Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.

@a10dr4651 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

There's nothing wrong with grindy content. Some of my favourite commendations and rewards come from those that can't be cheesed and take a lot of time like hoarder of barnacled gold. It feels nice when you finally achieve it. The main thing Rare need to do beyond season 8 is to keep giving incentives for people to use the hour glass system. The core design doesn't really need altering, maybe some tweaks here and there but it's a solid and enjoyable concept.

I think the primary complaint is that the content is grindy for experienced PVPers, it is downright sisyphean for anyone no good at PVP.

I also like the it giving one level per sink. I have sunk 156 ships and am level 83... it's hard to get huge streaks between the 30 minute wait time and when all I match with is lsd's and the occasional person using cheats.

@legionpen661875 Lol, I don't think they care if you and Jimmy stop supporting the game by buying emporium.
Im pretty sure majority of players that pay are from the PvE crowd.

@ix-indi-xi

Jimmy here,

I plan to stop spending money on the emporium as well.

Rare designed a matchmaking system that doesn’t do anything other than attempt to limit wait times.

You can and will rematch the same sweaty players that roll you over and over again.

The allegiance gains for losing are pathetic. The ratio is about 10:1.

It’s about 170 wins to get to level 100 allegiance or 2000 losses.

Who knew Rare hates losers so much.

In turn, they will not get a penny from me ever again.

I usually buy 4250 ac every season. Absolutely will not going forward.

@tawnymusic78392 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@ix-indi-xi

The allegiance gains for losing are pathetic. The ratio is about 10:1.

It’s about 170 wins to get to level 100 allegiance or 2000 losses.

Who knew Rare hates losers so much.

That's my main issue with the season 8. I don't mind progression being locked behind pvp grind much, nor matchmaking being such ****, but my time playing the mode being judged worthless compared to good pvp players is seriously killing my willpower to bother.

@arch-ideall said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@tawnymusic78392 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@ix-indi-xi
The allegiance gains for losing are pathetic. The ratio is about 10:1.
It’s about 170 wins to get to level 100 allegiance or 2000 losses.
Who knew Rare hates losers so much.

That's my main issue with the season 8. I don't mind progression being locked behind pvp grind much, nor matchmaking being such ****, but my time playing the mode being judged worthless compared to good pvp players is seriously killing my willpower to bother.

I love this game. LOVE it. It has been the game I play during 70-90% of my game time for the last two years. And I hate to say it, but I agree. I have been sitting in the Official SOT discord server looking for a crew to play with. Everyone is asking for LSD/TSD to join them and be carried to the curse. It has brought out the worst of toxicity and elitism and childishness in the community. Since season 8 came out, I have spent time trying to find a crew to play with and getting my teeth kicked in by people who got the curse after a week. I have spent nights that I usually spent gaming scrolling through youtube and lamenting to what hour glass did to the LFC channel and the game. I wish I could find a crew to just do some PVEVP and chill, but I can't because everyone wants the curses. And many players have left because they are so discouraged by the mega-sweats that stomp them. It's only going to get worse as well—faster matchmaking will result in more lopsided matches.

The only way this mode stays alive is to add more unlockables, and increase the allegiance gain from losses. That's the only way to get the casual players back in queue, and getting people back in queue is how you keep the mode alive. Otherwise people will ignore it, or just quit after they unlock the curses. Which, again, I feel is fine. This gives the mega-sweats a mechanism to find each other which gets them off the casual PVE crowd and away from the chill PVEVP crowd. I think locking the curses everyone wants behind the LSD/TSD gatekeepers was the worse idea in the history of this game. That group will be the only ones left in hour glass by 2024, guaranteed, which again, may have been Rare's goal all along.

At this point, after everything I've read, I honestly believe that:

• Hour glass losses should award the same allegiance of wins. I know the people who already have the curses will gripe and whine and complain about this, but it keeps population high in the game mode and that's how you keep it alive.
• This change will make the base curses a "participation trophy" which again, is fine because everyone wants them. We know the gold curses are the level 1000 awards and the sweats have that to work up to, but to compensate they should add more curses along the way. There are coral skeletons or sunken curses above level 100, there are jungle skeletons and something similar they could add for athena's.
• Put more PVP oriented cosmetics above level 100 for the sweats who are going to complain about making the grind easier. Skeleton themed weapon sets for the reapers, legendary weapon sets for athena's. We need to give the sweats their "status symbols" so the rest of us can get the curses we want.

Essentially, make the curses everyone wants easier to get, and entice us to keep playing by giving us more rewards as we go.

@pugawuga216 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

Honestly, pretty good idea to make the curses almost a participation trophy, but making losses count as much as wins just doesn't make sense. Losing intentionally then re-queueing would be faster than trying to win.

But it almost has to be right? I think @grog-minto and you said it more eloquently, but in short you need more players trying and staying in hourglass than you have players quitting after level 100 because they get the curse. Look at the season progression, you do something and you gain like five levels. At level 90 it takes more but at the beginning the game pumps the dopamine into your brain rewarding your pants off. Put yourself if the sailor's sandals of a brand new Sea of Thieves player.

Option 1: You log on to hourglass, you get your teeth kicked in by basically everyone, and you get a tiny tick of allegiance. That's the current player experience. Sadly, most players just quit and may not give hourglass a second thought.

Option 2: You log on to hourglass, get your teeth kicked in, and immediately gain 3 levels and unlock new cosmetics. DOPAMINE BABAY. You want to see what's next, all of a sudden those curses you want don't seem so far off, you're interested in what else you unlock along the way.

It's about driving people toward the game mode and not away from it. The sad truth is the internet is very good at instantaneous gratification and if people don't get that, they'll simply leave. The best way to get new blood into the game mode to balance the people who leave once they get the curse is to make the grind up to 100 fast and easy; make the curses a participation award. The more people play up to 100, the more likely they are to stay after 100.

You can't punish people for losing, honestly some of us just suck that bad...

@pugawuga216 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@lordqulex I see your point, but there needs to be some contingency that prevents people from just loss farming, which obviously would hurt the gamemode. Maybe a loss streak could make you gain less and less xp for each loss, while just one or two would give you lots of xp? I think that might be a good solution to this problem.

I think a solution to that would also be the match making system (if it ever works), why? because it would match people that want to PvP against each other and like minded loss farmers against each other, it can create a couple of interesting interactions tbh.

@pugawuga216 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@ghutar yeah but making queueing up and losing the optimal way to progress just doesn't make sense at all. It probably would be better than what we have now, but it would still be awful. That being the best way to progress clearly isn't what is intended, so I still think a loss-streak system where the more you lose in a row the less xp you gain would be perfect, as it satisfies the need for losses to give good xp but also doesn't incentivize people to just queue up, intentionally lose and then move on.

I honestly believe that players should be left to play the game however they want, rather than trying to micromanage them whenever we can, if you wanna lose you way to 100, so be it, its a very boring way, no glory in it whatsoever, but if that's you jam then fine (I mean, Rare did put curses there that everyone wants, I can't blame the players for doing so), the current system only rewards the top PvP players in the game, it benifts only about less than 1% of the WHOLE PLAYER base which sucks.

@pugawuga216 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@lordqulex I REALLY don't want to be the guy that says "git gud", but otherwise I don't think that even lorewise this gamemode could stand up on its own if losing didn't have some negative affect on reputation gained. People would just throw because it would be easier and quicker xp. With the right tweaking of the xp streak loss decrease, I think it could work well, because like in 1 out of 10 games, I feel like even the worst crew can get a game in edgewise, especially with sbmm whenever they get that working.

I literally just won a match on a work call (so I wasn't listening to audio) by baiting a solo slooper into boarding me by ramming his ship. It's literally that easy to get a win; I don't think you have to worry about people exploiting the system by farming losses because even when trying to farm losses I win. You may be trying to fix something that isn't broken...

@pugawuga216

To be fair the only reason I'm doing it is because SBMM is broken. I need my MMR to be so bad that I am never paired with mega-sweats with the curse, and sometimes I still am! I'd stop cheesing the system if the system were remediated, and fair.

But right now what I'm most concerned about is getting my discouraged friends back into the game. To do that, losing needs to be as rewarding as possible, even as much as rewarding as a win. People need to feel good losing, it needs to be as rewarding as possible, otherwise they'll lose a hand full of times and never come back.

The issue aren't just wins and loses. There are also short and long battles. For battles to be rewarding there also has to be progression for time spent doing the pvp mode (in best scenario even for time spent matchmaking both for attacker and defender). With time spent being large source of progression example 50%, even something like W50%+Time50% = 100% vs L25%+Time50% = 75% would be good enough as the time would balance the difference between W/L to be smaller the longer the battle gets.

@magus104 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

Ironically they just increased how much it takes to get to 100... Then again with the irony they made it so Christmas weekend you get double allegiance gain? Cancel your holiday plans and get the coffee pot ready. Gonna need to pull a 72 hour shift for this one.

that is so... odd.

@oinarrow of course though if allegiance obtained from a battle is increased by x%, then they would also have to increase the allegiance people already have by x% otherwise you'll get tons of lvl 100 players complaining that the levels they already have were much harder to earn. but if all of this is done this seems like a good thing for everyone! :)

@arch-ideall said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

The issue aren't just wins and loses. There are also short and long battles. For battles to be rewarding there also has to be progression for time spent doing the pvp mode (in best scenario even for time spent matchmaking both for attacker and defender). With time spent being large source of progression example 50%, even something like W50%+Time50% = 100% vs L25%+Time50% = 75% would be good enough as the time would balance the difference between W/L to be smaller the longer the battle gets.

Sounds great, this would both encourage trying to win instead of losing quick, and yeah, if a battle lasts long that means it was probably tight so a decrease in difference between loss and win xp would suit this well.

@pugawuga216 said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@lordqulex Fair enough, and I see your point. As one of those "mega sweats with the curse", I have ran into many people solo queueing who see me and say that "the sbmm is broken!" (which it is). I think that if the sbmm was fixed this whole thing would be a non-issue, and the system could pretty much stay almost as it is, but unfortunately that would only work with a perfect sbmm system and a large playerbase of all skill levels going into the gamemode, and unfortunately, I don't think that either of those things are true.

agreed! if this would even the playing field so that everyone has a chance at getting streaks, and if everyone can get these streaks this would also solve the problem quite well.

@sir-sniffils said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@oinarrow of course though if allegiance obtained from a battle is increased by x%, then they would also have to increase the allegiance people already have by x% otherwise you'll get tons of lvl 100 players complaining that the levels they already have were much harder to earn. but if all of this is done this seems like a good thing for everyone! :)

Who cares, let them complain. Less than 1% of the community has the curses, they are NOTHING.

@sir-sniffils said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

@arch-ideall said in Allegiance Gains Need To Be Increased.:

The issue aren't just wins and loses. There are also short and long battles. For battles to be rewarding there also has to be progression for time spent doing the pvp mode (in best scenario even for time spent matchmaking both for attacker and defender). With time spent being large source of progression example 50%, even something like W50%+Time50% = 100% vs L25%+Time50% = 75% would be good enough as the time would balance the difference between W/L to be smaller the longer the battle gets.

Sounds great, this would both encourage trying to win instead of losing quick, and yeah, if a battle lasts long that means it was probably tight so a decrease in difference between loss and win xp would suit this well.

Or it means I sailed around in circles for an hour to maximize my allegiance gain. You can't make allegiance gain tied to time, eventually two people who just want to make the battle last an hour will find each other and fish until one has to go.

@lordqulex how about people who are terrible at pvp but have spent hundreds of hours getting to... let's say lvl 50? there are a lot more of those people...