Discussion: Partnering issues for high-level Attack mode

Opening up the subreddit with a discussion of the issues finding a partner for Attack mode.

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At present, once you reach the maximum rank of 5000 it can be a long wait before someone decides to join you in 2-player Attack mode (where you assault a ship's defense platforms for credits and tech points). Reasons (besides off-peak times, etc.) include:

- Assisting in Attack mode gives a flat reward of 22 bro points (11 in some cases). This is only slightly better than assisting with most Story levels, which are usually over much faster and also count towards the daily Bro tasks. Even with the maximum 22, you can get as few as 8 if only one generator is broken open.

- The amount of tech points collectable from exploding generators is a few hundred at most, compared with tens of thousands for the mission starter. Same with the credits.

- The Attack Help screen displays the potential partner's rank, and seeing 5000 will put off anyone who is the least bit concerned about the difficulty.

- Anyone even close to the maximum amount of collectable tech points has survived multiple attacks and is therefore likely has an average Heroic or better platform. After the last patch Heroic can indicate a potentially extreme difficulty, let alone Legendary.

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So as a result of all this, the optimal approach for rank 5000 players to amass the millions of required tech points is to choose only Normal level opponents (Easy is rare), which seem to consistently have about one third of the maximum collectable tech points. Each tech upgrade from level 24 to 30 therefore requires about 20-30 wholly successful Attacks, and the wait for a partner for each is still a LOT of retries on average. This pushes the limits of what's possible for a casual gamer, especially when a lot of your winnings can be stolen if you don't immediately spend them. Even the "whales" spending huge amounts on the game can't accelerate this very much, because you can't easily exchange crystals for tech points, and bro points are needed for so much else.

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Suggestions to alleviate this (if the developers indeed have any interest in doing so):

- Less information on the Attack Help screen, discouraging people from screening out challenging help requests.

- Partners receive a cut of the mission profits, e.g. 20-50% of the tech points (credits are less important) from the main reward.

- Bro points are awarded on a sliding scale of difficulty, not just 11 and 22. (They can afford to be much greater for Heroic and up as the chances of taking down all three generators are much smaller, or it can be a more granular progression based on platform strength.)

- Attack Help counts towards Bro tasks for partners.

- Rewards stated at the outset are guaranteed rather than pro rata.

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Comments?