Regarding Hardcore TDM...

Hear ye, hear ye! I, Redneck Messiah, present a number of reasons why the upcoming changes to Battle Bay's ranked mode are going to ruin the game!

So firstly, I shall enlighten you readers on the finer points of the current ranked system. Team Elimination mode is a test of players' skill and ability to work cooperatively. You need to plan a loadout that will let you survive, deal damage, and help your team, and work with your teammates to win. You need to figure out if you want to play your ship as an offensive weapon, a defensive tank, a hit'n'run specialist, or a support class, and build it accordingly. You need to be well versed in the strategies of the game and be skilled with your main ships and items in order to move up the ladder. Rewards are based on your performance in-game, which of course is based on your ability to attack, heal, survive, and win. And this is excellent. A ranked mode should reward players and teams of players for being better at the game than their opponents, not for having more fire bombs.

Which brings us to Hardcore TDM, the soon-to-be blight on society which the forum community has been happily bashing since the sneak peek launched. For anyone who doesn't know (however small, blissfully ignorant few of you there are), Hardcore TDM is set to replace Team Elim this month as the ladder mode. This mode is basically the event TDM, except you need to be able to equip 2+ ships to play. Say I choose to equip a Defender and a Reaper, and go in as the Defender. Should my Defender sink, I may respawn as the Reaper or any other appropriately outfitted ship. As far as we know, items cannot be shared between ships, meaning that I need to have, say, a shield on the Reaper that is NOT one of the ones on that Defender. Let's take a look at the problems this creates.

1. This is a problem we're already experiencing with ye olde TDM Events: A lack of required skill. As discussed above, Team Elim rewards skilled players who know what they're doing. TDM has been shown to reward damage, and only that, leading to suiciding and weapon spam. *examines le firebomb.* Soon, ranked will be about fitting as many high-DPS weapons as possible onto a few ships and throwing them every which way, not working with your teammates to survive and strategically attack.
2. Problem number two is the matter of needing to equip MULTIPLE ships for this mode... You see, many players will be hard pressed to fill two ships' worth of certain color groups. This mainly applies to blue items. In general, players have 1 good turbo, 1-2 good shields, and 1 good bandage. How, exactly, does that fill out two ships? Simple answer: It doesn't. All the players who have spent months building one core set of good items on one or two main ships are going to get screwed big-time because they won't be able to fill multiple good ships. Say you've mained speeder since you started playing and spent many months learning speeder and building speeder items and speeder related talents and mainly upgrading your speeder... what exactly are you going to do when the ranked mode expects you to be able to equip and play ANOTHER ship ALONGSIDE your speeder, using DIFFERENT items? That situation could become a reality for many players.

Knowing this, a few of you may be asking "But why would Rovio do this if it's so gosh darn awful, Redneck?" And despite not being Rovio staff, I can tell you. The answer is what it always is. Money. Rovio knows that by requiring players to play two different ships with different items if they want to rank up and gain prestige and better rewards, more players will be inclined to buy pearls so they can get the items, talents, and ships needed to compete. Rovio doesn't care about how this impacts the playerbase, or how anything impacts the playerbase. If they think they can profit from something, they'll do it, and drag their veteran players kicking and screaming along into the void. Good night all.

@Zeus

 

This is just my opinion. Whether you agree or disagree, thank you for reading and feel free to share your opinion in the comments or in my handy little poll up top.

See you on the Bay,

Redneck Messiah​

 

It is unfortunate Battle Bay is being changed to coerce money out of the existing player base instead of making the game better.

 

The ugly truth...

 

I actually like TDM game mode a lot more than any other mode there is. And am looking forward to hardcore TDM in ranked cause currently ranked absolutely sucks for me.

I joined this game couple of months back, so all of my ships are between 20 to 25 level, excerpt interceptor and reaper which are at 29 levels. And given my infamy hovers around 1500+, I get matched with all players with 47+ level ships with tier 4 and 5 epic weapons against my mostly rare weapons. So if I peek out even a bit and get shot I lose big chunk of my health and can't do a lot of dmg, even though I'm very good player, hence 1500 infamy. And playing like this just utterly horrendous and tiresome, its absolutely no fun at all, except in TDM events when other players just don't spend minute or two hiding behind a wall or rocks and actually come to play. I like playing like this a lot more than ranked.

I barely even play ranked unless there are no events lol. So Rovio please bring in the update soon. Can't wait.

And do I even have to mention just how big of a help TDM mode is for guild quests. Lol. Which is the main reason I play this game everyday to help complete the quests. Most of my parts come from raffle rewards.

In a nutshell TDM is way way way more fun than normal ranked and gives way more rewards in terms of quests and others for playing. I don't see what's not to like.

 

Actually, if you are looking for making BattleBay more enticing for new players, TDM game mode is absolutely a way to go.

Current ranked battles are zero fun to play for new players. Although I despise some of Rovio's cash grabbing practices, like this ship level upgrades that they have introduce.

 

I am to go with @Redneck Messiah on this one. I am just now at a point where I am climbing through warrior league and am getting to know my way around speeder and enforcer (thank you to all the great folks who writing guide for those ship) and have good speeder/enforcer item and talent tree... now this! I am not sure that I can able to equip two boat! Mostly my items are for these two boats, and a lot of them,like shield, nitro, and blast cannon, are share... Guess I am to becoming a "filthy casual"

 

I am completely aware that matchmaking in ranked TDM will still be based on infamy, and that I'll be still playing with and against lvl 47+ ships, but I still like TDM more because in TDM players actually play this game by coming out in open guns blazing, which is what I like in games and it also allows me to do a lot more damage with my weapons if I just hang back, i would still die but I'll die doing quite a bit of damage and also I wouldn't have to just watch others play I can respawn and start playing again. Fun!!

 

Couldn't agree more. @Fisher214 brings some excellent, much needed points to this discussion. But I've also observed, like @TheAntiSnipe and probably others have, that the reason TDM event matchmaking feels so comfortable is that its system is based off of level, not infamy. TDM's problems are spam, suiciding, and a lack of skill, but it isn't THAT bad because everyone is fairly balanced against each other by the level system. Put this into ranked, and you have the same issues, but now with the oft-unbalanced infamy system for matchmaking... the seal clubbers will now have an easier time than ever with their FB/tritorp spam, and the rest of us, who are trying to equip enough ships to PLAY the darn mode, will suffer for it.

 

I can tell you that your infamy will take a big hit from ranked TDM. If you have weaker load outs, then the longer battle will be more disadvantages. @TheAntiSnipe is correct when he said his points. It will not be a brawl like TDM today because infamy is involve.

Luckily for me, I can have 3 decent load outs. The Enforcer will be without turbo but that’s OK. I was never into seal clubbing in the early TDMs so all my ships were MK7s before the update. Oh, the advantage of playing all ships since the beginning now pay off.

 

So when you look at team death match as a whole I think it is better for ranked game play. Now the way they implement it might not be.

For regular rank battles if one out of 5 players makes a big misteke it potentially costs the whole team the match a loss in infamy. This leads to extremely conservative game play not high level skill game play.

TDM allows for more mistakes hence forth allows for more aggressive game play. It is easier to overcome one players mistake to come back and win. The person who makes a mistake can actually be the reason you win. Players who take high risk high reward plays will not be punished as badly.

Capture the flag on the other hand would be the worse way to have ranked battles as it rewards extremely fast high risk high reward game play. It is my favorite mode, but massivly rewards fast boats over every other boat in the bay.

Finally with the way they are implementing the 2 boat system is rewarding the haves compared to the have nots. Especially with the fact that they changed the way you upgrade boats costs so much. Infamy will now reward a player with not only a deep resource of boats but a deep resource of items. Long term it should work out but short term there is going to be a lot of pain for players.

 

Exactly. Though multiple ships might be pain in start, its gonna be lot of fun in future i bet on it.
If things work out i might be able to recommend this game to others.
Looking forward to better things.

 

How about defender? It's large number of blue slots with make it impossible to play with another boat.

 

Why is that different than the situation with any other boat? Players typically have just enough blue items to fill out their main (2-3) so they also need an entire second set of items for the second boat, same as any Defender main. The advantage of a Defender is they already have enough Blue items to fill two non-Defenders.

 

Good point.

 

The wore part about BB update is that nothing is announced to prepare the players. These types of update keep pushing players away from a fan base that is already pretty small. The last update that was beneficial to the players without any drawback is the guild battle in September of ‘17. These devs kept sneakily shaving rewards without any announcement. Last was the scraapping returns.

 

If those players are ‘not punished as badly’ then it is questionable whether their strategy can still be called ‘high risk’. What you actually end up with is overly aggressive play becoming low risk - high reward. This means that it is not only a viable strategy, it is the only viable strategy, to the detriment of all others.

That is why so many people have a problem with TDM being ranked. It is just a one dimensional meat grinder, that ends up rewarding a reckless, selfish, playstyle.

That, in itself, isn’t the worst part though. Even though I believe it will lead to a shallower game, void of strategy... ‘that’ being worse, is still only my subjective preference. What is objectively worse, is that about half the ship types aren’t designed to crash headfirst into the unfriends, and go down swinging like that. For those ships, conservative play is all they have. In this new hyper-aggressive meta, those ships will start tanking infamy. It will be unbalanced, which is just bad, both for the game, and especially for players who have invested in those ships.

 

I have No idea what you are talking about. Haven't seen any TDM hate threads.
Agreed People play aggressive in tdm but that mostly because of two reasons
1. They don't lose infamy
2. Faster you play, faster u can play next match and more coins you can get.
People are smart you know. In ranked More Battle is not equal to More Rewards.
But More Win= More Rewards + bragging ryts
Player will find ways to win more, be may it be aggressive or camping.