19-12: 2 things:

1) It should be possible for me to do some streaming with audio commentary soon. I just need to set it up properly.

2) I'm in such an awesome place in my life right now, if I would stream I would make Syrreal look like Mother Teresa. Gonna have to postpone it.

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Starting on august 25th I began my challenge of earning as many medal points as possible in 1 week, with an ultimate goal of 100.000 points. During this week I spend around 100 hours playing medal games, an average of about 14 hours a day. Unfortunately, even though I tried my best to reach my goal, I didn't make it.

At the end of august 31th my final score was: 90000 medal points.

Why wasn't I able to complete my challenge? I can think of 5 reasons:

1) Lack of preparation. My job is going to be very busy soon, so the only available week to take some time off was the one coming up right away. Because of this I had only 1 day to pick the games I was going to play and set up the stream. While my list for the most part contained great games for this challenge, there were also a few big mistakes on it. When I figured out a game would take longer than expected it was usually too late to go back, and I had to spend at least an hour to earn 500 medal points, while I needed to average 1000 points an hour to win the challenge.

2) The stream. It was fun to interact with my fellow medal grinders, but it also brought up some issues. My Flash Player crashed several times during the week so instead of playing games I had to fix those issues and/or reboot my laptop. Also, the stream caused some lag from time to time. When playing skill games the fps should always be constant. This wasn't always the case because of the stream, causing unnecessary deaths within a game, leading to the next point.

3) Frustration. It's something I never have to deal with when playing medal games, because if I don't have a good time I just stop playing. Unfortunately, when you have a pace of 1000 medal points an hour to keep up with, you need to keep going. Failing to beat games because it takes too long or because of lag frustrated me from time to time. This caused me to play worse so it took even more time to beat certain games.

4) Time pressure. Normally when playing medal games, you read the instructions, play a bit, figure out a nice tactic and then destroy it. Because I needed to beat multiple games every hour, there was no time for this, so I had to dive in nose-first and hope for the best. This worked out nicely for the most part, but sometimes I had no idea what to do and lost a lot of time, or figured out a better way to beat the game, but couldn't restart because of time issues.

5) I was too stubborn to use walkthroughs. For the first 5 days I completed every puzzle game by trial-and-error. Using a guide (as we all do sometimes) could've saved me a bunch of time, but I thought the challenge would be more pure this way. I abandoned this idea by day 6, but I pretty much lost the challenge by then.

Looking back to last week, it was a great experience. It took a lot out of me and I'm really exhausted right now, but I still think it was worth it. I'm obviously disappointed I didn't reach 100.000 medal points, but 90k is still a nice score. Trying the challenge again isn't an option, as I now know how to play every game, making it really dull. It was a once in a lifetime thing and a perfect way to keep the medal system entertaining for myself. I really hope the people who watched the stream enjoyed it. I definitely appreciated the support!

Special thanks to: WonderTheHedgehog for helping me setting up the stream and Syrreal / Knuckstrike for entertaining me in the Twitch Chat with random cat and dog images while also providing me with useful information about the game I was currently playing.

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My Newgrounds account for this challenge will be: Yagya Watch me play on twitch.tv/nijsse. Again, any comments are appreciated.

25-8: Ended the day with 25000 points after playing roughly 60 games. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope to see you all tomorrow! =)

26-8: Just finished day 2. I played around 14 hours today and earned 12415 medal points. Pretty safe to assume this challenge is going to be insanely difficult to win. Total points after today: 37415

27-8: Played another 14 hours. Most of the games were lots of fun to play, but the quality of my play is starting to decrease from time to time. Ended the day with 50000 medal points.

28-8: Day 4 started out badly. I experienced problems with the stream, some lag, a few medals didn't register and I wasn't playing too well. Fortunately, things started to get better after dinner, so after playing for almost 15 hours, I ended my day at 61675 points. Slightly behind pace, but it could've been worse.

29-8: I think it's going to be impossible to hit 100k this week. Today didn't go very well, even though I played some great games (Abobo!). One of my biggest strengths as a gamer is that I can stay relaxed and focused without ever getting angry. Today I ragequit a game because of an annoying fly in my house. Playing for around 70 hours in 5 days might be a little over the top, but I'm not giving up just yet. Ended the day with 70320 points.

30-8: Tried my very best today, but the challenge is a little too much for me. Still managed to earn over 10000 medal points today, and finished at 80710. There is one day left, and even though I know it's not going to happen, I'll keep going just to see how much points I can collect.

31-8: With 10 hours left on the clock (and after playing for 13 hours today) I gave up the challenge. Even if I would spend every minute that is left collecting medals, 100k would still be too much. Ended the challenge with an even 90000 medal points and I will post a summary of the challenge soon.