Losing on purpose

so we have many players losing on purpose so that their infamy stays low and the guild will be grouped with easy opponent for rivalry quest. Can you make it in a way that when a ship losses much infamy they will also lose the fire power? It’s unfair to those ship with low damage to compete with them.

 

There is already a system in place, however, it has its flaws and limitations.
Whenever a player drops around 800 infamy less than his best, he looses his rewards and gets matched with players as if his infamy were his highest.

 

what if it is unintentional like me a mortar specialist using a carronade for a guild quest and just kept on losing from 1000 infamy to 200 infamy ( i neraly happened but i mange to stop my decent at 300)

 

Unfortunately thats one of its flaws.

 

You should leave the use of carronade to others who use speeder, my friend. It is very hard to use.

 

i was trying it out for guild quest lol

 

Good to know there's an 800 infamy limit. Unfortunately, that just puts more pressure on me to manage my infamy carefully until such time as I'm ready to "move up". Unfortunately, the matchmaking system in the game leaves a lot to be desired so it needs to be manually handled. Hands down this is the single thing I dislike the most about BattleBay. I do NOT like deliberately losing and I especially don't like it in a team-based game. The fact that it's a significant part of this game is sad.

 

Matchmaking will never, ever be perfect. We dont live in a static universe. Even with two mirror image teams, there will be at least a dozen random elements (from lag to phone calls to human error, etc) that will affect the outcome. Who’s going to win is kinda based on who wants it more, who;s more focused, who;s more relaxed... who;s “in the zone”

Isn’t that why we play?

 

Also, if you lose on purpose and I see it, I’ll be obliged to report you... even if you are on the unfriends and cause me to win. I will still watch the replay from your POV, and if I see you tank the game I’ll hit that nasty button.

It’s not personal, but we need to preserve the integrity of the game.

 

I was totally with you but ongoing play experience convinced me otherwise. You are talking about a different phenomenon than me. Yes, there are going to be unevenly matched teams. Yes, people will lose their data connection or just plain be superb or poor players. That's what a combat game ought to feel like. In my perfect world, sometimes you get wafflestomped. Sometimes you crush the opposition. But normally it's a fairly engaging fur ball and who wins depends on the things you mentioned along with that ever present "luck" thing.

What I am talking about is different. Loosely speaking every boat in my battles is 400% my strength. I reason that out this way. Their weapons hit about double of mine and they have about twice as many hit points. I'm not even counting the added weapon slots or the higher turbos. That is in every single game and would be true of maybe 80% of the boats in the battle. There might be another lowbie like me in the battle but it's rare to see them. This isn't random variation. This is the matchmaking system taking me quite a bit higher than I'm comfortable going. Nor do I think I'm being a wuss to opt out of battles where I am overmatched by that degree. Obviously, a lot of people either don't have my elite skilz (lol) or don't want to play that game because, as I said, I was pretty much all alone in the 1250 infamy range.

Insofar as reporting me, my player name is the same as my forum name. Go ahead. I really have zero interest in playing a combat game where I am exceedingly over-matched in every single battle I'm in by every single team-mate and enemy. That would reduce me to a fairly pointless and boring long-range sniper mode and I'll just find a different game to play. Even worse, it's hard to even learn in that environment because your play style is SO constrained by how fragile you are. You simply cannot do "reasonable team tactics" since you, as a juicy, ultra-low hitpoint target, will be top on everyone's list if you allow yourself to get into any sort of action with your much tougher team mates. So report away. Until Rovio gets around to banning me, I'll keep my infamy at an appropriate level to offer up battles that are generally my level with a smattering of +1 boats. I'll seek to maximize my learning so I "git gud" as well as advance. And I'll hope things are different at higher levels.

Do I think this is the worst aspect of the game that I've run into so far? You bet! Deliberate losing is a real struggle for me and I detest it personally as well as on a team basis. I'm hoping that the spread the matchmaking system offers closes up a bit at higher infamies levels. It's almost universally true in games that progress is relatively quick in the beginning. In the higher end videos I see on youtube it isn't like this. People seem MUCH more evenly matched on the whole. So perhaps there is hope? But at the levels I'm at, playing to my abilities in every battle is incredibly counter-productive from an advancement standpoint as well as a quick trip to the uninstall button.

If my matches looked like you described then yes, that would be why I play. They don't. They don't even remotely resemble that. In fact, the reason I have to manage my infamy is to make it possible for matches to look like you describe.

 

Nicely said sir

 

I'm glad to know it isn't just me seeing this although too bad it also happens at higher levels. I do wish Rovio would take a look at it since any system which encourages the players to lose is clearly got some sort of issue. I'm also glad to learn that my caution (based on nothing in particular) about allowing my league to go up too far was well placed. I could've crossed into the next league (1300) this time still in my M3 shooter and assortment of level 20 stuff. Now that I'm in a M4 and once I get most of my stuff up to level 30 I'll poke my nose into those waters.

Insofar as fighting impossible battles, I generally groove on playing the scrappy underdog in a pitched battle role. This game, however, is the first game to cross my tolerance thresholds for being the underdog. It is SO extreme and SO permanent that it's oppressive rather than challenging... at least to me. Judging by how rare a similar boat is, I have to guess that other people either cannot play to that level or, like me, choose not to.

 

Don’t get me wrong, Snap. I have nothing but sympathy for your situation. I got up to about 2800 and got slapped down so hard that I bounced twice. But I would be back up there if it was not for a certain obnoxious penalty system, getting hammered again. The higher you climb, the more resources you will win per battle and the faster you will power up. I know what you are saying, it’s difficult to enjoy walking on eggshells all game but I promise, you’re going to find bigger ships at the lower infamy too. There are MK 6 and 5 as low as 200 I’ve heard from guild mates who started alts recently.

There’s a fixer in my guild who showed up one day in a MK 2, and he already had 1800 infamy. He’s some kind of a freak lol... and at MK 3, he’s actually holding his own. As a fixer. Everybody’s favourite target. But he plays cagey, and when he’s a MK 5 he will probably be in nightmare, getting his ass kicked alll over the place. And I’ll be jealous, because I’d fight thise guys today if I could. I do, with my guild mates in custom battles. One rail shot and I’m done, but I learn. Next time, I’ll feed him a torpedo before I die... and some day I might sink one or two of em.

It’s your game, man. Play it any way you want. And if you aren’t having any fun, make whatever changes you deem necessary. But if I can offer you some advice, just don’t take it too seriously. I fell for this game hard when I first started, so I tended to take it really personally when I would drop a couple of games, and suddenly I get no resources. How dare they accuse me of losing on purpose? And to halt my progress?? Insult to injury. Now, screw it. Like Milton said, I’ll burn this whole place to the ground, I dont care.

 

Agree with this 100%. I recently ran into this problem as a level 21 mk3 shooter (will upgrade when I get the gold) at 1567 infamy. Got there doing guild quests, then started trying to complete the carronade guild quest and realized I do about 5 damage per projectile per shot. Not fun.

I need to be in the 1000ish range (where I'll still be overmatched). To get there means to force others to lose, which I'm not comfortable with. So I go in with my speeder and kite the bad guys as long as I can so my teammates have a good view of them, doing damage as much as I can as well. If my teammates are good enough to win in that situation, more power to them. They can at least still have fun doing it and I can learn how to dodge shots in the process. Intentionally losing just sucks for everyone.

 

Thanks and not to worry about the "taking it too seriously". For one, I'm too old to take a game that seriously. For another, if I had this in the "serious game" category and I ran into a situation where losing was required to advance I'd quit the game in a heartbeat. For me, this is a fun, 5v5 combat game so long as you manage the infamy to make sure it's non-stupid. That's it. As long as it serves that purpose I'm happy. The moment it does not, I'm gone.

So if i was going to try to sum up all my thoughts (some of which may be totally incorrect remembering that I am a noob) in case Rovio reads this... here are the factors which play into making me "manage my infamy".

• Matchmaking system: Left to it's own devices it will make me mostly irrelevant in a match. Worse, once I'm irrelevant I can no longer control my own infamy. So I developed a fear of letting it get "too high".
  For reference, what "mostly irrelevant" looks like is on those 2% of games where I "shaped the matrix" and all the stars align, I'll get 3'rd . On all other games I'll get 4'th (if there's a sandbagger or some truly awful player) and mostly 5'th place. Sure, I did some damage but it's 1/8th of what the real team members are doing. I like to think I contributed a bit more than the damage numbers since, as the juicy, low-hp target I'm good at sucking enemy bullets into the waves. But the bottom line is that when I'm on a team I do not want to be irrelevant. One of the ways I know I'm irrelevant is that I cannot sandbag a match at that level. Whether I play great or awful has little effect on who wins.
• Other players: Some of whom are doing the same thing and some are doing god only knows what. All I know is that infamy & matchmaking have little to do with the player's skill or their gear. As one moves up in infamy you do not see a reasonable correlation between your infamy/boat and those you are fighting.... or any correlation whatsoever oftentimes.I suspect people collectively doing stuff like what I'm doing skews the entire system. You see people in M6's at 200 infamy. You see people like me in a "normal" boat for some infamy but able to play that boat much better than average. It seems pretty much semi-random largely driven by players like me subverting the system.
• Guild Raffle: What's there to say? It's the best place to get gear by far and it's much easier at more reasonable infamy levels. This is one of the biggest ways I get penalized for winning.
• Friends: I don't have infamy by boat (why not?). So if I want to play with my son then my max infamy right now is 1285. My understanding is that there's an 800 point window for fleeting. I get why there is that limitation, but it plays into my thinking all the same. If I could have a second account or infamy by boat this would go away.
• Reward Structure: Perhaps I simply don't understand it or maybe it's all jacked up. But one way or another, my feeling is that I get much better rewards at low infamy than high. If this is just an information problem on my part then Rovio ought to REALLY spell it out. Make their case for why I want to advance to the next higher league. If the rewards are there and I simply don't know about it then it's an advertising/education problem. Right now what I am sacrificing is stars, gold, and raffle prizes -- a lot of them. if I allow myself to move up. What do I gain other than a tiny bit more sugar & gold? How is this not a net loss in every possible way as well as a significant hindrance to my advancement?
• League Structure: Once I make a certain league I seem stuck there. That means I need to be VERY cautious about my infamy until I'm actually ready to be in that league. The permanence of it along with my lack of knowledge regarding the advantages and penalties of the higher league will put a hard cap on my infamy at every new league level until I've really sized things up. I am acutely aware that 1300 is the hard cap for me right now so I cannot deliberately win above 1250... leaving just 2 battles gap for my infamy management. In real life I'll probably keep that cap closer to 1100 to ensure I can still lose successfully (and isn't that just a totally jacked up statement in a combat game? I'm more worried about successfully losing than winning).

And on the wild notion that someone from Rovio is actually reading this I'd like to point out that my preferred play style is "ridiculously hard". I played a naked character in Diablo2 hardcore mode for crying out loud. Naked means no armor, no weapon, no belt for potions, no spell power ups. It means that it was an absolute 100% certainty that every single monster would one-shot me if they hit me. Hardcore means that when that happens you start over from level 1. I played halfway through nightmare and recorded the progress to the amusement of the D2 hardcore crowd who one and all said it was impossible. I LIKE challenge. What BattleBay does to me is simply ludicrous as well as unrelenting. At least in D2 I could swap over to my other characters and play the game as it was intended. In BattleBay, that IS my normal game experience and I must do something freaky to get something even remotely akin to a fair battle. Very, very few people will like that.

Worth noting is that this problem does not affect everyone or even most people apparently. Most of the players in my guild do not manage their infamy (to my knowledge) yet max out at much lower infamies than I do per a given gear level. There are PLENTY of M4's in my guild happily floating between 350 and 850 infamy. I assume these are more casual players and the system seems to put them at an appropriate difficulty level for their abilities and gear. Where it seems to break down is with the less casual players. When you start leading targets, moving your boat tangentially, knowing and using wave action, effective weapon selection, etc., is when you separate from the pack and suddenly you're screwed. I just want to experience the same game these folks are playing but at a higher skill level.

 

I do this too. For instance I just shed some infamy running the swift torp quest on my M2 speeder with whatever E1 gear I could put on it. I suck at torpedoes in general but it was good learning for me and I still had to play hard. But in the end, I still know that I'm sandbagging my team.

The other thing I like to do on my shooter is play absolutely normally but deliberately "just miss" 3/4 shots. That's harder than it sounds because it implies absolutely precision aiming and still requires pro boat positioning. It's actually harder to do that than to hit them. I get to practice all of my skills and STILL sandbag the team. There's a dubious win at best. My problem was that once I crossed 1200 me sandbagging or not didn't seem to matter. I was still going UP in infamy. That's where I panicked, got help from my son to lose, and now have a healthy fear of higher infamies. I could've easily been carried into Master league and I didn't even remotely want that.

 

Is that how it works? Our current rivalry leader has won 13 straight (all of them, ever?), which makes me wonder how the rivalries are put together.

 

So what if one of your fleet mates is trying desperately to claw their way out of Rovio’s punishment zone? Thanks to the growing number of people who, for one reason or another, ‘don;t feel like winning’ the task goes from impossible to completely ruining the game. It’s really not fun or fair to people who are trying their best... and now you are pretending to be earnest so they dont even have the option of taking you out of the mix for a week by reporting you? And the fact that you are still getting battle rewards, while they are not... insult to injury.

Now you are here, spreading your ideas to those who might not have thought of it themselves, giving others the same idea. Instead of tanking infamy you just deliberately keep it low, so your version of tanking is actually the worst. You pass all the consequences on to your team mates.

Ive read your rationale, and although you are a well-spoken and thoughtful poster, how do you not see that this is destroying the integrity of the game that you claim to like? Once in a while I get to be the guy you are complaining about, the guy who wins despite all your best efforts, but normally I end up being top damage on a doomed team. Not one single thing you have said justifies this. You complain that at higher levels you have trouble sandbagging your team, and in the same breath mention how much better than everyone else you play... if you want low infamy why not make an alt?

But I;m glad you are having fun at our expense.

 

Guild quests were only the icing on the cake for me. I detest losing on purpose enough that I'd have put up with the massive inefficiency. For me it was the matchmaking system. When I just went ahead and played as hard as I could the game got unplayable and showed signs of getting worse. This business of losing on purpose was a desperation play on my part but I may quit anyway. I have never played a combat game where I worried more about winning than losing. I dislike even having to think about that and I don't like screwing with my team mates.