Cheaters roam free in Battle Bay

Here a cheater I ran into tonight. Season top of over 1500 Infamy, now: 1 Infamy!!!

Look at his weapons, he is losing op purpose, just ruining the game for others. We may not name and shame, so I covered his name. But these people don't belong here, who find it funny to let others lose or testing if you can reach 0 Infamy just for the fun of it.

BAN!

 

Wow... that's more difficult than actually doing well

 

Indeed it is, you cannot go from 1500+ to 1 in a week without doing it deliberately!

If you look at the weapons on a mk3 ship, then it is obvious that you are dealing with someone who is deliberately trying to lose the game!

As I said before, I heard people who are angry at Rovio for the matchmaking, they have suicïded themselves a 100 times in a row. They were annoyed they faced mk5s with their mk2s, alright be angry, fine. But don't ruin the fun for tens or even hundreds of others, only because you are angry.

It is getting out of hand the floaters and cheaters, I have appr. 20% floaters in all my battles. I asked others and they said it is about the same and also people who on purpose get killed to lower their Infamy.

Something needs to be done and quickly, if not, then this game is going to implode and many people say good bye. Which would be a great shame!

 

I [sort of] did that. It had nothing to do with being angry. That's the thinking of a 3 year old. It had to do with "fixing the game" so that it was playable and fun. I suppose I could've just deleted the game and moved on also but I'm glad I didn't.

The floaters and tankers will always be a problem because pretty much the entirety of the economy virtually demands people do it. Certainly any min/max'er would do it since losing is so much more profitable than winning. Rovio really only has two choices:

• Put in more rules like their existing and utterly failing seal clubbing rule. My prediction is that all such efforts cause more problems than they solve... just like the existing one.
• Fix the economy so noob content stops dropping high level gear. This is a large effort and unlikely to happen.

The better choice is, if you like Battle Bay, to work your way through it. Things get a lot more sane 1500+

 

I don't say you were angry, but there were a few which did do it, because they were.

Truthfully I don't get why people lower their Infamy on purpose, because if you are not up to the challenge, then you are going to lose anyway and lower your Infamy that way. At least you go down fighting! That is why I always keep on firing to the bitter end, you never know if you can make your team because of it.

 

It's not that complicated. Consider this an explanation not an attempt to convince you that I was right or should've done this.

Below 1500 the matchmaking is a total disaster. Because of that, winning and losing is something approaching random. By far the biggest determination of who lost was who had the most floaters... and at that infamy, the floaters are always the high mark boats. So I didn't find any sense of challenge or achievement battling in those infamies. In my head it turned into "a problem area that I need to grind through".

That brings us to the second part of this. Three times I tried to "play as hard as I could". What happened is my gold/sugar/pearl income slowed to a trickle and I bankrupted myself almost instantly. So that was the end of "grinding through the problem area". Instead, I was in a situation which I found un-fun and it was going to be a long, long time before I got out of it. This is where the jacked-up economy really shows.

So finally that brings us to "un-fun". For me personally I wanted to play a combat game where... yanno... I engaged in combat. Being so readily one-shottable doesn't really lend itself to combat. Instead, you hide... A LOT... because the first time someone gets a turret on you may well be the last. It's like playing a speeder where the high-risk part has been amped up several-fold. Even worse, I wasn't playing a speeder at the time, I was playing a shooter which simply wasn't nimble enough to dodge.

So in the end, what I did was to lower my infamy to "grinding range". I didn't do it in any way as crass as floating. That turned out to be inefficient and I disliked the team impact. So instead I just got into "grind mode". I played hard but speed was more of a premium than winning. What this did was lower my natural skill and that lowered my infamy but it did so in a smooth way. It was just like I'd been bounced up too high by some random luck in the infamy system and then it settled down again. Once I was at the new infamy, the win/loss rate was what you'd expect and my performances ranged from 1-3 stars just as you'd expect. Overall impact to other players... negligible. My skill levels were identical to all the other players I was playing with. The only real impact was on my way down and such streaks happen through normal play too. I didn't like it but it was a workable solution.

Finally, I used my shooter to grind out upgrades for the speeder. When I got that up to a minimal gear score I once again made an all out push and this time never looked back. It brought me over the magical 1500 infamy line and suddenly the matchmaking system was behaving exactly as one would expect. I no longer need to manage it because it was managing itself just fine. Note that ever since then I have been "punching up". In almost every match I am the lowest gear score and that can sometimes be by a very wide margin. It's not like I've made the game easy. The game is just performing as anyone would expect. I'm a top 5th percentile player so I'm fighting opponents stronger than myself. But those opponents are not stupidly more powerful than me. I can still take a hit or 4. I'm not reduced to hiding behind a rock and my own personal performance matters a great deal in the final match outcome.

 

Thanks for your thourough explaination. I completely understand you, the matchmaking is terrible often. I have a mk2 and am the only one often in between mk4s and mk5s, with weapons that kill me in an instant. I am so downhearted and I lost all the will to play Battle Bay, as did hundreds of other people who quit Battle Bay in 1 to 2 weeks after they started to play. I wish Rovio would see this and would work towards a more balanced matchmaking.

And you know what is also frustrating, that often my whole team of mk5s are not able to hit anything or use 1 out of 5 weapons. There are times I do more damage with my mk2, than others with a mk5. I rather have all mk2s or mk3s at this level, because those are good players. But the problem is at 800-1200 Infamy with a mk1, mk2 or mk3 you will not get the best players if you get a mk4 or mk5 in your team, because the skilled mk5s players are well above this Infamy. Still, even if they miss 80%, the 20% the don't miss is more than enough to kill you. And I have to hit a mk5 with an Big Shield at least 30 times, sometimes more. It is INSANE!

So, why don't they make it more balanced? I really don't know, maybe gearscore is an attempt? I have played a few battles tonight and almost broke my tablet in two. I did not even scratch the paint on their ships and even after hitting one 20 times, he still only lost a 1000hp. He healt so quickly with his bandage, that I could just give up. I did not, but I am done for tonigjht.

A game should be fun and often it is everything but that. So, I understand what you did and you did it on a gentle way, but I get soooo tired of people who just openly cheat, float or let themselves be killed. A lot of long term players are talking about switching to another game together, they also send me the name of these games. I am going to check them out, because I don't want to struggle another 2 months with my mk2. Bhurt is locked for 6 levels, so I am stuck with 200 damage Sniper, 250 damage long range mortar, but I am fighting mk4s and mk5s with cannons and mortars which do 500-800 damage and then 3 crit perks and the mines and torpedos are much, much worse.

I just don't know what to do, but I have had enough of it for tonight.

 

Here's the thing. Miika posted a handy chart which gave me some reason to believe that things were less awful above 1500. That turned out to be true. So if you like the game enough to muscle through it, you can do just what I did. The best part about the grinding is that it's just grinding. You don't care if you win or lose. You get in, attack, kill what you can, die, and move on. You only watch the ad if you survived to nearly the end of the match. Otherwise the 30 seconds isn't worth it. Best to do another match. It's easy and casual just as grinding always is.

When you have an infinite supply of sugar/gold and a lot of pearls you can do things like 'Buy every blue part and piece in the store every 6 hours". You'd be amazed how quickly that gears you up. Then, of course, is the leveling. I probably got more experience from matches than I did from crew training. So I leveled up pretty quickly also. Really, the only hurdle was just waiting for training to finish but since I was always capped on sugar the moment one guy finished the next started.

It worked for me. Then again, I was willing to grind it out. And once you clear 1500 it's like the clouds parting and the sky opening. It's the experience you should have had from day one. If you want a rough target, figure gear score minimum of 3750 (M4 with roughly R30 gear). Then you won't be the underdog by nearly so far. It'll still be tough but the good sort of tough.

Insofar as what's Rovio doing, you'd have to believe they are all utter idiots to now know or care what's going on sub 1500. Utter idiots don't make games like Battle Bay. My guess is that they do know what's going on but the core problem is fundamental to the economic systems and a fix is both costly from a programming standpoint and disruptive from the community standpoint. I can't even begin to imagine the crying and moaning when all the M5's in the 1-2k range suddenly find themselves showered in UNCOMMON stuff with the odd rare thrown in. But that's what needs to happen.

 

The problem is the mk5 ships if i understood correctly. That ca be only fixed by a few things.
1) Infamy limits for each ship, but then the noob mk5 players would lose and quit
2) Only match mk5 with mk5 and mk4 with mk4 and so on. This would increase the matchmaking time, and angry people to quit.
3) Downgrade a ship if it passes a certain infamy limit. This is not the solution because people get angry again.
The problem is the mk5 boats. They can’t all be seal clubbers, some must also be just noobs. But when they do hit, they hit hard. I don’t see an easy fix for this. I don’t see a fix at all.

For cheaters and seal clubbers, it’s banhammer time!

 

Those are all options. But me? I'm in favor of them simply stopping this business of noob content dropping epic loot. When it is more profitable to fight at higher levels then more people will. As it sits, you are penalized (rather strongly actually) for "fighting as hard as you can". So if you do that, you're doing it for personal achievement and not advancement.

 

But now skilled and paying customers quit, loads of them. Someone in a mk1, a friend of mine, got mk4s with 12 battles from his start. He bought some stuff in the game, but he quit. I removed over 40% of my BFF list. because they are fed up with matches where they face 3 times bigger boats.

Everybody advises me to drop my Infamy. Maybe I do it also, because I am being punished for doing good. Just played 2 battles tonight with a mk2, both battles I got killed in 1 shot. I also played one with a mk4, I got killed in 2 shots. I have never never killed someone in 1 or 2 shots, NEVER.

 

I am seriously looking for another game. Too bad for the money I spend, but that is just how it is(not to pay my way up, but to train my crew, because i cannot play much due to health issues). I don't see the point of getting nowhere and dropping Infamy, the fun is in getting as far as I can. I don't want to win 50% plus or mines 2%, just like everybody else. i think some players would in other games have a win rate of 70% ( I am talking about others, the high end players here, not myself)

And I really don't mind losing, but only for the right reasons.

 

You know I did learn a lot from when I was at the high points in my infamy. But I simply couldn't afford to stay there. The penalty in gold/sugar/pearls was simply too much. Then, when my infamy went even higher I stopped learning anything except how to hide behind a rock. So I ground out the problem area until I got above 1500 and then the game started behaving in a reasonable fashion and I could just "play as hard as I wanted".

Insofar as my "cheater's mentality", I disagree. Rovio's rule is idiocy in print. "Play as hard as you can". What does that mean exactly? If I've had a beer or a toke should I not play? How about if I failed to get good sleep last night? What if I just had a stressful week and I really don't feel like pushing myself that hard? Are all three of those bannable offenses? When I managed my own infamy all I did was basically option three. I played at a more casual level and my infamy naturally reduced down to a more comfortable range then stayed there. If you were to take that as a benchmark then you'd be banning everyone who was not in the top 30th percentile for being "too casual".

You know what? The funny thing is that I agree with you. I prefer a hard fought battle. I love the fact that at my current infamy and gear I don't need to manage anything and ALL the battles are uphill slugfests but I can still win and my own performance still matters. Sadly, that's not what the game gave me under 1500 infamy. I'm unrepentant about my "cheating" and I abso-freakin-lutely think the new player experience is horribly broken and it's Rovio's job to fix it. I just patched it up for them on my way through.

 

Not to complaining after every battle, but today a few battles played. In two battles in a row the same Speeder. In both cases he let himself be killed on purpose, I watched both replays. In one battle he did not fire at all, even if he could, did nothing to get away. Said 'Yes' we he was under attack. In the second battle I said 'Together', he replied with 10x 'Negative'. i shot accidently his way(I did not even hit him), then he started to follow me and shooting several times at me, even when the Unfriends showed up he went on, then he went to the Unfriends and he got killed because he wanted to get killed. It was so obvious, just as the first battle.

Another battle a mk5 Fixer in my team with 1 Infamy, yesterday a Defender with 1 Infamy, whereas last week he had over 1500! A mk6 in our team did not want to fight either, he fired some shot just to pretend, but that was it. And of course again i encoutered some floaters, as usual. So, we lost at least 4 battles because of cheaters or people who just don't care.

And I play just 10 a day or so.

SIGH!

 

Honestly I stopped writing my "Noob to Noob" series because this was the next article that needed to be written and it treads on dangerous ground with Rovio's policies.

Yes, you're going to see a ton of tankers at your infamy range. Yes, those tankers will reliably be the highest marks on the teams. So here's what I did. I ignored it. I decided that winning and losing at that infamy range had so many random battlefield hazards (like high level tankers) that it wasn't worth my time to worry about it. Instead I started seeing each match as simply an income source... win or lose... "grind mode". Since I didn't really care how the match turned out I didn't care about the tankers either and hey, the other team gets them too. Not caring was my survival strategy.

I know it sounds like I'm really down on this game but I'm not. I LOVE Battle Bay and I really wish for Rovio's sake that the new player experience was better. Things really do change dramatically at a certain point though. If you think you like the mechanics enough to stick with it then my advice is grind through it. Honestly, it's hardly the first game that I've had to grind through some troublesome spot. It's just really bad that it happens to be the new player experience where that spot falls.

 

We players have power. Like at school. We have chromebooks, and I could use a command to open a page that had links, and I could disable, say, google docs. Students have power. Same in battle bay. The ordinary players have the power to report those dumb cheaters and get them banned. We're not powerless guys.

 

Sure you can. It just won't help. I could go into the reasons why it won't but lets just leave it at "Decades of study are very conclusive on the topic. Incentives win over rules every single time." It took me about 5 seconds to look at the rules they already had... even vaguely stated as they were.... and figure out how to tank successfully without running afoul of them. If they made new rules it'd take another 5 seconds.

Worse, Rovio can't simply ban 50% or more of their player base. They've got a systemic problem here and it isn't with the players.

 

I’ll admit I probably have a slight personal bias/disconnect to all this as I’ve been playing since Beta. It’s been a LONG time since I was down in that infamy range, and I’m sure my beginner experience was different than it is now.

 

*nod* I think a lot of the old-time players have that problem. I'm pretty sure the landscape is utterly different than back in the day. Try to remember that at least one guy who lives for uphill battles and is loving that exact thing in the 2k infamy range looked at the sub 1500 matches and said, "Not even worth worrying about."

 

Lol