Running Blog: The Life of a New Player Account

[East Coast Bias]

Last week I upgraded to an iPhone 6+ and thanks to the miracle of Gree, had to create a new account in order to link my other accounts via Game Center. So the creation of the new account was unplanned and given that I missed the anniversary loot, the tank glitch, the rerelease of the LTBs and the beginning of the equipment cycle, I figured that I would be handicapped enough to see what a new player would experience.

A bit about me. I've been around since the first WDE, but did not participate in the battle for Brazil because my faction leader did not know he had to declare and the rest of us did not know we had to press the globe icon. The result? The entire event went by and we were all left standing wondering what the hell happened. Thanks for the memories Eddie. Naturally, I moved on and joined MWD, where I was surprised the leader would accept a pretty lame gold free account. But to Rizz's credit, he must have seen something, or he must have been self consuming some of the meds from work. But I digress.

I've got three accounts, I call them main, mini and micro. Main is currently in LGSTO, but freeloaded in MWD, DN, SLO, VFFL and KYS. Mini has pretty much been in AIA since creation, thanks to ATG and Hakim for putting up with a fairly useless account for several months until it could hold its own. Micro was created last week during the FLTQ/RB event and was homeless for a few days.

During that time, I was quite helpless as anyone with money seems to have created their account prior to the award of the anniversary loot, therefore had 333k def, much higher than my 10 atk. So what is a crappy new account to do? Well I checked groupme to see if there were any factions who had open spots for RB. Luckily, one faction was willing to give me a prestige spot for free. No, I didn't know anyone in the faction, this was a random opportunity. I must thank Hard Rock Cafe, as this was completely no strings attached. Being the nosy guy I am, I checked out their vault to see if they needed cash or crete that I could give from my main, but these guys were rocking, and didn't need any help, so I gratefully received the presitge prize and left.

Feeling GREEdy, I set out to see if I could aim higher, and get the masters prize. Again, went on groupme and searched the chats. Bang, this must have been karma, but Dbalz/MWD came calling and I offered to bring my 2m atk account to knock those 150s. No, since main was done with masters RB/FLTQ, I sent him over and helped hit the bosses. Luckily, in addition to getting the masters prize, the faction finished the presitge FLTQ, so whamo, 6m atk. Good start, but who needs a lv15 account with an IPH of 20k? Of course no one.

Out of options, I joined faction after faction that came up in the faction list. Yes, those that have the door open. There are actually some very good factions that come up randomly, even some extinct ones like FFF. In the end, I joined GREE, a faction full of KYS mini slacker accounts. It is a very confusing faction as there is a man playing an account called Tadaah, and I had to remind him that from my recollection, Tadaah was a she. But hey, there are many confused people in this game, so I guess this faction is no different. I thought my account was bad, but I felt comforted after checking these wall busting accounts.

From the timeline, next was FL. Now to give you a sense of how bad the faction is, the current leader of KYS must have hit the declare button twice over the two day event. In most cases, I had to deploy by myself, which is difficult when your IPH can't afford much. But thanks to all the lv10-20 accounts that bought AMRs, I was able to raid 200m during the event (but had to level up 5-6 times) and was able to buy several hundred tanks. Amazingly, the 2000-3000 rank teams were pretty awful. So while we did not get any meaningful faction or indi prizes, we did complete the 9/9 sweep and the 10/10 indi.

So here you have it, the one one week flashback of a new account. While I used my main to get the masters prize for the micro, everything else is perhaps the best I could do for free. Equipment wise, the account is 11/11 and has few multiple items. It has 15 health packs from the RB event and IPH is now a stellar 40k. So now WDE is upon us, should I stay and freeload (or actually be freeloaded) or should I jump for greener pastures? I'm staying for the time being as someone needs to hold the fort in team GREE.

All of this is actually true. I'll report back again in a week or two to report progress, not that this is the best roadmap for a new account, but just one way to navigate the game.

[Norsklandman]

Last week I upgraded to an iPhone 6+ and thanks to the miracle of Gree, had to create a new account in order to link my other accounts via Game Center. So the creation of the new account was unplanned and given that I missed the anniversary loot, the tank glitch, the rerelease of the LTBs and the beginning of the equipment cycle, I figured that I would be handicapped enough to see what a new player would experience.

A bit about me. I've been around since the first WDE, but did not participate in the battle for Brazil because my faction leader did not know he had to declare and the rest of us did not know we had to press the globe icon. The result? The entire event went by and we were all left standing wondering what the hell happened. Thanks for the memories Eddie. Naturally, I moved on and joined MWD, where I was surprised the leader would accept a pretty lame gold free account. But to Rizz's credit, he must have seen something, or he must have been self consuming some of the meds from work. But I digress.

I've got three accounts, I call them main, mini and micro. Main is currently in LGSTO, but freeloaded in MWD, DN, SLO, VFFL and KYS. Mini has pretty much been in AIA since creation, thanks to ATG and Hakim for putting up with a fairly useless account for several months until it could hold its own. Micro was created last week during the FLTQ/RB event and was homeless for a few days.

During that time, I was quite helpless as anyone with money seems to have created their account prior to the award of the anniversary loot, therefore had 333k def, much higher than my 10 atk. So what is a crappy new account to do? Well I checked groupme to see if there were any factions who had open spots for RB. Luckily, one faction was willing to give me a prestige spot for free. No, I didn't know anyone in the faction, this was a random opportunity. I must thank Hard Rock Cafe, as this was completely no strings attached. Being the nosy guy I am, I checked out their vault to see if they needed cash or crete that I could give from my main, but these guys were rocking, and didn't need any help, so I gratefully received the presitge prize and left.

Feeling GREEdy, I set out to see if I could aim higher, and get the masters prize. Again, went on groupme and searched the chats. Bang, this must have been karma, but Dbalz/MWD came calling and I offered to bring my 2m atk account to knock those 150s. No, since main was done with masters RB/FLTQ, I sent him over and helped hit the bosses. Luckily, in addition to getting the masters prize, the faction finished the presitge FLTQ, so whamo, 6m atk. Good start, but who needs a lv15 account with an IPH of 20k? Of course no one.

Out of options, I joined faction after faction that came up in the faction list. Yes, those that have the door open. There are actually some very good factions that come up randomly, even some extinct ones like FFF. In the end, I joined GREE, a faction full of KYS mini slacker accounts. It is a very confusing faction as there is a man playing an account called Tadaah, and I had to remind him that from my recollection, Tadaah was a she. But hey, there are many confused people in this game, so I guess this faction is no different. I thought my account was bad, but I felt comforted after checking these wall busting accounts.

From the timeline, next was FL. Now to give you a sense of how bad the faction is, the current leader of KYS must have hit the declare button twice over the two day event. In most cases, I had to deploy by myself, which is difficult when your IPH can't afford much. But thanks to all the lv10-20 accounts that bought AMRs, I was able to raid 200m during the event (but had to level up 5-6 times) and was able to buy several hundred tanks. Amazingly, the 2000-3000 rank teams were pretty awful. So while we did not get any meaningful faction or indi prizes, we did complete the 9/9 sweep and the 10/10 indi.

So here you have it, the one one week flashback of a new account. While I used my main to get the masters prize for the micro, everything else is perhaps the best I could do for free. Equipment wise, the account is 11/11 and has few multiple items. It has 15 health packs from the RB event and IPH is now a stellar 40k. So now WDE is upon us, should I stay and freeload (or actually be freeloaded) or should I jump for greener pastures? I'm staying for the time being as someone needs to hold the fort in team GREE.

All of this is actually true. I'll report back again in a week or two to report progress, not that this is the best roadmap for a new account, but just one way to navigate the game.

We got 50wins in HQ.... Once lmao

[East Coast Bias]

So this past weekend was quite painful, as Team Gree had 20 out of 30 players missing in action, ie: deadwood. The top slackers were Tadaah, Clementine and Paul (these are their actual player names), who put up less than 10k - so made me wonder if they do the same in their real jobs, whatever that may be. Our goal of 50 wins came up 35 short, and in some cases we lost by only 200 points (300 vs 500), so some very close high scoring affairs. After a disastrous top 1500 finish, I expected a complete exodus of players, but alas, I wake up to find 5 more recruits who have joined our under-performing faction lead by Tadaaah. I noticed an FLTQ started this morning, and put out a call for everyone to complete at least 1/10 and 1/15. Complete silence in the GroupMe chat. I have begun to wonder if I've joined the right team, but I digress.

Some technical feedback. What became clear is that while equipment stats do not matter, having none does. Over the three day period, I did not lose a single attack that I initiated with my main as long as my attack was greater than 2x the def. However, with respect to the micro, I lost 3/4 battles (ie: gave away precious points) when my attack was only 2x greater, but equipment little to none (50/12). As you may recall, this experiment was to see how a new account would do, and clearly being so far behind in collecting equipment puts the micro behind the 8 ball. Whether new accounts will ever be able to make up the gap is questionable.

Size of faction does matter. Our team of 30 was typically matched against other factions with less than a 60-man crew. To be honest with you, the participation rate, not only of my faction, but all factions at the top 1500 level is poor. I think if Tadaaah, Clementine and Paul did not slack and showed up at every battle, we could have won 50 battles. I think the highest score against us was 20k, the rest were below 5k. Therefore, a well organized team could easily streak at this level.

What happens in the PvP to come will be interesting.

[ATG]

Sounds like if you hadn't given away 3/4 of your minis attacks you would have hit 50 wins. However you choose to blame your poor efforts on those around you. I suggest you fall on your own sword next time rather then place it into your brothers' back.

[East Coast Bias]

I just received some very good feedback. It went along the lines that I should have never joined a faction that I should have known would be absent on the weekend. I take this constructive feedback very seriously.

[East Coast Bias]

Last week was a great week for Team Gree. After a long absence, CJ returned to the team. Apparently, he felt burned out after his team finished 6th and 8th in the last two WDEs. I had previously warned CJ that the top 5 spots were already taken, so it might not make sense to push hard, but he apparently still had plenty of tapjoy video gold a la TKM to spend. While I think his top 6 days are over, he might do an occasional 40K dump at Target, so he still needs a close watch.

But the reunion had greater meaning, as it was a chance for Tadaah to learn from the MW master. CJ immediately improved our FL strategy, and the end result was 1400 places higher than what we did last cycle. You had to be there, with Tadaah at the helm we even had a 100m battle.

[East Coast Bias]

I must confess, trying to improve a micro is tough. First, you can't get far in collecting equipment (oh, did Gree say it was useless now?) and LTQs are way beyond my reach. So I did the typical 5/10, 1/15 (no masters as it does not show up yet). Now one needs to ask the community for some free help. The first player I'd like to thank is Stellaman of RTW, I made the mistake of helping another faction and while I was out my faction completed 15/15. So I asked around and he gave me a free spot so I could complete and get the wrapper. So I guess good deeds gets you good karma. Now with my mini account taken care of, I looked around the requests for help and found LMWS, Dbalz and a few more. While I could have made my life easier, since I had responded to a number of them, I rotated my main through these teams and did enough to get the micro the 15/15 and 27/27.

Now while the equipment no longer matters, the up hill climb of a new account with no IPH is daunting. Without the help of the community and my main, I think the best that can be done is to play top 2000 and take the long road (1-2 years) to build IPH and possibly graduate from buying planes to tanks in the medium term. RB will be tough, maybe I need just one cycle of freeloading with a top team in WD/FL to get enough raw stats to be able to earn the min damage. As of right now, even with an FA, i can only qualify for a lv125 boss, so jumping into teams working on masters is tough to get legendaries. Doesn't help that all my unit buildings are 1 so the current LTQ can't be touched. So while the micro has always been an experiment, the early conclusion is that gold free and lack of the tank glitch has made the climb difficult and I wonder if other new players would choose to continue playing. However, I've met a number of nice people playing top100-250 and working hard to finish prestige through this effort.

[East Coast Bias]

So I neglected the micro account (lv72, 380k IPH, 33B/35B) for more than two months due to gree getting stingy with boosts and me thinking that I would retire all of my accounts one by one. But I decided to dust off the micro to make a point to my own faction, where I think there are some extreme slackers. I wanted to embarrass them. So in the most recent RB, I farmed about 400+ of those nice shiny units and in FL I scored about 45 million points. In the process, gained only one level and stats increased to 74B/85B. I was hoping for much more, but with no boosts and no gold to buy the in store ones, I guess I need to be happy with only the raw stat increase. No excuses by me about not having enough money to fund all gunners all the time, heck if you recycle a few of those farmed units from RB, you are swimming in cash. Next RB will be fun, with a quick attack of 25B (hopefully I am correct), the micro hits better than teammates with 7-10x boosted stats. So the question to my slacking team mates, how do you let a throw away micro account to finish 25th in RB damage and about the same in FL?