Bah, jumped in a bit too early and got in kidicarus, keenie, and hairy dave’s almost full bracket
I’m here to tank 
Was thinking that there were a few names I recognised in there.
@spoit - about 10 minutes too early
edit: the out of whack sharding is back. Joined 2 and a half hours ago and it took that much time to fill up about 300+ places.
Stuck in another death bracket again with my tinykitty 2* team. Looks like 1 BP card for me at most.
Why is it called sharding? It certainly isn’t fun. I’m hardly a ‘vet’, but I’m getting dumped into brackets chock full of them. I guess they need someone to beat on to get their points up… sigh
They don’t see you unless your MMR is high enough. Brackets don’t affect who comes up in your queue. So they may beat you in points, but they won’t see you to beat your team unless you get up past 700 I believe. Then everyone can see you.
I don’t have any familiar names, but familiar alliances. X2 and Ace of Blades members so far. I don’t know who else is hiding down towards the bottom.
Joined 2 hours ago, not seeing familiar nicks besides Vairelome.
Thugpatrol, I just got a defensive win against you. Out of curiosity, are you tanking or did you get a bad board?
Tanking for LRs, shamelessly.
Ah … I failed to notice it was a win in LR and not Cap PVP.
You know that LR wins/losses don’t affect your regular MMR, right?
Misunderstanding. My bad. To clarify, I was tanking in the LCap event to lower my MMR for LRs for easier Iso farming. Since LRs don’t really affect your MMR you can get a lot of mileage out of tanking before they start and not touching the other PvPs while they’re going on. The loss you got was probably from last night before I went to sleep. I was tanking like a boss while watching TV.
I was wondering why the LR felt more like clubbing baby seals than usual - I’ve been tanking this like a boss too
(It was amazing - I climbed to 250 by beating up 1* and under-levelled 2* teams with Patch/Loki/Doom and used one health pack doing it)
Whether it’s my crappy timing or “Gentle Nudging” in action, I appear to now be in a bracket with at least five X-Men. And kidicarus. And Spoit.
Good thing I don’t need two blue covers …
I’m terrible. I do this every week. And now I have the baby seal clubbing imagery to go with it, thanks for that. But I need Iso more than I need self-respect, so off I go to “educate” some more noobs on how things work around here. 
And I’m in the same bracket. I will be going to 800 sometime, probably really late, for the HP and not giving a damn about placement. You crazy kids have fun up there.
I guess my MMR must be high enough… I couldn’t play fast enough to recoup my points before event end on the last one, and I never was even ‘allowed’ to break over 600 for the 25hp marker. I tried tanking some last season, but that is the most god-awful boring thing someone can do in a game. What little game time I do have, I don’t really see being used to lose on purpose. 
Edit: And 41st is the lowest I’ve placed in an event since I had a 1* team… so that’s something. I was doing good too, never had a string of bad luck with cascades. Never had to use health packs after just one fight. Just continually knocked down in points faster than I could keep them.
5 x-men too? Welp, I guess it’s a good season score doesn’t matter. No-shield HP gains go!
Did you do pretty well in Balance of Power? That messed up some 1* and 2* players’ MMR big time.
Yeah, I rocked the socks off of Balance of Power considering I didn’t shield. I imagine that does put a reasonable explanation to it, but good lord its not fun afterward.
I’m afraid to bother with breaking 500 for a tiny-torch until the last hour of the event. Except being at work makes mid-day finishes pretty terrible…
I guess just do the best with what I have. 
It’s not too bad - just baby 3 and 4s in the top 5
So far
Sharding is what the devs called it when explaining why they are filling multiple brackets at the same time instead of the “first come, first served” model that was around before (basically it helps ease server load, different “shards” on different servers or something). It came in conjunction with the “gentle nudging”, which was grouping more high-scoring forumites together than random chance would suggest should happen. That created quite a few brackets of death in the first 4 or 5 tournaments afterwards. They seemed to tone it down for basically all of last season, but it’s back with a vengeance so far in season 4. I haven’t started this one yet and I’m hoping not to get slotted into the 1 or 2 spots left open in some veteran-filled bracket when i do.
We’re familiar! Woo!