How can new players enjoy this game?

Yeah like enfo buff now all those yellow bananas are going to be gone when you nerf the yellow items more.
Goes with “be careful what you wish for” thingy.

 

I argued vehemently against this - for exactly these reasons.
Weaker skilled players will drop to ungodly low Infamy...
The community often doesn't know what is best for them...

Anyway, for solutions... what about just changing it so all new players start in mk3 boats. Delete mk1, mk2. New players would have more slots to play with, and they'd be able to rise out of the lowest infamies faster if they truly possess the skills.

 

There probably won’t be a perfect solution to this dilemma, tradeoffs are expected.
Hopefully we can keep an organized discussion of the pros & cons of different viable solutions, suggested by you guys.

1)MK infamy restrictions @What's Up Player
a)X tiered ships cannot drop below Y infamy: Won't work, reason stated by @Miku Da Yo 39 on #9.
b)cannot upgrade to X tiered ship until passing Y infamy:
Maybe this is better? Only disadvantage I can think of right now is the Y infamy limit will be hard to define, if it's too high then bad players will never be able to upgrade, if it's too low then there's no point in setting this limit.

2)All players start in MK3s etc @Spinners71
Great idea. As time goes on, I think we could progressively remove lower tiered boats.
Or something similar, by reducing the time of them catching up to the other players. Offering free captain experience, or even free item upgrades etc. By free I mean obtainable by playing, similar to achievements but limited to new players.
Disadvantage: Those who trained their captain levels and earned their gear with hard work & time & cash may think it's unfair?

3)?

 

That's actually a bigger problem than even just how high the marks are. The curve that I fight all the way from the peak of my infamy range at 2020 down to the place where I'm a a seal clubber at 1220 is pretty much all the same boats. It doesn't get appreciably easier as I lose infamy. From an infamy standpoint that makes the entire range "slippery". There's nothing to stop a lucky bubble up and there's nothing to stop a bad streak down. I've already lost 200 of my 800 allowable points and I'm looking at the lower-bound with a great deal of fear. The honest truth is that I didn't play hardly at all yesterday and I probably won't today. That's pretty unusual for me. But I've already lost 200 of my infamy points. I NEED to be in absolute top shape so I'll need to find some time to play when I am rested and focused.

This is not true. I've been complaining about incentive structures driving this problem for some time now and 'lo! Rovio's last patch contained some changes to incentive structures. I dearly hope they are working on more and I understand the kind of changes that need to happen are drastic so they'll take time in design and test. For instance, completely changing the reward system so that everything scales on infamy is highly disruptive to the existing economy AND it's an absolute bet that players will cry bloody murder when they cannot get epics from slaughtering noobs. All those hoards of M5/6 boats clustered between 1000 and 2000 would find themselves showered in uncommon gear and gold sufficient to buy uncommon parts. Oh they will cry.

I think the devs are, at a bare minimum, vaguely aware of the problem and the root cause. But the root cause is a deep systemic flaw in the design (decoupling rewards from success) and any real fix is going to be disruptive. Hence they gave us the seal-clubbing limit which only made things dramatically worse (at least for me).

 

Well... @Miku Da Yo 39 wasn't necessarily correct to refute this...
To say mk7 must fight in Nightmare, and then show why that's a bad idea is easy...
But no one is suggesting that because that's obviously too restrictive.
For a more logical suggestion of Infamy-floors, please see my post (#37) here: https://forum.battlebay.net/threads/steep-fall-in-infamy.17219/page-2

As for that (b) suggestion, it cannot work without (a)!
Because, without (a), what's stopping you from reaching Y Infamy, upgrading your ship, then falling right back down below Y? That would make it harder for all future players to reach Y. I can see where some players would eventually NEVER be able to reach Y because too many strong ships are blocking their way, and they can't ever upgrade their ship to try to compete!
If you implement (b), it must be paired with (a)...

mk3 isn't a tremendous amount of Gold... and those players would be training crew levels (i.e. captain levels) anyway, and nothing is getting taken away from them. So my bet is that they won't cry too loud.
Maybe a gold refund for whoever bought mk2 --> mk3 in the past 2 weeks?

 

Just make mk 1 and 2 part of a tutorial, which is facing bots. Then you graduate to an mk3 and the gen pop. Lots of games gradually introduce you to the game with the first upgrade free etc.

 

Miku's point is based on a matchmaking standpoint. I've read your post and here is what I think.
1)What happens when a player hits that floor and continues to lose?
Then their infamy wouldn't represent their true rating, causing matchmaking to be extremely off when those kind of players are paired.

2)What if for example that player is below that infamy-floor and has never reached that infamy-floor?
The problem would remain if nothing is done about them or will cause the same problems as (1) if they are automatically pushed upwards to that floor.

(b) could work if when they passed that Y infamy and upgraded their ship, they should be warned that falling back an amount below Y, similar to the 800-infamy-rule but stricter, they would be offered penalties, perhaps scaled with how much they drop. So that people should be fully prepared and be sure that they can somewhat maintain their rating before upgrading.

 

The thing is though, one can argue the same that ships like you who are in MK2 should not be at 1.3k infamy and we can do a reverse limit where they cannot go past a certain infamy cap until they have at least a certain MK. You don't have to clean the big fish out, you can just restrict the little fish until the grow. As a player, you need to grow to advance.

What I think is the best option would be this multiple threshold idea.
MK2 and below cannot go past 1000 Infamy.
MK3 cannot go past 1500 infamy.
Mk4 cannot go past 2k infamy and cannot drop below 500 infamy.
Mk5+ cannot drop below 2K infamy.

 

In one of the debates I had, someone suggested that pushing Nightmare League resets upwards, for example 5000 infamy, may actually have a positive effect for this problem.
He claims that pushing Nightmare League resets upwards will make the the chaotic 500~2000 infamy zone more sparse, giving more space to the newcomers.
He still hasn't proved his point to me, which I don't think is true, but I haven't proved that his assertion isn't true either.
Q: What impact will pushing Nightmare League resets to 5k have on new players? Please try to explain & analyze thoroughly.



For reference, this is a 90 day analysis of active players posted by @Miika on Jan 30 2018.
We can see that 75% of players that are captain level 30(eligible for mk5s) are under 1500 infamy.
It takes agonizing months for a player at Captain Level 15(mk2) at 500 infamy to reach Captain Level 30(mk5) but will only gain a total of 1000 infamy.
15 levels but only 1000 infamy separates them! This is really dense compared to the 1500-2500 average of just 31-36.
I'm not sure about how long 15-30 takes vs 31-36 takes but shouldn't it be easy to climb at first and be progressively harder?

 

I think "new" players add to the overall pot. But infamy is [nearly] a zero sum game. For me to gain some you need to lose some. Only adding in a new player adds to the overall pool size. Being new or killing bots doesn't do anything.

I think the way more interesting question is WHY are 75% of M5's below 1500 infamy and virtually all of them below 2k and a whopping 25% of them are below 1k. What that means is that the reasonable hunting ground for 4/7's of the boat marks is below 1k... 1/5 of the curve. I have my own theories but Rovio better develop theirs because that basically means that there is no noob zone beyond the bots.

 

Like.... you get way more progression at lower infamies than higher ones? Rovio strongly promotes tanking and seal-clubbing. It shouldn't be any surprise that people do it.

 

Interesting analysis. Now I'm going to have to run some spreadsheets of my own but that does make sense. It still doesn't explain why the pressure extends downwards so far without diffusing out but your math on "new infamy" seems better than mine.

 

It seems to me that the game will always be at a perpetual standstill UNLESS you upgrade your weapons and boats at a faster rate than people at a similar infamy. With Legendary weapons now and tier 4 epics becoming commonplace between 1500 and 2500 infamy you will never progress quickly anymore unless you buy your improvements faster than your opponents do. This is the new normal. I am happy playing between 2000 and 2500 infamy because I realize I am just chasing a dream to think I can get higher quickly without a massive investment into the game.

 

I don't think the upper boundary is a fair proposition. I was roaming the nightmare streets at MK5 for 2 months. Having an infamy cap would have fully demotivated me from playing.

 

To be fair, this is the reality in any freemium game. You simply aren't going to make it to the top without paying. The part that I find unfortunate is how harsh the curve is. It'd be one thing if I was bumping into boats that were just a bit too powerful for me and I lost more than won. But that's not really how it works in Battle Bay, is it? It all comes back to the fact that infamy is a complete hash right now. There is no such thing as a smooth curve. Just a jagged and steep one up to a certain point where there's no curve at all.