please clarify reputation rewards

From 0.7.12:

 

Game balance: General
* Participating in battles with ships of a rank far below yours, gives you less reputation.

 

What does this mean?  I don’t understand how to interpret this.  It could be:

 

  1. I queue with rank 8 ships and end up fighting a bunch of rank 1 ships, perhaps because I am in a team with other people using rank 1 ships.

 

  1. I queue with rank 1 ships but have unlocked rank 8 ships and end up fighting a bunch of rank 1 ships.

 

 

I can understand getting lower reputation rewards in situation (1), but not in (2), which I feel is currently happening to me.  If I use rank 1 ships and fight other rank 1 ships I get 50-100 reputation, but if I queue with rank 6 ships I get 500-1000 reputation.  Shouldn’t it be my choice which ‘tier’ I want to queue for?  

It is case 2.

We do not want the players to farm new players in lower Tiers.

You can still play lower Tiers, but it is less attractive.

That’s a bit mean. So I have my T3 ships unlocked, but I prefer the PvP gameplay of tier 2. So I get punished for that. BUT! It doesn’t even end here! I prefer playing Guard frigates to Engineer frigates… So I get punished even more, because there is no rank 6 Guard frigate, at least not in the Federation tree. So if I want to play my Guard frigate, I get less reputation not only because of playing a T2 battle, but also EVEN LESS because I want to play a Guard that is rank 5. So I am FORCED by the devs to play T3, which I don’t like in PvP, and soon I will be forced to play T4. Great!

Thank you for the insight.  I want to just say that it is not my intention to fight against less experienced players.  But rather, the lower rank ships are the only ones I feel I can currently fit with decent mk2 and mk3 modules.  I can not currently afford and/or lack the loyalty to fit my higher rank ships as well as my competitors.  

 

What I really want is to fly against players with similar skill level / ship rank / tech level, but this is currently difficult.  If I queue with higher rank ships, I am clearly at a disadvantage and it is me who is farmed by older players, but if I queue with lower rank ships I have too much advantage but am also penalized for it via reputation.