Gear score is a step towards proper matchmaking!

And also, to brag "I beat a person that has more than 2000 gear level than me!"
That'll be me of course haha

 

I strongly agree with you here. The easiest way to ensure people wouldn't want to stay in low infamy would be to significantly scale the rewards. I mean really significantly.
For example, let's imagine there is a battle where player X deals 10 000 damage, wins the battle and gets 2 stars. Pretty average battle, right? Today he could get rewarded something like 37k gold and 22k sugar and the rewards wouldn't significantly change depending on his infamy.

What I'm suggesting is to make it scale roughly like this, so that his battle result is always the one mentioned above but rewards are different depending on his current infamy:
If player X was at...
- Challenger III: 3,7k gold and 2,2k sugar (10 %)
- Challenger II: 5,5k gold and 3,3k sugar (15 %)
- Challenger I: 7,4k gold and 4,4k sugar (20 %)
- Warrior III: 9,2k gold and 5,5k sugar (25 %)
- Warrior II: 11,1k gold and 6,6k sugar (30 %)
- Warrior I: 12,9k gold and 7,7k sugar(35 %)
- Master III: 14,8k gold and 8,8k sugar (40 %)
- Master II: 18,5k gold and 11k sugar (50 %)
- Master I: 22,2k gold and 13,2k sugar (60 %)
- Ace III: 25,9k gold and 15,4k sugar (70 %)
- Ace II: 31,4k gold and 18,7k sugar (85 %)
- Ace I: 37k gold and 22k sugar (100 %)
- Nightmare: 44k gold and 26,4k sugar (120 %)
- 5000+ infamy: 55k gold and 33k sugar (150 %)

Numbers above are just rough estimations that I thought would be enough to encourage people to reach their highest possible infamy. Of course I leave it to devs to figure out the actual numbers if they ever decide to implement this system.

 

It would also reduce the draw to play shooter just to get dmg...

 

It's worse than that. The m5 in your example will have a wide variety of bonuses applied to him. So a "tanker" ends up in a situation where he ALWAYS gets more than the legit players on his team but when he chooses to win a 3 star performance is quite likely. The same thing happens in reverse at the top end. If you are actually "Playing as hard as you can" then every match you are squeaking by and 1 star wins are commonplace. I'd have to take a close look but I suspect my average win amount at 2200 infamy isn't much different than it was at 1000 but there's a lot fewer wins due to the next point.

Next, a tanker doesn't really want to win. So speed becomes the metric to watch. In this way tanking and grinding are a lot the same. When you're just blowing through matches it's not hard to fill up your gold and sugar coffers and buy every single blue part in the store along with other items of interest. But when each match matters they take longer individually and they take more out of you collectively.

There are just so many ways that tanking is profitable. The list is nearly endless. Even the season rewards which directly reward infamy are sort of ludicrous in how they scale. I've looked at the 1st place awards for nightmare league and even at 1k infamy I was underwhelmed by them. In general, every single time I tried to play as hard as I could below 1500 infamy I bankrupted myself within a day or two. It simply wasn't sustainable. Things are different above 1500 infamy happily although it remains true that if I were to return to tanking I'd be making more sugar, gold & pearls at a way lower stress level.

 

I have enjoyed watching you evolve through this thread. Nearly everything you typed in your first few parts was wrong and was driving me crazy. Thank goodness @Miathan was here to correct you...
But as the thread went on, you started making more and more sense! This post especially made me happy.


Actually, overall, this had been a fairly good, thoughtful, and productive discussion from many perspectives.

 

You may be right there because actually fixing the problem would be a total economic reset in a lot of ways. It would cause significant turbulence for those caught mid-stream. It would also take a lot of time in design, planning, and testing to get it right. That ship may have sailed for Battle Bay which is too bad.

I'm still worried that your solution, just like the current seal clubbing rule, would be much worse than the problem it attempts to fix. It's the very nature of unanticipated consequences to be unanticipated but I think I'd just prefer to deal with the seal clubbers and tell new players, "Yeah, it sucks till 1500 infamy so just grind through it."

 

I think you can still have a performance element. I just think the scaling needs to be A LOT more dramatic than it currently is. So even a top-shelf 3 star performance down at 500 infamy isn't going to yield rewards that a level 35 captain needs or wants. It'd be GREAT rewards for a level 8 captain though.

 

Using gear score in matchmaking is a terrible idea. In fact can't actually think of any useful value to it. Matchmaking needs to be simplified back to using 1. infamy, 2. boat type (not level). I can't see the value in obfuscating it any further without major side-effects, which already exist.

 

I agree with everything...
Except "2. Boat type"
Why boat type?

 

Because of the Meta? Maybe?

 

Not type...tier,if tier of the ship and imfamy matchmaking are finaly 1 thing,it will be more fair for the noobs to gain hope and FINALLY enjoy playing the game...like i did when i was a noob...only fair matchmaking,it was perfect then!only from ur tier ship and only with 1 tierhigher was the max,everything was so fun then...but now with my noob account im just sitting behind a rock and taking mortars,and then why people are usinv all mortar combo?becoz is safer for them(and they will do at least 1kdmg before a random shooter 1shots him with a b.torp)

 

Wow really? I'm thrilled to have gear score even though I agree, not for match making. Nor do I really care about bragging rights. But this will make it SO much easier when I'm talking to someone about speeders. Rather than a rather generic "Mark 5" now we can look at an overall gear value easily. For instance, I thought he and I had pretty similar equipment but his gear score is half again as high. Turns out I was glossing over perks. That's useful when trying to understand my own performance and plan for my growth.

 

I think it's fair to try to get the same boat types on both sides, makes it as even as possible, and fair for support boats. Shooters vs Fixers? Fixers would have a rough time.

That's essentially how it works now. Matchmaker(tm) tries really hard to match boats of same tier. Once the infamy dropping battle reward incentives are fixed, the issue will largely disappear.

 

Gear score seems like it heavily based on ships mk rather than actual gear
Thundersword(lvl50) gear score is 11179 with two rare items whereas flare crotch(lvl 59) gear score is 11986 with all tier 5 epic items and one tier 4 legendary.
Bittersteel (48)has gear score of 11 k and Banderas (50)has gear score of 14.4k and the difference between gear is off the charts