Hear ye, hear ye! I, Redneck Messiah, present a number of reasons why the upcoming changes to Battle Bay's ranked mode are going to ruin the game!
So firstly, I shall enlighten you readers on the finer points of the current ranked system. Team Elimination mode is a test of players' skill and ability to work cooperatively. You need to plan a loadout that will let you survive, deal damage, and help your team, and work with your teammates to win. You need to figure out if you want to play your ship as an offensive weapon, a defensive tank, a hit'n'run specialist, or a support class, and build it accordingly. You need to be well versed in the strategies of the game and be skilled with your main ships and items in order to move up the ladder. Rewards are based on your performance in-game, which of course is based on your ability to attack, heal, survive, and win. And this is excellent. A ranked mode should reward players and teams of players for being better at the game than their opponents, not for having more fire bombs.
Which brings us to Hardcore TDM, the soon-to-be blight on society which the forum community has been happily bashing since the sneak peek launched. For anyone who doesn't know (however small, blissfully ignorant few of you there are), Hardcore TDM is set to replace Team Elim this month as the ladder mode. This mode is basically the event TDM, except you need to be able to equip 2+ ships to play. Say I choose to equip a Defender and a Reaper, and go in as the Defender. Should my Defender sink, I may respawn as the Reaper or any other appropriately outfitted ship. As far as we know, items cannot be shared between ships, meaning that I need to have, say, a shield on the Reaper that is NOT one of the ones on that Defender. Let's take a look at the problems this creates.
- This is a problem we're already experiencing with ye olde TDM Events: A lack of required skill. As discussed above, Team Elim rewards skilled players who know what they're doing. TDM has been shown to reward damage, and only that, leading to suiciding and weapon spam. *examines le firebomb.* Soon, ranked will be about fitting as many high-DPS weapons as possible onto a few ships and throwing them every which way, not working with your teammates to survive and strategically attack.
- Problem number two is the matter of needing to equip MULTIPLE ships for this mode... You see, many players will be hard pressed to fill two ships' worth of certain color groups. This mainly applies to blue items. In general, players have 1 good turbo, 1-2 good shields, and 1 good bandage. How, exactly, does that fill out two ships? Simple answer: It doesn't. All the players who have spent months building one core set of good items on one or two main ships are going to get screwed big-time because they won't be able to fill multiple good ships. Say you've mained speeder since you started playing and spent many months learning speeder and building speeder items and speeder related talents and mainly upgrading your speeder... what exactly are you going to do when the ranked mode expects you to be able to equip and play ANOTHER ship ALONGSIDE your speeder, using DIFFERENT items? That situation could become a reality for many players.
Knowing this, a few of you may be asking "But why would Rovio do this if it's so gosh darn awful, Redneck?" And despite not being Rovio staff, I can tell you. The answer is what it always is.
Money. Rovio knows that by requiring players to play two different ships with different items if they want to rank up and gain prestige and better rewards, more players will be inclined to buy pearls so they can get the items, talents, and ships needed to compete. Rovio doesn't care about how this impacts the playerbase, or how anything impacts the playerbase. If they think they can profit from something, they'll do it, and drag their veteran players kicking and screaming along into the void. Good night all.
@Zeus Click to expand...