Level Gap Analysis For Mecalympix, From A Dropper's Perspective By James Waddington #714295

First of all, I'll come right out and say that tightening divisions would be the best way to help with the level gap, getting it closer to what an actual guild war would be. It doesn't have to be groups of 8 necessarily, I mean I can understand bigger divisions so there's more variety in opponents... but currently it's 4x as big as a normal pool for div 3&4, and if 30+ teams are fighting for one gold, it leaves a lot of heartache on the table and makes people feel cheated. similarly., It's bad enough when someone is at the bottom of a bracket of 8 teams, but at the bottom of over 30 is pretty rough just due to the average level difference over 30 teams.

Onto my response to other "solutions"

From someone who uses a high level / dropping strategy and is currently in first place in div 4 with it, I would not use it again. A team that gets 16 silvers has a 50% point advantage over a team that gets 8 golds. pretty much everyone realized that you want to bring a team of 16 to the mechalympix and you want them all to be able to perform well. Sure, hero level dropping is still somewhat effective in the format with the right balance, but far more people failed trying level dropping strategies than succeeded. So it's risky and squeezes the number of effective resources you can bring. With a proper level gap, this wouldn't be as devastating of a strategy as it is against a team that is already 10+ levels below your average - even though you'd be able to beat it by even more points with a standard death squad of 16.

If a team brings in a few ridiculously high level players, that is all they will get for point accumulation, besides a few sub-bronze scraps here and there, and they will fail as a group.If there's one guy who's twice your level, it's easy enough to avoid him, let him overkill that circuit, and then just join the next one for whatever medal you were going for anyway. Honestly, it's not a good strategy for this kind of event - Immortals are working extremely hard to outplay our competition from a place of disadvantage, and we wouldn't be winning if we didn't actually sit down and come up with a bunch of solid tricks and strategies to maximize our points. Of course this would work a lot better if we had 16 people earning us points, and it's a good thing brotherhood and acolytes landed at the bottom of div 3 or we'd probably be getting creamed by them.

But hey, it's the first of its kind and we're all experimenting. I say, if someone wants to hurt themselves with a bad strategy like we did with our hero level dropping, let them! It's so rare that I see people demanding a ban to a bad strategy, and it makes me laugh. Immortals are only doing it cuz we wanted to bring everyone we had together into one squad. it's kinda like in faction wars when a guild brings along everyone they have between level 10 and 100 and hope for the best - I mean it's fun to play with everyone together but it's definitely not the most effective strategy you'll find.

So from someone who vouches for level dropping, who likes using it whenever possible, and has had reasonable success with it, this is an event where I highly recommend against using it from personal experience, that is if you want to actually be competitive (or make things unnecessarily hard on yourself).











Submitted by James Waddington #714295