Best Of

I’ll chime in saying on the way to GC I feel dirty from raking up forfeits after people see my deck. I’ve never seen match making quite this rough. I think the right answer is fixing the seeding though

In principle, it is. In practice, its complicated because seeding affects rewards.

The reason we seed at all is because there are rank rewards in GC. Which means anyone who enters GC can theoretically get free rewards forever if there was no seeding, because once you're in GC you can't demote out of it.

And while that's fixable, trying to fix that one problem causes a whole bunch of things to come apart as you pull on that thread. Eventually, you've changed everything about tiers, ranks, and rewards, and you essentially have built an entirely new game mode.

The desire to make these "fair match ups" is so high, Kabam themselves tried to do it several times in the early days of BG even though we already established it is completely broken in Alliance war. Remember prestige/rating matching in AW? It took Kabam two years to give up on it, while we had to see season after season after season after season of alliances full of Uncollecteds placing super high in war seasons. I think one season an alliance like that placed second overall.

Knowing this, they implemented it again in BG when there was absolutely no chance for any other result than what happened. And then tried to patch it over and over. Seeding is itself a path of sorts. I actually suggested that patch as a way to mitigate some of the match up problems in BG as a way to soften the problem without completely tossing out the structure of BG. But it is a mitigator, not an eliminator.

At the end of the day, either you have to face stronger opponents to progress past them, or you don't. If you don't, the entire game mode becomes a mockery of competition. If you do, then the only question is how. It would be nice if each individual player saw a slowly escalating ramp up of match ups rather than the cliff we used to have or the random jumble we have now, but those are side effects of how the game mode works. If you try to prevent this by actually putting in explicit rules to prevent it, you're back to horrible results.

I did suggest a kind of match up metric phase in/phase out mechanic way back when, but the specifics of trying to make that actually fair are non-trivial.