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Ok, so the loss-induced propensity to bring big ships, friends and pile on the winning side has cast a shadow over the patrol missions. BR limits will help and maybe even fix it? The intention of the patrol missions is that players should feel free to bring an un-modded and cheap ship, do as best they can, sink but get enough rewards to make them not care about their loss. The big groups of big ships piling on makes it hard for smaller ships to do enough damage to farm rewards, at least enough to make the experience equally frustrating to a normal gank anywhere in the OW. Sandboxers love to gank. They will tell you they love their freedom, role-playing, war-game or “playing it smart”, but they simply love to gank. Even reasonable guys are quickly turned to the dark side when the lizard brain kicks in and tries to avoid loss at all cost, yes, even to the point of having less fun. There may be something we can do to counteract this, or give the lizard brain something else to knee-jerk to. We’ve talked about this loosely in the past but it’s never been tried: BR based multipliers. We could have variable multipliers applied to xp, cash, marks, damage or all of them but for the purpose of patrol missions I guess most players are grinding the damage thresholds. The idea is to let the gankee get something from it while at the same time making ganking a truly inefficient way of farming rewards. Let’s start with an example where one ship is ganked by three ships and two late joiners come in to, um, secure the win. As it is today all damage is logged for all ships and rewards are based upon said logged damage. In my illustration the B-C-D gankers know they will have to share the damage but one of them is getting the kill rewards and it will be over quickly enough for them to go find a new victim. The victim will struggle to do enough damage to make it feel worth it, he will soon lose the ship, get sent back to port to buy a new ship, guns and repairs. Let’s say we put a tag on all incoming damage. Ship A would have damage tags from ships B, C and D. The gankers would only have damage tag from ship A. Then we could make damage or reward multipliers based on those tags: A multiplier: sum(BR-B, BR-C, BR-D)/BR-A = 450/200 = 2.25 B, C and D multiplier: sum(BRtags)/BR-B = 200/150 = 1.33 Notice how the gankers are even being rewarded for ganking in lower BR ships than their victim. It’s even possible to actively pulverize the gankers rewards by using the tags to indentify the gank, but it would get more complicated and I suspect it’s enough to give the victim a consolation price. The late joiners, though inside the battle instance, don’t factor in as they didn’t get close enough to put a damage tag on the victim. If they did get some damage in they would get precious little for it while bolstering the victim’s multiplier: 1050/200 = 5.25. If you want to enjoy your freedom and gank the shit out of people like a true sandboxer you can go ahead until blue in the face, but you will let the victim run off with all the rewards. If you are motivated by rewards you’ll have a strong tendency to join the outnumbered side to get damage done and farm those damage tags.