Strategy Irrelevance Theory (in General)

I chose this name for the following theory because it echoes something from finance.

Hypothesis: Your strategy (within reason, but mage/tank, 1 minion/4 minions doesn't matter) does not determine how fast you can grow. [I am pretty sure of it before 8BA/20, and I am extrapolating it to the 7BA and 6BA/20]

Premise: At the early point, you will always find enough inactives to farm 100% challenge bonus.
Premise: At about 9BA/20, your strategy will still find some bad players around, so you will fight the same dozen or so players.
Premise: At about 8BA/20, you are stuffed one way or another. It doesn't matter your build, people's score/PR ratio is too low. Most people at 1.5m score have 1.5m PR. You will have problem finding enough a good challenge bonus almost at all.

Following those premise, yours strategy really shouldn't have any impact on your growth. Can someone tell me they found a strategy that can grow fast at 8BA/20? [I am looking for evidence to disprove the theory.]

"Most people at 1.5m score have 1.5m PR."

I was about 600-700k MPR when I hit 1.5m score, and I can point at quite a few people who hit that point around the same time.

Even now I'm sitting at 2 million score with less than 1 million MPR.

I'm not sure what that says about growth or your theories, but the 8/20 refresh isn't as disastrous for challenge bonus as you paint.

There are certain strats that enable you to fight higher, thus getting better challenge bonuses and better rewards. The RBF is one and UC lets you fight high for your size, especially earlier on thanks to the bonus to the weapon from Helms.

Actually using something that involves evasion is key here, because it allows you to take on much higher opponents, while completely nuking their NW.

Evasion also involves specializing to a certain degree, which from my own experience does let you grow pretty fast.

The real slowdown hits around the top 50-75 standings, and that's less from your own strategy, more about the bottle neck of very very large teams that are sitting there.

Just to go into a little more detail; I'm sitting at about 48 in the character standings, with 8/20 refresh and 50% on average for a challenge bonus.

Chuck1234's char MI5 is slightly bigger, and slightly higher up, but I suspect bonuses won't that dissimilar.

Both strats use evasion...go figure....

Scion and myself are both in the top 50 overall and have been playing for less than 6 months. What exactly do you expect? You just are not gonna get into the elite field of players who have been at this for years. Johnny has been around for a minute and gives good advice,listen up and be ready to adapt to change as you grow.It's gonna get worse before it gets better!The only thing I can suggest is-beat who you can and use as much BA as you can. Dont worry about whos kickin your head in.Oh yeah, I'm in the range you speak of.

In my experience its when you reach the TOP 20 door that maintain max growth become impossible.

easiest way to grow is to use a highly-specialized single minion strategy... Don't try to kill all teams, just a small handful of them...

I was doing this with Queen Beee, and I think it's safe to say that i was the only one using a tat at 1.6m MPR and still getting double-digit challenge bonuses... I was able to do this by training most of my XP into evasion with a single ToA VB tank... I could kill a few of the top 10, but at the cost of losing to those not even in the op 50 (i was getting beat by mages at half my MPR that were using RoEs >.<)... But so what? I was getting owned by lower levels... A considerably higher CB than anyone else my level was more than enough to make it worth it, IMO...

I firmly believe that had i actually been able to play at that time the way i do today, and I were to have stuck with them, I'd have a top5-10 spot on lock right now ^_^

Luckily, the char was sold, and the new owner has done his best to take them out of any possible top 10 contention with a few relearns, sporadic BA spending, and a cheaply-hired minion ^_^

Forgot to add that you're supposed to get that single minion high enough to where you can spread XP without losing efficiency, then hire more minions (expensively)...

Im at 79th and I still have 50 more days of NCB. I don't buy a lot of BA and my bonuses are around 60-70%. Up until the last week I was fighting at 80-100% bonus.

My stats: Score / PR / MPR: 1,840,181 / 1,079,541 / 817,148 @8/20

The only problem I am having is the higher you go the less targets you have. As far as I can tell your strategy has a huge impact on your growth rate even into 8/20. I am not the only one who is doing well in this range. Several others are doing almost as well or even a little better.

Just noticed that I am 8th highest score for 3 minion teams.

*does a little dance

I don't belong to your premise: 1.8 mil Score with 1.5 mil PR.

If you look closely enough, neither does Painkiller - a very healthy 3:1 Score/MPR ratio. But maybe he's just hit the growth slowdown range...

If that is the case, if you're running a tank strategy you have the option - cash permitting - of increasing your damage on your weapon(s). This can help you find bigger more rewarding opponents. Couple that with evasion and you're set for healthy growth for a long time......

What Johnny said. I think it is possible to get a challenge bonus in the 7 refresh but you need to go without a tattoo (or with RoE) and have a specialised strat. Last time I did it was with The end of days using a large EC.

Evasion Rules!!! There are a number of decentralized tanks up at 2mil score range and even though they have 50-80mil weapons, they can be dodged with enough evasion. Same cannot be said about mage teams. I have a good chance of killing a single tank team in that range even with ToA, dex focus and a big weapon. I cannot dream of doing the same to a single mage team. 860k mpr and averaging 60-70% CB (with JW giving me 75% CB occasionally ;))