After looking at some peoples screen shots it is apparent that you can get 625 PP for a max ph against a max ph rumble rival no matter your rank. In the old system rank gave you extra Bp if you were ranked higher. Why did you get rid of this feature Midoki? You are killing the competitiveness of your own game.... So disgusting for you not to reward people for rank pushing... What is the purpose of your game? Upgrade a building? Or be the best pirate in the seas.... If anyone spends money on gems to increase rank at this point let me be the first to tell you that your a fool....
The new Plunder Points offers highest rewards for the most difficult bases (maxed HP buildings/defences) - PR is irrelevant to difficulty of attack. Matchmaking will offer you bases that are closest to your PR - so if all maxed bases are high, you will need to be high too! 'Streaks' are intended to encourage players to 'push' so together these COULD achieve the result you want. Obviously if enough players 'game the system' to stay low, this won't happen - but that is hardly Midoki's fault!
A rushed PH9 with all lv 1 defenses will still give you the same points as a PH9 with a completely maxed island. I do agree this is silly, a higher ranked opponent should give you more points, since in theory their base should be stronger if they're at a higher rank.
A lot of people have reduced their rank, but the ones still up high still should generally be higher level bases, nowso more than ever, since it will consist more of people that don't really need the free chests to progress anymore. And when matchups get tweaked so we can't abuse the system anymore, the rest of the high level bases will probably start rising again as well.
Matchups have been tweaked today (in maintenances) - so no real advantage to dropping rank anymore (except for farming of course!)
I am beyond positive Midoki has seen the complaints about issues with lack of incentives for higher rank, and is working to fix it. They've made some small adjustments already to try and help with it, and I am sure its one of the things they're trying their best to do. Things take time, and they've been making small steps towards it. For example, map ports and strongholds on the Western Seas (old map) had their PR significantly increased, the strongholds going up to as high as 800! That is a bump to PR for high level players that care about it. And the new ones on the new map also have high PR. This both makes rank dropping harder (you have to use players instead of an easy port unless you've saved the very first ports from when you just started), as well as puts a lot more PR into the system to help put new PR in that dropping has been siphoning out. Plunder Points were obviously rushed out in an introductory stage, just meant to make minis useless so long term spending players were no longer upset. They will surely watch how things unfold over the next couple weeks and adjust things to further balance the game, and one of those adjustments will probably be to let higher rank players get more points given they have to fight harder bases. The first iteration of any system will rarely be perfect, but its been a big step in the right direction (removing minis), and its evolution will hopefully address the rest of the issues it has brought.
