Hey everybody! Hope you had a happy Halloween.

I spent a good chunk of today driving down the east coast, so I'm posting the stats report late. It's ready and available:

Stats Report

Of note:

• 12 of the 13 new accomplishments on Mythos Busters were by awp832.
• FINALLY it happened: the game is harder with the Dark Pharaoh herald than without a herald at all! I knew you could do it, Nyar. Good job. Now don't expect the Guardian entries to do the same until a few more years.

I wish the "Top Contributors" could be set into two parts, one for the Top Contributors, one for "All Contributors", so that my name could at least attend once to these stats I pay so much attention for, despite my noob level...

...sigh.

wow, are my wife and I the only ones going after these guys?

Also of note, DH as a herald is the first herald to be utterly vanquished. Congrats to everyone who helped.

awp832 said:

Yes, I noticed that and set the top of the Dunwich Horror column into green. This is partly to celebrate, and partly so that I skip over it next report.

Hem: You've clocked in at 13 games, which ties with three other submitters, and puts you (and them) at 29th place! Crank out those game sessions and you'll float up to the "top contributors" in no time.

The reason I only put the "top" in the list is so that there won't be massive sections of the list that have 20+ people who submitted the same number of games.

awp832 said:

It's catch as catch can for me: random AO and then, depending on my personal track record with, adding in a herald or guardian. For awhile I was doing a lot with the Dunwich Horror, so I was able to knock several combos down there (I log all my entries on the stats as ArkhamRel). Since then I've not been so lucky in coming up with new combos.

ricedwlit said:

Pretty much the same for me, except I adhere to my rotations strictly. Random GOO that has not been used in the current rotation, random Herald out of those that haven't been comboed with that GOO yet, go. Once/If I manage to complete my current schedule, I'll have 200 games done, one game with each GOO + Herald combo (AH + DH + IH), 2-3 games without a Herald, 10 games against each GOO.

Well, since I only use expansions that are available in German, there's unfortunately no undefeated combo I could try to tackle.

The only undefeated ones left require either the Black Goat exapnsion or Innsmouth

Anyway, I've played lots of games this month since I got Kingsport. It also allowed me to finally complete the 2008 Summer league scenarios.

There's still a bunch of games left to play using the Kingsport AOs. I want to play at least five games against each to be able to compare their difficulty to the older AOs.

Next, I'm looking forward to try the Spanish League scenarios that Weyoun kindly translated

SIX people managed Joining the Winning Team?

It was over the course of a long time. But only one has ever managed "For the Greater Good."

It really is something you HAVE to do, to plan and all, you can't happen to do it just like that. I mean, to get many stuff like allies in order to get rid of them in other places after that, that really is a mission, not a task ; so, well, anyway, a big bravo to the guy who did the greater good because man, I m too lazy to even think about trying it the day i draw this card...

Tibs, ok, I got you man, no probs. So, er, what would you think of not a column but just a tiny box entitled "The Player Who Contributed the Least to These Stats" ? .... like that I'd be sure to appear

I have to say I'm curious to know what the stats would be if you removed the top contributors. I feel like they have a really good idea on how to play the game, and may possibly be overloading the statistics with wins. I could be wrong however.

It just seems like a Guardian is supposed to make the game easier, but yet there are still more games won without guardians that with them. This could be because people familiar with the game don't use them and win, while people less familiar with the game use them and lose.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into statistics though.

messed up on my Ghantathoa/KIY game. I posted the results and then noticed i screwed it up (wrote 10 for my name instead of doom, and left out Zoey), and so i tried again, didnt seem to work and then i tried again. Now there are 3 logs for what really is an identical game. The last one is correct, if you could be so kind as to the other two.

Hey Tibs, can you tell me how many games I've submitted so far?

You alone submitted 4. You submitted 7 total.

I don't get it, how can I submit only 4 and yet submit 7 total? I sense Nyarlathotep is messing your numbers.

4 Games were submitted as just "Knuckles Eki." 7 games were submitted that had "Knuckles Eki" in the "nickname" field somewhere (you submitted 3 games with your friends' names).

I see, well most of the time now it'll be Knuckles Eki and Firefly, since we always play together. Those solo games were just tries. But I don't like playing solo anymore, so yeah. If you put me on top contributors, be sure to put my trusty friend there as well.

johnwatersfan said:

As the player (still) with the most recorded games on here (even though my rate has vastly decreased), I feel qualified to respond to this.

I feel like I have a decent grasp on how to play the game, yes. But through various reasons, such as 1) playing with players who do not, or 2) setting the game up to challenge myself or my group, the win percentage of games I have reported is somewhere between 60 and 70 percent, which is pretty much in line with the reports.

It could be a "speak for yourself" thing, though. Dam probably has a better percentage than that. I wouldn't be surprised if awp had better numbers.

As far as guardians go, the most likely explanation is that Kingsport (the set with guardians) adds plenty of difficulty to the game through vicious ancient ones and heralds, as well as board distractions and gate bursts. Only those with Kingsport could play guardians, and playing with any board expansion will reduce your victories to some degree.

The reason behind the Guardian issue is that they come with Kingsport, and Kingsport has some very hard AOs and the very influential Epic Battle deck. If Guardians came in the base game or any of the card expansions, we'd see a definite increase in win percentages of the Guardians compared to "no guardian."

After awhile, I assume that "no guardian" will have a lower win percentage because enough people will have bought Kingsport and played with it that the entries without will have greatly diminished.

johnwatersfan said:

Me too. As they are, I think the stats are good for showing relative difficulties, but are extremely scewed for absolute difficulty, and I fear all the new expansions are calibrated for the highest end.

I was thinking last night that it might be nice to have a new option or two for the "investigator selection" section of the reports. Currently our choices are "random, selected before AO, or selected after AO" . It would be nice to have a 'pseudo-random' option, I think. A lot of people do things like deal 2 choose 1, which many people view as not quite random, but it certainly isn't in the "selected" camp either. Just a suggestion.

that would be good, Awp. I've been playing with deal-3-choose-1, and I've set it to Random.

awp832 said:

I was thinking that too. Problem is that that means there will be a bunch of "Random" entries that actually mean "Random, with special rules."

I'll go put it in now.

Great idea ! Thanks Tibs, we too personaly do as Awp does. The almost 50 invests, throw a die, discard until your number, take it, watch it while everyone does the same, then a new turn, and then you choose between your twos. Additional rule for people who never played the game before : ONE trade allowed per player (just one, so you give one and receive one, no matter who from, that is). That is quite random, but that is not selected at all. So, "Special Random", yeah, that sounds good.

I have a question that might have been asked before:

If you use part and not all of an expansion, do you still check the expansion which you used a part of on the submission form? Say if you were playing KH investigators without the KH board?

Thanks,