> Well, I'm probably in no condition to make an unbiased judgement right now, since the same thing just happened to me. I just spent a week carefully cultivating three good characters, cautiously weighing and balancing the spending of points, etc. I had a good record with only two losses, and then in the first elimination round, I was up against a player who had a losing record, no wins at all. This person had, throughout the the tournament, kept all three of his character completely identical in stats and equipment, only varying in his use of elemental bonuses. He'd sunk most of his points into agility.
>
> But for the first round of elimination, he sold off everything he had and invested all his points into one character, buying the most expensive equipment he could afford and adjusting it as high as he could afford. So he had two wimp characters and one that was just *slightly* stronger than my TWO carefully-cultivated heavy hitters. And it worked. He acheived his first win. And I'm out of the tournament. And I'm a little pissed right now.
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> It was really close. If I'd attacked the right character first with my two strongest fighers, I might have pulled through. But his strategy of keeping his characters identical throughout the game until now so that his first real opponent would have no idea who was most dangerous worked.
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> So I suppose it's a good strategy in the short term. Now I'll have to watch and see how this person does the remainder of the tournament. I doubt he'll get very far. It just makes me a little mad that I was the unlucky b------d who got paired off with this guy.

I'm scared. I'm paired off with a guy who seems to be using this strategy. I'm really scared. My characters are mostly equal, but one is slightly ahead of the other two. As preparation for being pummeled, I've been leveling mostly their constitution for most of the game - the most important lesson I learned from the first game. I wonder how Sam will deal with the problem of people like these, and if he'll deal with them at all.