Score and retraining (in General)

Since the score system seems to be up to debate.. here is my question:

Why does the score go down when I retrain stats?

The experience loss is of course needed, but the score loss is to me a mystery. I have had to change my strategy lots and lots of times to learn the game mechanics, and every time I lose a lot of score.

When I go back to fighting, my old targets will lose some of their score and my rewards will sink. This penalty will of course also hit every one else with that target in sight.

It will also reduce your opponents rewards, as thier Challenge Bonus will now be lower.

That is true, although not really the answer to why it has to decrease.

In the top I recon it is a less issue, since people have a better idea of what they are doing and since they actually have opponents.

But in the bottom, most chars are inactive and not really opponents in a competing sense.

True, I just wanted to mention that you can (and it has been) use this to purposely hinder your foes.

And that it's considered a legitimate tactic, and fair game to do.

Why not instead lower my score on by removing the gear, or give penalties by placing them on the wrong minions, and then fight some inactive chars with low score?

I cant see the experience loss being small enough for that retraining tactic to be useful (on high levels you get a lot of experience loss and on low levels there are really not many opponents).

There was something about retraining something base and equipping a large weapon, but not sure how it works.

It's a Retrain plus High PR that will drop your Rewards through the Floor. However, if you hit someone high then it will suck their Score into the Floor as well but will propel your char very high in a matter of a few wins. Gaming the system this way can really affect the Scoring System as well as mess up the Rewards for a while if it is done repeatedly. As a side note yes if at the right MPR it can even affect the upper ranks so no it is not necessarily a no-issue for the upper echelon ALL the time. :-/