MAG 2: Thoughts and Ramblings

With the second round of Maximum Attack G almost upon us (finally), a lot of the attention seems to have turned once again to the leaderboard issue. When MAG 2 was announced way back in June, Sega reps commented that they would not allow characters from the first leaderboard to compete for prizes in the second event.

(Of course, if a player wanted to try and get a different character ranked on the board the second time around, they said that would be OK.)

Now take a look at this post:

. . . we do want to discourage players from using the same characters, and will most likely be asking Sonic Team to delist them, but as always Sonic Team will get the final say on this and they may not have the time and resources to prevent players from double dipping into leaderboard exclusive rewards.

I'm not exactly going to complain about this yet though, because it could turn out to be a non-issue.

One major reason: We've been capped at level 130 for a couple months now. Players have had lots of time to level their characters up to the cap, so it's a good bet that there are plenty of people with multiple LV130 characters. With no new content for the past 7 weeks, players have also had time to work on their class levels, too. So a lot of people will be starting this little competition on equal footing. After all, if you're spamming C runs to get yourself on the personal leaderboard, a high level character is all you really need. Whether you do it with LV130 Character #1 or LV130 Character #2 seems really inconsequential to me.

On the other hand, allowing the same characters to compete twice would be unfair to the newer players who don't have the luxury of having multiple high-leveled characters. But even in this case, these players are probably going to wind up competing against the players who ranked in MAG 1, only this time with different LV130 characters.

We'll have to see what happens. There is one group of MAG 1 players I hope Sega keeps tabs on, though, and you can probably guess who they are. Yeah, that group would be the "mechgun glitchers" that were removed from the first competition.

I stress that these players should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to compete with any of their characters. People who go around cheating or using exploits to win at an online game get absolutely no sympathy from me. These players cheated to gain an advantage, and were correctly punished for it. Allowing them to compete this time around would negate these efforts entirely.

Well, that was a pretty long first post. Congratulations if you actually took the time to read all this! Hopefully MAG 2 will go off without a hitch, and we can move on to the next event.