*chuckle* I gather from the way you asked that question you think I want more stuff. If so, I'm glad you asked.
In general I think rewards at the lower infamy levels are ridiculously good compared to the high infamy levels. I'd need to get into more than armchair game design to get exact numbers but in any game, if you find the high levels swamping the noobie zones then you know that you've made them too profitable. So I want to increase the spread between low infamy rewards and high infamy rewards and most of the increase would come from reducing rewards at low infamies.
For instance, why did I have access to epic gear at level 9 and infamy maybe 600? Had the game been focusing me down on the more appropriate common gear with all rewards scaled that way then the only thing a tanker would get fighting at 0-750-ish infamy is common stuff and the occasional lucky uncommon thing. How many mark 6 tankers do you think you'd see then?
Instead the rewards appear to be scaled with level rather than infamy. So the min/max strategy is to get to be high level and low infamy, aka: tanking. I don't have enough experience with the high levels but my general sense is they need to be scaled up but nowhere near as dramatically as the low levels need to be scaled down.
I'd do the same thing with quest rewards. I'd probably add a few more boards and then I'd DRAMATICALLY scale down how many tickets you won for the lower boards. Then I'd add in a few versions of the raffle -- cheap, medium, expensive -- each carrying appropriately leveled gear. So sure, some guild can artificially reduced their infamy and then coast through the first board or two but they get nothing useful from that. In order to get the stuff they want in any reasonable time frame they need to get more tickets which means fighting at higher level boards which inevitably means fighting higher infamy players. For this to work, the rewards from just playing need to exceed the rewards of playing the lottery or else tanking will be driven by lottery min/max.
In general the point is rather than trying to make some arbitrary set of rules trying to curb tanking, you just make the endeavor pointless. If they also got rid of the 800 point seal-clubbing penalty those things would stop my own tanking in the following ways:
- Min/Max: As a F2P player in a P2W game I always adopt a pretty hardcore min/max strategy. It's the only defense against big credit cards and even then it's a weak defense. These changes totally alter the min/max equation making it more efficient for me to fight at the highest level I comfortably can.
- Other Tankers: It would do the same for all those tankers higher level than me. That would free up more comfortable breathing room for me. Remember that the view from the bottom is that everyone higher is pushing down on us with their own tanking. We respond by doing the same and kicking the can down the road to even lower level players. So the new player finds himself in a Mark 1 boat fighting M4 and higher opponents. I'd hope that new incentives would change this dynamic at the systemic level.
- The 800 point boundary: I've read too many stories of obviously good players getting caught by this and lamenting their fate. So I avoid it by monitoring my lower bound as well as my upper bound. I feel like I need to ensure that I can always dominate at my lower bound so that I can avoid falling through the floor. Given that I can find M6 boats at my current lower bound of 650 it's not any easy thing to dominate at the lower bound. I also ensure that a lucky wave doesn't carry me into infamy levels where I can't really hope to fight my way back out of the clubbing penalty box. This seal-clubbing effort on Rovio's part actually inspires me to tank rather than preventing it. I'd hope that once the incentives were fixed there'd be no real need for arbitrary boundaries. We'd have to see how many genuine griefers remain and whether anything more than reporting was really required to deal with it.
The only other thing which caused me to tank was wanting to play with my son (who was much lower level). He stopped playing so that's not an issue for me any longer but it'd sure be neat if they somehow facilitated playing with friends. I can think of several ways to do it but right now it seems to be impossible without infamy manipulation.
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