sugarvalves [1963573] —
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Highest ever points tally recorded by 2019 champion. Lowest level top 25 record equalled. Records also smashed for participation and total tags collected.
Penicillin was crowned the winner of Dog Tags 2019 at noon today, with his score of 42,682 marking a new Torn record, beating the previous high of 36,440 scored by Hildegarde last year. In second place for the second year running was ShuKa with a score of 33,120, and he was followed in third by Logiet on 28,525 points, who massively improved on her previous highest ranking of 18th in 2018.
The top 25 table can be found via the Dog Tags competition link or the Community Centre page. But if you're too lazy to click and only care about the top 10 anyway, here they are.
1st - Penicillin - 42,682 points - 1,267 tags
2nd - ShuKa - 33,120 points - 1,169 tags
3rd - logiet - 28,525 points - 1,175 tags
4th - Dekloren - 24,078 points - 833 tags
5th - Smokey123 - 23,164 points - 1,614 tags
6th - DOM - 19,161 points - 1,221 tags
7th - Shiff - 14,160 points - 642 tags
8th - Riverninny - 13,804 points - 777 tags
9th - Dondantoni - 13,536 points - 644 tags
10th - Wildhare - 13,046 points - 897 tags
Our record-breaking champion Penicillin will describe his achievements and methods in more detail in a special edition article to be published later this week. But before that is released, Penicillin gave his brief thoughts on achieving Torn's highest ever Dog Tag score.
"It is pretty cool to have broken the total points record, although with the general rising tide of everyone's level, it was inevitable that the record would have been broken. I stopped collecting after the newspaper article came out a couple of days ago because I had a huge lead already. Had I kept going, I could have beaten the record by even more."
Penicillin's achievement is even more impressive when you find out his Farm lost its 10-star status during the second week of the competition, costing him the extra 700 energy per day its top perk provides. This is why second-placed ShuKa was able to catch up to within a few hundred points of Penicillin - that, and the fact he overdosed twice over consecutive weeks!
In response, all Penicillin could do was continue to work hard and hope it would be enough. His chances were further boosted when his energy job special returned last week, and at that point, there was no realistic chance of anyone ever catching him.
"It was really cool to win, but I will never try to win again. It is fun, but it takes a lot of effort."
Pictured: Penicillin returns to the farm now his work is done.
We haven't been able to contact our Silver Tag recipient ShuKa for comment, as he hasn't been seen in Torn for four days at the time of writing - he must've known he'd done enough to seal second, but couldn't possibly take third! I have managed to speak to our Bronze Tag winner Logiet, however, who says that this was the most effort she's ever made in the Dog Tag competition - and boy did it pay off!
Logiet managed to collect nearly 20,000 more points than she did last year. Her strategy was one of extreme preparation, having already made a list of all Torn's beatable inactive players several weeks before the competition began.
"This resulted in a huge target list with several tabs in the spreadsheet. I started with stacked E around 24-hour booster I used it all for the 25K chain we had. The list sure helped to get the high score tags the first few days, however, after 3-4 days the list was already drained lots by other people having the same strategy."
Logiet then switched her focus to active players, only to find she was gaining too many low score tags. She then updated her inactives database to show all players who hadn't lost any defends since the competition began, and this, combined with cooksie's helper script gave her the advantage she needed.
In the final week, Logiet began to add tags from friendly faction members and those who had collected their 250th tag merit. But over the course of the whole competition, Logiet feels that her ability to operate undetected was her biggest advantage.
"My most important strategy was to sit below the radar and not draw attention. This meant trying to stealth all my attacks. I did reset my merits and put it on stealth to have that advantage and I used high stealth melee weapons. Further, I made sure I was abroad most of the time and that I did self hosp using SEDs and whatever to not get hit by others losing tags."
Despite her best efforts to stay off everyone's hit list, one person who had noticed Logiet's progress was the infamous Dekloren, who was only 700 or so points behind his third-place rival when we published the final tag scores update on Saturday. Having spent the entire week prior grinding away, Logiet admits she nearly gave up when she saw Dekloren was so close.
But as you can see from the final gap of over 4,000 points, she did no such thing. And this is in spite of some rather threatening messages having come from her opponent, whom Logiet had never previously spoken to.
Pictured: What a lovely introduction.
Despite being a big name in the PT ranks, Logiet describes herself as someone who minds her own business in Torn City. She never pays much attention to what other players are doing and is content to just play the game her own way. Clearly this attitude worked well for her when it came to Dog Tags, but when Dekloren started breathing down her neck, you could have forgiven Logiet if she'd panicked.
"I had to think about what I would reply to make sure I would not end up being a target. After comp end, we spoke again and found out I had a lucky win. It was fun competing for 3rd but also very stressful to keep up with that pace, however, we had a clean fight with not hitting each other (not that I could beat him) or putting bounties on each other."
"Overall it was a fun event, but I think it will be a one-time thing putting that much effort into this comp."
Outside of the top three, there were many other players who put in an impressive performance this year. Smokey123 came close to beating the record tag total of 1,773 with his tally of 1,614 tags collected. After finishing fourth in 2018, Smokey thought he'd be targeted heavily this year, but he was only hit three times throughout the entire event. Having missed out on third-place by 80 points in 2018, Smokey was determined to go one better this time around. But alas, he fell short once more due to the high turnout of aggressive taggers.
"It turns out that a lot of people had the same thinking as me and had an ominous amount of energy to spend. I knew it wasn't possible for me to obtain high scoring tags in the late stage of the competition so I decided to hit the inactive level 11 and 10's. I started reading Ugly energy for this event to give me the best chance of going for the most 10 point tags rather than source out 30's or 40's."
Smokey realised he stood no chance of gaining a top-three place when the first tag table was released, so he turned down the chance to take tags from his factionmates. In hindsight, he feels he should've organised something several weeks before the event began, because he ended up clicking around 150,000 profiles during the event, and double that when he checked the Defends Lost stat on every single one!
"Yes, my fingers are hurting, but was it worth it?, Probably not. Will I take part in next year? Hell no!. However, I do have an idea for a competition I would like to do for next year which I will give details on nearer the time."
Interestingly, on the 22nd, Smokey predicted who the top five would be with a reasonable level of accuracy. Although he clearly overestimated the activity of Z_junior, and vastly underestimated the abilities of Penicillin!
Below Smokey in sixth was DOM, whose level of 15 makes him the lowest-ranked player out of this year's top 25 and the joint-lowest level ever to have placed in the top 25. The only other player to achieve this at level 15 was Drizella, who finished tenth last year, and who incidentally helped DOM to accomplish this magnificent sixth-place finish.
"My strategies were similar to the others. Only the difference was, I had my babygirl Drizella, a top tagger in my corner assisting me wif her experience from last year. This means so much to me coz it was Drizella's ultimate goal for me to score higher n place better than she did last year. N WE DID IT! It was our absolute solid teamwork n it will become one of our memorable moments in Torn together."
Another impressive performance came from Wildhare in 10th, who achieved the 250 tag merit in last year's event when just over a month old. Wildhare believed that she could've made the top 25 in 2018 if she hadn't have slowed up after achieving the merit, and her incredible performance this year shows she was right to believe her own hype!
"Realizing I was 10th when Duke left the top 10 was pretty exciting. A big part of my strategy was to stay under the radar. Going as far as level holding and limiting market purchases. I owe a ton to being recruited into White Rabbits very early in my Torn life. Having a great faction that is supportive during competition is fantastic. (And toleration branch to help with no xanax ODs is a good thing). "
At just 418 days old at the close of the competition, Wildhare was the youngest player in the top 25 by a margin of over 150 days. She says she believes that "a mind-boggling number of people" in Torn don't seem to read things, like the newspaper, where several inactive search strategies were published just before Dog Tags started.
But Wildhare does read. She reads and she lurks. And she also writes! Wildhare has written up a fantastic guide for new players which covers all of the major Torn events of the year, as well as a few general tips and tricks for becoming what she describes as "moderately successful". So if you're a new player who's wondering how you can compete with the big dogs in Torn, keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.
Finally, in fifteenth place, a shout-out must go to Torn City Times reporter and Ultimate Racing Tournament steward SinCitySinner, who was the second-youngest player to achieve top 25 status. On the 19th, SCS sent me a list of names he thought were placed in the top 10 and 25 at the time. He correctly predicted five out of the top ten, and a further two out of the top 25, including himself.
"This was my 2nd year taking part, went for the 50 Tag merit last year but wanted to go all-out this time. Stacked E, had a solid target list of Inactives to start out (also managed to snag 1 NPC tag in the first few seconds). After that I tried to stay under the radar, going after lvl 20-29 (then lvl 10-19) Inactives. Constantly traveled so I wouldn't be a target, used SED's toward the end and that attracted some attention but still only lost 4 tags total."
"No real in-depth analysis for the top hitters, just looked in the Hospital to see who had been using SED's.... anyone blowing themselves up and with 500+ attacks since Nov 4th I figured were trying for top 25 (only others that sue SED's are high-level traders). Reason I didn't use them until the end since people could figure out the who the serious Tag hunters were."
Pictured: Someone with a lot of tags to their name.
And that's our round-up of the Dog Tag 2019 tournament done with! Congratulations once more to our champion, Penicillin, and to all of those who finished in the top 25 of Dog Tags 2019. This was a record-breaking year in more ways than one, as the total of 511,147 tags stolen represents a huge increase on last year's record of 443,587, which is unsurprising considering a record 36,187 people took part!
Oh, and if you're wondering what the cut-offs were for the ten levels of tokens, here they are:
10 tokens - 727 points
9 tokens - 290 points
8 tokens - 115 points
7 tokens - 55 points
6 tokens - 37 points
5 tokens - 16 points
4 tokens - 11 points
3 tokens - 10 points
2 tokens - 8 points
1 token - 1 point
The top 25 table can be found via the Dog Tags competition link or the Community Centre page. But if you're too lazy to click and only care about the top 10 anyway, here they are.
1st - Penicillin - 42,682 points - 1,267 tags
2nd - ShuKa - 33,120 points - 1,169 tags
3rd - logiet - 28,525 points - 1,175 tags
4th - Dekloren - 24,078 points - 833 tags
5th - Smokey123 - 23,164 points - 1,614 tags
6th - DOM - 19,161 points - 1,221 tags
7th - Shiff - 14,160 points - 642 tags
8th - Riverninny - 13,804 points - 777 tags
9th - Dondantoni - 13,536 points - 644 tags
10th - Wildhare - 13,046 points - 897 tags
Our record-breaking champion Penicillin will describe his achievements and methods in more detail in a special edition article to be published later this week. But before that is released, Penicillin gave his brief thoughts on achieving Torn's highest ever Dog Tag score.
"It is pretty cool to have broken the total points record, although with the general rising tide of everyone's level, it was inevitable that the record would have been broken. I stopped collecting after the newspaper article came out a couple of days ago because I had a huge lead already. Had I kept going, I could have beaten the record by even more."
Penicillin's achievement is even more impressive when you find out his Farm lost its 10-star status during the second week of the competition, costing him the extra 700 energy per day its top perk provides. This is why second-placed ShuKa was able to catch up to within a few hundred points of Penicillin - that, and the fact he overdosed twice over consecutive weeks!
In response, all Penicillin could do was continue to work hard and hope it would be enough. His chances were further boosted when his energy job special returned last week, and at that point, there was no realistic chance of anyone ever catching him.
"It was really cool to win, but I will never try to win again. It is fun, but it takes a lot of effort."
Pictured: Penicillin returns to the farm now his work is done.
We haven't been able to contact our Silver Tag recipient ShuKa for comment, as he hasn't been seen in Torn for four days at the time of writing - he must've known he'd done enough to seal second, but couldn't possibly take third! I have managed to speak to our Bronze Tag winner Logiet, however, who says that this was the most effort she's ever made in the Dog Tag competition - and boy did it pay off!
Logiet managed to collect nearly 20,000 more points than she did last year. Her strategy was one of extreme preparation, having already made a list of all Torn's beatable inactive players several weeks before the competition began.
"This resulted in a huge target list with several tabs in the spreadsheet. I started with stacked E around 24-hour booster I used it all for the 25K chain we had. The list sure helped to get the high score tags the first few days, however, after 3-4 days the list was already drained lots by other people having the same strategy."
Logiet then switched her focus to active players, only to find she was gaining too many low score tags. She then updated her inactives database to show all players who hadn't lost any defends since the competition began, and this, combined with cooksie's helper script gave her the advantage she needed.
In the final week, Logiet began to add tags from friendly faction members and those who had collected their 250th tag merit. But over the course of the whole competition, Logiet feels that her ability to operate undetected was her biggest advantage.
"My most important strategy was to sit below the radar and not draw attention. This meant trying to stealth all my attacks. I did reset my merits and put it on stealth to have that advantage and I used high stealth melee weapons. Further, I made sure I was abroad most of the time and that I did self hosp using SEDs and whatever to not get hit by others losing tags."
Despite her best efforts to stay off everyone's hit list, one person who had noticed Logiet's progress was the infamous Dekloren, who was only 700 or so points behind his third-place rival when we published the final tag scores update on Saturday. Having spent the entire week prior grinding away, Logiet admits she nearly gave up when she saw Dekloren was so close.
But as you can see from the final gap of over 4,000 points, she did no such thing. And this is in spite of some rather threatening messages having come from her opponent, whom Logiet had never previously spoken to.
Pictured: What a lovely introduction.
Despite being a big name in the PT ranks, Logiet describes herself as someone who minds her own business in Torn City. She never pays much attention to what other players are doing and is content to just play the game her own way. Clearly this attitude worked well for her when it came to Dog Tags, but when Dekloren started breathing down her neck, you could have forgiven Logiet if she'd panicked.
"I had to think about what I would reply to make sure I would not end up being a target. After comp end, we spoke again and found out I had a lucky win. It was fun competing for 3rd but also very stressful to keep up with that pace, however, we had a clean fight with not hitting each other (not that I could beat him) or putting bounties on each other."
"Overall it was a fun event, but I think it will be a one-time thing putting that much effort into this comp."
Outside of the top three, there were many other players who put in an impressive performance this year. Smokey123 came close to beating the record tag total of 1,773 with his tally of 1,614 tags collected. After finishing fourth in 2018, Smokey thought he'd be targeted heavily this year, but he was only hit three times throughout the entire event. Having missed out on third-place by 80 points in 2018, Smokey was determined to go one better this time around. But alas, he fell short once more due to the high turnout of aggressive taggers.
"It turns out that a lot of people had the same thinking as me and had an ominous amount of energy to spend. I knew it wasn't possible for me to obtain high scoring tags in the late stage of the competition so I decided to hit the inactive level 11 and 10's. I started reading Ugly energy for this event to give me the best chance of going for the most 10 point tags rather than source out 30's or 40's."
Smokey realised he stood no chance of gaining a top-three place when the first tag table was released, so he turned down the chance to take tags from his factionmates. In hindsight, he feels he should've organised something several weeks before the event began, because he ended up clicking around 150,000 profiles during the event, and double that when he checked the Defends Lost stat on every single one!
"Yes, my fingers are hurting, but was it worth it?, Probably not. Will I take part in next year? Hell no!. However, I do have an idea for a competition I would like to do for next year which I will give details on nearer the time."
Interestingly, on the 22nd, Smokey predicted who the top five would be with a reasonable level of accuracy. Although he clearly overestimated the activity of Z_junior, and vastly underestimated the abilities of Penicillin!
Below Smokey in sixth was DOM, whose level of 15 makes him the lowest-ranked player out of this year's top 25 and the joint-lowest level ever to have placed in the top 25. The only other player to achieve this at level 15 was Drizella, who finished tenth last year, and who incidentally helped DOM to accomplish this magnificent sixth-place finish.
"My strategies were similar to the others. Only the difference was, I had my babygirl Drizella, a top tagger in my corner assisting me wif her experience from last year. This means so much to me coz it was Drizella's ultimate goal for me to score higher n place better than she did last year. N WE DID IT! It was our absolute solid teamwork n it will become one of our memorable moments in Torn together."
Another impressive performance came from Wildhare in 10th, who achieved the 250 tag merit in last year's event when just over a month old. Wildhare believed that she could've made the top 25 in 2018 if she hadn't have slowed up after achieving the merit, and her incredible performance this year shows she was right to believe her own hype!
"Realizing I was 10th when Duke left the top 10 was pretty exciting. A big part of my strategy was to stay under the radar. Going as far as level holding and limiting market purchases. I owe a ton to being recruited into White Rabbits very early in my Torn life. Having a great faction that is supportive during competition is fantastic. (And toleration branch to help with no xanax ODs is a good thing). "
At just 418 days old at the close of the competition, Wildhare was the youngest player in the top 25 by a margin of over 150 days. She says she believes that "a mind-boggling number of people" in Torn don't seem to read things, like the newspaper, where several inactive search strategies were published just before Dog Tags started.
But Wildhare does read. She reads and she lurks. And she also writes! Wildhare has written up a fantastic guide for new players which covers all of the major Torn events of the year, as well as a few general tips and tricks for becoming what she describes as "moderately successful". So if you're a new player who's wondering how you can compete with the big dogs in Torn, keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.
Finally, in fifteenth place, a shout-out must go to Torn City Times reporter and Ultimate Racing Tournament steward SinCitySinner, who was the second-youngest player to achieve top 25 status. On the 19th, SCS sent me a list of names he thought were placed in the top 10 and 25 at the time. He correctly predicted five out of the top ten, and a further two out of the top 25, including himself.
"This was my 2nd year taking part, went for the 50 Tag merit last year but wanted to go all-out this time. Stacked E, had a solid target list of Inactives to start out (also managed to snag 1 NPC tag in the first few seconds). After that I tried to stay under the radar, going after lvl 20-29 (then lvl 10-19) Inactives. Constantly traveled so I wouldn't be a target, used SED's toward the end and that attracted some attention but still only lost 4 tags total."
"No real in-depth analysis for the top hitters, just looked in the Hospital to see who had been using SED's.... anyone blowing themselves up and with 500+ attacks since Nov 4th I figured were trying for top 25 (only others that sue SED's are high-level traders). Reason I didn't use them until the end since people could figure out the who the serious Tag hunters were."
Pictured: Someone with a lot of tags to their name.
And that's our round-up of the Dog Tag 2019 tournament done with! Congratulations once more to our champion, Penicillin, and to all of those who finished in the top 25 of Dog Tags 2019. This was a record-breaking year in more ways than one, as the total of 511,147 tags stolen represents a huge increase on last year's record of 443,587, which is unsurprising considering a record 36,187 people took part!
Oh, and if you're wondering what the cut-offs were for the ten levels of tokens, here they are:
10 tokens - 727 points
9 tokens - 290 points
8 tokens - 115 points
7 tokens - 55 points
6 tokens - 37 points
5 tokens - 16 points
4 tokens - 11 points
3 tokens - 10 points
2 tokens - 8 points
1 token - 1 point
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