Sorry about the late post tonight. Family event meant I was gone for most of the day and while (obviously) a lot of this is pre-cooked, I couldn't do nearly as much as I normally do, plus my planned post ended up being way too much and is getting moved into a separate blog for later so that this doesn't run into a major length problem.
So, let's have a look at this past period: the cut-off moved up pretty sharply--a 44% increase from last week and enough to finally get our trendline moving back up. The past few periods have stagnated and had actually brought our trendline to near zero! Not much pressure indeed.
The extra scoring seems likely to have come about because of the fairly recent release of the ODST DLC for
Halo: The Master Chief Collection. The release of that DLC pushed Halo MCC back to the top of the scoring games list once again, the fifth time Halo MCC has topped the charts in 20 periods. Never underestimate the popularity of Halo!
New game releases (or DLC/TU) are a major driver of scoring this year, we're seeing. Other relatively new arrivals,
MASSIVE CHALICE,
Beach Buggy Racing, and
Sparkle Unleashed all made the top ten in terms of scoring for the period as well, though in Massive Chalice's case the score was made up in bulk by one gamer who earned 42% of that game's points for the contest for the period by being the first (and as of cut-off) only gamer to 100% the title. Hat's off for the impressive accomplishment. Stand by for decay, drama, and quite likely elimination.
This week: 5
Last week: 9
The score increases meant more pressure, so fewer freebie survivors, and even then most of them had to use bonuses, so definitely not 'free'.
7 Teams with 8 bonuses lost.
40 Individuals with 41 bonuses lost.
The rapid score rise from last week to this week may have caught some of these folks by surprise.
An extremely quiet week for me as I focused on grinding gold for
https://www.trueachievements.com/Diablo-3/achievements.htm because: why not. There really was nothing else pressing in the week and it was a good way to spend time for my other goals, even if unimpressive. The week was more interesting outside of gaming, but who cares? Gaming! Grind that gold!
I love isometric dungeon crawlers. They are my gaming panacea. Diablo in particular holds a massive sway over me, and Diablo 2 will forever be one of the finest games ever made. That said, Diablo 3 at launch was riddled with problems, and even by the time they got to the console release, it wasn't "right". This achievement demonstrates that problem pretty well. Earning it to get the monkey off my back was definitely a highlight.
Since I love the game, I have no problem playing it endlessly for many hours, but that's exactly what this achievement requires, and to do it efficiently, you need to play in a manner that is less fun than normal play. The problem is compounded by bugginess in the gold drops. No, the achievement itself is not buggy, but the spawn rate of the trigger is. At a minimum the RNG is broken. Based on the data points I collected while grinding this, there's something significantly wrong with the mechanics of the game. Fortunately, that's all moot now as we move on to Reaper of Souls. Finally, the game can be proper fun again.
271 TA for the week on 5 achievements worth points? Yeah, that's pretty low. Any my over-confidence was almost a disaster for the team. At least I spent my time grinding, though Diablo 3 was only the visible beneficiary.
None. I've settled back down again, but we're getting close to Bean Dive time. What will happen then? And bonuses next period... will that shake things up?
#100
https://www.trueachievements.com/Diablo-3/achievements.htm (per my DLC settings)