(*FIXER'S UNION*)

I was told something similar before the patch, I was told I am total crap and am "leeching" infamy from others. funny that once the patch dropped I was able to hit a personal best of 3508 infamy and have hovered around 3300-3400 since. Well I until yesterday when I have had a run of total poop, I've been up against folks with T2 + legendary weapons the biggest so far was a T4 explosive cannon

 

Everyone seems to be all confused about how much reward fixers are getting. I've paid close attention to this and my findings from a mk4 fixer in the 1700 - 2500 (current 2.3k) infamy range are as follows:


1) Healing done only seems to count when it's healing to others on your team and not healing to yourself in terms of rewards.

2) It doesn't matter who you are healing on your team this won't affect how much reward you get. I.e. More damage done to higher damage output ships does not mean you get more reward.

3) You will get less reward the more damage you take in a game.

This last point I am very critical of for a number of reasons.

Firstly the new targeting system means people can focus fire fixers, and quite often do. If then as the fixer you have been able to take a shed load of damage, but stayed alive through the barrage you really should not be penalised for it at all, but that seems to be the case.

Secondly, taking damage and surviving means your team is not taking damage, it's effectively quasi healing, rather then healing team mates who have taken the damage, you heal yourself who has taken the damage. While it is easier to heal ones self, it is still not an easy task.

I have raised this last point to @Zeus to get the devs to explain why fixer self healing doesn't seem to count, and why damage taken seems to have a negative effect on reward but have yet to receive a response.

Peace out fellow fixers, it does get better again when you can up your gear.

 

It's probably a bad idea to go after suicidal chargers even if you could

It's probably a better idea to stick with the team

 

That last point is FALSE! I've managed to receive 3 stars multiple times while taking damage and one time even dying. One main reason might be my fire bomb but it also depends on WHO you heal not exactly how much you heal.
Exp. If you heal a defender at half hp who has done 100 damage to full it will weigh less hat if you heal a shooter at 3/4th s hp to full who's done 1000 damage
So my point is heal the players dealing the most damage. This may vary in certain situations but in order to get those 2-3 stars it's necessary

 

It's not false at all, and it's a lot easier to track and correlate then who you are healing and for how much.

It also makes for a much easier reward calculation.

Damage done + healing done + control effects applied - damage taken = reward

Where each of the contributing factors has a weighting of how much they are worth.

I have also received 3 stars in battles where I have died, but it's rare, and only when I have been nuked, which invariably at less damage I take in games where I heal myself a lot!

 

1. Agreed.
2. Semi disagree - @Miika specified at some point that healing an afk player is worth nothing and said something like "it has to lead to something", which I interpret as players damageoutput (etc.) after you heal them as being what matters.


I've given up trying to understand the calculation behind stars, just focus on trying to win and your average amount of stars will be fine!
I think I get more stars with Napalm Launcher than with Cannon, but apart from that it feels very random (which im sure its not!)

 

Ignoring stars for a minute I am talking about battle rewards, gold and sugar. I get less in games where i do comparable damage and healing but have taken a pounding then games where I don't. This is frustrating, especially as a primary target for the unfriends.

 

It makes me cringe that they have designed an incentive system that is a secret. We now have a player base that has no idea what leads to the greatest rewards other than hazy proclamations about the components of a secret sauce. I wish we had more transparency and participation with users around design, but I just don't see it. So...enjoy the ever changing game and accept that the coding excecutes in mysterious ways!

 

Can you imagine if they did release the formula? 1) People would instantly figure out ways to game the system and 2) the forums would become intolerably flooded with instant experts irately demanding every manner of tweak and adjustment.

 

Of course you release it. That is the whole point of incentives.

And you should want feedback. The idea that you can hide from irate users or customers by keeping secrets is a fallacy. You will get it no matter what. Users just give ill-informed feedback now since the workings of the game and decision making appear arbitrary.

 

I don't know how much of this I agree with. explicit "This action=that reward" will encourage those actions whether or not they're appropriate in the situation or hep your team win. I was on a big losing streak last week and still getting 1-2 stars every single game because I was doing whatever the algorithm said I should be doing - even though it obviously wasn't helping my team win. If I was farming/sealclubbing, that's almost the ideal situation, and I think we'd see a lot of that behaviour if they were more explicit about how the sauce is calculated.

On the other hand I see where you're coming from, and in most cases I think openness is the best policy - many heads are better than few ... (most times)

 

They are rewarding and punishing based on behavior. Yet it's not an incentive if it is unknown.

Look, there can be bad incentives. But most of them in this "secret sauce" are simply pointless as they are hidden from the players. You can see massive swings in your rewards for no known reason. Silliness. And it's not like we see superior team play in BattleBay from all the secrecy in the first place.

I don't play any other games where I don't understand the reward formula.

 

Somebody please tell me why the hell some fixers want to take the lead and go up front

Please please please, how the hell am I supposed to protect the fixer when the damn ship has twice my speed and keeps overboosting in front of me and simply won't get behind my back.

How the hell are fixers supposed to launch boxes from in front of me?

 

What are you playing? Perhaps covering another ship? Avoiding fire because sitting still is often a very bad idea? Are you not advancing? Being chased by speeder? Many reasons. But a fixer shouldn't generally be at the front of the pack. You individually though? There might be a reason. A battle is dynamic.

 

It is either a) all the reasons listed above or b) bad players driving. Train yourself into becoming fully aware of the map, the enemy position and your party situation (e.g. whenever that happens again, scroll the camera to check if a speeder is flanking the fixer, if he/she is getting spammed by mortarts, if he/she is signaling together whilst the map shows the enemy approaching from behind, etc etc)

 

No dude, they start doing this right at the start, from the second the match starts, oveeboost and whizzzz.

No speeder flanking, no enemy in sight. He gets in front and stays in front for the rest of the battle

Who the fudge can fixers cover from the front??. Do fixers think they are tanks?.

And hell yes I am advancing but thanks to that damn overboost, I need to change my setup to a turbo just to catch up to the damn fixers.

 

I rarely see this happen. So no idea why. I hope to play against these fixers though.

 

Bless your infamy, happens to me all the bloody time. I have no other reasoning aside from fixers in my level being poop

 

Anthrax, a fixer who overboosts at the start, says together and takes the charge like he's some defender who's supposed to be at the front. Didn't heed our advice to stay back and kept charging taking 2 shooters with him.

Died first and cost us the game. The enemy team had no fixers and we could have won if we had chosen to play defensively instead of charging but ofc anthrax was too stupid to understand such strategies.

I remember playing with him twice and anthrax played the same way both times and single handedly cost us the game.

I know I sound too harsh but the difference between the number of fixers between the 2 teams decided whether we should be aggressive or defensive and one of the fixers dying at the start without doing much heal screws up everything.

Especially when the damn fixer takes 2 shooters with him for suicide (The shooters share blame too but as a shooter, it's custom to stay with the fixer.)

Seriously, if a shooter charged in a game where we are supposed to stay back, that's understandable, but fixers too?...that to taking the lead at the front?.

I can't find the first game I had with anthrax, it's buried somewhere but here is the second.

 

1 bad fixer is not a reflection on all fixers. Every class has a smattering of terrible players. The amount of times I, as a fixer with 2.7k hp, have had 5-7k hp defenders and 3.5-4.5k hp shooters refuse to push forward ahead of me is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean all shooters or defenders are useless.

The amount of times I get teamed with speeders who charge off, try to cause a fuss and implode because they didn't know when to head back to their team/fixer is crazy.

Then there's the "together" "together" dudes who run away from the rest of the team and get killed.....

The games I love the most are ones where speeders are fully away of where the fixer is, take note of the pre dropped boxes and hang around for a pulse to come off cooldown, and where defenders know not to charge head long in to 5 unfriends, and where shooters jockey backwards and forwards but know when to cover their fixer and when they need to take cover themselves.