User blog:Fairingrey/About Mammon and Future Events Like It

Maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little selfish right now.

Opening
Hello, reader. I'm Fairingrey, or Lyra as you may know me in-game. You can read more about me in my user profile at User:Fairingrey but for the most part I'm just the main admin of the wiki. Well, at least now I am. I guess I just do most of the legwork. I'm also the leader of Scrubs, the union, and I will discuss them also.

Anyways, this blog post isn't quite about anything regarding the wiki, game strategies, or anything like that, but just to serve as a reminder to the community how important it is to keep calm in the face of tough adversity. As of the past 2 or 3 weeks I've been feeling very iffy about what I've been doing with my time, and although at many times I do have second doubts I always try to feel like I'm enjoying the things I do - and that can be tough.

So like the rather odd and brutally honest heartfelt person that I felt like I ought to stay true to be, I'm here to write about my experience with this game so far. Because although this detracts from my regular duties as an admin and sorts, I'm also a very active player that just likes to share my thoughts. Lately I haven't been doing that, so now's perhaps the perfect time.

This may look like a very long complaint or something to discuss about, but to you reader, I hope it's interesting to read. And before I start, thank you.

Background Info
About a few weeks back right after Cobalt Coliseum (otherwise nicknamed Cobocoli by my union mates and I), quite of number of my members considered quitting the game and some of them did. Many members did - the event was already very competitive to begin with and took a toll on some of the members' health and happiness with all the free time they were wasting away. That free time was effort spent, effort that at some points almost did not come to any fruition. One member failed to make top 100 just because he slept the first day and couldn't make the other battles because of finals - he regret ranking because of it. That member has since quit the game.

It was definitely tough. As a union leader that still had a lot of fun with the game and was still responsible for helping keep up the wiki with things, I felt like I had this duty to continue trying to encourage the others to stay and have fun, to help iron out the kinks and problems that came with being the kind of union that I lead. Some situations were out of my control - some people just didn't enjoy the game anymore and others felt like they had already finished what they wanted to do. Others felt like the game was getting more pay2win and would bail out before they fell any deeper into the hole. Age of Ishtaria was still a fairly new game so I do understand those sentiments well.

As a union that was highly tied to finding more information about the game, we knew about upcoming events. Another member who has since quit the game would be generous enough to jump on his level 20 mule and take screenshots of the current event running in JP Ishtaria and forward those screenshots to us that we attempted to translate a bit. Oftentimes it would come up in our discussions to prepare for these events - the rewards, the mechanics, the exploits. The reason we even have an "unreleased" unit parameter in the Template:Unit documentation is a sign of this. I prep the other unit pages when I have time so others just have to add in the information.

Okay, but to not derail from the point I'm making, the Mammon RBS was one of these events. It was an event I was quite hyped for and that I encouraged every member, former and new, to try and stay for. Many quit - we were almost as low as 12 members at one point in the game. At some point I considered just letting loose steam by dropping my duties for a while and separating the union but in the long run I think that would have made me unhappy.

Come Titania's event (otherwise nicknamed coincidentally e-coli), it was an absolute mess at some points. It took anywhere up to 20 pots in some brackets to rank for the battles, and part of the current status quo was that the game was slowly just getting too tough and stale with the competition - Vinea's Bingo Challenge prior to the event made players who had the time to reroll accounts be able to collect abundant amounts of BP pots. Ever wonder why stuff became so expensive in the bazaar at one point? You can blame e-coli for that.

God forbid I tried to rank in that event despite having the pots - my old Nexus 5 that I've had since launch had a problem that I had to RMA the unit for. I didn't get a working replacement until about the 13th of January. But for the most part, it was definitely the competition that kept me away. I decided to coast it out because I knew Mammon was coming, and that we had information of it prior that I still wanted to try my best to prep the union with.

Well, here comes that part.

Why Mammon Sounded Attractive
I think this was one of the big points that I brought up, but the fact that Mammon was not a tradeable unit brought me and at least some of my union members to the thought that maybe she's much easier to get than most conventional means of ranking and/or selling pots. This was largely due to the fact that she was not ranking based for an event 6★ - instead, you just had to pray you were lucky. There were no gaps to jump or no need to have a rank upkeep because there was no competition.

This was how the event worked, much like how it's going on right now:
 * At 1 mil Union Pts, you're guaranteed a Mammon base
 * At every 200k Union Pts interval past 1 mil, you get a parcel of 10 greed vouchers
 * You could get greed vouchers from discoveries or finishes

The key points to coming to this estimation was this:
 * Mammon was not tradeable. Thus, she must somehow have been a bit easier to get.
 * Mammon has pretty low stats. At her +0 and +1 evolutions, her ATK and HP does not even compare with other common 6★'s. At +2 she gains decent stats but still exhibits a high deck cost at 26 without the stats to back it up. Well, that does detract a significant amount from how attractive she is to get.
 * Her pull rate in the JP server was 1%. I would have hoped that it would work somehow like a box summon - where drawing 100 vouchers would at least guarantee you one Mammon. (I was wrong.)

It was not all too bad though. At the time of writing this, 12 out of 19 union members have at least 1 Mammon+2, with a couple other members with spare bases and one with 2 Mammon+2. Ahh, good for the last guy. I'm jealous.

Sadly, I am not one of those 12 members, and I am one of the few that have went beyond 5 mil union points and still lack a Mammon+2. Ugh. Talk about hopes and dreams dashed.

The Union
I won't lie that I've been kind of excited for Mammon ever since I've even heard information about it. The banner on SS's official site always made me wonder whoever was that pretty girl, and I decided in my heart that I would +2 her no matter the cost. Hearing more about her event from my members made me work hard to try to prepare the right union for it. I wanted to create a fun loving union that showed a lot of activity and promise, with members that were willing to be generous and go out on a leg to help other not-so-lucky members like myself.

And I did succeed. I was very happy that I did, because it took a lot of work and a lot of denied applicants to finally find the right kind of people that I wanted. Scrubs became a fairly competitive union since I founded it back in November, and members who often didn't seem up to par with the others would be the butt of complaints or the first to leave. So in my experience I just decided that even if this kind of tough screening lost us potentially decent members, I wanted to find people I thought really fit the bill and would comfortably fill in the atmosphere for my chat. After all, we are a very communicative union.

Not to say that we're scary or anything like that, but I do uphold very high standards for nearly every member here. We are not an invitational union, but we are not quite a casual one either. I think Fairly Serious is fitting for our union, despite us coming very close to Hardcore only!.

The benefits with having a union like this are that you have a wealth of other players' advice to draw from, you have resources that you can ask others to pool for you, and it takes less BP and effort to do well during a raid season when almost everyone else is working as hard as you are. That's awesome. The benefits are not limited to just that, and we often throw around spare units or just be generous to each other.

The problem wasn't the union though. As a leader I felt like I hit all the right stops with the preparation. For the union being filled back up to a full and healthy 20 active members, to get to know people that were even only a week in comfortable. But some things are just out of your control. You just can't really do much about that.

The Benefits and Demerits with RNG-based Raid Events
As I have said before, I am one of the few players in my union, and perhaps one of the very few in game, that have still have not managed my Mammon+2 despite the effort I've put into it.

I'm pinning the blame on no one right now. I guess I'm just unlucky, that it wasn't meant to be something I could do in a matter of days. To try any further in this face of adversity seems almost impossible at times. All I can rely on for vouchers are discoveries and finishes, and I've already burnt through quite a reserve of BP pots that I saved up particularly for this event.

Some members have been awfully friendly and responsive about the effort I've been putting in and even allowed me to steal finishes from them just to help me try to edge out with at least one more Mammon. I don't doubt that they would have traded their spare bases if they could to me, but it's just a shame that I'm in this with RNG on my own. I can't rely on much else to carry me through since I no longer can grab 10 voucher parcels from Union Pts.

I'm not too upset with what SS was trying to aim for in this event, at least I think. From a more neutral point of view, ignoring my ugly situation, there are some positive and negative things about this event:

Benefits

 * You don't need to be competitive if you do not wish to go far. You can still edge out with a single Mammon base at the 1 million mark.
 * Lucky players, regardless of experience or resources spent, can get Mammon. This can help out new and casual players.

Demerits

 * Because pulling Mammon is a randomly determined event, it can seriously gimp hardworking players like those in my situation.
 * Resources don't guarantee your Mammon. Some players I've heard from would have preferred for her to at least be set at larger intervals so as to make her guaranteed for those who aren't as lucky.
 * Vouchers are just hard to get after you clear 5 million points (though this only applies to Mammon so far)

The vouchers thing seriously just sucks. I wish SS would have at least made it easier to farm for them, because having to spend all this extra effort getting about a fifth of the tickets I could have gotten prior to reaching 5 mil just sucks.

This ends talking about the event.

The Stress with Being a Leader
A former member of mine asked me if leading the wiki was a bit too stressful for me and I said no, that it was a really refreshing and new experience for me that I enjoyed. I was learning a ton of things that I don't think I would've learned otherwise during my normally boring winter break from college.

What actually stresses me out more is being a union leader of the kind of union I do lead. For those who haven't gotten to know me very well, I'm an assertive player that at times makes rash decisions that I don't know are right or wrong - thus I do refer to others to help me out regarding that. At times I've felt like I've said or done the wrong thing, and I've seen the repercussions of those acts - for better or for worse.

It definitely isn't easy leading a union that's as active and tightly knit as my own. When we have a member that's saying harmful things purportedly, I make it a point to talk it out with himherit thoroughly. When we have a member that's doing odd or selfish things in game, I consult them about it. As a leader I want to hit all the right notes with my members but sometimes the stress does get to me, even as I try to be composed myself.

A Recent Situation
One of my best friends and most valued members was a person that recently just raged and had to vent off some steam from the game due to the fact that he was in an even worse situation than I was. He spent much more resources than I did getting to 5 mil Union Pts and he didn't have a single Mammon to show for it. Nothing. Whereas other players, even new, old, or casual, got them. He was very jealous of those people, even within our own union, almost to the point of hostility.

I would be angry too. I think one of the biggest traits that's important to have as a union leader is the ability to be empathic, to understand others' situations well in regards to your own. This was a player I would've gone the extra mile for, a friend that I knew from a previous game that I knew was very generous and hardworking despite the terrible situations he'd have to go through at times.

However, he flipped, and so did I. A day or two ago of writing this I was having an argument with him due to the fact it was just getting on my nerves and the others' that he said some mean things regarding the others' luck in chat. That I was way too optimistic and composed despite the same crap I was going through with him. That others were just lucky. I did agree with him on some parts save for the fact he was a bit rude and demeaning about it, and I didn't like how this kind of arrogant side of him came out.

Well, turns out we got into an argument big enough to make him leave my union and also delete me on all fronts of communication. I remained pretty angry for about some 30 minutes because of the effort I tried to make to ease the stress on him. Again, this was a player that I would've done so many things for. He was nice to me, he talked to me, he was quiet at some points but I often thought he was a very reserved person that could hold his cool.

This same player, well... let's just say that as soon as I started to see what he was doing on his account I got extremely worried, reaching some sort of breaking point where I spammed him with messages through the only medium of communication I had left - the game itself. The aftermath of this following was just talking about his situation with regards to my own. As of late, I've been quite stressed, and the rest of my members knew that. It was recommended I take a good break, and since then I have. Others have been volunteering to help subdue my raid bosses and/or take over my account temporarily so I could take a giant breather.

It's why I'm awfully grateful now that I have these friends and union mates to refer to for help. I wouldn't know what to do without them. The main point I want to draw out from this experience that I've had is the fact that even if RNG treats you terribly, it's important to keep calm and know that things will still be fairly decent even if it just seems impossible otherwise to finish off the unit or other things. I'm still very happy for the things I have right now, and I'm remaining positive in the hopes that maybe one day Mammon will either come back or SS will make her tradeable. Either of those things would just bring me to tears of joy. I'm still somehow satisfied with the fact that I just have all these good people around me to cover my back.

Closing
Wow, that was a lot of reading, I know. I know this is a highly personal situation but it does bring to light some complaints about the events and despite those flaws, some things to think about. Things like how to still enjoy the game and how to perhaps fix or tailor the event otherwise to make both the new, old, hardworking and casual happy.

What I'll mention as a closing note is that I don't take it hard when people quit. I think players should often just go out on a leg for themselves to find fun in the games the play and nobody can stop them from it. I'm particularly stubborn, but I think I've always went by the motto to enjoy what you enjoy, and do the things you like to do.

Again, thank you for reading! I know it was a long post, and it's okay if you've only read part of it since it's pretty expansive. This will be the first post that I think covers something similar to the Thoughts series of blogs I did for the Valkyrie Crusade wiki. You can check that out later if you like.

Anyways, this is your admin Fairingrey, checking out. Thanks for reading and as usual, best of wishes to all you peeps out there working hard for your cute grills. See you all soon! If you have any questions or comments regarding this post, feel free to leave them below or on my message wall.