Introduction
Hello everyone! In this post, I’ll be comparing the effectiveness of cycling to the more simplistic grinding method, which is just circling around the map breaking chests in a single game/run.
Skip to the TL;DR at the bottom if you’d like 
For those who are unfamiliar with the term “cycling”, the way I would describe it is switching between two accounts in order to grind. After grinding for a bit on one account, you would switch to an alt account, which would join the game and take the gold. And then you would switch back onto your main account and continue grinding. If done properly, cycling would allow you to search for and break purple chests quickly and consistently.
Cycling as a grinding method was nerfed pretty hard after gautam implemented a feature that prevented a player from picking up their own gold after rejoining the game. However, by having an alt pick up the gold, cycling is still possible, but it’s far less efficient than it used to be. But in this post of mine, I’ll be evaluating how viable cycling exactly is.
Now, my original plan was to grind for 1 hour straight with cycling and compare but I didn’t have the time and focus to do that 
. So instead, I opted to grind in 10 minute intervals, and conducted 3 trials of cycling. I would then compare these results to a single 10-minute-run.
Results
Cycling (10 Minutes Each):
- Trial 1 - 281,969 XP
- Trial 2 - 283,599 XP
- Trial 3 - 313,712 XP
- AVERAGE: 293,094 XP
10 Minute Run: 238,326 XP
Comparing these two grinding methods, we find that cycling is 293,094/238,326 ≈ 23% more effective for grinding than doing long runs. While the difference here doesn’t seem that significant, note that these were only 10 minute grinds. That difference will add up the more time you put into grinding.
To put it into perspective, imagine if you were to do a 1 hour run and get around 1,000,000 XP (roughly my pacing during my 1 mil speedrun). If you were to cycle in that amount of time instead, you’d be able to grind around 750,000 XP more.
TL;DR
Cycling is actually pretty great, and here’s a list of reasons why:
- 23% more effective at grinding XP than just doing long runs.
- Less lag, since you’d be playing really short games, each being 2-3 minutes tops.
- By cycling and rejoining the game many times, you can watch a ton of ads to support the game.