So, now we have to pay $ to keep our points?

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    Shields are a calculated risk. If they're truly P2W, then send me my #1 prize for every tournament because according to my calculation, I can always shield for 3 hours for the 50 HP I gain as a progression reward. It is even possible for the guys buying 24 hour shields to find out they ended up placing out of top 45, and in that case it's pretty clear those shields weren't as powerful as people thought they are. Again, it's simply a risk. You may win and you may not.

    There's no need for free shields. The 50 HP you get for rating 400 is your free shield. If you're sure it will return a gain of greater than 50 HP, use the shield. Otherwise, save it for something else.

    The effectiveness of the shield is not dependent on the strength of the players, other than that strong players may have an incentive to use shields to preserve their rating. Let's say I gather 100 newbies with level 1 characters and we're pretty sure we're roughly in the same MMR range. We can simply have a hierarchy of shielding order, which would probably look like first 10 to 500 shield for 3 hours, first 10 to 700 shield for 3 hours, then first 20 to 1000 shield for 8 hours (using the award), and finally first 20 to 1200 shield for 8 hours. If everyone is in on this plan, you can conceievably end up with 100 guys with level 1 characters all have 1400+ rating at the end. Of course getting people to buy such a plan is difficult, so that's why it won't actually happen, but there's nothing stopping this plan from working.

    The key to making shields successful is that if you're relatively strong in your MMR range, you should shield (and optionally put a tank team if you feel your team might be too imposing in your MMR range, though that's usually not a problem) so that you can prop up everyone else's score, and then you feed on their score later. The old model of just keep on try to beat the weak simply doesn't work for high progression rewards. Instead, you got to offer something for people (via a shield), so you can beat them up later for more points.

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