The Biweekly Tournaments Suck

Platinum Triad packs are similar to Ragnarok Online card drop rates.

I've been doing these tournaments (which can be Random/Random as a ruleset which is by far the most cancerous ruleset I've seen in any card game) for practically a year now. I always open around 3-4 packs constantly placing in top 10-20.

I don't know what kind of droprate these packs have, but it's absolute garbage. I've only gotten one Silver card in a year and it was Tidus. Worst off? Cards aren't unique. This game isn't sophisticated enough to check your deck to see if you have a card. So I very well could get Tidus again.

On top of rampant cheaters who get in the top 3 each tournament, the card drop rate is complete trash. I've gotten Shiva and Lahabrea dozens of times. Tataru used to drop Lightning Card, but I guess new players have to do the tournament a bit more than older ones.

Honestly, what was SE thinking with this implementation? There is nothing in this game that is more annoying and time-gated to farm than these cards. The only thing close are some achievements. The fact that cards aren't unique and can be gotten more than once and that the ruleset can literally make the match a coinflip is just really bad.

If you're in the top 20, you should get a voucher that you can turn in for a silver card. We have these with extreme primals for the ponies, etc (literally an easier farm). Hell, we even have it in Savage. I can gear up in Savage much faster and easier than I can acquire a silver card. I've spent less time getting a top tier chocobo and destroying every challenge.

Aye, I just get an endless stream of Shiva's, Lahabrea and Ultima Weapons. I've hit top 20 a fair few times and got more Lahabrea's. It's discouraging to place well, get your reward and it's 3x Shiva and you have another 2 weeks to try again.

I'm not sure why more than half the cards need to be extremely low drop chance from a pack you can only get once every 2 weeks. Even if they were all fairly even, you'd need a few months with decent points to collect the full set which is fair enough. Nowadays I don't really see the point entering, besides the MGP.

How about SE actually update these tournaments with new rewards. Gosh it's been 3 years with the same rewards card given out.

i would have thought they would have old FF games boss platinum cards by now.

I think Triple Triad as a whole needs a face lift.
We haven't seen any new rules, new types (Garlean, Beast-tribe, Scion, etc.), and Rank 4 cards are in some weird limbo state.

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Originally Posted by Kai_Lee

How about SE actually update these tournaments with new rewards. Gosh it's been 3 years with the same rewards card given out.

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No thanks. Even with a pool of 4 silver cards, it's next to impossible to get them.

If there's anything I could wish for Triple Triad, it would be to make NPCs play by the rules that we have to play by.

I'm fine with NPCs breaking rules on deck composition, it's there to compensate for their bad AI which makes them predictable and sometimes causes them to make really dumb moves. But I agree with the tournament cards, even though have all 4. I managed to farm Lightning and Firion from Tataru when she was still playable and was lucky enough to get Cecil and Tidus in platinum packs. But the pack drop rates are still really bad, I had to open over 200 gold packs to get Zidane. If they implemented some system where you could exchange a certain number of unopened platinum packs for a card of your choice, that would be better.

I also agree on the tournament rulesets. The only tournament I consider to have good rules is the Tournament of Champions, everything else puts you at the mercy of chance. Even the Order rule in the Durai Memorial, while not based on RNG, heavily limits what you can do in a match, and matches will mostly come down to which player's card order counters the other. I think the bad rulesets are partly because TT lacks many good advanced rules in general. Same, Plus, All Open, Fallen Ace, Sudden Death and Reverse are the only rules I'd consider appropriate for competitive play. It'd be nice if they reconfigured the tournaments to draw only from these rules, or if they came up with some new rules.

As for cheaters, I guess they're still around but it's not nearly as bad as it was before they added the battle hall. I'm not really sure what more they could do to curb cheating, since it's hard to detect people intentionally feeding points to others. At best they could maybe prevent players from being matched with alts of players they've already faced.

I guess cheating is no longer a problem.
Triple Triad is just like all trading card games, what your decks do is just raising up the winning rate.
And the "Battle hall" + "tournament rule sets" is something decent to dig in.
Constantly I get like placing 1~10 in all kinds of rule sets, and once you placed 1~3, you get the silver card, which means you don't have to bet on those platinums.

One can never have enough cards.
But one can never do enough research about his/her cards, either.

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Originally Posted by Sannsenn

I guess cheating is no longer a problem.
Triple Triad is just like all trading card games, what your decks do is just raising up the winning rate.
And the "Battle hall" + "tournament rule sets" is something decent to dig in.
Constantly I get like placing 1~10 in all kinds of rule sets, and once you placed 1~3, you get the silver card, which means you don't have to bet on those platinums.

One can never have enough cards.
But one can never do enough research about his/her cards, either.

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Issue is, 1-3 is riddled with cheaters and with some rulesets, you can't consistently beat players without luck. Researching your cards does very little against double roulette. No one cares if you made the perfect plus deck, but the ruleset is chaos ascension.

Hmm, I was jumping in TT after the battle hall update, which means I cannot imagine how bad cheating was in the old times.

In my case and on my server, I found it doable to get rank 1~3, that's why I think cheater is no problem. Of course you cannot match some NPCs who is too easy.
I manage to get all silver cards available by ranking 1~3 in tournaments in half an year. It can be lucky but I work really hard on all cards possibilities.

On my server, most ranking 1~20 players are not 20/20. So that's why I guess there's not many cheaters, or, cheating is no longer beneficial.

The trick to getting 1-10th place is to never play against NPCs. Winning against an NPC is roughly the same as tying with a PC. You want to aim for roughly 100 points a game. That's like tying half the games and winning the other half. Depending on the tournament, you don't even need to do that.

When you only play against PCs, you have a very good idea what cards they will use and it's not that hard to construct a deck that takes advantage of that. Most people from what I've seen just use the "auto" deck feature and that's incredibly predictable. Build a deck that takes the current tournoment's rules into account and you'll be better off then half the people you play against.

The most annoying part is waiting in the Battle Hall for PCs to pop up who are not playing against NPCs. That takes forever. If more people didn't play tournaments against NPCs, the rankings on the board wouldn't have as many gaps between the high-scoring players and the low-scoring players.

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Originally Posted by Sannsenn

Hmm, I was jumping in TT after the battle hall update, which means I cannot imagine how bad cheating was in the old times.

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It's definitely a lot better now than it used to be. In the old system, you just had to walk up to people and challenge them directly to tournament matches, and you could play the same person as many times as you liked. The amount of points you got was based on on the relative strength of your decks, and how high your opponent was in the rankings. So all you had to do was get a single collaborator, have them build a 3-star deck, and then have them deliberately lose to you over and over while you're using a 1-star deck. If you did this right at the start of the tournament, your opponent would get on the rankings board even from losing, which would further increase the amount of points you got. It was impossible to even get in the top 10 if you didn't cheat, and the 1-3 positions would typically go to the same people every time.

You could still cheat the current system, but you'd need 20 people helping you since the game doesn't let you face the same person more than once. You'd also need to pick a time when no one else was in the battlehall.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

When you only play against PCs, you have a very good idea what cards they will use and it's not that hard to construct a deck that takes advantage of that. Most people from what I've seen just use the "auto" deck feature and that's incredibly predictable. Build a deck that takes the current tournoment's rules into account and you'll be better off then half the people you play against.

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It's true that most people use predictable decks, although I think part of the reason for that is that the "strong" cards are quite obvious (ones with 8 on two sides), and most variation between players comes down to which 5-star card they pick. But there's not much you can do to prepare yourself against Roulette, or Swap giving your 5-star card to your opponent. Even with Order, you can't really prepare for it without knowing your opponent's deck in advance.

Roulette is probably the tournament that reveals how well you understand how rules interact with each other. And how well you know how your deck plays. It's easily the tournament I place the best in on a consistent basis.

Swap is the most annoying tournament. Figuring out how to force a Draw with five 3* cards as a backup plan is the way to go.

Order is very easy to defend against. Instead of having your 5* card be the last card (what the game defaults to), have it be the fourth card. That way you will always be able to play it even with Order.

Most of winning Triple Triad (in the current meta) is all about knowing what side(s) your 5* is strong on and then designing your deck around it. A lot of it comes down to blocking access to certain card sides while leaving other ones open. Setting up the field in the first 2-3 moves so that the other player is forced (or heavily encouraged) to play their 5* card before you play yours is also really important. This can lead to weird strategies like playing a double 8 card with the weak sides purposely "open" or not flipping a flippable card so that your own position is better. Plus has it's own interesting variations on all of this too...

Your best strategy though is learning how to purposely tie games. Tying games is fairly easy to do in the current meta and saves you a lot of points in the long run. Flipping cards usually means you have to bring your 5* out which usually means you open yourself to your opponent flipping the 5*. Depending on whether they've played their 5* yet or not, that can go a lot of different ways. Or you can use your 5* to just put an unflipable card on the board or save it to counter their 5* when it comes out. Generally speaking, I've lost more points due to being too greedy with my flips then by being too conservative.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

Your best strategy though is learning how to purposely tie games. Tying games is fairly easy to do in the current meta and saves you a lot of points in the long run. Flipping cards usually means you have to bring your 5* out which usually means you open yourself to your opponent flipping the 5*. Depending on whether they've played their 5* yet or not, that can go a lot of different ways. Or you can use your 5* to just put an unflipable card on the board or save it to counter their 5* when it comes out. Generally speaking, I've lost more points due to being too greedy with my flips then by being too conservative.

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Tying is not a gain over beating an NPC.