Manually vs auto-retired : keep them attackable ? (in General)

Not sure what you guys think, but I see plenty of retired characters with very high scores comapred to their PR/MPR.
Personally, I think this contributes more than just a bit to the existance of the "dead zone".

Wouldn't it make a little bit more sense to have two tiers of "retiring" of characters ?


The first tier, the manual retiring, this would keep the usual effect (can't access the character), but the character would remain a valid target for attacks (the difference would be that it earns neither XP nor CB$), so that other active characters can drain the score.

Only when the character reaches a low enough score relative to the PR/MPR (the moment he would have become auto-retired) would the character be removed from valid fight lists... and while you're at it, removing that character from the realms statistics listing (score/PR/attributes) would also be a good idea (if you want, have a "Hades" realm or somesuch which only lists the auto-retired characters).
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The effect should be quite easily noticeable, with an overall score increase for all ACTIVE (or, at least, reasonably well constructed) characters, leading to a better spread of scores (mitigating the existance of the dead zone) and a better overview of the fightable characters in the realm stats.

What do you guys think ?

Leave my high scored retired chars alone!!! My own personal monument to myself!!!

Let me get this right (I probably have it wrong, because it sounds wrong):

You retire a char with score of 3 mil score, probably sell off it's gear before retirement, making it an easy target.
I attack your char, but I don't get rewards, just score?

Correct me if I'm wrong but score is just about purely cosmetic isn't it?

Lets say your char is THE bridge in the dead zone. Heck, for fun you retired all five "dead zone bridges", as it were. Even if I could get my score past the dead zone, if my mpr isn't rising with my score I'm still as helpless on the good side of the dead zone as I was on the crap side.
And as soon as these 'bridges' get auto-retired my score will quickly drop back to where it was before.

Perhaps I misunderstand your proposition, or the problem with the dead zone. But if I can't beat anyone with 3 mil mpr (or whatever it is on the other side of the dead zone) how is raising nothing but my score going to help bridge that gap?

Oooo oooo...... I think I get it now.
Pardon the double post.

So it does work like I described it, but the benefit isn't for me, raising my score. It's for those who can defeat me, but weren't getting a decent challenge bonus (therefore rewards) before <i>I</i> bridged the gap.

Ok, I think I'm getting now. Good thinking, I love it.

Sry I'm a lil slow tonight, lil tipsy, too.

I should comment on everything like this, that way it gets dumbed down to the lowest possible level so even the common folk can understand.

That's kind of like a suggestion to make everyone's strats above the dead zone weaker. 'cept of course, you don't have to do that to the current, active group. Or rather, you're asking for manually retired characters to be set aside as a sort of a farm, for a certain period at least.

It will certainly alleviate the 'dead-zone', since I suppose there are a large number of easy-to-beat, high scored characters in retirement at the moment. But once this store is more or less used up, you'd then only have a really small trickle of retired characters being these "bridges".

Just saying that this won't have much of an impact beyond a certain period of time after its implemented. As for the cons, well, I dunno, but it seems like the ability to 'freeze' your characters in time is.... nice?

The gap is actually due to many people abandoning their char once they realised it will take forever to enter 6/20. But by doing so, it creates wider and wider gap between top and mid level of 7/20. And eventually they will find themselves having need to strive harder to get into 6/20.

Unless the top spots are going to restart their char or slow down a bit, it's unavoidable, even if you add random chars in each score range. Score fluctuates and eventually regulates itself.

Or some different implementation on how char growth is done :) I can almost hear OB getting in now....

"You retire a char with score of 3 mil score, probably sell off it's gear before retirement, making it an easy target.
I attack your char, but I don't get rewards, just score?"

No.
You, the attacker, you do get rewards and score normally, as if the target was an active character.
The attacked, retired character, that one doesn't get any rewards in case the attacker draws or loses.
This is necessary in order to prevent "retired farm abuse" or something similar.


"Correct me if I'm wrong but score is just about purely cosmetic isn't it?[...]Even if I could get my score past the dead zone, if my mpr isn't rising with my score I'm still as helpless[...]And as soon as these 'bridges' get auto-retired my score will quickly drop back to where it was before."

Well, the score you draw away from retired characters gets drawn away from you by people who attack you succesfully, and from them to other people, and so on and so forth, seeping downwards or laterally, spreading around a lot of characters.
If we would be talking about one, two, five, a dozen characters, the effect might not be noticeable.
But when half of the game's score (a rough "guesstimate", might be a lot more in fact) that is locked away on various retired characters of all levels of score suddendly becomes available to be seized, well, that could result in a significant surge of scores all across active characters, everywhere from the low ranks to the deadzone and beyond, even up to the highest-scoring characters.

A major surge in scores would lead to better differentiations in score all over the place... right now, betwen around 2 mil and 4 mil PR, you are practically unable to find targets with a positive challenge bonus, and it takes almost a miracle (and a very focused strategy) to beat just one higher-scoring character.
But as soon as even just one person manages to do that (and the sooner he manages to do that), even if in the beginning the gaps in score fill quickly by the people that can beat him, the challenge bonus accelerates his growth very fast (less so for people attacking him, while they can still beat him, unless they focus exclusively on him), soon "getting away" from people that could previously attack him properly, and the gap reforms until a new high-powered character gets close enough to leak some score away from the top and so on.

By allowing the score that was seeped out of the game by high-performing characters that got retired for some reason to finally return into the circuit, the better-performing (and/or better specialised) chars can suddendly find better challenge bonuses constantly, growing faster, and having a better chance of getting closer to the top whenever they enter what is now (and hopefully "would have used to be") the "dead zone".

"It will certainly alleviate the 'dead-zone', since I suppose there are a large number of easy-to-beat, high scored characters in retirement at the moment. But once this store is more or less used up, you'd then only have a really small trickle of retired characters being these "bridges".
Just saying that this won't have much of an impact beyond a certain period of time after its implemented."

Except that right now, there's a LOT of score in retired characters, a lot more than retired MPR. People abandoining their NUB/NCBs without allowing them to be drained of score first, plenty of tournament chars with insane scores and so on and so forth.

Once that score is allowed to re-enter the "active" part of the game, everybody else's score (at least, of those actively fighting) will be much higher as it is right now, allowing everybody that has a better strategy to find high challenge bonuses... and in case of another high-score retirement, that score will soon be drained away too.

So, no, even if all "current reserves" get drained, and even if no other high-score chars retire, the improvement is permanent.

Of course, the same result would/could be reached if all retired characters' score would be set to zero and spread evenly across all non-retired characters... but that's a bit too brutal, IMO.

Hmm. I support this suggestion!

All my need for a monument to myself aside; this would only benefit non-clan members or people not using favourites listings.

Clan fighters won't even be aware of retired chars most likely.


The dead zone is going to continue to exist so long as there is such a bottleneck of very large chars further up. The next tier down generally can't defeat them and so are stuck. The only thing that would change that would be for most of those upper level players to quit.

It only takes a couple of newcomers fighting up the ranks to "gather" all that "leftover" score just sitting there, all over the place... a great deal of it is stuck in the 400k-1.2 mil range, with strays here and there outside (a few in the high score ranges too).

Oh well, I guess the "brutal" suggestion could work too : whenever a char is retired, all the score is (temporarily) wiped down to zero and distributed (proportionally even) among all the other non-retired characters in the game.
Score would be listed as 0 (x,xxx,xxx) / PR / MPR
If that character ever becomes un-retired, the score is "drawn out" proportionally out of all active characters and restored.

Still, this "brutal" option could lead to much-too-large scores in the long run, which could lead to too many people getting costantly maxed-out challenge bonuses.
A variation would be to only reduce the score of retired characters down to half of MPR, or even just MPR instead of zero (if it is higher than that), and distribute (if any) only that among the rest of the players.

Still, that "much too high scores overall" idea wouldn't be all that bad... imagine what if Koyaanisqatsi's, King of Pain's and Edyit's scores would not be the 4-5-ish mil they are right now, but instead would be close to double their PRs, so around 13-14 mil for Koy, 11-12 mil for KoP and 10-11 mil for Edyit.

Sure, a nice high 15% clan score bonus would be peachy indeed, but if they could get very high challenge bonuses themselves by splitting up, they would be fools not to, right ?
Heck, they might even be tempted to reduce some of their NW/PR so they can actually get some decent challenge bonuses with others of similar MPR.
Not only that, but there would be a huge incentive for just about anybody else to custom-tailor their strategy so they can beat at least one of them for huge bonuses too... while at the same time opening themselves up to people of significantly lower MPR of strategies custom-tailored to counter theirs.

All in all, higher overall scores promote a more fluent gameplay, with people actively trying to retrain to beat other, higher-challenge opponents.
Which would, undoubtably, be a good thing, right ?

The retired chars wouldn't do much outside of making decent tourney targets for a couple tournies. Their score wouldn't raise that of those above them by much at all, and it would just create a temporary swell at the lower levels where 100% CB isn't at all difficult to accomplish.


The dead zone comes from players on their way up. My NCB for example, is constantly sucking score from those with higher score than my own, and then losing it to those with lower score, those people lose to a lower score, then those people lose to lower scores. This process continues until the score that was on a 1.6m MPR char ends up on a 400k MPR char.

With as many N*B characters on their way up as there were, are, and will be, the only way to "mitigate the deadzone" is for players to stop losing to those with lower scores than their own. This is near impossible, due to the rock-paper-scissors effect of the game (though a few in 6/20 have managed :P).

"Not only that, but there would be a huge incentive for just about anybody else to custom-tailor their strategy so they can beat at least one of them for huge bonuses too..."

Right here is exactly what 'm talking about :P When you custom-tailors and edy strat, they are beating him from much lower score. Then, due to the specialization against edy, you are able to be defeated by those lower than you, and all the score you gained from edy is gone soon enough. Keep drawing more and more score from him, but it will keep getting sucked from you.

If we were to double the score of everyone in CB, the deadzone wouldn't be nearly the problem it currently is... For a month or so... In any event, the N*B has been tweaked to take the deadzone into account, so any changes to the dead zone would definitely entail another N*B re-work :P

Sorry for the triple-post, i really should pay attention while reading before making a reply :P but as far as:

"All in all, higher overall scores promote a more fluent gameplay, with people actively trying to retrain to beat other, higher-challenge opponents.
Which would, undoubtably, be a good thing, right ?"

This would be a good thing. However, most are not willing to retrain even a little bit unless it gains them at least one or two characters and doesn't lose them any. Gaining 5 and losing 1 is still not worth it in the eyes of most because they are losing XP that way, the XP that may someday help them get further than they are now :P With the stagnation at the top that occurred with BR all being top dogs in score, PR, MPR, tat, nw, etc. and now, with Ranger already giving hope on ever having a chance at catching LA, Players are in a "prepair for the future mode", since they know there's nothing they can do to make their chances at "the top" any better at the moment.

Then there's those who don't really care about taking number one and have their own private missions and goals, but they tend not to do much strat re-working in the hopes that someday, somehow, what they have will miraculously get better and they didn't have to lose the 2%...

The only real re-training that occurs is when teams are bought/sold, or when a tank-user gets fed up with evasion enough to stop using their tank and go with a mage/evasion strat of their own, or when a mage-user gets fed up with reduction layers and gets a decent weapon to go tank with... And in the event of the last 2, NCB is often the route they take (Yay! More deadzone! :P)

Well, then, wouldn't you agree that if at all MPR ranges challenge bonuses of up to 100% would still be possible (theoretically, at least), then a lot more retraining would go on ?
I personally think that would be actually a good thing.

As for the "dead zone lack of bonus already taken into account for N*B growth", I'd seriously have to disagree... it took LA constant purchase of BA up until close to the dead zone as single minion, THEN massive amounts of purchased CB$ to hire the rest of the minions simply to pass most of the dead zone, a hiring which coincided with the "superbonus" following the readjustment of the N*B value, all of which was done while using a RoE permanently.
So, no, I really doubt the dead zone is taken into account there, and moreso, I have to say that it is unlikely for somebody to match LA's performance in the future unless he purchases massive amounts of CB$ to do the exact same thing, grow as single minion up to the dead zone, then hire minions to get in the 6/20 area as soon as possible.

Heh, with the recent changes (items, skills and other such things for this last changemonth), the scores of the top few have REALLY dropped like a rock compared to their own PRs.

Still everybody think this idea here isn't a good idea ? :)

Pretty much ;)

Even if you put dummy chars every where. Their score will be drained in like maybe a day or 2. Then scores will normalize again to what it is now.

Or most likely it won't help anything at all, because people in 7/20 regions normally fights clan chars. Inactive char won't be clan chars for certain. So what's the point?