Fist Report 8.0

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Fist Report 8.0

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Introduction

Greetings Dark Jedi Brotherhood!

Thank you all for being part of what I believe was a very successful war all the way around! I will admit that it was a bit odd not to be diving into all of the competitions head first but I had a ton of fun creating a varied slate of activities for everyone to try their hand at.

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GJW XIV Fun Facts

Looking at the numbers, GJX XIV was a great success overall and the gaming competitions seem to follow that trend.

We saw 542 entries with over 159 unique participants. The war as a whole had 181 unique participants meaning that just under 88% of the members that participated in the war submitted towards at least one gaming competition!

Average competition participation rate of 3.4 competitions per member.

Additionally, 89 members participated in every bin, just under 56% of gaming participants.

Impressively, we had 8 members submit towards all 9 competitions! Congratulations to:

  1. Alaisy Tir’eivra
  2. Bentre Sadow
  3. Kalan Amak
  4. Kenath Zoron
  5. Kojiro Keibatsu
  6. Marick Tyris
  7. Rulvak Qurroc
  8. Von Ricmore

A total of 27 novae were given out for gaming in this war (9 competitions, 3 nova per competition). Out of those we had 18 different members receive at least one nova with 7 members receiving more than one. That seems like a very diverse group of placements!

Lastly, outside of the bracket activity Hearthstone was far and away our most popular PvP platform. I have a sneaking suspicion that this could change by the next war with the fall release of a game whose name rhymes with “Bar Scores: Cauldrons”.

Gaming Time Chart

I am looking forward to additional feedback but I am glad that the numbers seem to indicate that you either:

1.Had fun or;

  1. Are a glutton for gaming punishment.

Thank you all again!

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Hearthstone Wiki Update

Minor but important changes were made to the Supported Games wiki page for Hearthstone.

Big thanks to Zoron for providing these updates before he left the Fist office.

The two changes are:

  1. Added a picture reference for “Basic” vs. “Non-Basic Cards” showing the rarity game or lack thereof.

  2. Added a note not to use the “complete my deck” feature when building a basic deck. The game will not fill your empty card slots with only basic cards using automatic completion even if that is all you have filtered.

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Diablo 3 Cluster Changes

Changes were made to the cluster modifiers to Diablo 3 that I believe more fairly represent the effort required in relation to difficulty levels. With the associated power creep of each season, new items and further Paragon it has become much faster to clear higher levels of difficulty.

The new modifiers are:

  • Regular Rift All Levels = 1x

  • GR 1-75 = 1x

  • GR 76-100 = 1.5x

  • GR 100-125 = 2x

  • GR 126+ = 3x

These are already live on the website. As with everything, I look forward to your feedback on these changes.

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New Competitions Guide -

This is a repeat from before the war but I wanted to post it once more in case it got lost in the pre-war excitement.

I have created a Fist Competition Approval Guide to assist members with running competitions, especially at the club level. For those who are familiar with Operation: Stomping Grounds, I consider this another contribution towards that effort. Increasing the occurrence of member run, club-level gaming competitions a key component of enhancing our gaming community.

This guide covers a wide range of topics such as competition types, tie-breakers, non-approved platform competitions prohibited elements and general competition ideas along with other relevant topics. This should be useful to both new and experienced competition hosts.

Please email me any suggestions for additions or changes to [Log in to view e-mail addresses].

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Competition Spotlight

Want to see your name here? All you have to do is host a club-wide gaming competition.

August 2020 GMRG Competitions hosted by the Fist office.

Lucioball hosted by Junazee

Overwatch: Incoming! hosted by Kashiro

Jedi Knight Academy: Free For All hosted by Kashiro

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Helpful links

[DB Gaming on Telegram - Log in to view join link] on Telegram. Come be part of the discussion in the one and only official gaming channel of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood!

Send us an email at [Log in to view e-mail addresses].

Regards,

JD Signature

A few of us are wondering why Hardcore modifiers were removed from Diablo 3. Could we get some explanation on that first and foremost?

Good to see the Hardcore thing was just a hiccup, as it really would have been a shame to lose that benefit of playing so risky! I expected the changes to the tiers in D3 many moons ago (as power creep is indeed a real thing), but I feel like the upper levels may have been overdone just a tad. Currently, even in this season, no 2+ DJB members are running 100+ regularly, let alone 125+ at all. I think I understand where you might be trying to move the new levels to. I'd love to talk rift clear times and crunch numbers with you later if you would be willing, and I am also down to help with testing in game for both seasonal and non-seasonal.

The Hearthstone thing is huge. I remember hearing about a lot of confusion with the term 'Basic' during the GJW and previous.

Lastly, I wish I could see the chart! Nice update, Justinios.

Don't like the drop in clusters for diablo rifts. Not all of us can even do level 75. Even with perfect gear, it is near impossible to do past 50 alone.

As for hearthstone, instead of basic or custom, it should be between standard and wild, just like the game. Almost no one, especially full time hs players like myself, even use basic cards. Most decks are built with quests, speciality toons, and different strategies that basic doesn't come into play.

With the roc rules, we are hindered in chat of asking to playing custom games and finding only those. Many times, most games that are matched up, end up being forfeited because neither competitors agree which to play. Perhaps instead of one specific comp for the game, should be 2 running concurrently. One for basic and one for custom

Yes hardcore was just a hiccup and has been fixed.

Chart also fixed.

The issue with Diablo 3 is that it is a very gear dependent game, and is 8 years old. With even mid-level gear it isn't that difficult to power through Torment 16 and some slightly higher level greater rifts. When I am seeing a regular stream of submissions of people that are earning clusters at rates double or more to our other platforms I have to act. With perfect gear, enchants and high paragon levels that are possible at this stage of the game the power creep has increased significantly. GR 100 doesn't even get your close to the non-seasonal top 1000 leader board, as an example.

Regarding Hearthstone, the Supported Games wiki page says: "If members cannot agree on the type of deck used, both will use basic decks." Cancelling matches over this issue will be considered match dodging. We use this as the default, with the option for more advanced decks, because we have players at different levels of card ownership. Hearthstone does not have deck options with cheap or free cards that can contest with those who have robust collections. However, members are free to run competitions for any deck styles they would like, basic, custom, wild, standard, etc. As a general rule though, the Fist office is going to focus on competitions that allow as many people to participate and compete as possible.

@brim

If you are barely clearing a 50, you do not have even remotely close to perfect gear.

I really hope that you didn’t just admit to rampant HS match dodging lol.

@justinios

D3 is the hardest game in the DB to balance. Good to see HC was just a hiccup. Thx for the update.

@kalen, not me but I have seen others on the gaming channel stating that the match ups have been cancelled multiple times. I only cancelled one cause we were on different servers.

Weird. I’ve quite literally never seen that happen. Pretty sure the Fist would have addressed it as well, since it’s a blatant ROC violation.

@Brimstone, you and I have had a lengthy chat on this matter already. This update to the wiki reflects that conversation to some extent. While you are an avid player of HS, many of our club are not. As an example - my opponent had to do the tutorial just to be able to play in the GJW (and they were not alone in that).

I'm confused what you are getting at by saying the game splits them only between Standard and Wild. I just logged into HS and "Basic" is one of their built-in filters.

Regardless, I remember playing matches against you with your full deck vs my basic deck. I think the term "ROFLstomp" is what the kids call it for what your deck did to me. Even the slightest variance in decks results in a massive disparity in performance for the average player - even with my GJW opponent (accidentally) playing with only a handful of non-Basic cards, it was obvious which cards were the better ones. That inherent imbalance and inability to level the playing field in any other manner is exactly why Basic is the default.

I know you play HS at a high level outside of DJB, so I trust that you can probably fairly easily beat anyone in a DJB-mandated Basic-only match, so while it may be more boring for you with these rules, it at least gives the rest of us a fighting chance.

To be frank, Diablo 3 has it's ups and downs like every other game. New season? More submissions. Old season/off-season? Almost non-existent submissions. D3 Non-seasonal play has been just that, almost non-existent, but let's talk about that anyways. Non-seasonal heroes for the club, in comparison to that TOP 1000 leaderboard you are referring to, are not even close in comparison. You're looking at guys that have 1500+ paragon to even reach those leaderboards, and all the guys at GR125+ are at around 3k+ paragon. I'd be willing to bet that no-one in the club even has half that paragon number, let alone the actual experience numbers it would take to reach that paragon. It's 10.3 trillion experience to reach paragon 1000. It's 4x that (39.2 trillion) experience to reach 1500 from 1000; 49.5 trillion to go straight to 1500. To get to 3000 from 1500? 338.5 trillion experience. You're telling me that you're expecting even the best D3 players in the club to play roughly 6x their total playtime to reach a paragon that can barely clear a 125 for your new tier?

So do you, Justinios, expect the club to start playing non-seasonal, work it like a job to gain a massive amount of experience, but also push their character to the max just for a chance at the highest tier? You might as well make HotS vs AI all 1 CE, and then add competitive ranks as the other tiers, starting at 2CE for Diamond/Master, and 3CE for Grandmaster. Because that's what the top 1000 players are doing in HotS.

I'm also wondering why non-seasonal is being focused on when they majority of the DB, if not all of the consistent players, are doing seasonal which resets every x period of time. Can't wait to read the response to this. I think some insight into the thinking behind all this will be great.

@Zoron. I think in our games, I won 70% of them. But they were great games cause they weren't one sided, some serious RNG and luck between both of us.

As for Standard or Wild, when you click on a person to challenge, it gives you 4 options. Standard, Wild, Arena, Battlegrounds. I think that's were we are getting discrepancy in the word Basic.

As for playing, I mostly only play Battlegrounds, especially in my streams. I play the others for the daily quests and the free packs to unlock better cards

I'd also like to add some thoughts for this. I draw a comparison to SWTOR flashpoints, which is content you can immediately run once you hit level 11 - which these days can take you no more than a half hour if you're smart to achieve. One flashpoint is approx 20 minutes, so 5 mins for 1 CE at the 4x flashpoint full clear multiplier. Bear this in mind for a moment.

What you're saying is that an almost zero set up game can be used equally for CE submissions, where rifting at 75+ takes actual weeks of preparation before you can even start? That is an insane disparity. I would say account for the work put in for higher tiers. Yes there is power creep, that's part of games. But that's still a huge disadvantage to D3 players who put in huge amounts of work to get to that point.

@Brim - I’ve never won a round of HS against you, so you may be mixing me up with other people.

It’s super obvious in any match when someone accidentally (or intentionally) puts in a non-Basic card (or 15) into their deck because the odds are so badly stacked. It’s similar to how we used to have limitations on what type of cards were the default in Pazaak matches - without those limitations the tables are slanted so badly even for just a small difference in decks.

I understand that many of you are unhappy that the cluster faucet was turned off for Diablo 3 but the values were insanely out of whack. Even this current season, and I do not push the leader boards, and I was solo speed farming T16s in about two weeks. New seasons come with a guaranteed set that gives you a huge power boost, not straight to T16 but with some luck it isn't that hard to get there quickly. Seasons are also not short, they seem to last for about three months. If that is your chosen play style that is still more than enough time to reach insane levels of clearing power. While seasons are a focus, it is also not true that we never see non-seasonal submissions. Seasonal characters also automatically transfer over to non-seasonal once that season ends, along with the paragon experience, gear, stash and gold. This progress is not lost and only adds to the power levels of non-seasonal characters at the end of the season.

This game was providing too many clusters and I recognize names in this thread as the some of the members that were benefiting greatly from it. There is also a lot of over-exaggeration on how hard it is to level and gear up in this game. Even in a new season people are power leveling withing the first 48 hours as the people who are pushing hard are already ready to do so. Saying it takes weeks to get to these levels is hyperbole, especially in a game where helping someone else get to level 75 can take 30 minutes and it is also very easy to help them gear up by soloing mid-tier GRs or regular Rifts while they soak up paragons and loot.

Both of my comments have mentioned no problem whatsoever with your nerf to earlier levels, AKA your "cluster faucet", but you seem to have glossed right over them both. So, in an effort to make this easy: send me a screen shot of your character when you complete your GR 125 solo, then another when it's with a DB member if you don't mind. It doesn't even have to be seasonal! It's for science. Thanks!

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