Hello,
Today's suggestion will be a tad smaller than normal, but this is concerning possible solution to making hourglass more appetizing to everyone.
To explain, the current system of hourglass focuses on trying to get as much winning streaks as possible before lowering them for huge amounts of rewards and allegiance. On paper, it is a High-risk high reward tool that incentivizes people to keep on going to receive the highest amount of rewards possible, and it is also a badge of honor to have a huge streak under your name.
But when applied in-game, we have seen that the cons of this system- which is the risk of losing everything when getting sunk- actually deters a lot of people from continuing on playing the mode. Most would just try to win once or twice before lowering and then stopping in fear of loss.
Of course there are other reasons on why people stopped playing the game mode (ie. Losing all your supplies on a sink), but I do think that this streak reward system is one of the major culprit that stops most lower-skilled players, especially some of the more casual ones, from trying the hourglass mode more than a couple tries which leads to the imbalance of high-skilled players mostly overtaking the queue, and the rise of people trying to find shortcuts either by losing intentionally or by the unethical use of third party applications to gain an unfair advantage.
So as a solution, I propose a small change as follows:
Replace the current streak system with a simpler and more instantaneous rewards system where every single win will immediately reward you with gold and allegiance as if you are lowering your hourglass.
To be more precise, every time you won a fight, you will immediately receive the streak one rewards of gold and allegiance on top of the normal win.
There will also still be a streak system, but it is modified in a way that if you defeat an opposing hourglass ship more than once, the reward for each win will increase (ie. sinking an enemy hourglass ship for the second time will give you streak 2 rewards, and so on.)
of course to balance things out, we can balance the rewards to be around 10~20% lower than the old system.
If you lose and sink, the only thing you would lose would just be the win streak that you have, resetting it back to zero while still preserving all the previous rewards you have gained.
And finally, the option to lower the hourglass will not give you any streak rewards but only as a way to disable hourglass invasions and the caveats of having it on. This will also reset the streak record back to zero and you will have to start all over again when you re-raised the hourglass.
This small change helps to pad the risks of losing for as much as possible, reducing the chance of discouraging players on playing the game mode and helping to populate the game mode.
Let me know what everyone thinks about this. upvote if you guys liked it and want to support on giving this post more visibility, and any constructive opinion that can improve this would be very much appreciated.
