Nine Swords

I was thinking about speed dungeoneering. . .

We kind of did this one time a while back when we had two dungeon groups of similar level starting at the same time and did a bit of a friendly "race" to see which team could finish first. Now when we did it the first time it was an E6 level, but I think E1 would be more appropriate so that more of the cabal could participate. E1 would also make for faster runs, and we're already kind of doing them as speed runs for the agent farms.

Since we don't always have enough tanks online at the same time to have two dungeon groups running simultaneously, I was thinking maybe we could record our runs and post the video here. The team with the fastest time on video would get some kind of prize from the cabal bank. Katelin was looking for a contest to use up those extra keys, after all.

What do y'all think? Any interest in a speed-run E1 contest?

Sounds like an easy competition...I'm game!

Our anniversary events are using the keys up - but I'm sure we can collect more together

The only problem I see is making this a fair contest when there are wild variation in IP among teams. An all E10 rated crew is gonna blow through an E1 dungeon in 5 minutes or less, while a team that has a few of our newer players is going to take longer because they can't steamroll all the bosses. Knowing how competitive some of us can get, I can see that leading to cherry picking among the high IP players and leaving the low IP players feeling unwanted.

A potential solution to this would be handicapping, kind of like they do for golf or bowling. Maybe add a minute to the completion time for every level a player is overgeared. For example, Phanth in his E10 rated gear would add 9 minutes to the completion time as his handicap. Shadowcat, in his E6 gear would add 5 minutes to the completion time. That's the only way I see a team containing E1 rated players being able to seriously compete with higher geared players with even a chance at coming in ahead.

If handicapping is something we want to consider, I'll need to run a few numbers to see what a reasonable handicap would be. The one-minute thing was just a number I made up because it sounded good, but I don't know if it's realistic. I'm pretty sure I can talk some of the north american crew into doing a few naked runs so I can see how long it takes an at-level team with experience to do an E1 dungeon. Using that as a baseline reference, I should be able to come up with some idea of how much time to add to account for being overgeared.

I can't wait to sell this to the crew. "C'mon guys, let's get naked . . . FOR SCIENCE!"