They're in the group queue or dropping in and out as I've been in the same matches. That or using some weird laser poptarting in the solo queue...
Yesterday I played for about 12 hours, with a few breaks in there. I didn't see Space_Cowboy, Fivethirtyeight, Jaberwocky, StillRadioactive, or Brassyjack. Those are a few of the 'top' players on the leaderboards that I failed to see. I spotted everyone else at least once, guys like Twinky or Monky I saw about 20+ times. In my opinion, allowing group queue to count is pretty silly. You know they're getting helped. It's not even on the level, but w/e. Oh well, I sit down today and see I'm still in 8th place... still not sure if I'll be able to achieve my goal I set of a top 10 finish, but I think it's at least doable. It's more competitive than I thought (or maybe not given the previous statements above).
Those challenges are meant to be solo drops, I agree on that. Noticed the same things when I got MCs in faction challenge 3, I never saw the guys who scored the most points for the whole tournie. In faction one, where only solo was allowed, I made it to the 6th place, towards the end I kept dropping with Proton and all the other top tier leadeboard players.
Yeah I dunno if I care enough to try another 20 hours to keep fraudsters off my tail. Or maybe try out the R63. Not sure, really. Just know I sat down for day 2 and only lasted a round before I was terribly bored and exited out...
Interestingly I got Twinky maybe 50% of my solo drops. I've noticed he plays very carefully and just accumulates damage/kills steadily from behind the main combat - never attracts attention if he can which seems to be the trick for the tournies. I just can't stand playing like that. Behavious has been MUCH better than previous tournies though. In fairness though I'm just leveling mine up as not willing to put in the time for that competition. Nowadays I just do tournaments/CW/levelling mechs and weekend competitions... the placing tournaments like the urbie one are too mind numbing for me to stomach.
I'm having that sort of "urbie moment" - helped someone in corp get their two man group done as they had all their others so first battle of the day was a DRG-1N... Why can I not get 9,390 xp on my urbie... *cries*
Because only a limited portion of the playerbase is competing. That doesn't really impact the global behaviour. But I'm with you about not being able to play "tourny effective". I made few Urbie drops this weekend, grinding XP and testing build, I'll probably not enter the top20
I only played for about 45 mins yesterday, as a result I only had one round to add to my score. I check this afternoon and I've dropped to 20th... Dunno if I care to log in and defend and grab another round or two to maintain, it's just... soul sucking. 12 hours on Friday night reminded me bigtime of why I burnt out originally.
Currently sitting at 21st... ugh... I'll try and play for another hour or so and find one more good round................... so far a 4/6/500, 3/10/ 39/ and 3/8 haven't applied to my score... bleh.
I tried VERY hard tonight, got to 47th...and can't raise it. Need to kill some PUGs, group queue got hard.
Ok after 2 hours I finally had a decent round, 5/3/718... jumped me back up to 15th. I got a lil bit of a 2nd wave right now so Ima try and just coast on it til I hit fumes, if I get another round, who knows, might crack top 10 again... I really do mean what I said, spending 12 hours straight [breaks ofc] tryharding on Friday night took a lot out of me... it reminded me kinda why I quit... it's just... not how I want to play this time around. For example, I dropped one round on Saturday afternoon... saw the same people from the night before... dropping laaate Sunday night/Monday morning right now, seeing the saaaaame people........ I asked one, "have you done anything else this weekend?" ... "I slept... Saturday" I replied how that was me once... a long time ago.
And all this is exactly why I don't bother with the tournies,... (Did get close to blasting Twinky Overlord during a drop, but my mech was too beat up from carrying the PUGs to victory to kill him before he burnt my XL side out. A teammate got the honour of finishing my job )