Infamy and Ship Level

Nailed it.

 

Great post 100% with you!

However i will disagree only on one thing(Its something you can totally ignore, not related to post much) .. At my current infamy i get small amounts of mk5s and mostly mk6.. So, Frankly speaking i would be more happy to get mk5 who is tad better skilled than mk6


But i disagree only on this point, speaking of otherwise as spinners said you nailed it

Anyways here are screen shot to my explanations
Crossed out names, all good weapon, high mks but no skills. Countless examples of this (however mk6 with above 3.5K never fail to disappoint).

It also proves how lower mk ships like mine (mk6 soon) would gain infamy if i upgrade to mk6 without suffering a drop with my mediocre skill, via the solution you suggested. Full support

 

i mean, leave this topic alone, i struggle around 1000-1300, almost every game i see at least 2 mk6 ships, sometimes 6 mk6 ships, some of them loaded with max rare gears, some with lv40 epics, and i seen max epics sometime. i m talking about infamy 1000-1300, if i m not complaining, u should zip your mouth.

 

At 3000 infamy points I agree with you, but until 1000, the new matchmaking system is way better almost every mk5 can delivery 700 damage with one shot and that's the HP most mk1 have. Before the update a brand new mk1 player would face lots of mk5 at 200 infamy points

 

Pretty sure the opposite is happening now. There are much more mk5s at low infamy now than there were before.

 

I generally felt things were somewhat better in the below 1200 range after the update. What made them A LOT better was getting into a decent M4 with R30-ish gear. Matchmaking above 1500 is so much more sane.

 

If that's happening, I suppose they are not facing new players as soon as they used to be before the update.
I made a mini account to fleet with my soon (he came back to BB but his infamy is so low that I can't fleet with him on my main account anymore), I'm about 600 infamy points with mk2 shooter and I don't remember to see any mk5 until now and just few mk4. Way better than some time after we first started to play
I guess the best solution would be to let the matchmaking as it is today until mk4 or 1000 infamy points (or something like that) and use the pure infamy matchmaking for those above that.
I'm sure the devs will find the best solution, the game is a lot better today than when I started

 

I consider the land below about 1500 as "the land of flotsam and jetsom". Floaters and tankers are commonplace... I'd guess averaging more than one a match. You find level 30 captains mixed in with level 12 ones. Each match is like something out of an Escher sketch. I personally found it hard to take seriously from any sort of competetive standpoint so I just ground my way through it. The chart Miika posted gave me some hope that things would clear up at 1500 and sure enough, they did. Honestly, above 1500 seems like an infamy and matchmaking system working more or less as designed with some tweaks needed. Below 1500 seems like an epic fail and the worst of all possible ways to welcome a new player to the game.

I personally blame the reward structure of the game. If you put epic drops on newbie content then the high levels will farm that noob content. The developers encourage competitive play but they reward seal clubbing. In the real world, the reward will win every time.

 

What you are describing matches what I've seen in the 1500+ range. I'm in a newly minted M5 fighting a bunch of other M5's and the smattering of M6's. Who knows if that's an appropriate place for M5/6 boats to cluster but it seems pretty low on the overall scale of infamy.

Below 1500 it doesn't work that way at all. For various reasons I "managed my own infamy". At times when I wanted to fleet with my [much lower level] son I'd drop it all the way down to 400 or so (in a R20-ish M4 boat). It was incredibly hard to get it down that low and it took constant diligence to keep it within fleeting range of him. Winning was like falling off of logs. Sure, I'd run into other tankers also. But half of them were on their way down so they weren't contributing to their team at all. The other half I had to actually fight... and I'd often lose. But whatever the case, the problem was always excess winning not excess losing.

*** edited to add ***
To be fair, per Miika's charts, I'm a top 20th percentile player so I would need to work harder than most to be at a very low infamy. But I'm still pretty familiar with the texture of combat and there is no reason whatsoever for a level 30 captain to be at 400 infamy. Being that TerriBad seems like a stretch.

 

This problem is what spawned the current matchmaking-by-ship level problem... which resulted in infamy drops on ship upgrades, because infamy is no longer a universal number. I feel very strongly that progression in this game is a problem, and this is a cause of it. We all would like to see extra efforts result in continued infamy rise but that's just not how the game is working at this point.

My suggestions:

• Matchmaking should stop manipulating the matchups, other than balancing ship type. If an MK6 kills an MK2 in a battle in 2 shots, the MK6 will move up and the MK2 will move down so that they will no longer meet. A really simple solution to fix the root cause of the original issue is to level all boats at once.
• Squashing the seal clubber incentive system

This will result in infamy returning to truly mean a universal number, which is necessary because it is how the game treats it for leagues, guilds, etc, and so forth, and the progression system would actually work properly. I'm personally very frustrated with this progression system, going for weeks or months of stagnation.

 

I agree on both counts. Because the incentives drive so much corruption I'd fix that first. Then I'd look to see if there were still problems and think about addressing those. Ideally, as you say, they would get rid of all the arbitrary stuff like the seal clubbing rule and the boat mark balancing. But for that to work, infamy needs to properly function as a measure of skill.

 

That's not what was happening. The mk6 was destroying the new mk1 player in a battle with one shot, then the same mk6 was destroyed the next battle, by the third battle he'd destroy another mk1. Above 1000 infamy points I'd prefer a pure infamy matchmaking system, under that value our current matchmaking is way better

 

For all I know ship level doesnt always help. If gear levels wer around before, I would have been a 2500 gera score mk4 at 1700, 3 months later, I have topped 5000 and still at the same infamy. The lower levels have got really messy over the past, I got my highest infamy of 2000 with a mk4 fixer after playing 50 matches compared to 2500 with speeder. It would say stay at lower mk for easier matchmaking.

However what was said is true, I would rather have the mk6 on my side compared to a mk5 at the same infamy. Most of the time the mk6 can endure more with high hp so I would choose them.

 

Seal clubbing penalty... After wait more than a year i get mk6 hoping to reach NM, 3.8K at least.. But dropped infamy instead.

I have invested lot of time in this game, the only reason i don't want to scrap my inventory..

 

Never goes the wya u hope in the end, personally I am hoping to go down, so that i would actually go up