A retirement party! (Complete with gifts!)

Dear friends,

As with all good things, my time with MPQ has come to an end. I don't want to dwell overmuch on why this is so -- in my time on the forum I've always tried to avoid the negative, but if you're really interested, I've put my reasons in a spoiler tag: I'd like to thank a lot of people for making my time with MPQ so enjoyable. In no particular order:

- To all the forumites, past and present, who have contributed so much of their time and energy to adding humor, insight, strategy, and entertainment: thank you. I won't try to name everyone, but you know who you are. Your efforts help make this community what it is. I know it's not always easy to wade through the negativity and the invective, but keep fighting the good fight, and know that there are those lurking who appreciate what you do.

- To the hardworking staff at Demiurge and D3: thank you. I haven't always agreed with what you've done or the way you've done it, but at the end of the day you guys made a great game that provided me with literally thousands of hours of entertainment and held my interest for near a year and a half. I hope you guys all got super rich from the Sega acquisition and are now driving gold-plated Ferrarris because I've worked in the game industry and I know how hard it is to make a successful game and keep it alive for this long. Kudos to you. The forum gives you a lot of flak, and we're not usually very good about remembering that there are real people with real feelings at the other end of the line, but I appreciate your continuing efforts to incorporate our feedback while also doing what you think is right for the game. I wish you guys much success, and may your metrics forever go up and to the right.

- To all the members of my alliance, Chaos League, past and present: you guys are so awesome. It's been a great privilege to have been your commander these past twelve seasons. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together: an alliance that's been top 100 every single season and has never missed a new release cover, ever...but I'm even more proud of how we've done it -- no drama, lots of silliness, and in all our time we've only ever had one person leave the alliance on bad terms. It's been a joy to watch our transition players filling out their 3* rosters and our 3* players finally finishing their XForces and Thors, and the thrill of seeing guys who were consistently scoring in the 600s finally break through to their first 1000 progression reward has been so fulfilling. Thank you so much for all your hard work in supporting your teammates and me. It's been an incredible journey and I feel lucky to have been a part of it.

- To all the wonderful alliances and people whom I've gotten a chance to know via LINE: thank you for having our little alliance and letting our minnows swim with your sharks. Some of my fondest memories of this game come from the coordination and cooperation that we've managed to forge together, and your acts of kindness and generosity for both me and my guys have been as heartwarming and spectacular as they have been unexpected. May all your shield-hops be snipe-free and your PvE clears be optimal.

Now, it wouldn't be a party without some parting gifts, would it? Throughout my time, I've found a bunch of tools to be very useful -- here, for the first time, I've collected them all for easy reference.

ISO/Level calculator - planning how much ISO you need to level a character to any level
Level cap calculator - knowing what soft level cap is for a given number of covers
Token spading spreadsheet - for getting numbers on the probability of pulling specific characters or rarities from tokens
Buyback data - how much iso and hero points you get back for selling off a changed character
Tile damage - knowing at what level characters tank colors for other characters
PVP score calculator - figuring out what someone is worth to you based on what he's worth to someone else

So long,
mischiefmaker

P.S. Some of you may be wondering what will become of character rankings. I'd like to do one last edition, but right now I really need a full break from the game -- perhaps once I've had a little time, I'll be motivated to finish that up. After that, it'll be up to someone else to pick up the torch!