I think freeze your lv at low lv no wrong. i lv 67 and have power 34K (nearly 35K) i still face higher power than me. It is still hard for me to win into top 3. btw i'm just a light spender. most of the power i free play one.

First, addressing the OP's concern: I think level-freezing has the side benefit of making advanced Refine Runes more accessible--I don't think it's the main incentive. I doubt swapping out rewards will reduce the number of level-freezers.

Edit: After reviewing the other comments, I realize now that, while my perspective is valid and relevant, It misses the main intention of the topic--the improvement of a flawed event. So I'd like to suggest that (as some others have) to make it power-based, but there are a couple things I'd like to add:
1) I think it should be modified to compensate for rare event ninja too. A 60k player with only starter ninja cannot win against a 50k player with edo deidara, susanoo itachi and shark kisame.
2) A player can't change their level much in the 5-10 minutes between registration and starting the event--but they can easily change their power and ninja. Therefore, I think that a player's power and ninja should be "locked in" during registration--much like the Matsuri--and the calculation for field selection be based on that.

Secondly, and more importantly...

I disagree with the underlying motivation of this issue. Level-freezing isn't an unfair exploitation, it's a solution to the larger issue of whales creating a gap between pay and free players that renders the latter's gaming experience, an impossible struggle to not be the former's constant victims. Level-freezing makes the game playable for everyone. If you remove, or discourage, this approach to playing, you then make this game less playable, and dimini*s lifespan further.

Additionally, I see all too often players that recklessly level too quickly without regard to the consequences. I've had level 70-75 players with 30k power whine about losing all the time in pvp events and approach me asking me for advice. It's hard to tell them, that they made a mistake and it's too late to fix it, but it's the truth. It's also the reality for most games. You can't just dive in to really difficult areas of a game before you're ready and expect to succeed.

Level-freezing is a timeless, smart technique to give yourself the time you need to prepare. In fact, I whole-heartedly think level-freezing should be encouraged. It takes a considerable amount of discipline, patience and strategy. For example, daily rewards (or perhaps the Jonin medal benefits) should provide the option of getting experience or coins, to make freezing more effective.

Best idea of all, BY FAR, match players based on POWER NOT LEVEL - the cheating sandbaggers won't enjoy themselves quite so much in a fair fight

Sage has gotten worse recently because the lower powers stop playing SWB being they either get booted for low morale and don't get any reward from this event.

Instead of booting out the loser for low morale, you should boot people who always win for having too much morale. Let them get 10 wins and then kick them out with max rewards. Then let us others rack up enough kills. Everything in this game is set up to keep low power people down and benefit the 1%. Just terrible. There is not social justice in this game.

I would disagree with this, I was Six Path at level 55 and vsed people 25 levels higher based on talents unlock(last mystery at level 80). Granted this was 3.0 just before 4.0 was released, which you stated has been around since 3.0 anyway.

i dont like to read so ima just skip to the commenting thing and put my ten cent (see what i did there lol) in,

i think they should decrease the amount of advanced refine runes in the SWB to 7-10 for the top 3 and everyone else in 4-10th gets 5 refines (i think i got 1 or 2 for being in 5th/6th place once? like wtf) and the only thing that has a wide gap between the amount you get and the poisiton youre in being the summon points so the only difference between level freezing and being top 1 every time in SWB is ~2 refine runes therefore decreasing the amount of level freezers since theres no point anymore, im lvl 89 at 70k and im getting my fair share of streaks and streak hunters by 80-100k's but back when i was level 83/84 i was at 60-65k power and constantly getting first since i was fighting 40k and these low level 80s and high 70s with * near 80k power just arent making it fun for anyone in SWB, almost like theres no point in going anymore

It's a way these freemium games die very fast- letting the top dominate to the extent that there is no point anyone else even t* up - sage is one of the worst offenders in this regard, almost no mid to low level players left, next tier of power up will quit soon as well so eventually it will be like before where there are only a handful of whales playing

Is not so hard, top 10 people of each sage field, get HUGE exp as reward, problem solved of freezing level

You want a solution that will benefit OASIS big time and a bit chaotic?

Put all whales in one SWB bracket. Whales vs Whales, if lower spender whales got starched by higher spender whale, they will use credit no mama no jutsu to increase their power. OASIS = profit! $$$

Put mild spender in one SWB bracket. Neck to Neck fight. If you want to place first you need to spend more and probably will transfer you to above tier. You will be forced to become a WHALE.

Put f2p in one SWB bracket. Paradise. No spending needed. Beat the crap out of each other.

based the SWB on VIP level.

Accept this one OASIS. This will benefit you. Specially those cowards on HK server, they are on bracket of level 90 with 120k power ending everyone's streak but they dont fight each other so they can place first on SWB. Whales are monopolizing the rewards on SWB and to avoid it put them all together. Let them drain their cash to try and beat each other.

most evil suggestion but make sense.

Problems:

1. Freezing does have negatives. If nothing else, you are missing coin from fox, which is used in treasure, 8 gate, donation into wheel spin into coupon. And depending on how hard you freeze, potentially other things like jin rewards, daily quest rewards etc. Generally, the pro is greater than the con, but you do have to sacrifice something. And there is potential for con to outweigh the pro, see #2

2. Freezing creates horrible game experience for newer players. If they don't freeze, they will not win on their way growing up. If they do freeze, they will still lose to player who have frozen longer. So they will lose all the time either way. For server cluster that are relatively new or small, this might not be a problem. But for somewhat older, growing clusters, this could be a problem. Fact of the matter is, there are only 9 "winners" between all ptw and freezers for a partciular bracket in a specific cluster. More than 9 people freezing means someone will lose, and that tend to be the "fresh meat".

Proposed solutions:

1. Nerf top 3 rewards for non-100 fields.

For one, this only affect sage, which is not the only reason people freeze. For another, this is working off the assumption that only the freezers win. But while rare, a "normal" player could win as well, why exactly should the be punished? This is, imo, a very spiteful suggestions as it helps no one and only hurt some. And not everyone of the "some" are "guilty" of whatever behavior we do not approve of.

2. Give exp to winners.

This would work for lower brackets, but for higher brackets, say the 80s or even low 90s, it doesn't work so well. For smaller amount of exp, it would take too long to have any effect. For larger amount of exp, say 10% of a level, that's literally more than what a player can normally gain in a day. This could potentially make ptw even stronger in newer servers. So while it might help in the Xserver prospective, it can cause problem within a specific server. Granted, the impact might be limited, because if a ptw spend enough to keep winning sage, he'd probably win w/o the 10 level advantage over his ftp/ptp peers. But it's still a potential problem to have lv 90s in a server that otherwise barely have any 80s.

3. Power over level

This, IMO, is what it should have always been. But it does have the problem of potentially harming ptw, which the game is probably unwilling to do. Because bracket one in each cluster is going to be filled with those who spend money to win but are now unable to, regardless of their level. Also, while I dislike level freezing, it is, objectively speaking, an "investment" that people work for. Taking away the fruit of the investment is questionable. For player who have already harvested some fruit, it might be fair, but for those whose fruit have yet to ripen, it can be unfair, especially if you consider many of them are just following the advice provided by more seasoned players.

Furthermore, while the top ptw are pitted together and "lose", the lower paying player with purchased ninja might end up dominating the rest of the fields and free player might have no recourse whatsoever against them due to the similar power, whereas level freezing at least offers some options for f2p players.

4. Capping wins

This is an interesting suggestions. If there is a finite number of time one can win, to maximize one's own points, one need to try to terminate streaks. This would encourage the strong to fight each other rather than picking on the weak. The problem with this is that it does cause sage result to be partially based on luck rather than power/skill. Because you might never get to catch someone with streak even if you can beat them. Also, we would have potential problem of players using alts to feed a strong opponent, getting them to the win limit but with minimal amount of points for that number of wins (which, btw, is probably why they kick out the people who keeps losing, so people can't use alts to feed themselves) As much as I dislike bullies, I hate cheaters more.

On a side note, you might noticed that I said capping win as opposed to capping "morale"(win streak). Because one c*ually terminate their own streak easy enough, so capping streak won't do much.

5. Shrinking sage size

This would be good, but unlikely. Because this essentially means more reward per capita for free. It's essentially asking for free hand out and we know how oasis feel about that. But if done, at least in the short term, it would help, as it's less likely for there to be 9 ptw/freezers taking up all the winner slots in each bracket. That is, at least, until problem #2 noted above catches up and they become saturated again.

6. Winners bracket

This is an idea I had before, where the winner(top 3 of each side, so 9 per bracket) gets tossed into one bracket the next time they do sage.

This, in a way, is a cross between #1 and #5. It will punish the winners, except the top bracket winners, as no one can win twice in a row. It will allow more player a chance to win top reward (becomes 18 per bracket instead of 9, as alternating sets). It does avoid the "extra free reward" bit of #5 which oasis won't like. But at the same time, it carries the same potential problem. It may or may not be fair to punish the winners. And eventually, even 18 winner per bracket might get saturated as more and more people level freeze.

So as you can see, there is no "perfect" solutions. Every solution have problems, either long term or short term. And there is always the question of fairness as well as the status quo oasis might wish to preserve in the amount of reward to hand out as well as protecting the "rights" of whale which they do need to cater to. So sadly, there is no cut and dry simple 100% positive solution.

Also, I'd like to note any modification would have to be implemented by tencent, not oasis. And then take months before propagating here. The chance of these suggestion even reaching tencent is rather unlikely. And who knows what would be lost in translation in between, with the reasoning or wording twisted in such a way that puts the devs off.

I doubt Level Freezing will be a big deal for that much longer, currently my Cross server sage goes from 30-91, which to me sort of defeats the point of Cross server SWB but also is making level freezing less relevant as it seems like the level range is just constantly growing.

EDIT: Luka, I'd like to point out that gold is entirely a non issue for level freezers, I gain far more gold than I can spend at my level and all of my 8 gates are level 10/11 with extra runes leveled and stored away for new slots at level 80 etc. The new Ninja Tool system has been about the only thing in 6 months to put anything resembling a dent in my gold that generally hovers around 40-50 million no matter what I do.

The only reward that has ever made me feel like I was remotely missing out on is the 3 Myoboku things from the final daily pack, no other daily reward that also gives EXP is ever worthwhile to a level freezer as far as I'm concerned. Donating to groups has never been particularly useful unless you have group skills to level, otherwise there is the wheel which rarely pays off for the cost of gold you put into it, you also get plenty of group points between Convoy/plunder, SA and GNW on a daily/weekly basis.

What color are your 8 gate? Because higher color cost MUCH more. I have 5 purple(4 of which being quick, ofc), 11 gold, all lv 11, and 16 reds, 12 @lv 10 and 4 @lv 9.

40-50 million is hardly a lot of coins, that's about what I get in less than 2 weeks. And it's not even enough to get one red to lv 10.

As for wheel, right now we are at 14 spins/day. I get, on average, about 30 coupon from it daily, and about as much "value" in magatama, thou I don't care much for magatama now. Are you saying almost 1k coupon/month is not useful?

I support the Winner's bracket idea. It works well from my experience

I used to play a football-management game called Goal Nation, that had a similar concept to Arena/Bonds here. It was divided into 2 month seasons, at the start of which you'd be initially placed into a random "league". Twice a week you'd compete against 1 of the other 16 players in the league. At the end of a season, the top 5 performers would be transferred to a higher tier league and the bottom 5 performers would be transferred to a lower tier league. Higher tiered leagues offered better prizes for being promoted at the end of a season--usually rare upgrade items and coins.

With the high volume of players, this made the leagues extremely balanced. It had it's drawbacks as all approaches do. If you were a terrible player and most of your league quit the game or was inactive, you'd often win and be promoted, even if you weren't ready for the next tier up. Likewise, if a league was really packed with strong pay players and you narrowly lost every match, you'd be demoted and completely wipe out the lower tier. Despite this though, it largely worked.

I often toyed with the idea that this could work for our servers...but i think Naruto players place a great deal of value in the comraderie with the other players there and within their groups--too much to want to work amongst all new players every 2 months

But I do think it's a workable option for Sage World. The whole point of it is fair competition. If you're out for easy wins, then you've lost perspective, and maybe you should do a bit of self-reflecting about why you play games with others--cause preying on the weak isn't a meaningful way to sustain fun or achieve happiness--just my opinion.

If you're strong player, you should be challenged by other strong players...If you're a weak player, the only way to improve is by testing your team against other weak players, so you can truly see what does and doesn't work for you. A promotion/demotion system is among the best ways to ensure everything remains fair I think. It can't be exploited by alts or level-freezing whales. Further there a remains an incentive to go to stronger brackets...since the higher brackets would offer better prizes. A level -freezer would have to ask if sandbagging or otherwise camping at a lower bracket would be profitable in helping them progress

it costs about 30million coins to get a red from lvl 9 to lvl 10, double that to go from 10 to 11, so its not that you dont need coins its that u dont get enough to spend to get red chakra. I save to 50million before spending my 30million to level up 1 of my red chakras,I can do it every week and still haven't pushed any of my 22 red chakra to lvl 11.

So yeah, coins are still a big deal

you must be in a pretty populated server then because I would like to see you upgrade group rank with just a dozen active players by donating 1.6 million coins daily to group funds and also upgrade the fairly new summon cultivation and those new battle tools or what ever they are called those take over 100k coins per upgrade after level 45 or so. On top of all that 8 gates and upgrading magatamas also needs coins and let me tell you upgrading just a level 6 magatama needs around 800-900k+ coins approximately as far as I know. You also need coins for upgrading your ninja equipment and from level 80 onward they take like 280-300k+ each level. summon cultivation also need around 60-70k+ coins per node after you do the first 4-5 circles of each summon.

Also I know this is like a week old thread but why even suggest stuff when we all know (lets be real here) they are never going to implement it into the the game, and by the way when was the last time they listened to us? I can't seem to remember. Have everyone already forgotten when they had the cross server voting polls and we all thought we had a choice and we all voted against cross server sage but it happened anyway!. Just save yourselves and the mods precious time because I don't think for a second they can do anything without tencent giving the OK first, So if we really want change we should write to tencent and not waste time here.

Up, that no mods replied here is pretty dejecting, given the high number of replies.

Up.

just in case you didn't bother to do the math, it takes about 5 months of saving adv refines from getting first place in this event to get 1 level 10 refine, assuming you don't get adv refines elsewhere(20 for 1st * 3 per week = 60 per week, 1350 needed to go from 7->10 worst case during the refine rebate, 1350/60 = 22.5weeks of farming). making that take longer when you need 20 level 10 refines would be bad, 20pieces of gear * 5months per piece=100months which is over 8 YEARS. I would say buffing rewards would be the way to go, not nerfing them

yes. that too would work, indeed. But they are greedy.

if we ask for a reduction of the rewards could be they hear to us, if we ask for an increase no way we get it

To be honest would be enough that they add a 500k exp reward for top3 placement to solve the issue, something that works the same way as the space time finals packs.