Fingers crossed. The competitive element had its ups and downs and we all got something out of working together, but it's been such an endless, frustrating grind, and I'd like to see a change of pace, rather than another four or so days of the same again. I'm sure Matlal didn't tell us that story about helping his brother to the top of the mountain for nothing.

Team Steele got a lot of good weather; Team Gold got a lot of bad weather. Sure, it could be completely random, but when one team basically gets the opposite of the other giving them a solid advantage, it looks suspicious... (In no way condemning, but still suspicious.) The fact is we were actually hit by an error on Day 2... It shouldn't be that much of a surprise that several of us are giving the code a dubious eye. It also shouldn't be a surprise that we are feeling a little disheartened, a little salty about the whole thing.

Yesterday was not fun for us. I don't think anyone on our team enjoyed that mess, enjoyed putting in tons of effort with little to no result. Day 2 wasn't much fun either, and that had nothing to do with the fact we lost... We weren't able to do any obstacles for hours, so it was just the same old, same old Survivor game. All I want - all I think any of us wants - is to be able to have fun during this event.

For that reason, I'm all for teaming up for the rest of the event. I've never been much for competition and with all the problems, I'm more than ready for that aspect to be over.

So there's a few things.

RNG is RNG. Sure. But what I am curious about is the PROBABILITY and FREQUENCY of such events (Weather) happening. Sure its random, but event every 1 minute you roll the dice, its "more" opportunity for bad luck than rolling the dice every hour. IE Frequency. There's also probability, is it 50/50? (likely so, but might as well ask)

Secondly, its important to note that ONLY TEAM GOLD can have bad weather in the last leg of the events. Team METAL has the NPC buff that negates that.

Therefore, if the FREQUENCY was changed (e.g. raised), it only made team Metal go faster because they can only get good weather. While Gold would essentially have no difference assuming the probability was 50/50. (e.g. if we got 10 boosts, 10 slows, or 5 boosts, 5 slows; it evens out, (again, assuming one boost equals the other).

Team GOLD was still fighting through it, but a few hours in we were already 10-15% behind (while only moving like 30% of total race). I mean, even with the Sephora speed boost in the previous race, we only won by <10%, and thats over 100% of the race. IE the further along the race, the greater the progress discrepancy due to boosts.

Ever since Steele hit wind at the end of the first day and got knocked back, negating any possible chance of effectively competing for the leg win, I've really disliked it as an event. The monsoon I understand, as it slows/stops you, but knocking you back just seems like insult on top of the difficulty cake no matter who encounters it.

I do think the wind should be turned into a monsoon effect, where it might slow/stop you, but I hate the kickback.

That and the AMOUNT of weather yesterday was pretty nuts. A lot of weather happened on both sides - yeah, it was sunny for us, but teammates were mentioning they couldn't finish all their five tasks because there weren't enough other adverse events. I was expecting maybe two or three weather events, not half a day's worth.

Three kickback winds in a row is pretty awful, especially right out of the gate. I'd have been extremely discouraged too.

I'm thinking the "it's no longer going to be a problem going forward" is because the plot is going to change how we travel.

[Quote]Esther gives your team the Weathered Traveler trait: Esther's connections with Tempest means she can ensure your team a sunny journey to the summit. Your team's weather conditions will all be favorable.[/quote]

The way the last sentence is written makes me think that any potential bad weather event that Steele could have got, were converted into the good weather boost. That's what it seems like happened. And that's really overpowered to me, given all the weather that's been happening this far in.

It seems like the further we go towards the volcano, the more and more weather events there are. I can really only remember like, 2 from the first day (though there were probably more) but these past few days seems like weather every other obstacle.

I thought immediately that Esther's buff was OP and figured whoever won her would never lose on the trail.

If one team gets no obstacles that stop or push them back and the only obstacles they get are sunshine or something they can overcome as a team but the other team can still get the stop/pushback obstacles then that team has no chance of winning because after even one push back the likelyhood of catching up, if there is even a chance, is tiny. After another I expect it to be nil. Team gold had way more than that.

Don't mind losing if it at all felt like we had a chance to win. After the first two or three pushbacks it was obvious we couldn't. We still fought on but it was not enjoyable and felt hollow and pointless.

Personally, I think putting the wind effect in at all was a bad idea. The other obstacles I get, because you can work past those. But the wind and monsoon obstacles can't be avoided, making it no fun for either team. When you make a competition like this, it needs to be purely on the work put in by the teams, not RNG.

Edit: Saying this as team Steele, btw.

I was under the impression that Esther's bonus would mean it would just nullify bad events, not change them to good events. I'm with everyone else saying that's super overpowered and absolutely guarantees that Steele is going to win. (inb4 'sore loser' I'd feel that way if we'd managed to get Esther too. Changing all bad events to good ones is overpowered. She should just cancel bad weather, not change it)

I thought the point of Esther's "blessing" was pretty much to do just that: keep all bad weather away. This thread would completely be the opposite if Gold had Esther instead of Steele, cause you'd have the good weather AND the 10% speed boost.

Everything is playing out fairly. Work harder, get better bonuses. It's all going to equal out in the end. Each team has won the race twice now, yeah? Good enough. Don't see what the big deal is.

Except it doesn't appear that she's keeping bad weather away. It seems what she's doing is changing bad weather to good, which gives the team a speed boost. Meanwhile, the other team is going through the same weather events, but because we don't have Esther all the events remain bad, pushing us BACK, not just stopping us.

It's not 'each team gets three rocks each, but because one team has NPC that team doesn't get rocks at all'. It's 'each team gets three rocks each, but because of NPC that team gets cookies instead of rocks'.

And Gold DID work hard. But the way the quest poll was set up meant that once you did your quests, you were done. You couldn't help more. And while Gold seems to be the bigger team, it also appears to have less active members.

Am Team Steele, we got hit by weather events over and over again in the post-Sephora leg, if my memory is correct. I swear, every time I got online it was A GUST OF WIND PUSHED YOUR CARAVAN BACKWARDS.

Team Gold got the same bad luck in the leg after.

It was bullshit for us in Leg 3, and it's still bullshit now. Seriously, this is why I actually have to go and forced myself into doing quests, because Leg 3 was so fucking terrible for us that I feel that all of the team was "THIS IS TERRIBLE, LET'S GET ESTHER SO THAT WE NEVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS AGAIN"

Unavoidable obstacles should NEVER have been a thing in the first place.

Personally, I don't mind the monsoon events. Because it slows you down/stops you in place. The gusts of wind are the bullshit events, where you LOSE progress. They're not even logical! When you have an entire caravan, winds aren't going to push you backwards. Every other event/obstacle has logic to it, except for the gusts.

"It's a competition" only works if you're able to compete. Having one team constantly pushed ahead by "lucky" good weather and one team constantly pushed back by "lucky" bad weather they can't do a single thing about isn't a competition. It'd be a little more fair if we could do SOMETHING to drive away the bad weather, like band together as a team to create sails to leverage the wind, who knows. But our team gave up for the day because there was literally not a single thing we could do to even attempt to catch up. It wasn't about not trying hard enough in the competition. It was about the competition having a foregone conclusion for the day, with no possibility of changing it.

Glad to see staff's ignoring this thread after popping in and offering a "it was bad luck, but we've fixed the bad luck, WINK" platitude.

...if the bad luck was "fixable," that makes it bad CODING, not bad luck.

But we'll see how it works out. I'd be up for continuing up the mountain as a single group now that we're tied for days arriving first at camp.

I don't like this winkwink bs vibe from staff. If we were meant to each win two legs, then finish the last leg together, a lot of us put in time, money, and stress we really didn't need to because of a predetermined outcome. Frankly, that's bullshit.

While we're at it, can we also talk about the food bar? Because it was literally impossible to fill it for team Gold. LITERALLY. Game after game, nothing. Then, back to back food stealing events. No matter how much the team played, the food bar was basically empty, which also set us back 30 min. each time.

This is the least amount of fun I've ever had during a plot, and it feels like it really wasn't thought out that well. There's no way staff wouldn't know how we'd react to these sorts of complications.

For what it's worth, for the leg after Gold won Sephora, she absolutely seemed OP herself at the time and Gold unbeatable because of it. That's a big reason we were so focused on getting Esther, if only to balance out Sephora's overpowered boost.

If the last leg had contained the kind of weather we'd had in the past - two or three events a day - I think the teams would have been pretty well matched, buff wise, as Sephora works 100% of the time and Esther only when there's weather.

But yeah, what bonecrivain said. It's not a competition if it relies primarily on RNG luck based events that can't be removed, only endured.

Again, that's just a bad RNG you guys got stuck with. I only recall seeing one or two sunny moments, but we got held up a few times with the map collection one. And our food meter was draining pretty fast at times, so don't worry, we had our fair share of problems.

shrugs I'm sorry you guys are stuck with some slackers. Put the blame on them, not on Steele.

Gold wasn't unbeatable, though. We won that leg with Sephora, but not nearly by the kind of margin that happened in this last leg. It gave us a speed boost, but it also increased our obstacles, so we were still working incredibly hard to keep ahead. It's not at all comparable to what happened with Esther...I'm guessing that when they removed the bad weather from the winning team, they forgot to build in something to keep it from looping to give ALL the bad weather to Team Gold.

For the record, I'm not blaming Team Steele! I think you guys are a hardworking team. I'm blaming the staff for not making it a fair game. :P

Just because you only saw a few doesn't mean that's the only ones there were. Other Steele members have said you guys had roughly the same amount of weather events as we did, but all of yours were good. That implies that Esther is changing the weather from bad to good, which gives an automatic speed boost, while Gold is literally losing progress because of the same weather events that are automatically bad. That's not balanced or fair in any way. If Sephora gave us a 50% speed boost, Steele would be crying foul too, because it's overpowered. The fact is, if Esther's power is changing bad weather to good, that's overpowered as fuck because it's literally six speed boosts in one day ON TOP of the team voted speed boosts.

And nobody is blaming Steele. Not a single person. So don't go there.