sugarvalves [1963573] —
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Record points haul set as Relentless tagger secures victory in his maiden tournament. 89-day player L0rne also beats youngest top-25 record...we think.
Hildegarde is the 2018 Dog Tags winner, and in achieving this feat our champion has also managed to set a new record points total, with his score of 36,440 beating triple-tag winner Kniv's 2017 record by 516 points. Hildegarde accomplished this despite securing nearly 600 fewer tags than Kniv did last year, proving that targeting quality over quantity is a legitimate strategy when it comes to both the dog tag competition and having children.
Pictured: This took me seven hours to make. You're welcome.
In second place by a margin of 5,838 points was ShuKa, who improved greatly on his sixth-place finish in 2017 twenty-second in 2015. The gap between the top two and third was wider than the one between Evil-Duck's ears at a monumental 14,541 points, with RiverNinny securing the bronze tag after finishing just 87 points clear of Smokey123 in fourth.
Hildegarde's victory seems all the more impressive given that this was the first year in which he has entered the Dog Tag tournament, having previously ignored the event completely. When pressed on why he had chosen to enter this year, Hildegarde responded thusly:
"It was a moronic combination of dumbassery, heavy IRL neglection and endless means within the game. Ultimately it boiled down to the best of all reasons: Why not?"
During the early stages of the competition, Hildegarde adopted an efficient tag strategy targeting inactive players of levels 70 and above who hadn't yet been attacked. This tactic is also employed by muggers in real life, who are known to shank pensioners for their savings knowing full well their inactivity means they're unlikely to fight back. However, after 24 hours, all of Torn's high-level inactive players had already been hit, forcing Hildegarde to target lower value players as the event wore on.
Upon the release of our first scores report on November 13th, Hildegarde was in second nearly 2,000 points behind ShuKa, whose own strategy involved simply checking player stats and hoping to catch an early break. Shortly after the publication of said article, ShuKa's fortunes began to turn like old milk spilt on a mattress on a hot summer day, and by the time our second article came out one week later, that 2,000 point lead had turned into a 1,000 point deficit, and ShuKa was staring down the barrel of defeat.
Pictured: An artist's impression.
ShuKa initially blamed the release of the scores for the downturn in his form, but Hildegarde feels the article had little impact on the eventual outcome, and nor did it affect his own strategy going forward.
ShuKa's early lead was indeed partly due to his hoovering up of NPC tags, and come the end of the competition, he was in possession of tags belonging to Arduous, Futile, Chimeric and Keneshi. However, Hildegarde also ended with four NPC tags to his name, having yanked badges belonging to Jefferson, Congenial, TCSE and Samuel. Elsewhere, the tags belonging to Duke and George were last owned by Bodybagger and Leafeh respectively, with a selection of individual players accounting for the rest.
"If you play alone, eventually you will run out of tags to find and be forced to farm 10p tags from inactives. Attacking other tag hunters is generally a bad strategy since they are attacking a lot and get hit a lot, which means that the chance of them giving out a tag is lower on average. Not to mention that by having 100s of tags, you will most likely get a crap one."
When ShuKa asked for faction support, he found that Subversive Alliance could barely put 1k together on his behalf. He agrees that teamwork is crucial if one is aiming to win Dog Tags, but ShuKa knows this wasn't always the case, citing Bodybagger's 2011 win and his own personal victory back in 2013 as examples of players who bowled a perfect game without having the special needs barriers up. Nevertheless, ShuKa made a point of congratulating Hildegarde on his "smooth sail to victory".
2017's third-placed tagger Td3h was one of the players accused of helping Hildegarde, but he feels our victor's efforts should be lauded rather than criticised. Td3h even goes so far as to claim that Hildegarde would beat both himself and last year's runner-up Ofgortens if they all took part next year, adding he would pay good money to see Kniv return and have a right good ding dong with our new champion.
Pictured: Or they might call it squaresies and make out. You don't know. Don't judge them.
Kniv also congratulated Hildegarde while denying that he had helped ShuKa in any way at all. In fact, Kniv stated for the record that the only player he had given marginal assistance to was third-placed Riverninny, who confirmed this by thanking the triple-tag champion in the following praise-laden quote:
ShuKa singled out RiverNinny for congratulations too, with the Helvete member improving hugely on her previous finishes of 8th in 2017 and 23rd in 2016. A bronze tag was just reward for RiverNinny's spectacular efforts, but praise must also go to all of those who finished in the top 25, especially Bodybagger, who Kniv points out has never finished outside of the metal tag positions in the entire history of the Dog Tag tournament.
Further adulation should also be splurged in the direction of two young players, Drizella and L0rne, both of whom belied their young ages to finish 10th and 15th respectively. Drizella, a player of 226 days, entered Dog Tags solely for the merits and never dreamed of hitting the top 25. However, upon finding herself on a +5,000 score after just one week, Drizella elected to strive for more, despite the fact that her active graphics thread made it hard to fly under the radar.
"When I read your article about Dog Tags Top Scores Exposed, I realized that I can actually be in the list. I knew I was fighting with people with billions and hundreds of millions in stats so I kept going without stop. I didn't have any specific strategy honestly, except a few precious people that helped me a lot during the competition especially my dazzling spouse Daddy DOM, Kelsie and mama Teddybears."
Pictured: The kind of profile picture which inexplicably allowed Drizella to fly under the radar.
At the risk of sounding like Drake, the young age of L0rne makes him seem even more impressive, with this 15th-placed whippersnapper having snaffled 841 tags and 8,843 points at the tender age of just 89 days. He too began the competition aiming for no more than the fifty tag merit, but after being attacked within the first few minutes, L0rne almost called it a day.
"I decided to spend all my free time from attacks for a few days travelling or self-hosped. A couple of days later I got it, then I aimed at 250, and after that, well, I was pulled in... I've been in non-stop voyage for all this time... setting the alarm clock, slept in fragments for two-three hours. Fragmentary sleep is much worse than insomnia, I tell you."
"I was really-really tired and when I found myself j*****g off at the playground (thank God, it was at night), I realized I got a bit carried away and then just eased off... nobody attacked me for the last two weeks of competition. I started to sleep normally, waking up at night only for 6-9 times to go to the toilet. Besides, I'm less-than-hundred-days-born noname, I have closed my bazaar, was buying xan only from one person, constantly did only stealth attacks on low-level deserters, in sum all those things helped me a lot to almost completely disappear."
Something tells me that L0rne may find it hard to disappear after that rather graphic response and the fact he may be the youngest top-25 tagger in history. The closest I've been able to find is CCWY's 11th-place finish in 2016 aged just 109 days. If any of our readers know of a younger high-achiever, please write in and tell us - but don't be smug about it, or I'll get upset.
Our final business regarding Tags 2018 is to inform you of the scores required for tokens in this year's event. As ever, the top 10% of players take home the maximum amount of ten tokens, and to achieve this one would have had to have scored 828 points or above. A score of 344 to 827 would've garnered you nine tokens, with 145-343 paying out eight, 67-144 giving you seven, and 45-66 resulting in a six token payout.
So that's it. After 21 days, 443,587 stolen tags and a +1000 spike in Xanax usage, Dog Tags 2018 is over. All that is left is for me to congratulate our new champion Hildegarde, and indeed all of our top twenty-five taggers, and request that you don't eat all your points at once or you'll spoil your tea.
Next up, Christmastown!
Pictured: This took me seven hours to make. You're welcome.
In second place by a margin of 5,838 points was ShuKa, who improved greatly on his sixth-place finish in 2017 twenty-second in 2015. The gap between the top two and third was wider than the one between Evil-Duck's ears at a monumental 14,541 points, with RiverNinny securing the bronze tag after finishing just 87 points clear of Smokey123 in fourth.
Hildegarde's victory seems all the more impressive given that this was the first year in which he has entered the Dog Tag tournament, having previously ignored the event completely. When pressed on why he had chosen to enter this year, Hildegarde responded thusly:
"It was a moronic combination of dumbassery, heavy IRL neglection and endless means within the game. Ultimately it boiled down to the best of all reasons: Why not?"
During the early stages of the competition, Hildegarde adopted an efficient tag strategy targeting inactive players of levels 70 and above who hadn't yet been attacked. This tactic is also employed by muggers in real life, who are known to shank pensioners for their savings knowing full well their inactivity means they're unlikely to fight back. However, after 24 hours, all of Torn's high-level inactive players had already been hit, forcing Hildegarde to target lower value players as the event wore on.
Upon the release of our first scores report on November 13th, Hildegarde was in second nearly 2,000 points behind ShuKa, whose own strategy involved simply checking player stats and hoping to catch an early break. Shortly after the publication of said article, ShuKa's fortunes began to turn like old milk spilt on a mattress on a hot summer day, and by the time our second article came out one week later, that 2,000 point lead had turned into a 1,000 point deficit, and ShuKa was staring down the barrel of defeat.
Pictured: An artist's impression.
ShuKa initially blamed the release of the scores for the downturn in his form, but Hildegarde feels the article had little impact on the eventual outcome, and nor did it affect his own strategy going forward.
"I didn't do anything, it just confirmed my observations. The current 1st place at the time had a lot of NPC tags which gave him a very strong start. My way to counter that disadvantage was buying tags around and doing transfers. He also had access to much more energy than me due to his pub job; only choice I had was to go for maximum efficiency x tag."
ShuKa's early lead was indeed partly due to his hoovering up of NPC tags, and come the end of the competition, he was in possession of tags belonging to Arduous, Futile, Chimeric and Keneshi. However, Hildegarde also ended with four NPC tags to his name, having yanked badges belonging to Jefferson, Congenial, TCSE and Samuel. Elsewhere, the tags belonging to Duke and George were last owned by Bodybagger and Leafeh respectively, with a selection of individual players accounting for the rest.
As the competition wore on, both ShuKa and Hildegarde were subjected to accusations of receiving help from other players. ShuKa claims that his tag collecting pace then dropped naturally due to all the inactive high levels having been hit, and active players fortifying their collection with 1pt and 5pt tags. However, he believes that Hildegarde's pace was maintained unnaturally through his purchase of tags from factionmates, and that this gave him a chonging great advantage.
Do you know who supplied Hildegarde with ShuKa's logs? Contact the Torn City Times with this information and receive a special reward in return. Hildegarde does not deny ShuKa's claims, admitting that the bulk of his help came from his Relentless teammates who supplied him fresh, high-point tags. He believes this strategy is perfectly legitimate, though, opining that all of the previous winners received help and that this kind of event requires a team effort to achieve victory."Somehow Hildegarde obtained my faction logs, so he had the perfect measure of my targeting habits and pace, while Hildegarde's pace was very much synthetic and depended on what he bought from his relentless faction members as they stored a lot of the early good tags on them, 9 Relentless members are top 25."
"Honestly he could run circles around me, I was one-paced and he had different gears using money and team support, while I had to search for low and fresh targets he had plenty of good targets in stores, also I refused buying tags as it made no sense paying to win, there is a difference between contest and shopping."
Pictured: Hildegarde (right) "One victory please."
"Honestly he could run circles around me, I was one-paced and he had different gears using money and team support, while I had to search for low and fresh targets he had plenty of good targets in stores, also I refused buying tags as it made no sense paying to win, there is a difference between contest and shopping."
Pictured: Hildegarde (right) "One victory please."
"If you play alone, eventually you will run out of tags to find and be forced to farm 10p tags from inactives. Attacking other tag hunters is generally a bad strategy since they are attacking a lot and get hit a lot, which means that the chance of them giving out a tag is lower on average. Not to mention that by having 100s of tags, you will most likely get a crap one."
When ShuKa asked for faction support, he found that Subversive Alliance could barely put 1k together on his behalf. He agrees that teamwork is crucial if one is aiming to win Dog Tags, but ShuKa knows this wasn't always the case, citing Bodybagger's 2011 win and his own personal victory back in 2013 as examples of players who bowled a perfect game without having the special needs barriers up. Nevertheless, ShuKa made a point of congratulating Hildegarde on his "smooth sail to victory".
2017's third-placed tagger Td3h was one of the players accused of helping Hildegarde, but he feels our victor's efforts should be lauded rather than criticised. Td3h even goes so far as to claim that Hildegarde would beat both himself and last year's runner-up Ofgortens if they all took part next year, adding he would pay good money to see Kniv return and have a right good ding dong with our new champion.
Pictured: Or they might call it squaresies and make out. You don't know. Don't judge them.
Kniv also congratulated Hildegarde while denying that he had helped ShuKa in any way at all. In fact, Kniv stated for the record that the only player he had given marginal assistance to was third-placed Riverninny, who confirmed this by thanking the triple-tag champion in the following praise-laden quote:
"My Champion, My Hero, My Mentor, The Dog Tag King kniv, teaching me how to play properly. My faction - Helvete, Keeping the tag hunters at bay as they were itching for retal points in warring. Always check the scores in the paper to see how I was going. If anything it upped my gameplay and gave me new goals. And the rumours in the paper there great, love it, though kniv was not happy about his little rumour as it was wrong."
Further adulation should also be splurged in the direction of two young players, Drizella and L0rne, both of whom belied their young ages to finish 10th and 15th respectively. Drizella, a player of 226 days, entered Dog Tags solely for the merits and never dreamed of hitting the top 25. However, upon finding herself on a +5,000 score after just one week, Drizella elected to strive for more, despite the fact that her active graphics thread made it hard to fly under the radar.
"When I read your article about Dog Tags Top Scores Exposed, I realized that I can actually be in the list. I knew I was fighting with people with billions and hundreds of millions in stats so I kept going without stop. I didn't have any specific strategy honestly, except a few precious people that helped me a lot during the competition especially my dazzling spouse Daddy DOM, Kelsie and mama Teddybears."
Pictured: The kind of profile picture which inexplicably allowed Drizella to fly under the radar.
At the risk of sounding like Drake, the young age of L0rne makes him seem even more impressive, with this 15th-placed whippersnapper having snaffled 841 tags and 8,843 points at the tender age of just 89 days. He too began the competition aiming for no more than the fifty tag merit, but after being attacked within the first few minutes, L0rne almost called it a day.
"I decided to spend all my free time from attacks for a few days travelling or self-hosped. A couple of days later I got it, then I aimed at 250, and after that, well, I was pulled in... I've been in non-stop voyage for all this time... setting the alarm clock, slept in fragments for two-three hours. Fragmentary sleep is much worse than insomnia, I tell you."
"I was really-really tired and when I found myself j*****g off at the playground (thank God, it was at night), I realized I got a bit carried away and then just eased off... nobody attacked me for the last two weeks of competition. I started to sleep normally, waking up at night only for 6-9 times to go to the toilet. Besides, I'm less-than-hundred-days-born noname, I have closed my bazaar, was buying xan only from one person, constantly did only stealth attacks on low-level deserters, in sum all those things helped me a lot to almost completely disappear."
Something tells me that L0rne may find it hard to disappear after that rather graphic response and the fact he may be the youngest top-25 tagger in history. The closest I've been able to find is CCWY's 11th-place finish in 2016 aged just 109 days. If any of our readers know of a younger high-achiever, please write in and tell us - but don't be smug about it, or I'll get upset.
Our final business regarding Tags 2018 is to inform you of the scores required for tokens in this year's event. As ever, the top 10% of players take home the maximum amount of ten tokens, and to achieve this one would have had to have scored 828 points or above. A score of 344 to 827 would've garnered you nine tokens, with 145-343 paying out eight, 67-144 giving you seven, and 45-66 resulting in a six token payout.
So that's it. After 21 days, 443,587 stolen tags and a +1000 spike in Xanax usage, Dog Tags 2018 is over. All that is left is for me to congratulate our new champion Hildegarde, and indeed all of our top twenty-five taggers, and request that you don't eat all your points at once or you'll spoil your tea.
Next up, Christmastown!
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