Balancing Rivalries and Seasons

They are completely, hopelessly out of balance. I can't remember the last time I saw the "Season has ended!" popup and I actually cared. The rivalry is where the rewards are at now, and that's destroying the game. Of course, nerfing the rivalry this far in would piss everyone off, so I have another idea. I'll start with the rivalry since that's the only thing that matters right now.

Make them like events instead of permanent features. The rivalries should be just 1 week out of the whole season. Having some downtime creates an incentive to actually play the game seriously, otherwise you're wasting precious time when the guild quests are unavailable. It would be fair to maybe give a small buff to the rewards from guild quests if they don't occur as often, but I wouldn't mind if they stayed the same tbh, I just want the game to stop heading down the track it's headed. Guild quests are fun to do with your guild, but they have seriously created a gigantic negative impact on matchmaking which everyone has been complaining about ever since.

As for the seasons, there are a few things that could be done. Some of these ideas are my own, some others I'm taking from what I've heard from other people. Firstly, the seasons should be longer to give players more time to settle (and yes, the rivalries should still only occur once per season). Secondly, the rewards are trash. Unless you get like 1st place, you likely don't even care what place you get because you'll get 20x better rewards from the rivalries anyway. There is absolutely 0 incentive to get to high infamy in terms of getting rewards. Thirdly, get rid of the infamy reset! I was just ranting about this in another thread. If players are to be stopped from reaching infamies that are far too high, simply add an infamy cap and have infamy gain (but not loss) slowly decrease as you approach that cap once you pass a certain point, eventually becoming impossible to pass said cap. A lot of the existing problems exist because of high level players not being able to top the very best of us, and as the player base is growing, are being squished into a smaller and smaller infamy range (relatively speaking).

TL;DR rivalries have rendered seasons and infamy gain basically irrelevant.

 

Besides, what good is an epic piece when the quests can get you epic items.

 

To be honest, if they just got rid of the seasons and leagues I wouldn't even miss it. The rewards are fairly pitiful below nightmare for two weeks of effort.

If guild rivalry gets nerfed though, league rewards would need huge buffs to compensate for it. I'm actually getting pretty tired of waiting for enough epics of anything to build an item that exceeds the power of any of the Rare items I use... so stalling out progression even further would just lead me to uninstall the game.

 

They should just change infamy entirely and let gear score take over. Before you freak out and say that this removes the skill portion of the game, it does not. Let me finish lol.

So if matchmaking switched over to just gear score, in terms of strength, the teams would always be balanced. The difference would lie in your skill at the game. You might think, where does the incentive go for building a stronger boat? Well, that's where the new infamy system kicks in. There should still be seasons, but instead of being based on your league they only take gear score into account. Infamy would use this new simple equation: Victories * (Gear Score / 167). This means the stronger your boat is, the stronger your enemies, and the stronger your enemies are, the more infamy you gain. I'm dividing gear score by 167 so that the current system of 24 infamy gain per victory is what it will feel like at 4k gear score (the devs can adjust this to fit the average gear score across all players using their data). Players would fight for top placement in the infamy leaderboard for their season. At the end of the season, everyone's infamy is reset. This type of reset wouldn't cause issues because your gear score is what now keeps the game balanced. This type of system would not require infamy to be lost when losing a battle, as that would keep lower skilled players at 0 every season. Competing in seasons will be very dependent on 2 variables: how often you win and how strong you are.

To be concise, your strength directly affects your gear score, your skill directly affects your infamy, and both of these together directly affect your rewards and infamy gain.

 

Just to add onto the guild rivalries. They say they have balanced the guild matching and fixed the glitch where guilds would have a bunch of members join just after the season end.
At this stage, I believe they balance by 1. Guild quests completed THEN 2. Guild infamy. This results in a vast discrepancy of guild infamy where a 25-member guild can be matched with a 4 member guild.
If anything, I feel they should be reversed: balanced by 1. Guild infamy THEN guild quests completed last round.

 

I think it should just do matchmaking based on total infamy like before, and push guilds that haven't completed any quests out of the system for that rivalry so they aren't placed. Reasonably speaking, having similar infamies means you perform at the same level, more or less, so there's absolutely no reason we should be rewarding less active players the same way as more active players just because they're slightly more active than other inactive players.

 

I have not got 45.000 Reward for Months Because of this

 

As you concluded, you still have to have an infamy score, but if it's not used in matchmaking, you'll just be playing the same people with similar gear scores, regardless of yours or their skill. That sounds sort of pointless, even if it does feed into a season leaderboard.

 

Well the idea is that you'd get bigger rewards the stronger you get, so the motivation to grow stronger sort of feeds itself, and you get even more rewards if you get good at the game because you'll win more often.

 

One guild rivalry a month or even a season is enough. As the OP said, it would give everyone time to play properly and breathe! Back to back rivalry is too much.

 

Also means that there would be less tanking, as it means that people wouldn't tank all the time.

 

Meh, don't forget us 1RARE PIECE at master
And 1uncommon at warriors

 

I'm with you - As much as I like the amazing rewards from rivalries they are a far too large part of the ressource income.

1. Find a better balance between how large a portion of rewards come from Seasons and Rivalries.

2. Give us breaks between Rivalries. Have those breaks at the end of Seasons (so we get to focus on infamy without being bad guildmates).

3. Go back to end of season infamy rather than highest peak (its silly that I only need to go above 4k once a month to stay in Nightmare). Would make the last Days interesting again.

4. Make Nightmare finishing positions matter for people outside the top 10 (a system where 99% of players have zero incentive to focus on winning is silly).