This MFO has been a long time in the making for me. Those who know me and my history on the forum know that what I've always liked about Diablo II is character optimization, and competition. Pretty much the only goals I've had in this game is to make characters that are as good as possible at what they do, which pretty much always means running a target (be it Pit or Pindle with MF, Travincal with GF, or Baal with Speed) as efficiently as possible. Having and making the very best MF character I can has been the top priority for me as long as I can remember, and doing everything I can to do as well as possible in an MFO with an insanely strong character has been my end-game goal in this game for a long time.
I was planning on making last summer's MFO that time where I went all-out for 10 days to get the best result I possibly could in an MFO, but as it turns out the MFO collided with a trip abroad. Sometimes real life is more important I guess. I was
very lucky in the 4 days I did run though, but it wasn't the 100% effort I knew I wanted to do.
Which brings me to this MFO.
I had two goals coming into this week. The first, and more concrete, was to beat the old MFO record for time spent playing, which (as far as I know anyway) was set by my dear teammate LiquidClear in the 2011 Winter MFO, at 104 hours. The second goal was to get the very best haul pic I could, which in my book means a great top end as well as great quantity. I consider 9.3+ qualifiers to be "haul pic worthy", and so I kept track of these items from the start.
My plan was to play at least 10 hours in every 24 hour block, and a bit more on some days. I managed this perfectly, except for hitting 30 hours at 15 minutes past midnight on Monday morning. Having small goals along the way (9.3+ drops, getting 10 hours a day) was completely necessary for me. Every single day was a huge huge struggle for the last 5 hours or so, but every morning I woke up with renewed motivation, which lasted for a while. Having such an insanely efficient character was very helpful too, as I rarely had very long streaks without haul pic worthy items at all, and since I was of the mentality that every 9.3 pointer counted, seeing one drop turned into something positive which gave me a motivational boost every time, even though they of course quickly turned irrelevant as far as the score goes.
The above was perhaps especially important for the first 5 days or so, when I got a steady stream of haul pic items, but none of the top end items I knew I wanted to get a great score/haul pic. When I sent the first update to Cyrax around noon on Monday, I had played 39 hours and had found 26 9.3+ qualifiers, only 1 of which was above 11.6 points (a Spirit Keeper). I whined a bit about my bad luck, and also included this pic in the email:
Noon on Monday, 39h
That's not to say I didn't have fun things happen. In 4½ hours, between 3am and 7.30am on Monday, I had three Griffon's drop. When I finally got my first 14.6, a Dragonscale, I took a breakfast break, and when I continued half an hour later, another Dragonscale dropped within 5 runs. I got a Thunder Maul and a Berserker Axe on the same run. Then, late on Wednesday, after roughly 59 hours, my first
high scorer finally dropped. I was super worn down at that point, and it helped raise my spirits significantly. Looking at my screenshots, it seems it was my 38th haul pic qualifier.
When I sent my second update, at 3pm on Friday, my score hadn't improved, and I was really frustrated. I posted in the thread saying "if I send an update now, it means I'll improve my score immediately, right?" Well, I had to send a new update an hour later or something, to include
this drop. When Cyrax posted the update, it seems like it was very close between me and zgpmf, and I'm guessing that 4.7 point improvement was the difference between first and second at that point. Very shortly after that Darkforce, I had my first of
this drop, which was a very scary/exciting few minutes.
Somewhere right around here, the pace at which I found haul pic qualifiers started slowing down, but I did get a second of
these on Saturday, which again made me very happy.
Then Sunday happened. I woke up having played 93 hours, knowing I needed to play more than on previous days to meet my goal of 105 hours, and was ready for a long painful grind. After less than an hour, I had another one of these
these. I was very happy to see that all the effort I had put in previously that week wasn't completely wasted, as I now had a respectable number of high scorers. Quote from the AOYUT team channel at this point (note the time stamps):
[08:04:00] <Fabian_> if I find a Caduceus or an Archon Staff, I'll have 100.0 points
[08:04:04] <Fabian_> just sayin...
[09:50:33] <Fabian_> lol
[09:51:21] <Fabian_>
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/4198/screenshot069zh.jpg
That was the highlight of the MFO for me. I had been extremely frustrated over the huge amount of Archon Staff/Caduceus/Unearthed Wand base items I had seen, knowing that roughly 1 in 30 should be a 27.x pointer, on average. This drop made 95 hours of frustration melt away in an instant. I kept playing pretty much all day, and at 9pm, well, it was a
pretty good day. I played for another three hours after that, but didn't find any more haul pic items. I didn't mind.
Throughout the week I had some pretty severe hardware/lag problems, which caused me to abandon the run counter after 76½ hours. At that point, it looked like this:
I kept track with an online stopwatch after that, and added the times up manually. I did 106 hours and 2 minutes, in the end. Throughout the week I took many many short breaks, mostly to stretch my legs and get something from the fridge, or to talk to the IRC crowd and whine a bit. Whenever I tabbed out of d2 I paused the counter though, so there's no dead time in there.
Thanks to all the IRC people for talking and listen to me whine when necessary. Thanks Nagisa and everyone else for the encouragement, even if I didn't always appreciate the method
Special huge thanks to AOYUT teammate LiquidClear, who got to read updates pretty much every time I found a haul pic item, all day long, all week long. Seeing that 9.3+ counter slowly increase whenever I looked at IRC helped a lot with motivation.
I'm super proud of myself for this week's efforts. It was complete murder, and I honestly can't believe I didn't quit any number of times. I met both my goals, and I'm very happy I did it, but I also know (hope?) I'm never doing it again.
I made you wait until the end for the haul pics. Only fair right, it took a lot of effort to get these for you to see after all.
Primary haul pic:
Secondary haul pic:
Crap haul pic:
Really crap haul pic:
I found 66 qualifiers worth 9.3 points or more, 36 of which was 10.4+ and 30 which was 9.3. Note that I would have liked to fit the 10.4 Conqueror Crowns in the primary haul pic, but 32 is the limit of items which can be displayed at once, so I had to demote them to the secondary haul pic. That meant that two 9.3 items wouldn't fit in the secondary haul pic, so I included them in the crap pic. Sorry War Pikes. An Azurewrath, which used to be primary haul pic material, also made an appearance there. Also, I forgot to include two Hand Axes in the crap pic, but didn't care enough to re-take it when I noticed.
Thanks a lot for reading.