Event Ranking Guide for the Top!
Disclaimer: The following guide does not apply to all top scorers in events, nor they give me all the tips and guides. Some of the stuff might not work on you, this is how I work and survive. If you have any questions, please ask me and I will try my best to answer you!
WARNING: Minors are encouraged to not do this because it has potential for affecting your health and mental state. Guardian's advice and supervision is encouraged if you are doing this.
"I want to be 1st in 'Insert event here'!"
Your friends will say "Good luck", your parents will probably take away your device from you after listening such words from you, and the top scorer veterans will do their "best" (which they always do) to deny your words. But you will probably ignore them because you are here looking for guides, tips and tutorials on how to survive this chaos. You are determined to do this, right? Then I might as well will give you all the details of how to reach the top Rankings in events!
First and foremost, you need the ability to survive EX songs (Hard songs are also an option but the top will be unlikely due to points received in event being low). Since the type of event I survived was a Challenge Festival, the ability to survive Daily EX songs is a must. In every Challenge Festival, Round 5 guarantees you some of their Daily Songs (the 9 songs that are hard since Nawatobi appears in Round 2) and your job is to survive them and claim all those event points. This is not advised for beginners and amateurs who cannot guarantee their survival of EX songs. In Medley Festivals, you need at least 60 LP to perform a 3 EX Medley to score the event, so that's a reminder to those who don't have enough LP to tier events.
My next tip is somehow related to my first point: In order to survive songs upon tons of hours on playing, you need teams with healers. If you feel confident enough about your team lineup, you are free to use them. As an example, all my teams have at least a healer in it, and I don't have problems on surviving songs, so I use my usual teams in this event.
All my teams have at least a healer, and they are useful than you ever imagined. The 1st Year, 2nd Year and 3rd Year chibis give the bonus upon full Stamina at the end of the song, and songs like Zurui yo Magnetic Today are traps set by KLab to prevent you from getting these. Protip here: It is best to not use Time based healers in your team. For example, my Pure team has Job v2 Nico as the only Healer in the team, and her skill activates every 17 seconds with a 28% chance of healing Stamina by 4. It's garbage. I had once got the chibis during Listen To My Heart!, and I had 1 miss throughout the whole song. The miss happened at the start of the song and guess what? That card never activate the skill even once. Chibis are part of the gameplay that have the potential to save up your Love Gems because of LP recovery and extra event points towards your goal.
Here comes the main stuff. Events lasts for around 9 or 10 days, and time management is extremely important. Make a timetable. Set alarms as reminders. Make sure you have the time to do it, not just spam Love Gems and lost track of time, and ended up regretting it. The longer you play the events,the more you will be tired of it and wanting to give up. Sometimes you just want to rest and forget the time again. This is the main reason of setting up timetables. At least, you know and realise what are you doing.
Love Gem management is important as well (for f2p players). I am a p2p player, but all the love Gems I've used during this event were all saved before 4.0, and I've been saving it since 3-4 months before the event. So, another question from players to the scorers: Can a f2p player get to the top? The answer is Yes. There are cases that players saved up a year's worth gems and have over 800 Love Gems, so it is possible for players to save up for an event.
The next thing I want to mention is about your general life during event. Food and drinks? Prepare those.
Those who live with parents: If you decided to score at the top rankings, your parents will know that something's wrong with you because you keep hiding in your room without a sound. If you try to keep it a secret from them, they might be suspicious of your actions. So you need to make sure that your parents won't be an obstacle for your scoring in the event. Instead, try to tell them your goal of doing this. If you have kind parents that understand your intentions, they will support you. But if you don't have parents that are supportive from your actions... you might need to wait for the day of living alone (Like me~) Do you remember the 1st Medley Festival which features Christmas Maki? The player who was at the 1st place was Makeiri who had support from her parents, and they let her stayed in her room to reach her goal. She spent over 350 Love Gems to do it, and she shared her experience in her YouTube video.
Those who live alone: Well since you are free to do anything, you can get food by calling some pizza orders or prepare pre-cooked food and microwave them when you get hungry. Please make sure that you have enough water everyday because hydration is really important and coffee is not a substitute for water. Prepare everything on the desk so that you can get necessities within seconds of time. For me, I need mocha to wake me up, and I sometimes prepare cup noodles because I am a lazy person. Takomiya has pre-cooked food as meals and such. Some players just use some snack bars to keep their energy. It depends on everyone and you might need some days to figure out what works best for you. Protip: Get a plant in your room while tiering. At the last day of the event, I had to rush for a consecutive 25 hours of playing and my eyes were burning for the last 12 hours. This happens because of the lack of sleep and contact with radioactive devices for a long time. You can at least take a breather during game menu transitions by turning your head and look at the green. It will at least help your eyes from suffering. As for the times you need to sleep, remember to move the plant out from the room because plants use oxygen instead of carbon dioxide at night. You don't want to compete with a plant while sleeping, don't you?
If you have any health issues, aiming for the top scores are not advised unless you are confident on doing it. Please prepare the medicines and tools you need at the desk upon tiering. As for someone who does the top scoring, since the last 24 hours of event is a "Wonderful Rush" and we will keep playing it, get eye drops for eye comfort, and I highly recommend it since I suffered it without knowing, and after I passed out the first thing I did was asking people from Discord how to solve the problem and rushed to the convenience store to get eye drops.
And here comes the most important stuff: Make sure that your device, charger and internet connection is stable and fine. If anything happens to those things, you might as well saying farewell to the event you want to tier and score. Turn off all notifications of other applications because things might happen and you might break your combo just because of that or even failing the song.
Alright folks, these are the basic stuff I want to cover for anyone who wants to tier for the top rankings! If there is any details that you want to ask/look for, you can try to access the Frequently Asked Questions section of my website to find your answer! Once again, thank you for reading and I hope all of you succeed on getting the throne on the event Rankings! Faito daiyo/Ganbaruby!