TOP Drives: Should you go over 4,000 Trophies?
After my first few days of playing Top Drives I hit the forums to find out the best way to play this game. I quickly discovered smarfing (a term derived from smurf and farm). At the start of an event you put up a poor hand go to the bottom of the leaderboard, this is the smurf part, then, you play your strong hand to climb the leaderboard earning gold & cars along the way, farm part.
I became quite efficient at smarfing and by the time I was approaching RQ500 I had what I thought was a fantastic garage. Unknown to me was I had gone over 4,000 trophies and on reaching RQ500 I was to put in one of the top brackets facing players who had been playing for years (I was six months in).
The game became very frustrating and as I was looking for help I realised that in Top Drives every 500 trophies the trophy count is locked, e.g. go over 500, 1000, trophies you will never go below 500, 1000.
The help offered amounted to 'suck it up', perhaps unkind but other players suggested clubs, smarfing etc. With the greatest of respect it is easy to give glib advice when you are not in the situation yourself. Forums would talk about how many maxed legendary cars you would need to win an event!
In the time I had been playing (6 monthes) I had acquired two legendaries (1 was career) and 10 epics (3 career), to max a legendary you need 15 epics. So assuming I fused every Epic it would take me at least another year to max one legendary. However, I was getting epics at a rate of around one a month when I was finishing top tier in many events in this 4000+ trophy bracket I was finishing tier 4 or 5. Easily double the time it would take to amass enough epics to max a legendary.
Restart or give Top Drives Up
Also consider progression is relative, the players at the top of the bracket would be getting epics at twice the rate. The choice was stop playing or restart, having restarted now I'm RQ500 have kept my trophies below 3,000 and decide what tier I will take in non-tri series events.
Tri-series I smarf, you are facing players that have been playing for years
One day I will go over, it is a pain keeping my trophies low, but I know I'm not strong enough yet to compete.
Rant Mode: Is this a Hutch up?
I've noticed on forums the saying 'you hutched it up' has become a saying. I think Hutch get a rough ride, but the logic behind this mechanic is a bit baffling. I'm going to try to steelman Hutch's position:-
The 500 trophy lock is there to prevent players keeping their trophy count low and 'dominating' the lower bracket.
This is what I'm doing, so it demonstrably doesn't work.
If we removed the 500 trophy lock everyone would go below 4,000 trophies and this would break the game.
Two issues with this:-
- You lose 10 trophies for losing a normal event. Hypothetically lets say there is one event per day, so it will take 100 days per 1,000 trophies that you are over. It would take someone with 8000 trophies over a year to get below 4000!
- You get to 3990 trophies, you win one event 4030 trophies, you now have to lose 4 events
If we removed the lock then the 4000 trophy bracket would thin out making it much harder for anyone in that bracket.
True, why is this a bad thing?
