Thread: Fake Lay

I'm still not entirely sure HOW the devs have decided to program what opponent pool the challenges are chosen from, but whatever it is it is clear that it is pretty unbalanced.

I've come up with a system that I think will make it more balanced in terms of actual stats to ability to progress, that would change slowly over time instead of immediately based upon people's progression in the event every week (which may or may not be close to how it's currently calculated, but I doubt it).

The idea would be that all players in the game are divided into 25 groups based on ONE of 2 things (depending on how they want to balance it - based on stats or based on fame). Stats would probably be more balanced but it would also require frequent updating of the tiers whereas fame could just be calculated once a week when it is given out, so for ease of programming the devs would probably use fame (which is fine and I'll explain why it'd still be semi-balanced over-time). Each group would correspond to a tier of the challenge and whenever you initiated the call for it to find an opponent, it would pick a random opponent in the same tier of the challenge as you are. Obviously if groups were divided by stats it would mean you would eventually reach a place that even with RNG being on your side, you would not be able to beat any new opponents because their stat total would be higher than yours (this seems more balanced than what currently happens, since sometimes I'll still face opponents that are vastly under or over me in terms of stat totals).

Dividing the groups by fame would also be balanced given a long enough timeline, as people with high stats but low fame would constantly be able to gain the max amount of fame until they hit a fame tier where people had the same or better stats than them (although that would take weeks if not months for it to trend towards equilibrium - however in the grand scheme this is still considered balanced because high-stat, low-fame players are technically outliers and there would not be that many in the game for long). In order to avoid players that have high stats but don't do challenges (because they left the game or just don't like the pvp), people that didn't participate in the previous week's challenge would not be part of the list that competitors are chosen from (so stale accounts wouldn't even be part of the roster and only active players would count - this does make pvp more dependent on the continued support of a constant player base in order to create the maximum amount of competition). However, in the case where the player base fell significantly enough that pvp wouldn't be viable anymore, the devs would likely abandon the game anyways so that's not really an issue.

In either case, I think dividing the pvp pool in this manner, or even allowing the challenger pool to be +/-1 would allow players to be lucky/unlucky and attain a tier above them sometimes but not enough that really lucky players WILL hit 25 and really unlucky players WONT attain a rank appropriate for their stats (which seems to be the case now, since if you pvp a lot really early in the competition week you can reach a higher rank than you can if you participate later in the competition).

In any case I really hope the devs pay attention to the fact that people think the pvp is unbalanced and that they are doing something about it, if not following this suggestion.