Back-to-Back Daily High Score World Records by d_tea
Posted by GC on April 7th, 2019 @02:15AM
It’s not often that players win two daily challenges in a row. It’s even less often that both of these scores are world records! In fact, this is the first time that any player has ever gotten two world records on back-to-back dailies (there have been a few single dailies that had multiple world records, however). With astonishing scores of $6,965,675 and $8,762,150 on the March 31st and April 1st dailies respectively, d_tea has done just that. It’s even more impressive that both of these runs outpace the world record for non-seeded score. So just what made these runs so massive?
Well, one initial advantage of daily challenges is that they can be scouted, and thus tea was able to plan out the most efficient use of resources. For example, since he knew that in the March 31st daily, each mines level had a few bombs (and the Black Market entrance in 2-1 only needed a single bomb), he was able to use his bombs early to maximize score. However, in the big picture, this really is not that relevant to the overall score. Optimization of resource usage and ghosting in the mines can account for at MOST $100k - but the first run beat the world record by over $350k. The real culprit here is duping.
Ever since the discovery and research of the underlying mechanics of render duping, the three temple levels (excluding Olmec) can account for over half of the entire run! In addition, duping in Hell can account for another third of the total. For example, on the April 1st daily, tea exited Olmec with $6.2 million - gaining the other $2.5 million in Hell! It seems the real difference maker between a good seed and a great seed (these two dailies) is the dupability.
Dupability, particularly in the temple and hell, depends mainly on one thing - lavafalls. Lavafalls contribute a large amount of "noise" to a level (which has the effect of dampening, or even outright cancelling duping). The lack of lavafalls on the April 1st daily allowed tea to gain an unprecedented amount of wealth in the lategame. In fact, while both dailies were massive (and good seeds), the only significant difference between the seeds was the lavafall count. While there are several requirements for a seed to be 6 million worthy (namely saveable hired help and a jetpack), the real dealmaker for an 8 million seed is the lavafall count.
GG d_tea, and I look forward to more runs to come!