Downgrade option for boats

I really wished I hadnt 'upgraded my Shooter (or any other boat) from MK3 to Mk4.

The sluggish nature now of the boats have the speed and maneuverability of a ocean going tanker is not outweighed by another gun or perhaps an extra 400 HP.
For instance the Fixer at MK4 is the same as MK3 except you then have the space for a turbo to make up for the lack of performance, and it will have the same maneuverability as Tower Bridge in London.

I'd really like the option to downgrade or a trial before committing, as at the moment I have no real intent of further upgrades to boats, only weapons..

 

If this option were to be added they will have to add a system that limit the equipment levels (and or rarity) in relate to ships level (e.g. Mk2 can't have equipment above level 20).
If not, expect shameless seal clubbers with insane equipment in low tier battle... Personally though, I think this option should be in the game in the first place, I hate seeing players having over powered equipment on their low tier ships, ruining other's game
Also if you don't like sluggish ship, either invest in Turbo or play Speeder or Enforcer, like one once told me "heavily shielded Shooter is basically glorified Defender", give the other ship a try, you won't know whether you like it until you try it. I'm once a Shooter/Defender only but up until recently I transitioned myself into an Enforcer player \:^] it's hella fun

 

Part of the issue is that BB's Matchmaker(tm) takes into account boat level, so you get thrust into an entirely different class of matches when upgrading boats. It makes infamy a meaningless number if boat class is such a heavy weight on the matchmaking algorithm. This was a decision made by the Devs to counteract infamy tankers, but I think it was the wrong move. What they should have done instead was stabilize the infamy number itself so it's not swinging 23-24 points every match. A 500-match moving average with floors would ensure that infamy tankers couldn't take advantage of these huge swings and ensure that players who were once at, say, 3k, are simply not allowed to be in 1k battles, or at least it would take quite while to drop, so much that it is no longer a useful mechanism to game the rewards system. There are many complaint threads opened in these forums on this issue, not to mention MK5's at 500 infamy or MK1's at 3000 infamy... I have opened two threads on this with really easy fixes.

https://forum.battlebay.net/threads/infamy-stability-suggestion.16034/
https://forum.battlebay.net/threads/level-all-ships-at-once.16185/

 

I get the my solution to downgrade is by far not a great option, I also play all the boats as needed to work through the guild quests, and have started using a Turbo on the shooter.

 

This is me chiming in with my obligatory "won't work". I am being literal when I say there is nothing Rovio can do about tankers as long as the current incentive system remains. There is no set of rules... procedures.... tests.... reports... or data that will solve the problem... ever. Let's suppose you made it so no captain could ever lose infamy, only gain it (yeah yeah, I know). Aside from it's obvious other problems you'd think that would at least resolve tankers. It won't. It wouldn't stop me and I don't see who it would stop except the most casual of tankers who probably aren't much of a problem anyway.

I agree that matchmaking score ought to be a combination of your boat mark (which has both pluses and minuses attached), your captain level, your "skill" (if that was being measured some way), and the sum of all the gear you put in the boat. In other words, if they were even trying to accurately measure the competitor going into the match things would be smoother. I have no idea why they are so focused on boat mark. Honestly, with no gear in it, I think higher level marks are frequently worse than lower ones.

 

The thing is, I am not commenting on the matchmaking, it's more the fact that as you upgrade, it feels more like a downgrade.

*** Upgrade Now for Gameplay that feels slow and sludgy. ***

 

Ultimately infamy tankers will have a 50% win/loss ratio just like anyone else, so where does the advantage come into play? It's simple: Infamy dropping is rewarding as a factor of engaged time.

Players are allowed to shed infamy VERY quickly, then spend most of time climbing back up and getting rewards for the effort in a matter of minutes or hours. You know the drill, just join a battle and X out of it you can drop hundreds of infamy in minutes. After floating was banned, all you need to do now is to suicide relatively quickly and X out and you can easily drop hundreds of infamy in an hour. It's not that it increases your win/loss ratio, and not that rewards are increased that much as you are still winning and losing at the same rate.

Eliminate that immediacy, that instant whiplash in infamy, and the problem goes away. My solution is to keep infamy stable on a moving average bases (suggested 500 games) and then it takes days to tank infamy, days in which players are getting almost no rewards. Problem solved. It is really that simple.

 

Close but here's a better view.

For starters I, at least, don't find it all that easy to "drop hundreds of infamy in an hour". Granted, my preferred strategy isn't exactly suicide. But I very definitely do play much more aggressively than when I'm wanting to push infamy. I typically die early in a match although I may well have taken out one or more enemies and/or contributed meaningful damage to the encounter. The net of all that is I've been trying to shed infamy for about a day -- probably 2 hours of play time. My net drop as of this moment is about 200 infamy. The lowest I managed to get was 850 from a max of 1250. That was a brief moment and quickly bounced back up again.

For me what this sort of behavior does is:

• Makes each match much quicker. Instead of 5 minutes plus a commercial if we win, every match is more like 1.5 minutes. So that's more than a 300% increase in match count which probably neatly offsets the reduced win rate and lack of commercials on most of the wins.
• Reduces my stress levels making it possible to just grind through a zillion matches in 2 hours.
• When I decide it's time to start pushing again, most of my wins will be 2 and 3 star rather than 1 star. So as I climb back up the infamy tree which I inevitably will I'll offset even more of the reduced wins I had while dropping.
• Let's me participate in guild matches... worth about ?52k? raffle tickets each week I participate.
• Lets me play with my lower-level son.

"Grind mode" fills my coffers quite quickly, ensuring that I have plenty of gold to buy blue parts and plenty of sugar to upgrade them. It also gives me loads of cool perks & blue parts from the raffle board and I might actually get a piece of usable gear there.

Unfortunately (from my perspective) sometimes the worst of my play is better than the best of the enemies. That generates the dreaded win. Sometimes we get a team fixer who sees what's going on and keeps me alive (curse him). That generates pentakills and the commensurate win. Sometimes my team, even without my best efforts, simply outclasses the other team... either by match-making weirdity or by skill. That generates wins. I've found reliable ways of tanking but I avoid using them for this purpose because they generate a guaranteed loss. I just can't be that much of a troll. i'd rather not discuss the how's here.

 

Heh... certainly on shooter that was my experience. I managed to take mine up to M4 but the game had blessed me with an Epic turbo giving me just short of a 50% speed boost. My M4 shooter speed is 1.2 and it just barely feels like a capable platform (assuming I don't want to play the long-range bombardment game). I lust(ed) after the extra gun tube on the M5 but when I pondered the next loss in speed I knew I was barking up the wrong tree.

Speeders for me now... which frankly was always the better fit between my personality and the boat.

 

It can be rough when you first upgrade, and I agree that the way turbo has be implemented is ‘less than ideal’.

Every time I’ve upgraded my boat to the next mk, I’ve lost infamy, and had to play catch-up with my crew training. For Mks 3 and 4 it was speed, for Mk5 it was agility.

On the plus side, however, the bigger boats are better, and they have a higher max speed, so if you keep working on your turbo and your crew, eventually you will be significantly faster than is possible in a mk3.

Having said that, I would still like some option to downgrade my boat for custom games, so I can play on a more even footing with lower mks.

 

That's a really good point, upgrading should result in climbing infamy ladder. The fact that it doesn't in this game is a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

I think it's basically a wash. When I upgrade my shooter what i get is more HP. That is offset by reduced agility and speed which means i get hit more... directly taking away from the HP bonus.

Until you put a new gun in the gun tube and that, along with all the other gear, has been leveled up it seems like not much has changed except my boat has become more annoying to drive.

 

Yea, I'm not actually why they decided that upgraded boats should come with reduced agility.