DEATH BANKS
Originally, I thought “What if score rolled over between useful action cycles?” but that’s clearly abusable and would just solve the issue of “People leave lobbies” as getting the full reward requires sitting out multiple UA cycles until the roll-over runs out.
Still, this is one of the biggest issues: It takes 30 minutes of very anti-fun flying that hurts both the player and their opponent’s experience and it’d solve that quite well.
How can we avoid it being abused?
It’s simple.
When you gain score, you are REWARDED like you currently are. Logarithmic function with a maximum of 92% at 1050 for 15 minutes’ survival and landing.
However, if you exceed 1050 score in a 15 minute cycle you start being rewarded a “death bank” for individual excess actions. This means you accumulate silver lions you will never earn or otherwise “take home.”
Instead, it’s used to pay for spawning new planes and it has no maximum cap and does not expire within the match.
So! You spawn in. You see an A point. You sneak in through the clouds and dive down skillfully on a train of enemies and get four kills in rapid succession. You are awarded for ~2.5 of those kills (1050 cap), while the overflow fourth kill adds ~5500 silver lions to your death bank at the rank IV/V (and whatever you get for rank VI/VII/VIII planes in ARB for severe damage & kill ). Lingering and winning the air superiority point earns you another 5500 silver lions (fully capping a point gives you same score as a kill, so same SL makes sense)
This means lobby-shopping is now punished as you lose your accumulated death bank. You are still encouraged to survive the full 15 minutes and land to receive your REWARD, but you are not discouraged (in fact: you’re encouraged to over-perform) to stay fighting and take risks. Worst case, your death bank goes down by ~15K SL (if negative, you pay your actual balance) and you don’t receive your full reward. Best case, your death bank gets another 5500 SL allowing you to take even more risks, which makes the lobby more engaging and fun for everyone, which encourages people to possibly buy cool new planes for playing them in sim.
I’ve no idea what’s an equivalent SL quantity for base bombing or ground targets we could yoink from ARB. We could go with ~5500 (at rank IV/V) for a full base kill excess of the 1050 maximum (only base kills - not bomb damage to avoid airfield farming), and ~500 SL for each ground target destroyed. A.I bombers/survey planes/attackers could go for ~1250 sl/kill IF done after reaching the 1050 score maximum.
- Yes
- No