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over and over again i'm matched with people doubling, even tripling my account rating in battlegrounds. why, after time and time again almost 30 SEASONS deep and you guys can't figure out a balanced way to engage al of your players in a pvp mode.

We tried all the other ways and they were much more horrible. At the end of the day, the problem is most of the people who want "balanced" match making want something that sounds reasonable to them, but always leads to ridiculous results in practice. And we just don't have the time or the resources to go to every single one of those players' houses and explain it to them on a white board. Its been explained at least a hundred times - at least that many because *I've* done so at least that many times - and it doesn't seem to put a dent in the complaints about it.

The short version is that the whole point of BG is for players to climb ladders. To advance upward, you have to beat the players above you. There are fundamentally two, and only two ways to do that. The first one is the "zero reset" method. Everyone participates, and they get rated based on their performance. Eventually, everyone settles to approximately their nominal strength, and from that point onward you will tend to win about half your matches. That's the definition of "fair match making." Which means, on average, you won't go up, you won't go down, you'll just stay there. If all of BG was just one big Gladiator Circuit with no season resets, that's what BG would evolve to being. It would also mean the newest players with the weakest rosters, players such as yourself, would be stuck at the bottom forever. You wouldn't get tough matches, but you also would have no chance to actually go anywhere either. And your rewards would also be stuck at the bottom forever.

The alternative is how BG basically operates now. To encourage participation, we have a Victory Track and a Gladiator Track. In the Victory Track, you can only move upward. You can't drop downward. So even weaker players that win half the time or even less than half the time can still move upward slowly. Uncollected players can easily make it to, say, Platinum or even Diamond. Platinum and Diamond are not the bottom of BG, they are more than half way through VT, and players in the bottom 20% of all players of the game can still get there. VT also has additional incentives: the 2/1 medal system makes it possible for even players who do not win half their matches - which means they are substantially weaker than their competition - to still promote upward. All of this allows lower players to get a lot of rewards from BG that they would otherwise have zero chance to get in a purely competitive BG with "fair matchmaking."

If BG was absolutely fair, then weaker players would not run into stronger players, but that's because a fair BG would trap them at the very bottom of the game mode only matching against each other and fighting over scraps. BG is unfair because it *helps* weaker players a ton. In doing so those players end up advancing to the point of facing much stronger players. We can't simultaneously give them those hand outs AND ALSO let them beat each other up all the way to the top. At some point they have to fight the real competition, or BG becomes highly unfair to the players who are actually stronger.

You want a fair BG? Imagine you, and everyone like you, trapped in Bronze 17 fighting for 3* shards. That's a fair BG. Making a fair BG is easy. All we have to do is just not care about players like you, and give you what you keep asking for and calling the game stupid for not giving it to you. And I truly wish there was a way to give everyone who asked for "fair BG" exactly that, without hurting all the other players who want nothing to do with that. If there was such a way, I would throw the Big Red Switch and give it to them myself personally, then break off the handle so no one could ever switch it back.

Progression-based victory track and seeding based entry to gladiator circuit.

That’s easy to say, literally. However, it is mostly nonsensical.

Players at a particular progression tier are not all uniform in skill or even roster/deck strength. If we segregate players by progression, or even by roster strength, we will still have players stronger and weaker in each bucket. Right now, the stronger Cavs are beating the weaker TBs and Paragons and advancing past them. With progression brackets those players will never get that chance. They will just beat other Cavs and get Cav rewards.

Basically, progression tiered VT doesn’t help all lower players. It helps the weaker ones in each progression tier at the expense of penalizing the stronger ones in each tier. Which is a perverse thing to do in a competitive game mode.

The easier this sounds to fix, the less you probably understand about how the mode works.

Here is a quick decision tree that you can use:

1. Does the content I want to play nextabsolutely require either a specific mechanic (bleed debuffs), type of champion (based on tags, class, rarity), or is it just tough content? You typically want to have at least one good champ ranked in each class (or other main subset of champion) because you then typically will have a good range of abilities and counters to the major class abilities. Most of the time though, content just requires a minimal level of not choosing a champion whose abilities actively suffer from the fight conditions (eg bringing most mystics against Human Torch) and you should be fine.
2. Do I like the champion? If so, you will be more motivated to learn their abilities, feel comfortable playing them, use them a lot, and have more fun in general. This should trump other concerns about the champion being "the best".
3. Do you understand their abilities? If not, there is an easy fix, but don't just bring along a champion to a fight without at least mostly understanding what they do. Just because Rintrah is a beast doesn't mean he doesnt have a specific playstyle or match up terribly against defenders sometimes.
4. Are they a higher rarity/rank? If you don't know about the benefits between champion rarity (star level) and rank, then I'd suggest spending a couple minutes learning about combat power and things like the sp3 minigame and adrenaline (though, less useful for you rn). If two champs are similar base PI (the number under their name), but one is a 4* and one is a 5*, you probably want to prioritize the higher rarity (5*) because they will last you longer and have a higher ceiling for ranking/attack/health/etc.
5. Some champions are just better *IN GENERAL* than others, and will often be at least slightly more powerful all things considered. But the game has 250+ champions, and almost infinite combinations of nodes and modifiers. Not every champ is always better, and often the gap is not that large. There is a wide grouping of great champs, but you will almost always want Doom over Elektra. Just how it is.


Keep posting and learning! The forums are a great place to learn if you can filter out the noise. Plus, some of the noise is funny, so there's that.