The current hourglass system doesn't reward effort. It doesn't reward skill. It rewards matches played. The curses aren't the reward for effort, they are the reward for reaching zero on an experience point countdown. This is why I feel loss farming in hourglass is so common.
3 of the 5 first matches in my last session of HG were loss farmers. I think I know a way to make loss farming less meaningful, and low skilled games more meaningful. If players were rewarded for skill based stuff like firing cannons, fixing holes, getting hits with cannonballs, it could make people less motivated to loss farm. Give a base amount of XP for a win and loss, and obviously make the base amount of XP larger for the winner, but also add extra XP for doing PVP things like what I detailed earlier. I don't think player kills should count towards this because there are a lot of heavy TDM sailouters who will technically not be farming you because they will sail you out eventually (sail at like 25%), but still kill you 25 times before it happens.
Not to say that these would be exact numbers, but you could have like 10xp for repairing a tier 2 hole, and 20xp to repair a tier 3 hole, 100xp for hitting a cannonball, 250xp for getting 2 chainshot on mast in a row. These are just general ratio ideas, not exact values I think should be applied. Have these metrics also measured against miles sailed to prevent people from sitting next to each other and farming it, so if they have really low miles sailed it would give them low XP, as well as if they have high miles sailed but low damage output, they would gain little to no bonus XP, which would help prevent runners from timewasting.
I'm not a coder so I don't know how hard this part would be, but you could also have a system that tracks the damage dealt/repairs/miles sailed over time to make sure that the players aren't just anchoring next to each other, getting a couple hundred hits, then sailing in circles for an hour to try to cheese the system.
