Question about Score (in General)

I haven't noticed anyone bring up a thread about it and figured I would to see Nightstrikes thought on it. Is it meant for only a few people to destroy the score system so easily? The rewards are based a lot on score from what I know and there are a few people out there that are manipulating the scores out there and disrupting the balance of the game if you ask me. You have a person stalemating to very very low score players on purpose and effecting everyone lower than them and thus changing rewards for everyone in the game. This is just bad form in my opinion and am wondering why it's allowed. This affects NCB runs, NuB players and even long term players. My score got to a max of about 6 mil not too long ago and then all of a sudden about 35 to 45 days ago my score started dropping and now it's down to almost 5 mil and under which I haven't seen since Jan 10th. This isn't because my character has gotten worse but because of certain people manipulating the score system. It slows down the growth of people not in 6/20 and just seems totally wrong in my opinion and surprised that more people aren't making threads complaining about it. I would love to hear more opinions and especially Nightstrikes. thanks.

It's a valid tactic.

One I don't like and have never supported. I've made a few thread son this in my time. :P

Can you explain in more detail what you mean, with specific examples?

This is a valid tactic. They slow their own growth down by stalemating to drop their score. Also once enough people start generating score it will balance out. The only real way to generate score is by fighting without a challenge bonus.

I don't think it balances out. I have noticed my challenge bonus has dropped a lot in the last 30 to 45 days and my rewards are lower. I haven't kept great details, but have seen a difference.

Scores will balance out once there are enough people fighting without a challenge bonus to generate enough score to overcome the score drain that is occurring. If you are still getting a challenge bonus then you aren't generating any score.

But that's the problem in a nutshell isn't it?

It's a tactic used to reduce your opponents growth, and it never recovers until your opponent loses all thier Challenge Bonus.

At which point, your job is done!

The tactic is good, for staying at the top, but is this a good practice for CB as a whole?

To me, the problem is the massive loss of score, when retraining.

Today.. someone (who beats me a lot) decided to retrain and ... now me and the people on my fightlist is permanently down 2-300k in score.

I have seen logic and balance in every aspect of this game except for this one. There is an experience loss when retraining.. Why not settle with that?

That problem balances out very fast. After the person retrains they start to fight again and as long as they made a good retrain their score goes back to where it was or higher and as you keep beating them if you still can after their retrain then your score goes back up. This problem is different in that the person is lowering their score on purpose to affect people lower than them :)

I view the score as a shareholding in a large "score-economy"

When they retrain they lose millions of score.. and it is taken right out of the system.

When someone intentionally loses or stalemates to someone, I assume that the score still stays within the system, but is just moved around.

Am I wrong here?

Stalemate counts as a non fight and both characters lose score. If there is a large score gab the higher score character loses a lot more.

Yes, the stalemated score goes bye bye.

In terms of the amount of score lost I believe that it is equivalent to losing to the other character for each.

Hmm.. well.. then the whole score system has this butterfly design to it.

(I think I attribute my growth up until recently to the Joel character, whom I never was involved in one single fight with).

Yeah I have been wondering why the scores have been all messed up lately. I thought it might be something NS was working on but I guess I was wrong.

This mainly came about as a response to a few people making 1-2 person fight lists for max challenge bonus.

I thought the score system is being worked on ? I hope it will finish sooner...

Don't forget crazy tournaments also disrupt the whole score system... Remember the 1000 % bonus or whatever tournament back then ? I remember hatchetman's character was attacking me and I lost quite a lot of scores, and so does all the higher score characters that I was beating, reducing the reward bonus %.

i have those 1-3 people fight lists... sorry ._.

The entire score system as it stands right now only USED to sort of work (it never worked quite right) because there were enough people actively fighting steadily across most of the higher MPR regions without a N*B, and with reasonably large fight lists.

Less and less people playing in an active fashion, more and more people are forced to reduce the fight list due to that, highly focused strategies and their counter-strategies in most of the N*B characters leading to wild score swings during the course of a day depending on order people come online and fight, and so on and so forth.

The current score system is not just obsolete, it's damaging gameplay on a fundamental level, and it's only getting worse. Most of it should be just scrapped, and a completely new way of calculating score should be introduced.

For starters, you could have fixed scores for a whole day, only recalculated during cache flush based on all fights made the previous day, as opposed to the current "per fight change".
Also, the maximum fluctuation from day to day should be limited to, say, plus/minus 10% of current score (or 50k score, whichever's highest, so we don't stifle dynamic scoreing in the low MPR regions).
The score should be balanced in such a way so that GAME-WIDE, the sum total of all PRs (not MPRs) should equal the sum total of scores (or that multiplied by a small extra factor), and should also be TOP-CAPPED individually to double the PR of each character (or slightly above that, but not much).

Can we at least get official feedback on whether the score system is being worked on at all or not ?
And if yes, some rough direction of changes desired ?

At the moment the score drain from tournament characters is being addressed.

A great fix to stop the problem getting worse.

But we do really need something to fix the damage that's already been caused.

I've just started another NCB, and I can tell from personal experience the low game is still no fun. ;)

Every time I start a tourney character I expect the beginning to be very hard to maintain a good challenge bonus. Yet it isn't too hard to get a good 50-60% challenge bonus with no real equipment and people farming you even.

The bottom might be a little harder than it could be but if you are focused and determined you can get a 100% challenge bonus throughout it. Or at least an 80%+ CB.

what is the bar set at for getting to the planned goal for ncb 100% or 0% challenge bonus?

Equivalent to what the Top Spot got.

If they got 100% it's 100%, if they got 0% it's 0%.

^if that is truly how it is figured then consistency in bonuses available should be a priority.

The problem still comes to when you have someone with almost 7 mil score fighting and stalemating on purpose to someone with less than 2 mil score to affect basically everyone in the game and effecting the challenge bonus of everyone to lower their chances of catching you, that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

Dude, I'd say right now it's set for 100%.

I always thought that the highest intended mark for a NCB was 95%, based on 100% challenge bonus the whole way and ignoring the now common tactics of 1600 BA and swapping characters.

Although I feel confident saying that with 100% bonus all the way I could get over the highest MPR, without buying a minion. I'm sure DoS would agree with me on this.

The NCB is based on 95% of the projected growth of the Top Spot over the time of the Bonus.

As far as I'm aware, that projected growth is based off of the current growth, which would be based on the actual Bonuses (Challenge, Clan, etc) that character had.

This is all based on equivalent effort, or equivalent BA spent.

Well, GL, Mikel is currently getting 0 CB, I can tell you with 0CB no one would make 95% of their size, as they shouldn't. I'm guessing it's set someone between 0 and 100, as to where exactly, your guess is as good as mine.

It's total (or rather average/aggregrate?) Bonus over character length.

So Mikel might be getting 0% now, but unless he got 0% over the whole length of his characters size, the N*B wouldn't be calculated on that.

Really, the Bonus isn't calculated on specific bonus amount, but overall character size and growth.

gl, i don't think jon could have set it up that way due to the fact that he doesn't know who the top spot will be nor does he have any method for back tracking and seeing what bonus they had over the life of their character.

with that in mind, he likely had to just pick a number and base it on that.

also, if it was figured on the bonus the top spot gets, when someone new takes over that would change the bonus amount? it would also have to be tracking everyones bonuses throughout the life of all characters and storing it as it doesn't know who will be in the top in the future.

I hope this explains a little better how I tohught it worked.

When you make a new Bonus Character, the game takes a look at the current Top MPR charcater. It looks at this characters past history (from the same figures stored in the history graphs), and from that information (which includes the exact variable bonuses that character had over it's lifetime, as they form the characters past growth) plots where it expects that character to be in 6 months time.

It then calculates an appropriate Bonus so that a new character would get to 95% of the predicted MPR with equivalent BA expenditure.

This is probably not generated at each new character generation, but at stock times, as evident by the numerous times it's been recalibrated.

But I'm probably off on this! :P

The problem still comes to when you have someone with almost 7 mil score fighting and stalemating on purpose to someone with less than 2 mil score to affect basically everyone in the game and effecting the challenge bonus of everyone to lower their chances of catching you, that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

No more a problem than:
SG that is still overpowered.
Stat Draining Items still killing Tanks in 1-2 shots.
Saving 1600 BA and transferring them around to others (I don't think the game was designed to be like that other than your OWN personal 1600 BA).
People want to run a 1-2 man fight list to maximize their CB, then that is their option. It is also an option to lower your score to prevent someone from killing your own bonuses (clan/CB).
Last but least, overall Activity in the game has really soured. (I am on the edge of leaving this game myself).