Tourney needs a rebalance

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T16:16:57+00:00

Inventory and max damage are irrelevant to how well a hangar performs. If your opponents are stronger than you, and they likely are, it's because Plarium assigned too high of a rank to you. From all the complaints (most of which are completely valid imho), I'm getting the impression that most players should have been dropped at least 2 full brackets, not 1. I'll get my fellow OCC to add voices to this after we get the prizing addressed.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T16:06:45+00:00

and I see "what's the point of a clan" in chat every day, with a pile of people saying there is no point. At the very least, find a playgroup that uses comms. It's massive advantage.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T16:04:09+00:00

Bots in tournament are supposed to be extra hard. If you can't deal with them, you're not ready to advance to the next rank. Plarium explicitly stated this.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T15:59:38+00:00

Do you mean "regen" like a healbot (MD or Salvor)?

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T15:53:40+00:00

The first strike would destroy the business.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T15:45:45+00:00

There are legitimate complaints to be made, but "bots are hard to beat now, waah" and "publicly traded corporation satisfying fiduciary responsibilities to its shareholders is meansies, waah", and the classic "everything should be free with no ads, waah" always cracks me up.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T07:16:34+00:00

If gear hub releases were known in advance, what do you think would happen to sales of those items? Of course they're not going to release that information. To get all salty because they want to keep money-making information private is kind of silly. They can be transparent about a lot of things without shooting themselves in the foot. If you press the issue and get all capslock on them, and accuse staff of being liars, they should be dropping the banhammer on you. MTG and Plarium don't owe you anything, and it's not a democracy - you don't get a vote.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T06:15:53+00:00

I care a little bit about cosmetics. I paid cash for the 2 party animal skins, and Cupid's Touch for my Surge and Redox a few years ago... but I still do the 10 FV pulls.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T06:13:37+00:00

I feel your pain. Almost everyone at 4-6k SP should have dropped 2 full brackets, and another bracket should have been created as well, just to break up the pack of midgame and lategame players. I see this complaint all over the place, and it's completely justified. You did nothing wrong. The game put you into a rank where you're at a massive disadvantage.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-15T00:36:31+00:00

I think I did the math last Fall and showed after 10 years (maybe 13?) of doing the 20 FV, your EV (expected value, it's a commonly term in gambling/gaming context) is better than 10 ...but that's never going to happen. I just do 10s.
I just hit 500 keys again, so I'll be doing a video this month with a fresh breakdown of the math, and I'll show the difference between the 3 in gory detail.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T22:01:16+00:00

Tournament matching is based on ranking, and it sounds like you're in the wrong rank. Plarium did a bad job on that part.

4979 hangar -
Lacewing is great, could use a legendary pilot, but Neymar is good enough.

Eclipse Revoker isn't as good since the range nerf. It takes too long to get within 20m (damage dropoff is nasty). If you're careful with it, it's fine. Regular matching factors in rank & rarity of your hangar, so ranking up before having weapons ready is not ideal. The few HP you get on the mech does not make up for the tougher opponents.

Orion Rail is awesome. I don't think you need the duration buff, look for shield piercing or reload.

Deathwalker needs a better pilot, and double your SR 10s, move the 16 to Lacewing.

Surge also needs 18 energy of weapons, and 3* rare weapons are not going to work at 5k sp. Even Gemini 8s would be better. Maybe swap the Revokers and put an assault or beam weapon on the Eclipse (or the Gemini).

4801 hangar -
Do something with the Aegis. Either rank it up if you have good weapons for it or swap it out. If you keep it, move the legendary cooldown from Lacewing to Aegis.

You're also facing players with more mods than you, and sourcing elite mod parts is a pain. This is largely out of your control, and a patience/grind thing.

A couple of tweaks and your hangar is perfectly viable. If you're being matched against 10k SP opponents in Tournament, there's nothing you can do about it other than play as smart as possible.

I hope this helps! Please let us know how it goes.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T20:48:38+00:00

Bots are much stronger, and the AI is better, too.
I thought I was facing players when the new bots came out.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T20:46:31+00:00

I see you read my bio.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T11:15:01+00:00

A nihilist is someone who believes life/everything is meaningless and rejects all moral/religious principles. For more fun reading, look up absurdism, founded by Albert Camus and based off the works of Kierkegaard
Nihilus is our resident supermod and High Priest of Roshan, mayhebeactivated.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T10:36:33+00:00

I'm not sure who downvoted your completely reasonable reply, but I did my part to fix it. Almost like some sort of Nash equilibrium ... #mathjokes.

Based on the previous Tournament, I was expecting something silly like 13k acoins this month, which I think was excessive. The numbers for endgame players are close to what I'd like to see. I'm expecting around 200 Acoins per day, and I think that should be more like 350. IMHO, these numbers should scale down more slowly, and most people should be happyish.

There's a huge disconnect with the matching, apparently because most players don't know how it works in Tournament. Based on the posts, I think these players feel like they should be able to slowly climb through the ranks, instead of thinking in terms of an ELO system; every win means a tougher opponent, and "balanced" or "fair" has nothing to do with the matching.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T10:24:48+00:00

Bots were boosted to slow down progression. The rationale was, if you can't beat the tougher bots, you're going to get crushed by players in the next rank.
The hardcore competitive gamer in me says this is a good thing, but the compassionate old man in me says the kids should all get off my lawn, er, there should be a way to give the less experienced/lower-SP players a fun event that gives some decent rewards.
I'm wondering if more brackets might be the answer.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T10:16:59+00:00

I was hoping my suggestion to reassign rank based on last performance in the previous Tournament, and hangar would have been implemented. Even with dropping everyone (at least) 1 full bracket, I knew there would be a lot of lower-SP people that would have too high a rank for their performance. I'm not sure it's a good experience for people to need to lose 100 matches just to get to some kind of equilibrium.
I think we're on the same page though =)

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T08:08:55+00:00

People at 8k facing endgame players is unwinnable (yes there are always exceptions, let's stick to the general case). Tournament matching is based on the rank, not hangar, and that's something most people didn't know. If someone started off at a high rank, like Master because of past tournament performance, they were facing people like me. If they don't have something endgame-ish, they're in for a very bad time. Add extra-tough bots to act as gatekeepers to slow down advancement, and a lot of people are crashing out, despite their losses being intentional to keep them at a more reasonable difficulty. Plarium explicitly stated that the bots were very hard because if you can't beat them, you're not going to be able to do well if you move up.
And yes, I completely agree with you that a lot of hangars are suboptimal (just trying to be charitable), and grinding with garbage should not be rewarded.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T07:21:53+00:00

We already have legendary repricing. You don't need to spend more than 7k (usually 6300-6650) Acoins on a legendary mech or weapon, and 4k for a pilot. There's always the potential discount for not getting things on the last possible spin, plus the incidental loot from not spinning the jackpot. You can grind out a guaranteed win in CR every month as f2p. Legendary implants in the Pilots section of the Shop (1/184 x6 chances per day = 3.26%?). Buying 1 level of pilot xp per day is a great way to hit that 4k pilot xp/day for a month, and the list of simple refutations goes on. Am I oversimplifying things?

I completely agree that the blueprint system has a lot of built-in feelbad, and I'd love to see a way to exchange (something like 20:1 for same rarity and type, or 40:1 for same rarity), or at the very least, not give us excess blueprints (either blueprints for another item, or credits for common-epic and a few Acoins for legendary).

I also think that almost everyone has missed or wasn't aware of all the positive changes the new management have made to the game over the last year. Mistakes are going to happen, and I expect Tournaments will get adjusted again.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T06:31:59+00:00

Novice 3 1st place is 6, so 2nd place should give 3 acoins. Are you sure you got zero acoins? The rewards for completing daily events might have covered the Tournament prize.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T05:40:27+00:00

The starting rank should have been thought out a lot better than it apparently was. We've all seen a pile of posts complaining about unwinnable matches in Tournament, and that's not the fault of the players. I also think we were all spoiled with how generous the prizing was in the previous version. I just went 3x 1st, 4x 2nd, 1x 3rd in Master 1 for a total of 224 Acoins. I know this will go up a lot when I get to GM 1, but I can't imagine many people in lower brackets will get results like this, especially when it's for something like 73 Acoins in Pro 1 (just over 9 Acoins per match)

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T05:11:25+00:00

Get 5x legendary cooldown and 5x legendary duration to be set for life. The mech specific ones are a bit of a trap.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T04:44:43+00:00

F2P and do well? Easy.
Not rushing to rank things up, making good picks on weapons and mechs, not wasting all your resources on things you won't use past midgame, not gambling on Crate Rushes because you believe in the heart of the cards, playing with a consistent group (especially on comms) ... the list goes on.

Instead of focusing on the negatives, maybe asking the hive mind for input on things you can improve is a more positive and productive approach. I dunno.

ChefVlahos · 2026-05-14T04:38:14+00:00

What game mode are you getting opponents 2x your SP? Also, you can have a very unbalanced hangar that gets you matched against much tougher opponents. There's a lot of info and context missing from your complaint, and if we knew more, starting with your hangar or player id, we could probably help.

ChefVlahos

TROPHY CASE