up. I got registered at the start of today’s match, then wasn’t able to start for 15mins, has something came up, by the time I got into the woods I was 900 points behind, within 30mins I had caught up and won comfortably.

Yeah, when you're 250 points behind in a supernatural league there are literally only two ways to have any chance to catch up:

1. Everyone ahead of you either screws up hilariously badly or more likely simply stops due to internet outage or some real-life incident.
2. An excellent Enchanted Woods game.

I’ve won every league with the supernatural easily in woods, all in completely random parties.

The completely random parties I found during my brief foray in Enchanted Woods all had at least 6 NPCs and generally didn't even know what ARKS League was. When you're 300+ points behind 1st but 300 points ahead of 3rd and 4th with 20 minutes left in the league and after 5 minutes of looking through the only games to have more than 3/12 in the MPA, you are left with a rather difficult decision:

1. Try to convince people who seem oblivious and whose games you have invaded to care about what you want to do?
2. Create your own game and hope people will both join in the first place and read the party name, or that any other random parties joining will care more and leave NPCs out?
3. Get back to Free Match BQs and protect 2nd place knowing that it's too late for the others to do either of the above and catch up?

On my experience it feels to me that the first two options are putting 40 SG at very high risk for a very unlikely chance to gain 50. That dilemma happened twice for me (both times self-created because it wasn't known and hadn't been shared anywhere online how BQs/UQs compared) and I don't regret choosing the third option both times. With 20 minutes left any effective Woods MPA is likely 12/12.

My point here being that the existence of Free Match BQ Grade 1 as an incredibly fixed-rate gain for kills not only made supernatural leagues uncompetitive, but gave an often insurmountable advantage to people who joined a league in the last 45 minutes just as someone else already in that league was about to start the first Defense wave.

And if you've arranged with 12 human players to group up and co-ordinate to find an efficient Enchanted Woods game to run for the whole 90 minutes, firstly congratulations because that's basically guaranteed 1st place unless two of you end up in the same league, and secondly that means anyone who even runs one Buster Quest to go with the stable kill income is completely eliminated out of any chance at 1st, so I don't see how this is meant to be competitive either.

So while "it is possible to catch up" may technically be true, it doesn't change my point: In every supernatural league I was in without exception, the 1st to 5th standing with 20 minutes to go was how it ended, with no overtaking having taken place, even when people were a mere 50 kills apart. Their presence limited to just two unique quest formats means supernatural leagues are surely the least competitive possible enemy type to make a kill league on, by a considerable margin.

While you do make some good points, buster quests being fixed kills, and only having two runs to choose from, hopefully by the time these come round again we will have more to choose from, but I don’t entirely agree about supernatural not being competitive. Part of a competition is working out what is the most efficient way to do something, and it definitely seems like woods was the way to go with this, even if it does take a bit of work initially to get the kills rolling fast.

I didn’t have any of those issue finding a group, I’m not sure how you went about finding your groups for woods, but I used search for parties on other blocks. I then looked for people with act req on, and had an mpa of around 8 people. It took a couple of extra minutes but each time I found a really good mpa first go, except one time where I tried to do it with another person, which made it a lot harder to swap blocks and join a party quickly

@Miraglyth

Haha I had a hunch. I wouldn’t do that, can you imagine someone being so mean?

@TEN-SQUARE-3 said in Arks League:

While you do make some good points, buster quests being fixed kills, and only having two runs to choose from, hopefully by the time these come round again we will have more to choose from

Supernaturals feel like the enemy of the week for Episode 5, the way phantasms were for Episode 4. (To an extent you could say that nightfallers were for Episode 3 and maybe oceanids were for Episode 2, but in both of those we also got new falspawn, draconians and I think even automata.) Episodes 4 and 5 are distinct since pretty much 100% of the new enemies have been exclusively one type that is both new and likely to remain limited to the episode they debuted in.

My point here being, the next ARKS League week will probably be far enough away that Episode 5 won't be the newest episode anymore. So if it follows the same format of focusing on falspawn and the newest enemy type, that wouldn't be supernaturals anyway*. Alternatively if my expectation about supernaturals is wrong and we do get more new ones going into Episode 6, that would likely mean they are available in a greater range of quest types which would add much-needed variety that I'd then be okay with.

* Of course that does mean there's every possibility that if Episode 6 does the same as 4 and 5 that a future ARKS League could be falspawn and a new enemy type that is just as limited in appearance as supernaturals are now. My complaint isn't about supernaturals themselves, but the idea of making a competition around an enemy type limited to so few quest types.

@TEN-SQUARE-3 said in Arks League:

I don’t entirely agree about supernatural not being competitive. Part of a competition is working out what is the most efficient way to do something, and it definitely seems like woods was the way to go with this, even if it does take a bit of work initially to get the kills rolling fast.

Yeah. This topic should provide a pretty good record that I'd taken part in that part of the competition. Back on page 2 after showcasing the relative potential of an oceanoid league I pretty clearly referenced old guides from JP that describe a requirement that enemies must be level 60/61+ (depending on source) to count. The working out involves such research, and when the knowledge available is wrong that sets such efforts back.

I had also repeatedly described Woods PSE as the fastest possibility, subject to everyone's uncertainty about alternatives like Rush Practise Harukotan inexplicably counting, It wasn't until LashettePSO2 introduced us to the detail about grid spawn types being fixed in Enchanted Woods (and all explorations/ultimates?) that this was thought to be more controllable. That was yesterday, by which point there was only one of six supernatural leagues remaining. It's a bit late to make use of such knowledge then!

@TEN-SQUARE-3 said in Arks League:

I didn’t have any of those issue finding a group, I’m not sure how you went about finding your groups for woods, but I used search for parties on other blocks. I then looked for people with act req on, and had an mpa of around 8 people.

Same. I went a step further and matched groups together. When there are only two Multi-Party Quests that are 8/12 on the same block and both are 4/4 it's pretty easy to tell they're in the same game. But when 6 of those 8 are Zeno, Echo, Afin and three Friend Avatars, it's a pretty safe bet they won't be getting many kills!

The first couple of games I found with the same strategy, its participants either didn't care about improving their kill rate (and were pretty slow) or didn't even know about ARKS League. At that point after a few minutes of fighting next to no supernaturals, 3rd was threatening to get within 250 kills of me so I switched back to Grade 1 Frees to protect 2nd and will never regret that.

@Miraglyth It was close when I checked it but he had been closing the gap hard (I'd held first most of the League) and had overtaken me on that check, so I figured second it was when I had to stop. BTW, I got cofused who I was replying to with the second bit.

@Kodiakmax-101 said in Arks League:

@Miraglyth It was close when I checked it but he had been closing the gap hard (I'd held first most of the League) and had overtaken me on that check, so I figured second it was when I had to stop.

They must have stopped too then. Lucky!