#PastebinMonday 08/02/2021 Onward to Tournament Time Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

The PPL CPU Level 10 Challenge needs to be workshopped before I do it again. In case you missed it, I had plans to beat the hardest CPU in Pokémon Puzzle League in fifty (50) best-of-5 matches at level 10. Any matches that the CPU won would make me give away a gift subscription to my Twitch channel at the end. I ended up giving away five gift subs at the end, but for reasons that I did not originally plan for.

Multiple issues became apparent throughout the challenge. One, as not confident as I was with level 10 play, the CPU, even at its highest level, is even worse. Combo garbage is incredibly distracting to the CPU and my naturally combo-heavy attacks are uniquely exploitative in the PPL engine due to how it handles combo garbage. I had some early struggles, but once I got going, I must have won at least 40 straight games. If I'm doing that while offering channel points predictions on whether the CPU will win a game in any particular match, people aren't going to want to wager their points in either direction. After 25 matches, the CPU had barely been any close to getting a point. The whole intrigue of the challenge was completely gone halfway through.

At that point, changes were made to the formula in collaboration with chat. I lowered the CPU's game level to 9 and vowed to lower it further after every five consecutive match wins. It turns out that the CPU doesn't handle level 9 much better and still lost every match. I, however, was consistently losing games in every match so predicting with channel points was still not incentivized. At level 8, however, oh boy did the CPU have a lot more survivability. I was still winning matches, but the games I did win were often going past one minute. That said, mental fatigue was starting to take its toll after 4 hours of high level Puzzle League play. I started losing matches, too. In fact, my record against level 8 by the time I decided to call the whole thing off was 8-5.

There was another little incentive  for viewers to participate that I was hoping for more people to attend to get traction. I was giving people the opportunity to give money to change the characters I was using as a way to help offset any losses I would have incurred. There's a reason why I was telling people to spread the word. It NEEDS more people to get involved in order to be interesting. I was hoping to have to change characters more often than I ended up doing. I got very little support throughout.

Makes me wonder why I even went forward with this challenge, to be honest. As few viewers as I get on a regular basis, this stream was never destined to be of notable value for anyone involved. I need the viewer base to grow before I try this again. I need to stick to versus level 10 play when I try this again. This was not a complete loss, however. No one really got anywhere in life by never trying new things. You're often better off trying and failing and learning from that failure than never trying at all.

All that said, the well is very dry on new ideas to grow the stream without completely selling out. I'm ready to welcome any and all thoughts related to this. I've been doing this thing for eight years and have very little to show for it. I'm not doing the right things to swing this into a full-time gig, but I no longer have any clue what those right things are. The one thing I cannot afford to do now is quit my full-time job, not when I have people to support, so I have to work around that.

Alright, enough lamenting about what I don't have. I spent way too long on that tangent. The Pokemon Puzzle League tournament is here! Go sign up at puzzlegeneral.challonge.com/PPL2021. This week's schedule will feature a lot of prep:

Wednesday – 8pm EDT – !PPL2021 Qualifying Easy/Normal/Hard – Estimate: 2 hours
Thursday – 8pm EDT – Final Fantasy X is Getting a Little Chilly Out Here – Estimate: 2 hours
Friday – 8pm EDT – Friday Night Salt Mines with !pg and !PPL2021 Qualifying – Estimate: 5 hours
Saturday – 5pm EDT – !PPL2021 Qualifying V-Hard/S-Hard – Estimate: 5 hours

Sunday streams are gonna have to go into the can while I finalize broadcast prep for the tournament. Then the tournament will be broadcasting on Sundays for September, October, and the start of November.

That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, thanks for reading!

--Cards