Right now the tournament has the same problem that the rest of the game has: a few players have secured a nearly insurmountable position. It's always the same handful of players in the final rounds. About the time the rest catch up, I expect a reset
My suggestion: as long as players can use any level of item regardless of the level of their knight, then also let them find any level of item on a mission.
Implementation: add a new mission parameter: % chance for item level.
Currently we have the following mission parameters to evaluate when choosing a mission:
- Thaler, the monetary reward
- Experience, the rate of advancement
- Find Chance, the % chance of finding an item at all
- Item Quality, % which I assume this is the lower bound of a random value between it and 100%
- Mission Success, % chance of getting or being able to possibly get any of the above
- Duration, how long the mission will take
Currently if an item is found, it is automatically the same level as the knight. I propose to change that. I suggest to add:
- Item Level, % which is used to analog to Item Quality but which determines the item level, likely in combination with some modifiers, such as the knight's level.
The benefit of this would be that a player of any level could get super lucky and find a level 50 item. That would reduce, but not eliminate, the advantage of the players who have the free time to send knights on short missions all day long. There wouldn't be a handful of players dominating the selling of high level items, killing the market for lower level items.
There should still be some advantage obtained by more frequent play, and there would be: more missions == more items found, more Thaler earned, and faster advancement with the attendant training improvements.
In addition, the knight's level could improve the chances. Example: an Item Level of 50% could mean a randomly generated item level from 26 to 50. If a level 10 knight were doing the mission, use the level as a modifier, 50% + 10% = effective 60% meaning a randomly generated level from 30 to 50.
That example of how a calculation might be done assumes a linear distribution with a floor underneath it. Alternatively, the Item Level % could be mathematically used in some other way that would make the results more like a Bell curve, with a small chance to find a really low level item, a small chance to find a really high level item, and a large chance to find an item in the middle (i.e. near the knight's level).
I like the idea of lucky finds introducing some wild swings in the early days of the tournaments, which I think should start already the first day. I want to see a bunch of level 1 and level 2 knights beating each other. Give the slower players a chance in the beginning to win a tournament or two before the players with more free time can establish dominance.