@jolly-ol-yep said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:
@lem0n-curry
At one point we need to stop caring about cheesers or we don't do anything and don't go anywhere.
If you can't see how rewarding the same XP whether the fight lasted 1 min or 2 hours is THE big issue and is ENCOURAGING loss farming, I can't do much more.
But don't we DARE reward losers/bad players accordingly, it really is better that they leave out of frustration rather than to give ways for 1% of the playerbase to cheese some cosmetic.
It's not like there were dozens of thread with thousands of posts complaining about how too much is too much on these forums already.....
Watch this mode become a meme and foresee the last 5 people playing it in 3 months, raging about queue times again and how they're matched with the same 4 ships over and over again
I have to disagree, that's not the big issue... Top three to be sure, but not #1. Loss farming, in my mind, is symptomatic of pirates wanting the curses but not wanting ODPVP. It has been my opinion from the start, and I only see evidence growing, that ODPVP was, frankly, not desired by the community. It was implemented to bring arena refugees back into the seas. And largely, it worked.
But the developers understood that the only way SBMM would work is if participation was large enough to support a standard distribution of skilled pirates. So they had to put the biggest honking carrot they could on the end of the stick to ensure everyone played the mode: phantom and skeleton curses. They needed to expose PVP to the largest audience possible in hopes that some pirates that dislike or fear PVP would be converted to enjoy it and participate in hourglass after they get the curses, so they put the most requested cosmetics ever behind the new game mode. I'm sure it worked for some, absolutely. Unfortunately, it seems, they underestimated just how much this community at large loathes PVP, and loss farming is the result of that decision.
The #1 problem, in my opinion, is how to prevent hourglass from dying like arena did, with 3% play time. Once loss farmers get the curses, there's no going back. What, they're going to add new green and blue and red shades for the blessing and more cosmetics for skeletons? Nah, casuals just want the first one they can get then they're out. Do you really think casuals are looking at the mysterious stranger pieces and thinking, "man, I've got to grind out 100 more levels of this rotten mango for those!" Doubtful. Once players get the curses, then what? Then only the arena fans are going to be playing hourglass. Probably.
So where does that leave us? I honestly expect one of three outcomes. 1) They leave it as is. Make the loss farmers stay as long as possible and hope they get taken under someone's wing (thank you @JJ-H816, sincerely for what you're doing with that pirate) or otherwise be converted to good faith PVP participants. Maybe give loss allegiance another small bump in one of a dozen ways but nothing too significant. 2) They adjust allegiance upward just so we zip it and leave ASAP so they can look at the real statistics of hourglass and decide what to do next. Perhaps with previously mentioned means of daily deeds, combat action tracking, letters or recommendation and such. 3) The introduce another way to gain allegiance/curses outside of hourglass/ODPVP in season 9 or 10 to appease the bulk of their community. (Probably not gonna happen.) Sure the PVP'ers will shriek violently about it, but they have ODPVP to play so ultimately few of them will rage quit the game in protest.
That is the order in which I think it's most likely as well, that way brand new players also need to experience ODPVP to get the curses and perhaps convince them to stick around.
