Recently, I started raising a Tigon using the
DMM method. I won't bother posting stats, as
that's not my point with this post, but I will post
something I found that's most interesting.

About three months into this method with my
Tigon (i named him Khan), I decided to get an
early start on hard drilling. I took him to Brillia
to do some Dig Moles.(I wanted to jack up his
Pow/Int stats) Not suprisingly, he failed. I did
the rigamarole of going back to some single
arrow drills in Morx, and again, I got the catchy
failure music. So, not wanting to rest him, (he
was very healthy, with no stress) I decided to
wait until the next venture. (it was Aug4 when i
decided to wait)

I unfroze Khan on Nov4 and once again went
back to Brillia to do the Dig Moles. (technically,
he was coming from a previous venture
unrested, fresh off a drill) Again, a failure. So,
like the last time, I went back to Morx, and
voila!!! He pulled off a 11 point Great on a
Trampoline drill.

I tried this again the next time he failed a hard
drill,(Feb4) and went back to the same locale
(Brillia) for the same hard drill (Dig Moles
again, May 4) And Khan got the drill down. My
point? Although I haven't really researched
this, I believe that season is the key to
breaking the failure chain. (based soley on my
casual observations)

For detail purposes, he was fed Salmon (a 2/4
food for him) and he had the "Horns"
accessory on at the time. He came out of each
venture having found the "very refreshing" and
"very relived of stress" Crystal Eggs.

Good observation, I used a different idea. If monster "X" failed HD and then failed LD after resetting, I'd reset again and put him/her away for 3 weeks. Then I'd use the failure week to beat an official tourney instead. On the next drill attempt, she'd pass and I'd have knocked out an official rank at an opportune time (didn't do this at first with my first DMM, but am doing it with the Cosmocchi and Kung Fu I'm training now from the start). So both monsters are both 3 months old and have yet to fail.

As far as what you said, I'm not sure if it's area, or location. Tigon is rare so it's hard to say, but we know that certain breeds seem to train better in different areas (I think it was theorized but not necessarily proven..I may be wrong though). It may be, that for Tigon, Morx is an easier drill area. Or that during that season, Morx is easier. I found my greatest success in the first stage of life in Morx for preventing failure. I typically leave Morx around 6 months. Now as far as venturing goes...the season seemed to make a difference for me, but I won't say so for sure till I finish with these two.

Hmmm...hard to say about that. While raising my monster for the first MR3 online tournament, I decided to re-set to avoid failure to try and make a better monster. Every time it failed, and I was just doing regular ranching without any freezing at all (drill a few times/rest), I re-set the game and tried another drill. In some cases, I wound up trying every single drill possible in the game. My result was that in almost every instance, there was at least one drill my Joker would pass. I wound up only accepting failure on two weeks of its entire life, and resting those two weeks.

i havent been hibernating, but i will look for a change of season when i do. but i have gone to easier drills, then gone to different regions, then finally to rest as a last resort, when faced with failure. the thing is, all the above observations, and my own experience, falls to hold constant such variables as level of fatigue and stress, breed of monster, level of bonding, form, and maybe a few others i cant think of right now.

i am not saying these do influence failures, mind you, i am saying we dont have any proof one way or the other as to whether they do or not.

I have a question for Dave. What do you do when your monster fails even the light drills but it is not yet powerful enough to beat the next tourney?

I really haven't run into that. When I trained Reilly, I wasn't as thorough as I'm being with BruceLee (the Kung Fu Dragon) or Harry (cosmocchi). I rested alot more. At 3 months I haven't run into that situation. Harry has had only one fail week to make him battle on and the dragon received Reilly's heart so he started with a stat composite of 1650 (655 + 995) and is kicking everyone's can.

I didn't even think of doing this with Reilly until she was 1 yr 6 months and could beat everything thru "A". In my thread at MR.com, I wrote up a version of the method called, "How I should of done it?" With Lisa's permission, I'll post it under DMM's thread here. It's just a revision that get's into detail. It's a composite of how I'm doing it the second time to be more efficient.

Anyway, with Reilly, she stopped failing at about 1 year. Now I was lucky with her. She was gaga for Nuts. 3/4 of the time she was 4 blocks under nutrition and favorites. She got nuts every other week. IF I fed her nuts, she would be a 4-4 in both Carrots and Hagsan Peach. So I spoiled her rotten. She got a 4-4 every week. Plus, at about 1 year I noticed the "Great" phenomena that Torey first wrote about. So I started concentrating heavily on getting something that refreshed and relieved stress. Once I started doing this, and rotated between Heavy drill/Light drill every other week, she stopped failing period.

So for argument's sake we'll assume that following the method failures disappear quite quickly (6 months to a year) but you still haven't achieved battle sense "A"(to help on ventures) you could instead choose to battle in the free battle (it's the same week) and win a stone. Either for this monster or your Dummy monster. Granted you will lose a week of life, but you have to battle at some point if you want to be able to get battle sense up so you can max out your techs too.

Or like the original suggestion, you could use that as a rest week as a last resort. That way you reset stress and fatigue to their best amounts.

My purpose in doing my "observational research" is simply to find a way to completely break the failure chain, meaning that there's always a way to get a drill outta your monster, no matter what. What I mean by "failure chain" is when you first go to do a hard drill, and you fail. You follow up with a easier drill, and you fail. Finally, you go to Morx or do one of the single arrow Lif drills in another region, and again, a failure.

Another reason why I'm doing this is because I'm more or less a stat type of guy. IMO, I really think that although they're very helpful, the Noisy Hall idea to level up your techs that MR3's programmers put into the game is a complete waste of space. So, what I'm doing here is trying to find a way to use every week for drilling until my monster reaches my desired stat total.

For my recent observations on this topic, I decided to study one of the dummy monsters I was raising. In this case it was a Scissors, age:3yr,3mo, looks healthy, stress from two weeks of Blowfish drills. He failed every drill I had him try on Aug2, so I took out a waste monster (all rest) to pass the time until Nov2, exactly three months away. (during this time, Khan, my Tigon was doing fine) I brought out my Scissors (Slash) and once again attempted to get him to drill. He failed the Blowfish, but he did the Swim drill I made him do.

As far as Khan goes, (very healthy, no stress) I had him try a drill on Nov4 of the year after I did the observation on Slash, and he failed every drill. I did my thing, brought him out on Feb 4 and again the same results. So, I was getting worried that this may all be for naught, so I once again waited until the next time he was due to be worked, which was on May4. And he got a Great on the Blowfish drill I was forcing on him.

Sorry for the length of this post, but I'm beginning to think that I'll have to do some more observation under different criteria before I can 100% say the failure chain is officially broken.

That's good stuff. Here's my question. You said on Nov 2nd he failed blowfish but passed Swim. so during your experiment in Aug 2nd week, did you attempt Swim and fail? If so, then you're on to something. The only 2 things that changed, would be the season and the fact that he hibernated (hibernation could relieve or increase stress...I doubt it, but it's possible).

Try to repeat the experiment and log the drills tried and failed and tried and succeeded. Furthermore (and this will take a while). Try all drills in all locations the first time and the second. Look for variances between the two attempts. Try drill x than reset. then try drill y, reset etc. This will be tedious as you'll have to save every week till he fails once and then you can test. There's only 40 drills so this should take only, 2 hours or so.

I wouldn't do it, if I would that's where I would start.

i mentionned this in my suezo thread, but it really belongs here:

my suezo just was doomed to fail aug4. tried every drill everywhere. so i put her back to sleep, and got out my joker. interestingly enough, i also tried every possible drill for him, and he failed them all...well, thats why they call it a "dummy" i guess. when nov4 rolled around, out came sofia, who did just fine! hardly constitutes proof, but it certainly fits the pattern.

happened again today exactly the same way. so clearly, there are failures that can be "sidestepped" using the seasonal method. now the question becomes, are there some which cannot?

a third failure week occurred for my suezo - tried everything; failed all. she seemed tired, and was emaciated, so i thought maybe it was her, and that no amount of hibernation and seasonal change could help. oh well - decided to put her to sleep, brought out my pancho [joker died] ... but the pancho succeeded! i would have bet anything that this was not a failure week type failure, but a monster specific failure, and that she was doomed to fail whenever i next tried her. wrong! brought her out in 3 months, she succeeded at life drill in goat, and got on with the rest of her life.

Well, I got rather bored with my Tigon, Khan, and so, for the heck of it, I thought I'd develop a psuedo-freezer style method based around my small findings here.

REQUIREMENTS-Beaming Rock, Holy Goblet, lots of paitence, and a little apathy toward the Noisy Hall idea. Oh, having around $100,000 gold also may help.

DRILLS-0yr,0mo-0yr,6mo=LD,LD,LD,rest. For failures, use the "Terrible" option if it appears, otherwise, use "Keep on Trying" option. This is so your monster can develop a sense of what to do later on in life.

0yr,7mo-last expected three months of monsters lifespan.
Cycle1:HD,HD,Rest,HD: Here, if your monster fails, freeze and bring out exactly three months later and resume drilling. (This may take more than one time to get to work.) Feed monster any depleting item it "likes" or "likes a lot". As far as food selections, feed the highest combined value of blocks, usually settling for favortism over nutrition.
Cycle2:HD,Rest,HD,HD: Repeat same failure/item/food criteria as previous cycle.
Cycle3:Rest,HD,HD,HD: This should be the month prior to the venture. Again, repeat same failure/item/food criteria as previous cycles. During venture, search for "very refreshed" and "very relived of stress" items. Don't settle for anything less.

MISC: During the time you raise your monster with this psuedo-frezzer style method, there will be the times you're waiting for a season change. For these said times, it's best to raise up a "money pimp" monster that does nothing except battle, and a "tech pimp" monster that does nothing except go after orbs and stones for the main monster. For both of these "pimps", I recommend doing two hard drills or three light drills in a row with a rest afterwards. Try to train in Spd and the desired offensive stat of your choice, to max both of these stats. Doing this will make your "pimps" more able to handle the necessary battles needed for tech and money gain for this method.

Here's an example of a Joker/Morx I'm raising with this method. Age:1yr,5mo. Hearts:None,1st gen.
Lif:135,Pow:524,Int:443,Spd:549,Def:75
Techs:same as he started with. (I haven't gotten around to giving him any stones and orbs yet)
Nature:Normal
Name:Juggalo

Due to my sporadic posting habits, updates on Juggalo will probably be within one to one and a half years apart from each other, so forgive me if I don't seem to keep up on this that often.

juggalo, eh? pity faygo isnt one of the items you find on venture...

I'm a fan of ICP, and I also used the "Picture Paradise" mask to put a picture of their album, "The Great Milenko" on the mask, to make him look kinda like a juggalo.