Made the mistake, I think, of trying out the 5,000 MT board once I unlocked it and while I'm only a half-dozen wins into it, I think the Rewards are worse than Gold. Going to try to play out this Gauntlet series as far as possible to see how the draws are across a less sparse sample set.
One thing about Gauntlet that's not good is that I am pissed-off a good portion of the time I'm playing. The mode is so elemental, with very little nuance and strategy, that everything my opponent does that's successful seems cheesy. I'm sure my opponents feel the same way about what I do.
I mean, these are the ways to score:
- ISO your best and most explosive ballhandler and spam dribble moves and spins until your defender makes a mistake and leaves an open lane to the basket.
- Zig-Zag around or run back and forth across the entire court until you can take a wide-open three, midrange, or defender doesn't commit to chasing hard enough and leaves open lane to the rim.
- Post Up any player who has a post-play mismatch...you'll often have a glaring one. Since there's no 3- or 5-Second rules to get in the way, you can just back them down for the entire possession. Often times, you'll have some legendary Center against some scrubby smaller guy, even a SF, and you can just score in the post at will.
- P'n'R between good ballhandler and a big and when third defender sags off his man to defend roll man, dish to wide-open perimeter shooter.
Any of the above get me raging, although I know I do the same stuff. The mode is just relentlessly cheesy, especially when you figure in how rampant it is that people re-roll for superstar teams.
I'm on PC where the population isn't that high, so I often play a guy with a superteam. Then, when game is over, I spend a couple minutes to look at game stats and, if I won, make my picks. Then go back to request another match.
Often times, I'm waiting for, say a couple minutes, maybe up to 5 or even 10 minutes, with no match, and then all of a sudden...get the same guy, who has the exact same starting card that he had the last game and also has two Amethyst/Diamond players again.
Last night, played this guy I've faced quite a number of times, who is good on the sticks and really good at 3-point shooting. He comes across, to me, as a bit of a dick who can't just simply win games but has to try and show off in any way he can. I think I've been down to him big and, late in the game, he starts to make all his guys "flop" fall down on defense to show you that he doesn't even need to play D on you, because he can score at will.
Or, last night, he started out the game doing almost nothing but launching threes with TBT Gold Dragic. I think his goal was to just try and hit 35-40% of them and play tough enough D to win with no other scoring. Tried his best to just toy with me by either biting too hard on a feint or sag off just enough to put up a merely lightly contested three.
But he ended up shooting around 33% with Dragic, this way, and wasn't playing very tough D, including giving up 4/4 from outside by my Dynamic Boogie. When the game got to something like 17-13, he very clearly decided to play "for real" and varied his offensive play. Was scoring at a 75-80% clip but, thankfully, had given me enough of a lead that my 65% sort of rate allowed me to finish out the game with a win.
Gauntlet is definitely a love-hate sort of proposition.
03-22-2016, 01:52 PM
