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First off, TKDB MERCH!!

https://didarabocchi.com/en-us

It’s officially in the US and I’m super excited! (and also super sticker shocked… 😳) BUT MERCH!! 🤪 (And no! I totally haven’t started planning how to purchase it… 🙈)

Second, the first part of the season finale is super interesting. Can’t wait to find out how season 1 ends at Christmas! Who’s going to win the Laurel Crown? Who’s gonna find and capture the rumored demon on campus? AND do we get to choose a date for the gala? I don’t know! But I’m here for it! 😂

Third, Mozi is back in LOP!! 🥳 And I’m going to see how far my ingots go. I saved as much as I could but I’m not sure it will be enough to get Mozi’s outfit. 😭 I’m glad it’s not entirely paywalled, but also not sure if I have enough to get enough event points for everything. You know, the regalia card and the two outfits you need for it. 😒 Soooo I may do something else with my event points this time around.

This new puzzle game is fun.

I also wish the “free” silver option wasn’t random. I mean I’d love the new partner, but I’m only going for Mozi right now! 😭 But as you can see my conundrum, in the picture. I’ve got enough ingots for one 10x pull on Mozi each day for the next four days and am only at 56%. Are the odds in my favor? 🤷🏻‍♀️ We’re gonna find out, cause I really don’t want to top up in LOP anymore. 🫢😭

Anyway! That’s about all I have time for! Until next month!

Okay, so aside from announcing that I will be posting more Hunger Games content (🥳🍾) and vlogging this year, I’ve been thinking ALOT about my plans for LOP too.

So where to begin? Well, I’m currently hoarding for CS Dom/Favored, not that I have any expectations for how well I’ll place. 😅 The player I anticipated dropping this last round, ended up only doing half the drop. 😱 Which, to be honest, really messed me up for next month. And unfortunately, I need to catch up since I haven’t fully unloaded everything for at least five cycles now. 😩 Or I at least don’t feel comfortable hoarding beyond this next CS round. (I’m beginning to feel it in debates, guild wars and field. 😰) It will set a new personal record for power/intimacy quick rank increase, but I doubt it will claim a victory on the CS ranking. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’ll talk more about the details of that drop next month.

However, in order to not completely miss out on the rank goodies for CS, I went ahead and revised a strategy goal I made last year. I decided to promote all my red partners to gold this last Dominant cycle (and hoping that 29M increase doesn’t come back to haunt me next month. 😆) I figured at this point in the game, bringing some balance to my partner stack will make me a stronger force to be reckoned with going forward. I say this having run into several players now who have an exceptional/somewhat unbeatable top 8, and weeeelll I’m a little jealous. 🙃 So I think that’s going to be a goal this year, evening out my top 12, and any other partners I promote to arch chief this year.

This includes my confidants too! I’m definitely going to get Mozi promoted to “Love of a Lifetime” and then work on evenly leveling up the rest of my top 8. Maybe I’ll win Grandiose Ceremony this year. 🤣🤣🤣

Back to partners. My previous statement probably means I am going to pass on adding “paid”partners to my stack this year too. I am a little curious to see how that fairs actually. I started it last year, but then the game added 4 free partners. 😅 Two of which I was given after an update, and the other two that you earn from the new CS events. I will eventually get the CS Hunting Competition partner this year, but outside of that, I’m going to try my hardest to NOT add to my current stack. I’m just interested to see how much it stunts my growth. And well, as we can currently see, the opportunity to grab missed partners always seems to come around eventually. 😏

Another thing I’ll be doing this year is replenishing my inventory for CS Banquet, Debate and Hunting. 😂

I’m like all out of banquet invitations, challenge letters, pursuit tokens, and all those hunting competition goodies. So I’m going to be doing bare minimum participation for a lot of stuff this year, or at least until I recoup my resources.

Oh and I want to challenge myself to hoard ingots! Maybe I’ll hoard to some ridiculous amount, like 50k. 🤣 (I say that, when I know I’m going to indulge a little here and there. 😅) But now that I have some sense of the event calendar, I feel like I can actually accomplish this goal, since I know when I’m going to need my ingots and when I won’t. (Also like right now. I may pay for a game or two to get some more banquet invites, but beyond that, I’m probably sitting out again. But then there is the argument for dropping just enough ingots to rank in event points, which can have a major item payout if hardly anyone else is participating. 🤔 Spending ingots as a F2P is always a gamble. 🤪) But sadly, there’s always that knowing I’ll have to pass on items I would love to have. 🙃 (Like so many of those pretty backdrops or partner skins… 😮‍💨)

But I think my main goal, if I can sum it up, is just to continue enjoying the game. Frustrations and all. I’m really curious to see how long I last in this game. It’s fun being around for all the new updates and watching how guilds reorganize as players cease playing for one reason or another. I’ve actually thought about making another F2P account to run a different partner building strategy, but I don’t have time for that. 🤪😂 Not with everything else I have going on and my interests being as divided as they are right now. (I’m constantly pulled between Russian language, Russian history/culture, Chinese history/language, Hunger Games blog posts, Theology, or my Fan Fiction. Which do I feel like doing now in my down time? 🤔🙈)

Anyway, as we keep progressing through the year, I’ll try to come up with some new LOP strategy series stuff to chat about here to keep me and everyone else on their A game.

TTFN (ta ta for now.)

So I got lost on Facebook a while back and I noticed someone talking about how they had been hoarding for CS Dominant and Favored for over a year and how they barely even made the dent they had expected. Now without going into all the details I discuss in my Dominant strategy post, and how they didn’t really follow those 🙃, I think it really reinforces the value of time in LOP and the importance of strengthening a previously well established partner stack.

But thinking about this brought an interesting revelation to me. As you know if you’ve been following along with me, I’ve been saving robes to finally promote one of my archchiefs to grand chief this year, but have been going back and forth on which partner to promote. I had been heavily considering my cabinet scholar or Mozi, just to be different. And then I suddenly remembered all the special tokens. Like the prince tokens, duke tokens, etc.

Of all these groups of tokens, the ones we accumulate the most of are the prince tokens. 😲

Now I know everyone has their own strategy on which partner they want to prioritize based on their strategy preferences. But coming from a purely game resource standpoint, if you’re looking to have one all powerful partner I personally think one of the princes is the way to go. 😅 So when the time comes, it’s already been decided for me, I’ll be promoting Prince Yi to grand chief. During CS of course. TBH, kind of interested in seeing how much damage I can do at that point. 🤔 I guess we’ll have to wait and see. 🙃

In other news, I’ve gotten into the top 3 for my local server in both the story and intimacy categories. 🙈It’s sort of funny seeing myself up there, but also make me a little proud. 🥲 Three years of waiting around really pays off. 🤣

I’ve also been considering throwing in the towel once I reach level 56. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Its not that I don’t love LOP, it’s just I’ve reached so many goals this year alone that I’m not sure what else I want to pursue anymore. And you know, it would be nice to not have to think about it as frequently as I do. Perhaps I’d get through more books. 😆 ...However, I doesn’t mean I’ll be shutting down this blog! 😅

Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out what the best plan of attack is for “Lobbying for Inclusion.” Like is using up all your lobbies daily or waiting until the end of the week better? I haven’t noted the point accumulation to see if one strategy is better than another. It probably also depends on what level your guild tackles every week too. 😅 However, I have noticed less points are obtained if you’re battling the “consort” at the end vs taking out the little buildings along the way. That being said, perhaps getting hits on those little bosses on a semi daily basis is the ultimate way to go. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Oh I was also REALLY excited that I made it into the Leadership Academia group for the Literary Gathering All Stars! 🤩🤩🤩 I certainly wasn’t planning on dropping my hoard on my cabinet scholar that Dom, but man it sure paid off! 😂 I didn’t make it beyond 128th finals, but I don’t care. Those bottom tier rewards were sooo worth it. Cause now my scholar has the cape outfit!! (I just haven’t activated it yet. 😅)

Another aside, I sort of found everyone’s comments about Qixi this year quite hilarious, since it’s how I felt last year. 🤣 I just decided to boycott it this year, save for all the free stuff. 😏 Though I did heavily consider getting the love birds. In the end, I just didn’t feel like they were worth the ingots. 🤷🏻‍♀️ At least in some of the other events I get free points that makes me feel like I’m not dropping 3600 ingots on pigeon mail upgrades exclusively. 🙃

And now for the Hunting Competition... 😩

First off, why do we need another partner bond for Wan’er?! I was really hoping that’d be done with CS Banquet. Oh well. 🙃 And by the looks of it, it’s probably going to take me ten cycles to get Qiqige too. 😩😩😩 Not that it matters much, since there will always be new partners to keep the game alive right? 😏

Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure out the best strategy if you’re not spending ingots on it. So far I’ve concluded that waiting until well after reset is the best time for me to start my main hunts, since it gets rid of a lot of my stronger competition. I’ve also figured that just skipping the hunts you know you can’t beat is helpful for me. (Knowing your opponents partner stacks from CS debate will help out tremendously here.) I mean why lose the 25 points if you can spare them? I’ve also noted how other players set up their hunts to be extremely useful, as in where do they put there strongest teams? It has helped me avoid unnecessary losses of points. The most useful thing has been taking advantage of those treasure boxes and free hunts in the “hunting clues” area. It’s a nice buffer, since I have no control over stronger players taking out my hunting teams multiple times in a row. 😏

So, okay haven’t spent 0 ingots on this event, but I’m also not spending them like some of the other players. I’ve mostly done it for strategy experimentation. To which I will say, the search party boosts seem like they could be more worth the ingots than say buying search tokens. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Maybe if I have more ingots to spare in the future I’ll spend a little more to see what kind of a difference that makes. But as with everyone else, I was over this event before it started. Like why is it five days long and seems to lack a purpose? 🤔🙈

Whelp, that’s all I have to say for now. Until we meet again.