Best Of

The past 6 or so seasons I’ve made it into gladiators circuit within 2 weeks with little to no effort. So you can imagine my surprise when bgs is almost over and I am still in vibranium. Now I’m not MSD but I’m certainly good at this game especially when it comes to battlegrounds. I just poured 2 hours and 30 minutes into playing battlegrounds and I started playing today in vibranium 3, you know where I am at the end of that 2 hours and 30 minutes. STILL IN VIBRANIUM 3. And it’s not like I’m 1 game away, I have 1 MEDAL. There seriously is something wrong with the way the AI works in this game, but even more so the META that Kabam chose for this season. I was up against a kindred and I was using onslaught, I did a heavy attack and he blocked it. (He didnt have a resist buff) he just blocked both hits somehow. ALSO, why is it only SCIENCE and deathless champions that we can use. There are 300 CHAMPS in the game and this meta has shrunk the useful ones down to a handful. Most players are struggling to rank up because instead of battlegrounds being a test of skill and strategic thinking, it’s just become a test of RNG and just praying you get the 6 champs in your deck that work well with the node. The meta just isn’t fair for anyone even those with MASSIVE decks. Y’all gotta give some sort of compensation for this miserable excuse of a bgs season. 0 fun whatsoever.

The past 6 or so seasons I’ve made it into gladiators circuit within 2 weeks with little to no effort. So you can imagine my surprise when bgs is almost over and I am still in vibranium. Now I’m not MSD but I’m certainly good at this game especially when it comes to battlegrounds. I just poured 2 hours and 30 minutes into playing battlegrounds and I started playing today in vibranium 3, you know where I am at the end of that 2 hours and 30 minutes. STILL IN VIBRANIUM 3. And it’s not like I’m 1 game away, I have 1 MEDAL. There seriously is something wrong with the way the AI works in this game, but even more so the META that Kabam chose for this season. I was up against a kindred and I was using onslaught, I did a heavy attack and he blocked it. (He didnt have a resist buff) he just blocked both hits somehow. ALSO, why is it only SCIENCE and deathless champions that we can use. There are 300 CHAMPS in the game and this meta has shrunk the useful ones down to a handful. Most players are struggling to rank up because instead of battlegrounds being a test of skill and strategic thinking, it’s just become a test of RNG and just praying you get the 6 champs in your deck that work well with the node. The meta just isn’t fair for anyone even those with MASSIVE decks. Y’all gotta give some sort of compensation for this miserable excuse of a bgs season. 0 fun whatsoever.

Yeah, so a couple things.

1. There's still almost two weeks to go in the current Battlegrounds season. You would still expect to see a lot of very strong players still in Vibranium at this stage, because it is barely halfway through. Not "almost over" as you describe it.

2. Both the AI and the meta nodes affect everyone playing in the Victory track,

3. If the VT was dominated by RNG, such that skill was largely removed from the competition, then on average everyone would win and lose about half the time. Since you gain two medals for winning a match and lose one when you lose a match, even if BGs was purely a coin toss everyone would still progress by an average of one medal every two matches. Two and a half hours should amount to at least fifteen matches and thus an average of seven or eight medals, which would promote a player by about one and a half tracks.

You can only stay in the same place if you're losing 2/3rds of your matches, which implies someone else is winning more than half of their matches. Your matches promoted someone, it just wasn't you. In the current version of BGs since Season 19, it is impossible for everyone to have trouble promoting, because every match nets a medal.

You seem to be under the extremely weird impression that it is possible that most players in VT are losing. Since short of an absolute tie, every match has a winner and a loser that is actually impossible. And since you gain more medals for winning than you lose when losing, every match is a net positive for the VT players overall. We can't all be losing, and we can't all be stuck. In point of fact, the average strength players in each tier promotes slowly, the stronger players promote quickly, and the below average players promote very slowly. The far below average players stall out, at least until similar strength players catch up to them.

According to the latest stream, Kabam is experimenting with a form of pity system in the context of special Valiant featured crystals. According to the stream, the system will work as follows:

If you pull four crystals in a row that are not 6* rarity or higher, the next one will be at least a 6* champ
If you pull 29 crystals in a row that are not 7* rarity, the next one will be a 7* champ
If you pull 199 crystals in a row that are not the 7* featured champ, the next one will be the 7* featured champ

This is not precisely how it was explained, but I believe this more clearly represents the intent Kabam was describing. If you miss four in a row, the game still rolls the next one, but if that fifth roll is a 5* champ it "forces" it to be a 6* champ to break the streak of misses, it doesn't just automatically make the fifth drop a 6* (because if it did, that might cost you a 7* champ if that roll just happened to be a lucky pull).

Given those mechanics, how does the pity system alter the effective drop rates of the crystals? Since every time the pity system triggers the crystal drops more 6s, 7s, and 7* featured champs than the drop odds would ordinarily produce, the average number of those drops goes up. By how much?

There's two ways to calculate this: solve a bunch of recursive equations, or ask a computer to do it. Computer?

Measured drop rates:
5* rarity: 67.06 %
6* rarity: 27.82 %
7* rarity (not featured): 4.42 %
7* featured rarity: 0.7 %

Compared to the published odds of the Featured Valiant:

5* rarity: 73 %
6* rarity: 24 %
7* rarity (not featured): 2.64 %
7* featured rarity: 0.36 %

(Note: the published odds lists 7* drop rates as 3% but that includes the 7* featured champ odds of 0.36%, so I've separated them here for comparison purposes).

Because almost one in four drops is a 6* anyway, implementing a miss streakbreaker of five doesn't improve those odds dramatically, but it does improve them slightly. The bigger changes are with 7* rarity and 7* featured drops. On average, ordinarily about 38 drops are 7* champs (not featured) so breaking miss streaks at 30 has a substantial impact on the overall rate of return of the crystal: the crystal will drop about 67% more 7* champs with the pity system than without it. And the largest impact is on the featured 7* champion drop rate. About one in 278 crystals drops the featured 7* champ, and a pity system that streakbreaks at 200 increases the drop rate to almost double its initial rate.

Now, this is all separate from the fact that these streakbreaking pity drops are *predictable*. In theory if you keep track of all of your drops, you can actually predict in some cases when your next drop is guaranteed to be a 6*, a 7*, or even a 7* featured champ. If you open 199 crystals and none of them are the 7* featured, the next one will be. And since the pity system is (according to the stream) global across all special featured valiant crystals, if there's a featured you want among the special valiants that are announced, you could simply stop opening those crystals until the champ you want is released, and then the first crystal of that champion you open will be guaranteed to drop the featured champ.

As far as I am aware, you don't have to stop buying crystals, you just have to stop opening them. So if you really want a particular champ and you keep track of your openings and you know #200 is coming up, you can continue to buy featured Valiants and just hold them until the champ you want gets released, open that one, then go back and open all the other crystals you've stockpiled. I'm not sure to what degree anyone intends to play those kinds of games, but it is theoretically possible.

For everyone else, the above numbers estimate how the pity system alters the effective rate of return on the crystals. You obviously need to buy at least 30 to see the drop rate improvements on 7* champs and 200 to see the improvement for 7* featured, but for anyone thinking about buying that many, that's the overall drop rate improvements you're statistically going to see (random being random, everyone will see different overall rates of return).