Ok so a shield has two mechanics..
Mechanic 1: protect your score from deductions in order to maintain your point total
Mechanic 2: reduce your visibility to other players to zero
My argument is this… Why the second mechanic? If your score is protected anyway there’s really no need to be invisible. All that does is reduce the amount of available targets at any given time meaning you pay millions in skip tax finding a target.
Remove mechanic 2 as it really is unnecessary and will make PvP a bit more fun rather than an endless stream of looking for targets and then 2 mins of actual playing time
When Shields were first introduced they didn’t turn the user invisible. As a result, scores skyrocketed as you could just milk shielded players for more-or-less infinite Points. The invisibility mechanic was added in short order to make sure it wasn’t too easy to reach the progression rewards, I assume.
I can understand the thinking behind it but now we have the opposite problem where unless you follow a shield check room and bakers then there’s nothing over 35 points 80% of the time.
I think the invisibility component was added almost right away; because they recognized the potential for score abuse. There were a few events were random players would wind up ‘still visible’ with a shield out, and people would go to town. Even better - people would retreat to the visible shielded player to lift their score higher and then continue to hit them for yet more points.
The potential for abuse is crazy-balls. And please don’t suggest taking away our defensive win points when we are shielded.