Only thing I feel would be justifiable to punish is the drop bomb and immediately J out. It does not seem as frequent off-event, but I still see it. Given time to drop the bomb, one can time their UA cycle so that it’s near the tail end of it when they max out the score and minimize penalties from dying like that. At least, flying my PBM it seemed to line up just perfectly for dropping a bomb to then get UA reward little after a minute I did so.
However, this then runs into the issue of punishing legitimate learners who put their planes into flatspins and would rather J out than wait for their slow demise, and people who simply lose track of their attitude and altitude and slam into the ground during a fight.
And then the added problem that with co-ordination you could bypass this punishment still by having a friend in red shoot you down to cut your time-to-score in half.
Thus, punishment meant to punish unsporting behaviour ends up hurting legitimate new players (who we ideally want to on-board as smoothly as possible for continued game mode health) while the abusers can just bypass it with minimal effort.
One thing I’ve been thinking of in terms of rewards remains that flyout cost versus reward potential becomes unsustainable after T4/T5. What if the UA system was changed so that if you die to player kill AND have the score to off-set your spawn-point cost in a full-UA cycle… What if you received full SL capped at spawn cost regardless of time left in your UA cycle while RP gets calculated as it is right now?
It would remove the punishment for engaging in PvP if you don’t want to AFK the remaining 15 minutes, while still rewarding survival and landing.
Rough napkin maths:
- My F4U-4B costs 11k to fly-out.
- I can earn a reward of 18K if I survive 15 minutes and land.
- I max out my score one way or another
- I get shot down before the full cycle ends. Rather than be given the ~18 * 0.8 * N/15 SL, I’m given exactly 11000 even if ~18 * 0.8 * N/15 would be higher than 11k. RP reward is scaled as it is right now.
This should at very least make it so that a positive K/D ratio (or successful bomb runs) won’t bankrupt you even if you earn nothing but scaled RP if you don’t survive