PvP - grinding allegiance with looses

I think it's closer to 10-12 losses per win if you ask me, but yea loss farming is definitely a sign that the system is broken.

The theory behind it is that losing fast multiple times garners more experience than a long battle that you win. If we say a loss is 1/10 of a win, that means as long as you can lose 11 times before you can win once and lose once actually trying (if SBMM were working properly and Elo system will get you matches where your odds of winning are 50%), the loss farming is more time efficient than actually trying. The secondary benefit is that losing intentionally lowers your match making rank (MMR) making future matches easier. Combine the two and it makes loss farming a very powerful tool to average players in a system that heavily favors the highly skilled and win streaks.

The real challenge is that Rare can't reward less allegiance for a loss, they already listened to the community and bumped loss allegiance in the last update. If they rolled that back there would be a mass exodus from the game mode. Which is bad, because SBMM systems only work when there is a large population and everyone can be matched with someone relatively close to their MMR. A friend of mine with a dual degree in Digital User Experience and Digital Design who is a UX researcher at a major digital firm once told me, "if you punish players for participating in an activity you don't intend they'll resent you, but if you reward players for participating in an activity you do intend they'll love you." The answer isn't to punish loss farming, it's to reward good faith PVP participation.

There have been many threads discussing how to best reward good faith PVP and IMO these are the two best ideas:

• Daily/weekly/monthly deeds that reward hourglass activities like first win and multiple wins (5/10/20). This will encourage people to participate in good faith PVP inside of hourglass.
• Daily/weekly/monthly deeds that reward hourglass participation, i.e. 5/10/15/20 matches. This will increase player participation in general, which raises the player pool which will increase the odds of people finding fair matches.
• Rewarding more allegiance for a loss, suggestions range from 1/4 of a win to equal to a wins worth of allegiance. This will respect the players' time investment so that players don't feel punished when the lose those 20-60 minute battles.
• Rewarding PVP activities such as cannonball hits, masts dropped, holes repaired and food eaten by opposing crew, each up to 5 times per match to encourage good faith PVP activities whiles discouraging farming these activities.

There is a lot of room for improvement, keep the ideas coming!

I know that the third point there is quite controversial. If you reward more allegiance for a loss, you will see more loss farmers and more curses. This is sadly true in the short term, but in the long term it will be healthy for the game mode. Players feel punished when losing long battles. They get 1/10 of a win's allegiance for actually putting up a good fight for 60+ minutes. Many players have voiced this opinion and left the game mode because they just don't feel their good faith participation is rewarded proportionally to their time invested. We need to encourage good faith participants to return to the game mode so that SBMM works, and for those people it means rewarding even more allegiance for a loss.

I've not encountered a single person that doesn't agree hourglass thrives with more pirates participating in it. The number of players who left for this reason is not insignificant, and if letting some of the casuals who want to loss farm the curses do so to make the game mode more enjoyable for good faith participants, well, that's a compromise I'm willing to make. If we don't bring those good faith participants back then hourglass will slowly decay until it reaches the 3% player time spent that arena had when it was shut down. Anyone who likes PVP or wants to participate in hourglass even only occasionally should not want that to happen.

@steppingfish438 said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

@lordqulex I agree. It's too dang stressful. I just want the curse and enjoy the mode. But at this stage I just want the curse then I'm going back to sinking pvers

Here's the problem: it takes me 60 seconds to grab planks from the barrels, lower the sail, raise the anchor, pull sups from my barrels, load my cannons, drop hourglass, and drop map. It just took me 2 minutes to find a match (dive time + tunnel time). Sailing out of bounds takes a little under 4 minutes, so 6m minimum to get a loss' allegiance.

The major complaint is that in even matches, which an Elo based SBMM system will try to get you, pirates are complaining about matches taking 60-120 minutes! I could lose 9-18 matches in that time, and as we've already established losing is not 1/18 of a win, so losing many times quickly is much more efficient that losing once in a long time. That is why loss farming is happening: because fair matches don't reward the loser for their time as much as loss farming. That is the problem that needs to be fixed!

The easy solution is to just reward much, much more allegiance for a loss. The better solution is for loss reward to scale up with time to the allegiance of a win. The obvious observation is both of those solutions can be cheesed to farm allegiance. And that is the game designer's dilemma: you cannot create a system that cannot be exploited in one way or another by bad faith participants. It simply can't be done, not in a game like this. Stop trying!!

Simply reward pirate's time investment, reward pirate's good faith PVP, let the PVP haters cheese the system to get their curses and get out as quickly as possible so the rest of us can enjoy the matches we're signing up for on demand PVP to get!

I mostly Solo sloop and most of the last few matches I took part in lately have dragged on longer then 30 minutes (fighting better or equally skilled players, people that try to play keep away for 20 minutes before fighting, and getting 3rd partyed) and by the time I finish for the day I've only got 2 or 3 matches done. So I can see the appeal for loss farming when comes to time they can comment to the HG especially if the XP you get for losing a 30+ minutes is the same a 3 minute match, not to mention the other factors that could kill your PVP mood or slow down progress like losing a win streak to a bigger ship that isn't even doing the HG the moment you finished a matched.

@adara-haze said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

@bigbadshadowman Exactly this. If you have 5 matches and your winrate is around 50% you would win 2, loose 2 and loose one more due to third party. If all of these took half an hour (and you never know how long the battle will take)... you would actually get as much allegiance with just farming looses as fast as possible in this time... and maybe even more. And this is guaranteed, no risk, no stress allegiance you can farm while watching something.
This is my problem with it. It should give less if you sink instantly and proportionally more the longer the battle goes on.

I agree but only so far... We already see loss farming and dice rolling. I encountered ship this morning whose name was "Idle Doing Housework." I'm not turning down a free sink, but man, people really don't want to participate in this play mode... Putting the curses behind PVP is really bringing out the worst in people, and my concern is that if there were a linear relationship between match length and allegiance gain, people would just sail around the biggest island in the bubble gaining allegiance. Thankfully I think Rare may be convinced to label that "trolling" and be banable, until/unless two like minded people find each other and decide to fish for three hours collecting allegiance...

I actually detest loss farming, but unfortunately hourglass is the perfect environment to foster that behavior. It's a system with a match making rank that rewards consecutive wins. So it is hugely beneficial to lose repeatedly until you can turn in champion streaks with ease. But that is not unique to this game, it is a problem in any game with MMRs—and rewards. Games like DoTA have an MMR, but there is no advantage to tanking because there is no benefit for winning. The way to eradicate loss farming is equalize the allegiance gains for wins and losses. It's a terrible solution, but it works. The standard objection is that doing so would encourage more loss farming, which is only true for a fraction of the loss farmers:

Some of the loss farmers are farming losses because they just don't want to put forth the effort/accept the stress of PVP to earn the curses. That group doesn't matter because they're going to loss farm their curses no matter what changes are made to the system. It will just give them the curses faster and get them out of the game mode faster, which again doesn't matter because they're not good faith participants in the game mode anyway. It doesn't devalue the curses because the curses already hold no value; between the streamers that are level 2000, the players who bought levels off Ebay from China, the cheaters, and the loss farmers that already have the curses, when you encounter a curse on the seas there is absolutely no way to tell what their skill level is. All you see is a shiny/boney pirate and gamble on whether to engage or not. I've already seen more than one in adventure mode that runs away from PVP. 🤣🤣🤣

The other group of loss farmers are the protestors/MMR tankers. The protestors would stop loss farming because now they are rewarded equally as the winners for their good faith PVP (minus the streak bonus of course), so boom, that group becomes good faith PVP participants. The MMR tankers now have less of a reason to tank their MMR: losing hard fought battles isn't punished as you get the same reward the winner gets. Everyone is equally rewarded for a hard fought battle whether it lasts 30 or 120 minutes. It of course wouldn't stop all tanking, there are still insecure pirates that like to thump bunnies to stroke their ego, but trollers gonna troll and we're not gonna stop it.

Rewarding the same allegiance for as loss as a win is a terrible idea, but it's the only idea that converts a healthy contingent of loss farmers into good faith PVP participants. Unless someone here can give me a better way to convince people to stop farming losses. (And no, awarding no allegiance for a loss is not the answer; it would only encourage more people to tank their MMR to get easy wins.)

@sweetsandman said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

IMO, you might as well get some cannon practice in and just don't repair your ship and only bucket or something. It'll end pretty quickly and you won't fully be that guy.

But...do what you want...Games are supposed to be fun...I can't imagine loss farming this stuff...like...it's not supposed to be a job...it's a game

Many years ago in WOW Alterac Valley had an issue where one side always won (it was a map issue). The other side didn't even bother to leave the starting cave, we are talking 40 players, just waiting to lose. There was even an addon to play trivia while they waited.

Players tend to make the best of bad situations.

@lem0n-curry said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

@lordqulex said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

[ ... ] Rewarding the same allegiance for as loss as a win is a terrible idea, but it's the only idea that converts a healthy contingent of loss farmers into good faith PVP participants. Unless someone here can give me a better way to convince people to stop farming losses. (And no, awarding no allegiance for a loss is not the answer; it would only encourage more people to tank their MMR to get easy wins.)

Really ? People would do less loss farming if losses would get more allegianace award ? Not sure what your logic is there, only that loss farmers would reach level 100 quicker and may stop then.

You argue again and again that some people don't want to have longer fights and rather have quick way of getting a small bit of allegiance. With your proposal the gain will even be more, why would they put the effort in to have an actual PvP fight ?
Why would people who don't particular like this kind of PvP mode and maybe aren't very good at it but currently do their best and might win some fights, try to win if the reward at the end of the fight is the same ?

I believe it is @jolly-ol-yep, @wolfmanbush, and @dragotech123 in another thread that have been discussing the reasons why people loss farm and what we can do about it. They may be able to help me recall this a little better, below is a summary of our observations and our conclusions. Do your best to read this in the voice of David Attenborough or Ze Frank, your choice.

• The "bored" loss farmer. Maybe they don't like the stress of PVP. Maybe they find it boring. Maybe they're just lazy and just don't want to put in the effort and would rather listen to music or watch a movie while earning allegiance. I encountered this type of loss farming who named their boat "AFK Doing Housework." They will never ever be good faith PVP participants so questioning their motives and trying to convert them is futile. Admittedly this is the loss farmer that would benefit the most from increasing allegiance gains from losses; they will get the curse they want and never look at hourglass again. Increasing allegiance gains for this type of loss farmer doesn't matter because they're going to lose their way up to the curse whether we increase it or not.
• The "troll" loss farmer. They probably already have the curses, or don't care about it. They are the ship you meet that sails around in circles baiting you to quit out of frustration. They're not in it for the curses, they're in it for the memes. They just want to waste your time because they think you're a PVP sweat and they want to ruin your hourglass experience just like you ruined their PVE experience. They see hourglass as a path to revenge and frankly don't really give two mangos about the curses. Increasing the allegiance gains for this type of loss farmer doesn't matter because they're not in it for the allegiance.
• The "protest" loss farmer. They feel the system is broken because they've spent hours in a single match (sometimes up to three hours!), hard fought and trying their best to get a pittance of allegiance after losing. They don't feel like their time commitment is being respected and are loss forming as a form of peaceful protest. They believe that streak bonuses should be the only reward for winning and there should be an even amount of basal allegiance just for playing so that every pirate's investment is treated equally regardless of skill. Increasing the allegiance gains for this type of loss farmer will get them to participate as good faith PVP participants in hourglass which should be the developer's goal.
• The "beardy" loss farmer. Cold and calculating, the beardy loss farmer has crunched the numbers and is loss farming with a purpose. They understand that in an Elo-like skill based match making system they can squeeze out allegiance efficiency by intentionally tanking their MMR. By grouping their losses in farming runs, they drop their MMR to make future matches easier, resulting in later grouping their wins together to earn the streak bonus. They have done the math and understand that losing 20 times in an hour earns more allegiance than winning or losing once in that hour. They are loss farming only for the mechanical advantage. Increasing the allegiance gains for this type of loss farmer will significantly reduce the advantage that they garner from loss farming, making it more efficient to be a good faith PVP participant than to waste time farming losses.

Essentially, for every reason to loss farm increasing the allegiance gains from losing either doesn't matter at all to them, or will turn them into good faith PVP participants. Bored loss farmers will quit when they get the curse, increasing the proportion of good faith PVP'ers in the player pool, which is good for hourglass. Protest and beardy loss farmers will become good faith PVP participants in the player pool, which is good for hourglass. Trolls gonna troll, suck it up this will happen every once is a while...

Increasing allegiance gains from losses will increase the odds of being matched with an equally skilled, good faith PVP'er, which ultimately is what good faith PVP'ers want when they vote on the hourglass. It's win/win.

Essentially, there are two types of pirates. Those that will continue to play hourglass after they obtain the curses, and those that will not. Of those that will not, some of them are loss farming. The faster we get them out of the queue, the faster we all get paired with equally skilled, good faith PVP participants. Which is what we're voting on hourglass to find in the first place!

@dragotech123 said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

• Losers would not be discouraged - Some players are still in the learning process and they still can't win very often, so this would alleviate the frustration of giving a good performance but still sinking.

This is the biggest point and should be the headline. We need to encourage good faith PVP participants of all skill to stay in hourglass. Those first few matches, before your MMR is determined, can be absolutely demoralizing for new players. If they gained like 20 levels in their first 10 matches, they would not feel so worthless for losing. They'd feel rewarded for losing and keep playing.

@lem0n-curry said in PvP - grinding allegiance with looses:

@lordqulex

"Beardy" loss farmers won't still lose purposely for a few matches because then they will get easier fights ? I wouldn't expect them to turn into good faith PvP participants - they might want those easy wins for the milestones.

"Protest" loss farmers become loss farmers because they spending hours & hours ? I think those long stretched fights are far between; sure they'll happen but their sparsity shouldn't be used to justify such a big change.

There will be an increase in loss farmers, people who don't partake in it now because they lack the confidence of winning enough to get the curses or don't want to spend a long time gaining allegiance will put up the Hour glass and not become a good faith PvP participant.
There will also be people who currently try to win but are mostly unsuccessful that will join the loss farmers - why spend 10 minutes fighting for the same reward as you get when you sail to the edge of the circle and sink.
People who hate the supplies gathering and just start a fight, perhaps fire some of their starting cannonballs and then give up.

You can make up the names for these types if you like.

I hate supply gathering before joining fights. I've rarely lost a match due to supplies, that's how wide the skill gap is in both directions. It's just not worth the gold frankly. If I can't beat you with default supplies, I may as well go on to the next match. It's more efficient.

I am a bored/beardy loss farmer. I can idly farm losses during meetings to drop my MMR so when I play after my kids are in bed I get easy matches. Turned in 8 wins yesterday, gained a half dozen levels, it was great. If winning wasn't so much better than losing, I'd do something much more entertaining while on work calls. Currently back into No Man's Sky. I'd be playing my switch instead of farming losses.

Am I the typical loss farmer? Probably not. But I assure you [pokes myself in the tummy to be sure] we do exist. If losing offered more allegiance, it throws off the equation. Turning in a 4 streak gives less allegiance than a win but probably close to 8 losses. If losing give me half the allegiance of a win, then two losses give the allegiance of turning in a 4 streak, reducing the mathematical advantage to artificially manufacture streaks by back-stacking wins via loss-tanking your MMR.

As I mentioned above, yes, it would give the curses to other styles of loss farmer faster. But no good faith hourglass participant should want any variety of loss farmer in the queue. People already bought the curse from China on Ebay, or loss farmed it, or cheesed it. It hold no intrinsic value whatsoever. It does not "tells other players that these pirates have suffered through the hellish War of the Sea of Thieves and managed to triumph a reputable champion among their ranks, might have a lot of know-how to guide newer faces on the Sea of Thieves, or make inexperienced/weaker crews tremble and panic at the sight of them." It's an utter roll of the dice. I've seen cursed pirates run from PVP in adventure mode. The curses mean nothing.

The only reasonable argument I've heard not to do this is all childish gatekeeping of the curses for ignoble reasons. Anyone who wants to participate in on demand PVP wants to meet other people who want to participate in on demand PVP, not loss farmers. Kick the loss farmers out of the play mode by just giving them the curses so we can move on to shooting each other with cannons and stuff.