My ultimate test: purple candy collection

Hello guys. With the knockout rounds I have moved on from checking how many purple I can score per episode (result: roughly 45,000 - 65,000) to how many purple I can collect if I play at speed, per hour.

I am surprised to see that this has not changed since last year, nor the year before. I had to perform some "harakiri" on my poppy account to test out levels 6000 upwards. I only played for half an hour as it was costing me too much gold and party poppers to get through the first episode of this level range. I was playing starting boosters, which by themselves were not enough to pass any of these levels on my first attempt!

Result: 188, 820 , after multiplying the 16 levels I played in half an hour by two and then by 30 for the multiplier I did not get since I was scrolling back.

Yesterday I tried how well I could do by just playing the Star Tournament, which did give me a genuine 30x multiplier. Again I had to play a party popper and the occasional UFO to pass. Timing of the party popper(s) is important, and a lot of the levels in the star tournament are really good and fun to play for an experienced player who understands the legendary level algorithms well. It also has the benefit that any useless level you can just quit without penalty. So I do understand why you like playing this @cookiemae . I managed to score 184,980 in one full hour's play.

So I conclude that with either game I could probably score enough to win a purple candy collection event if I had enough strong boosters and gold bars. The only problem being: Do I have the stamina and joints to keep going and how many other players out there are equally as fast? My guess would be: A lot of them. Especially if players in Asia are included.

In my knockout leaderboard 13 out of 30 players are from Asia. Do any of you who qualified for the knockouts see the same?

"Piggy" hasn't started yet.

Playing the 45 new releases and counting my purple score:

The score per episode is in the usual range: 55,000 - 69,000 purple. BUT I struggled to reach an adequate hourly score. These levels are just too long, too many colours, too many sour skulls etc. You can't just go in with a party popper or double colour bombs on these levels because most of the board does not unlock until much later. I only managed 115,000 per hour.

Made one final test of the knockout rounds this morning: Levels 561 to 575. Scored 65,298 purple in that episode. I have noted that across the board on all levels I play the red candies now drop as soon as I pass, so the end of level cascade is shortened. This might play into the hands of experienced players who understand how to play an obvious "win" level to the last move, so I'm not sure it adds fairness to the game. But that may not be the purpose.

I rather suspect that King are running their own tests during this competition to do exactly what I have done: calculate the possible maximum score for each level. They should easily be able to weed out suspicious players who score more than what they know is possible.

The qualifying scores for the final were: 160,000 in the groups starting Tuesday evening, and 300,000 in the group that started a few hours into the competition. These are the qualifiers for the final in my two groups:

Pakistan level 2271

Indonesia level 1312

USA level 1509

USA level 13,941

(Piggy UK level 575)

Brazil level 4577

Brazil level 883

Mexico level 2460

India level 891

(Poppy UK level 18,380)

There is a lack of mid range players, which may be due to those players being excluded. My own game at level 5000+ did not see this event.

I started a new test game (with sweet old early levels!) which has got the invite to join the second chance round. So there's more testing to come.

Great news. So joining late can still work. Good work! See you in the final.