My zone was level 14 and had 4160 points. By just killing one fnix rival tank (lvl4) the whole area went down to level 1 and 0 points. That makes no sense, cause you are an even greater threat to those robots in that zone by killing a that high value target of them. Also if you kill other types of rivals the zone doesn’t reset to zero, it gets lowered by a good amount but not totally down to zero.
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I agree. I don’t really like this System.
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I plan on talking about this in a video, but as always i kinda like to share my insight on the forums here before i go gung ho on a video.
If you want to grind a regions level, DO NOT kill the first rival spawned, leave it. Let it hit max and still ignore it. Every two hours you can respawn a new rival to hunt and farm, and you can keep that initial machine to keep your regions level intact. It’s a little clunky, and requires some self control, but is greatly beneficial to getting reliable rival spawns/high region levels etc. 
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Doesnt work. Cause the rival I killed wasnt the first rival that spawned in that zone, that one is still alive. Most time I only hunt for tanks and harvesters, the other types only get killed when they cross my way and anoy me 
Hunters only try to flank you and they (fnix) seem to only use flechette weapons now, which tbh pisses me off. Also they only drop that damn .44 ammo I really dont need at all. I dont know why the devs had to change the hit rate with that flechette gun, it was great before. You got killed when you didnt move, but if you moved you rarely got hit at all, so you had to run around constantly. Now even with running around you often get that sticky thing on you.
I think I got a clue how it works. By killing robots you gain “score” an military runner gives as an example 10 points. As higher the score in a zone is as higher the chance a rival spawns. Also the rivals have “experience points”. From 0 up to 2304 points.
Now its just some kind a formular I didnt figure out yet. When you kill a rival than that rivals “experience” lowers the score of that rivals zone. Now it would make sense that there are 2 factors invovled in that formular. One for the type of rival (runner, hunter, harvester, tank) and one for his class (prototype, military, fnix).
So the formular could be: new zone score = old zone score - (type * class * rivals experience)
so by killing an low experienced prototype runner rival that zone gets lowered by a tiny amount, but killing a fully experienced (lvl4) fnix tank your zone score gets lowered by a huge amount.
Imo the numbers could be something like
runner = 0.5
hunter = 0.75
havester = 1
tank = 1.25
protoype = 0.5
military = 1
fnix = 1.5
Killing a 200 exp (lvl1) prototype runner rival would result in: 0.5 * 0.5 * 200 = 50 points
Killing a 2304 exp (lvl4) fnix tank rival would result in: 1.25 * 1.5 * 2304 = 4320 points
Numbers are only an example but would explain how the system could work and also explains why “harmless rivals” only lower the zone score by tiny amounts, but killing that lvl4 fnix “reseted” my zone back to 0.
Now to figure out the math we basicly only need to kill rivals and write down the numbers… but I am to lazy to do so
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Just to follow up on the video i ahd talked about; here it is!
If you aren’t interested in the farming rivals strat i came up with check out the part at 9:10 in the video, i cover my method to retaining my region score and prove some theories in that section.
Also great work doing some number crunching there @LtAnders ! If only that info was more readily available, maybe if you take part in the dev stream tomorrow you can ask about that and see what their response is
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Simply put, the point of this system working this way is because rival spawns are tied to region level. If you made region level stay the same or increase based on killing rivals, you’d constantly get new rivals.
If you want a head-canon explanation; you killing robots in an area increases your threat level until the robots build up a substantial enough counter-threat to try and take you down. When you kill said rival, the robots have to regroup - making a bigger, tougher robot doesn’t happen for free.
But, in all seriousness, this is a game balance thing more than anything else.
Simply put, thats why people cheating the system right now. Working like intended you would say
I think a different system would make more sense, see my other post about a time system.
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The system currently doesn’t have a cheat. There’s a cooldown timer. If you choose to do your rival spawning via suicide spam, then cool; I choose to get my equipment by murdering other things, which also drop equipment.
So… Yeah. System’s working as intended. Not to mention, adding a minimum region level (say, 1000~) to the suicide spawning of rivals would fix that supposed exploit very easily.
There’s already a time system in place. If you’re suggesting that rivals just periodically respawn, it would eliminate any drive to participate in the region to begin with, and remove the ‘they’re tied to your actions’ flavor the current system has.
Aeoleone what are you talking about? Noone said anything about spawning a rival by letting him kill you over and over again. Noone is talking about getting rivals spawned within the respawn timer.
Those 2 things you mentioned have absolutly nothing to do with the topic. So again what is your point?
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Then what’s your complaint, exactly? Or were you just making things up with your comment referencing people cheating the system?
Btw. that you can spawn a rival by letting him kill you is not cheating, the devs even explained that system is working like intended in their livestream a few times already.
I think no one here is doubting this.