Penicillin [1517799] —
Original article
Read on to find out how Penicillin managed to win this year's Dog Tags tournament, and achieve a record score in the process.
This wasn’t my first time competing in the Dog Tags tournament. About three or four years ago, I went for the 250 tag merit and was in first place in the overall competition for a while. I stopped when I reached 250 tags because I just wasn’t willing to lose the training time it would take to win. Yet even though I stopped partway through, I still managed to place in the top 25. However, this experience left a bit of a gnawing feeling in the back of my head that maybe I could actually win this competition someday. And this year, I proved myself correct.
When this year’s competition started, I wasn’t sure I was going to try for the win. I knew the first day would be really important, so I decided to try hard the first day, then make a decision about the rest of the tournament. It also helped that my faction, Natural Selection, had decided to chain at the same time the tournament started, so I was going to be making attacks anyway. I came in stacked with 1000 energy, a refill, no Xanax on board, full booster room, plenty of Farm job points, and my finger on my mouse button ready for the exact start time.
I knew there were 500-point NPC tags, but I am embarrassed to say I didn’t know the names of the NPCs and couldn’t find a list of them, so I didn’t get any of those. My initial targets were the staff for their 100 point tags. The staff tags went quickly. I got nine of those. Then I very quickly started tearing through the level 100s with their 75 point tags. I got a lot of those.
This is where I was after one hour:
This is where I was after ~24 hours:
At that point, I knew my chances were good, so I decided to go for it. After a day or two, all of the high-value tags had been taken, so I started taking tags from other players. It just so happened that there were three other factions (SA, R, & FTW) chaining at the start of the dog tags competition. Since those factions were making lots of hits at the start, it was a reasonable assumption that their members had collected a good number of higher value tags.
For the next two weeks, I harvested tags from these factions. I felt a little bad about it, but players from those factions were doing the same to Natural Selection, so on I went. When I saw any other faction chaining, I would take tags from some of their top chainers too. I also had a supplemental list of other players that seemed to be collecting tags and would hit them as well.
This method required carrying around cryptic scraps of paper like the one below so I would remember who to hit. If someone had found one of these notes on me, they probably would have thought I was a code-breaker - or more likely, an insane person.
This competition is gruelling and seems to go on forever. Each day, you need to find decent targets. This requires checking the stats page of each potential target to make sure they are collecting tags and looking at their “Defends Lost” stat to see if they had been hit recently - if they have, they're less likely to give up a tag. Target selection is crucial. You also need to hide from other players who want to take your tags, which involves traveling or hospitalizing yourself. I was incredibly happy when I would get a red result on a warehouse arson. All that hiding became tiresome.
After the first newspaper article came out, I saw that there was only one person close to me in total points. After about a week, I figured out it was Shuka. This was somewhat concerning because Shuka is an experienced veteran in this competition and had finished in second place the previous year. The guy knows this competition. I also had a decent idea that Dekloren was up there in the rankings, and maybe Alexstrasza and a couple of SA people too.
After two weeks, I was still in first place. I really wanted to win the competition on my own, however, I came to the realization that was unlikely. I looked in the newspaper archives and saw that last year’s winners (including the person less than 600 points behind me) had faction mates feed them tags, and they also bought tags from others near the end of the competition. While I didn’t want to do that, I was swayed by an old adage:
“Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t”.
So, I asked for help from my faction. I was incredibly moved by the number of NS members who reached out and offered to help. It is very comforting to be in a faction where members will step up and have your back in a time of need. While I clearly won the first two weeks of the competition, it was NS that pushed me over the top during the last week.
With about five days left of Dog Tags 2019, Shuka just stopped logging in. I don’t know what happened there, but I was very thankful. Honestly, even if he had kept going, I don’t think Shuka would have caught me anyway. I could have pushed my point total close to 50k, but there wasn’t any reason to do so.
I lost about one tag per day on average; not enough to be noticeable. It certainly helps to be #12 in battle stats for both not losing tags and almost unlimited target selection. Overall, I made 1,876 attacks and collected 1,287 tags (finished with 1,267 tags), so the success rate per attack was 69%. I never saw any of the NPC tags, and I only managed to keep seven of the nine Staff tags I originally collected. However, by the end of the tournament, I wound up with 101 out of 488 (21%) of all level 100 tags. This was the overall distribution:
My advice to players trying to win this competition would be the following: You won’t win if you don’t do really well the first day. The first day is when all of the high value tags get vacuumed up. It gets much harder to pull those high-value tags from other people later on in the competition because they also hold a bunch of low value tags, and the tag you receive from any one successful attack is randomly chosen.
One change I would like to see implemented next year is that if someone returns a tag, that tag permanently stays with its owner. In my opinion, it is too easy to “game” the competition by having friends return tags to their owner before you then take it for yourself.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun overall in Dog Tags 2019. But while I enjoyed competing, I will never do this again. It takes a lot of dedication and soaks up a lot of real life-time. However, winning definitely doesn’t suck. I’m glad I did it once.
When this year’s competition started, I wasn’t sure I was going to try for the win. I knew the first day would be really important, so I decided to try hard the first day, then make a decision about the rest of the tournament. It also helped that my faction, Natural Selection, had decided to chain at the same time the tournament started, so I was going to be making attacks anyway. I came in stacked with 1000 energy, a refill, no Xanax on board, full booster room, plenty of Farm job points, and my finger on my mouse button ready for the exact start time.
I knew there were 500-point NPC tags, but I am embarrassed to say I didn’t know the names of the NPCs and couldn’t find a list of them, so I didn’t get any of those. My initial targets were the staff for their 100 point tags. The staff tags went quickly. I got nine of those. Then I very quickly started tearing through the level 100s with their 75 point tags. I got a lot of those.
This is where I was after one hour:
This is where I was after ~24 hours:
At that point, I knew my chances were good, so I decided to go for it. After a day or two, all of the high-value tags had been taken, so I started taking tags from other players. It just so happened that there were three other factions (SA, R, & FTW) chaining at the start of the dog tags competition. Since those factions were making lots of hits at the start, it was a reasonable assumption that their members had collected a good number of higher value tags.
For the next two weeks, I harvested tags from these factions. I felt a little bad about it, but players from those factions were doing the same to Natural Selection, so on I went. When I saw any other faction chaining, I would take tags from some of their top chainers too. I also had a supplemental list of other players that seemed to be collecting tags and would hit them as well.
This method required carrying around cryptic scraps of paper like the one below so I would remember who to hit. If someone had found one of these notes on me, they probably would have thought I was a code-breaker - or more likely, an insane person.
This competition is gruelling and seems to go on forever. Each day, you need to find decent targets. This requires checking the stats page of each potential target to make sure they are collecting tags and looking at their “Defends Lost” stat to see if they had been hit recently - if they have, they're less likely to give up a tag. Target selection is crucial. You also need to hide from other players who want to take your tags, which involves traveling or hospitalizing yourself. I was incredibly happy when I would get a red result on a warehouse arson. All that hiding became tiresome.
After the first newspaper article came out, I saw that there was only one person close to me in total points. After about a week, I figured out it was Shuka. This was somewhat concerning because Shuka is an experienced veteran in this competition and had finished in second place the previous year. The guy knows this competition. I also had a decent idea that Dekloren was up there in the rankings, and maybe Alexstrasza and a couple of SA people too.
After two weeks, I was still in first place. I really wanted to win the competition on my own, however, I came to the realization that was unlikely. I looked in the newspaper archives and saw that last year’s winners (including the person less than 600 points behind me) had faction mates feed them tags, and they also bought tags from others near the end of the competition. While I didn’t want to do that, I was swayed by an old adage:
“Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t”.
So, I asked for help from my faction. I was incredibly moved by the number of NS members who reached out and offered to help. It is very comforting to be in a faction where members will step up and have your back in a time of need. While I clearly won the first two weeks of the competition, it was NS that pushed me over the top during the last week.
With about five days left of Dog Tags 2019, Shuka just stopped logging in. I don’t know what happened there, but I was very thankful. Honestly, even if he had kept going, I don’t think Shuka would have caught me anyway. I could have pushed my point total close to 50k, but there wasn’t any reason to do so.
I lost about one tag per day on average; not enough to be noticeable. It certainly helps to be #12 in battle stats for both not losing tags and almost unlimited target selection. Overall, I made 1,876 attacks and collected 1,287 tags (finished with 1,267 tags), so the success rate per attack was 69%. I never saw any of the NPC tags, and I only managed to keep seven of the nine Staff tags I originally collected. However, by the end of the tournament, I wound up with 101 out of 488 (21%) of all level 100 tags. This was the overall distribution:
My advice to players trying to win this competition would be the following: You won’t win if you don’t do really well the first day. The first day is when all of the high value tags get vacuumed up. It gets much harder to pull those high-value tags from other people later on in the competition because they also hold a bunch of low value tags, and the tag you receive from any one successful attack is randomly chosen.
One change I would like to see implemented next year is that if someone returns a tag, that tag permanently stays with its owner. In my opinion, it is too easy to “game” the competition by having friends return tags to their owner before you then take it for yourself.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun overall in Dog Tags 2019. But while I enjoyed competing, I will never do this again. It takes a lot of dedication and soaks up a lot of real life-time. However, winning definitely doesn’t suck. I’m glad I did it once.
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