Updated participant list.  Please respond with your TBAC TruSkill rating:

Primary          2nd tags?               TBAC skill     Comments
SpeleoFool       1 gold, mult silver     16             Who put me in charge?
Disbron          1 gold                  16             on most days
M Scofi3ld       3 gold? mult silver     15             2 boxes; NAT issues
o0EVIL0o x360a   1 borrowed from Scho.   stil1 1??      in for M/W/F 6-9
OnWithTheShow    has cards to burn       8              has to leave by ~7 PST
AceOfJokers      (at least) 1 gold       12+ ?          on most days
Slim Pizza Boy   (at least) 1 gold       5+ ?           on most days
PapaStu          has cards to burn       ???            ready to start*
Jack Burton 78   will have               ???            can start next week*
Chiguy           will have               ???            ready to start**

Dragonmanic      ???                     ???            played w/ us once
Gameaholica      n/a                     n/a            has helped us boost

*   I  have spoken to both of these guys @ length in private chats and I’m confident they’ll be willing & able to help.  Both are on a lot & will bring 2nd accts
** Chiguy started the thread @ 3v to find ppl for boosting;  He wants to go on Wed / Thu and would have joined last nigh, but didn’t see me online (’cuz I was Feely)

I could burn a paragraph on each person in this list, but I’ll try to address what I think are the top concerns & keep this short....

1.  Do we really need that many people?  It will take forever to make sure everyone gets Kingpin....
A good booster wants to be fair, which means at some level we need to make sure everyone does hit Kingpin, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to commit gobs of time until the last person gets it.  Having more people (up to a limit) is helpful in a couple ways.  First, with any luck, more people means more sessions.  I think this is going to work best for everyone if we can get Kingpin happening every night, with most of us showing up for 2-3 sessions per week.  That will not only help smooth out bumps with peoples’ schedules, but it will also help progress to happen faster overall.  I’ve love to show up on a Wed and find that we had a 2nd account or two boosted up to 15 on Tuesday.  In the end we all win.

The other factor is "how do I know when I’m done?"  As a guideline, I think we should all expect that--at a minimum--we will boost up to Kingpin, then derank our primary accounts for someone else to rank up until deranking doesn’t help any longer.  I don’t think we know enough about that yet, though.  Maybe we derank too fast to get someone else up to Kingpin, in which case we’ll need to help more.  Or maybe beating Kingpins will rank people up so fast that you won’t need to rank all the way back down to 1.  Bottom line, people who reach Kingpin can be excused at roughly the same rate that new Kingpins are created, but we don’t know enough about what that rate will be to make any kind of promises yet.

I think we have enough people now.  I’m not going to turn people away, but I’m not recruiting anymore, either.  I am requiring that everyone has at least one secondary account to participate.  We need everyone to be able to play both sides of the fence, and in fact we’ll need some people to come up with 3rd accounts to try to boost primaries beyond 15/16.  I’m very curious to see how far we can get with that, and soon.

2.  How do I know who’s involved?  Who’s in charge?
Heh.  I guess somehow I got put in charge.  But really, anyone who wants the achievement is in charge of making sessions happen.  I’m not going to be able to make every time, so if you’re not getting enough Kingpin action on M/W/F 6-9 PST, or if you can’t make those times, then schedule your own session (and post it here, plz!).

As for how to find people, I am populating the friends list of ’Feely O Spool’ with primary and secondary accounts that we’re using for Kingpin.  So simply look at Feely’s friends, and if you see at least 4 people online (making you #5), then start sending out chat invites and try to make something happen.  I’ll keep this friends list stable until we wrap this up.

3.  What are our priorities?  IOW, "we have enough ppl, what should we do tonight?"
There’s a lot that needs to be done.  Always of top concern should be making sure nobody falls too far behind.  We don’t want anyone feeling like if they’re last in line then people will bail after they get Kingpin.  And we’re not there yet, but we won’t want people with Kingpin to feel like they can never leave.  We need to balance this with people who have been showing up to every session constantly helping new people rank up.  And in the end, getting everyone to 15 before we move on isn’t necessarily in the best interest of the group, either.

One major concern of mine is, can we get EVIL ranked up higher than TruSkill 1?  Maybe he needs to play vs. higher-ranked opponents, but we don’t have any accounts like that yet.  We should start working on that soon.  I’m equally curious about AceOfJokers, who has a number of legit wins & losses.  Will his rank move as quickly as tags with less history?

Another major concern is, how far will level 15 primary accounts rank vs. level 15 boost accounts?  How quickly will the boost accounts derank?  If the boost accounts bleed down to 0 in just a few games, but the primaries don’t climb much more than a few ranks, we might need to rethink our strategies.  It’s better to know this sooner, before we invest the time to get everyone ranked to 15.

Given the above, and assuming a standard evening with 5 ppl playing 2-on3, here’s maybe how we should split things up:

Winning Team: One "boost" tag + primary tag w/ lowest Truskill
Losing Team: 3 trash tags

Play ~ 5 matches and check Truskill.  Remix teams as appropriate until we get 3 boost tags up to 15, then play 2 level 15-16 primary tags vs. the boosting tags for 3-5 rounds to see what happens.

This will probably take us thorugh a couple more sessions at least. 

Thoughts?

Thanks.  I had a stub of my long post accidentally show up here, and have since removed it.  I finished up what I wrote there before I saw your message, but I think our concerns are similar.

It looks like Thursday nights may end up being a good time for people, too.  I know this isn’t an ideal night for you, but if we can get a bunch of the newer people ranking each other up on Thursdays while you’re either not gaming or doing your own thing, then you won’t burn out, and hopefully we’ll waste less time trying to find 5+ people online at once who can work on this on M/W/F.

I also get your frustration on not moving.  I’m getting concerned, too, since even 2-on-3 play doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere.  We really do need to start ranking some boost accounts so we can see what happens.  We might also try pairing you with a trash account that will quit so you go 1-on-3, but I’d rather focus on ranking boost accounts if we can.  We need to see how that works so we have a better understanding of what we’re in for in the long haul.

One other possibility is that we may have to use a different game type for you.  This could also benefit AceofJokers, who has something like a 28-rank in one of the other game types.  If we need to go that route, count me in to help you boost....

Cheers!
Speleo.

Alright, next session I’m going to bring a fresh account to boost up and then we can test it against my main account to check to see if I’m permanantly screwed on TBAC.  So we can do a boost account and another player against 3 trash accounts.  This’ll be a good way to test how leveling off higher ranked accounts does.  I’m also very concerned if someone beats on a level 15 boost account... whether or not that will take them all the way to Kingpin. 

Understand the scope of this, if it doesn’t take him all the way up, we’re going to need a minimum of 2-to-3 extra accounts for each person.  The boost accounts can become trash accounts when they’re deranked but we’re going to need a LOT of boosting accounts.  I think we need to get every primary gamertag as high as they can (15 or 16??) off the trash accounts.  It would be totally useless to pit a Kingpin against a rank 1 guy and trash the Kingpin account.  So this is gonna start costing some money for all of us as well.

By all means try boosting some guys up tonight if you can.  That’ll be a lot better for everyone.  The wife is home tonight so I don’t know if/when I’ll be able to get online to play anything.  I’m guessing at some point I’ll be on and play GTA with my kid or something, he can do some races for me.  ;)  So some time tonight or tomorrow after work I’ll be making a new gold account for this.

Double post I know but this just came to me.

We can actually save a lot of trouble here with the boost accounts.  If we run two different gametypes, the trash accounts can be reused as good accounts on a different gametype because thier trueskill isn’t ruined yet there.  If we want to start working on Pimp Kills, we can try this out as well!!  We might just find a better gametype (shorter matches or easier to rack up trueskill) if we try this a little bit.  The most important thing to me is that the other accounts haven’t been completely ruined yet.

Thoughts??

You can always edit your post instead of double-posting, lol.

Anyway, I just finished reading the collossal "official kingpin thread" on x360a.  I particularly enjoyed how your questions re: "what’s the best way to do this?" were initially brushed off ("use the search capability!"), then after a mess of posts organizing boosting sessions (and the requisite "you suck!" / "no, you suck!" exchange) people started talking more about what did and did not work.  And, not surprisingly, a lot of the more disorganized boosting did not work.  Trading wins also seemed to be a waste of time, meaning secondary accounts are essential to making any real progress.

Buried in that thread was an interesting post about using different game types to boost up faster, since other game types may be quicker to complete.  There were also recommendations to do single-player game types, but that scares the crap out of me because you have much less control about which matches you’ll end up in & whether you’ll win when it’s your turn.

I like TBAC because it’s a known quantity.  I’d like to stick with that as our "official method," but it’s also worth doing a few matches of other game types to see if ranking up really goes much faster.  In particular, ’Protect Tha Pimp’ might be a good choice since a round ends when the pimp dies.  But do you have control over which team gets the pimp?  We should try a couple games like this where the primary tags (pimp-team or not) always win.  Let’s call it a worthwhile experiment, and if it pans out then maybe we switch everyone over to Pimpin’ and leave our progress on chains as an exercise toward the chains achievement.

I’m not too keen on having different groups working on different game types, mainly because it’s that much harder to trade rank.  We’ve already had trouble getting 5 people together, and it’s going to be equally frustrating (or perhaps moreso) if we have 4 "chains" people and 2 "pimp" people on.  But take that in the context of TBAC potentially being a waste of your time, and if that’s the case then we’ll deal with the situation as best we can.

Cheers!
Speleo.

Ya ya, I understand what you’re saying.  My point is that the trash accounts are completely ruined for TBAC.  But Kingpin means trueskill in any one of the gametypes so that trash account has no losses in a different gametype.  So really we wouldn’t need to make a bunch of new boosting tags if we were to use them for another gametype.  Anyways, we could work on Pimp Kills or Ride Pimps while testing out how the other gametypes handle trueskill.  Plus for me especially, it might be worth checking out one of those othe gametypes where I haven’t played any games yet, might save the group some time and trouble.  Or it could be a wash and we would just do all the trueskill related stuff in TBAC and go to those gameypes later for their achievements. Just suggesting an option.  I know Schofield would like to work on Pimp kills and Ride Pimps so that is partially why I brought it up.

MAJOR success tonight.  We boosted for 5 straight hours and made some real, meaningful headway.  We also learned some valuable lessons.

#1 - trash accounts wear out
We created the first "boost" accounts and started ranking those up against the original junk accounts.  After 10 games those accounts were no higher than 10 or so.  After another 3 or 4 games, they were rank 11 and hardly moving anymore.  Then we created some fresh trash accounts and a new boost account, and it ranked up to level 16 in just 3 games!

#2 - boost accounts work!
before:

boost 1 = rank 16; #11,194
boost 1 = rank 15; #13,748
boost 1 = rank 15; #13,749
--
primary1 = rank 1; #154,934
primary2 = rank 16; #12,051

after:

boost 1 = rank 16; #11,195
boost 1 = rank 15; #23,725
boost 1 = rank 16; #23,726
--
primary1 = rank 3; #89,793
primary2 = rank 22; #3,463

Unfortunately, "boost1" fell asleep during this last match (which may have something to do with their rank not moving), so we didn’t get a good chance to test more than this one game.  But we did see very good movement from this one game.

The general plan now is to re-boost the boost accounts using the second wave of trash accounts.  Hopefully this happens as quickly as before.  If we can keep these accounts floating around level 15 they may boost the top accounts that much more quickly.  Otherwise we can count on needing a lot more accounts.  Bleah!  : )

My TBAC ranking is 17, for future reference.

I’m trying to put together a boosting session for 6 PST onwards on Sunday...I don’t know if it’ll happen, given the fact that a lot of people have lives (shocker, eh?), but I figured I’d give it a shot anyways. Let me know if you can/can’t make it via Xbox Live or on the 360v post I made to y’all.

Yeah, we’re definately moving in the right direction.  I can see someone cracking Kingpin in the next gaming session we do.  But I’m thinking that the kingpins are going to de-rank very quickly so we’ll need more boost accounts I’m thinkin.

my internet is still down. not sure how much longer its gonna take for it to go back on. Who got the 22 by the way?