Best Of

it also appears that the double track in game is missing rewards, atleast visually. Only 2/4 "boxes" appear

(moved this to “General Discussions”, especially since anyone who used to look at Recent will not be doing so until and if they can resolve this, and nobody looks at Bugs section)

Or the ability to run, without potion limits, the current map, so you can individually improve as a player. Practice makes perfect...the more opportunity to practice, the better you'll become...

Throttling (current word of the day) the potion usage inhibits each run for players who are trying a harder Map. Without the limit, they could make it further and learn faster…which helps the entire alliance progress forward as a whole.

Keeping the usage cap in place slows player growth and development...

I see the empowered grace crystals in my monthly event rewards.

My double track does look empty though, like it’s missing a image for each day

true. BG is built as very unfriendly mode.

I constantly feel frustrated while playing BG, does not matter if I win or lose.

Last season you got into Quantum 3 because the ratings cutoff was at an all time low (at least as far back as I keep detailed data). The minimum rating for Q3 was 130, and I believe you just made it. In any other season you would have placed far lower with that level of effort. The season before last you probably would have ended up in Arcane 2, and the season before that you would have been in Uru.

We talk about the influence of luck, skill, knowledge, and roster strength because those are variables that are either under the player's control or in the case of luck the most obvious uncontrollable variable. But of course the factor we don't normally talk about as much (in GC) is player participation; how many players are even in GC, and how many matches are they playing individually. How much rating is everyone stacking up, and what does the bracket distribution look like.

How strong the competition itself is has a dramatic influence on where people rank, and last season the competitive strength was probably at a near all time low.

The relative consistency of the top of the BG leaderboards is essentially statistical proof that skill has vastly more influence over BG results than luck. Which makes sense, because across the number of matches it takes to reach the top of the leaderboards, luck tends to average out.

If random chance had even the same influence on BG results as skill, this would leave an impossible to miss footprint on the leaderboards. Luck has a significant impact on a single match. It has almost no impact on where you end up on the leaderboards in general. It can be the difference between placing 1st and 2nd to be sure, but luck has little effect on who places in Celestial vs Mysterium, say.

Bero Man in his last video claimed to have finished top of season in something approaching half of all BG live seasons. This would be astronomically unlikely if luck had a larger influence on placement than skill. Luck being more important than skill would make that accomplishment so unlikely it would be statistically significant evidence of cheating if that were true.

The idea that you can overcome a skill gap with a combination of luck and persistence is true in theory, but impractical for large skill gaps. It is calculable how many matches it would take to overcome some qualitative advantage. It very quickly escalates from hundreds of matches to thousands of matches to more matches than humanly possible in the time frame of a single season. When VT was still +1/-1 I did the math on this for VT skews of various intrinsic win percentages. It didn't take a very large gap before it would take approaching a thousand matches to random walk your way up to GC. GC itself is very comparable in situation to +1/-1 VT dynamics.

I say random walk, but it is far worse than that. Anyone can get lucky and win a match in which they are themselves outmatched. But winning in GC puts you up against increasingly stronger competition. You would need a lot more luck to win the second one than the first one due to this. Trying to luck your way to higher and higher rating in GC very quickly becomes swimming upward while an increasingly massive anchor tries to drag you downward. It becomes quickly impossible to random chance yourself past roster strength and skill deficits, at least on the time scales that a BG season operates.

If it was possible to do, I would do it. But no amount of luck and no amount of matches is going to put me on the pedestal of the leaderboards. If it was possible, not only would I do it, lots of other people would as well, and you'd see a revolving door of crazy people grinding their way to the number one spot. There are people willing to grind an unlimited amount of effort for even trivial goals. Five to six hours a day is a trivial amount of time effort compared to the level of grinding players have put into doing things that have generated far less rewards. Players have grinded 12-15 hours a day for extended periods of time just to say they did.

Again: if it was possible, it would be happening constantly. Its not, so it isn't.

At summoner's fest I found myself in two different conversations about this topic, one of them until the wee hours of the morning. I'm not a top tier BG player so my opinion about the competition at the very top is somewhat sketchy, but I am decently familiar with, say, the bottom half of GC. I don't know if there exists any actual consensus on what would improve the perception that BG is "stale" at higher GC that everyone would agree with. It seemed to me different players had different perceptions of what the root issues were and how to address them, that other players thought would have deleterious effects from their perspective.

I did toss out one wild idea that I don't think Kabam would implement, and it would not be anything other than an every-once-in-a-while thing to shake things up, but I thought it had the advantage of working across many different tiers of BG. The idea is basically dodgeball. The game randomly picks a set of, say, seven champs from your roster and seven from your opponent's roster, with no duplicates. Then all fourteen go into a draft pool and players alternate picking champs from that pool. So each side gets to choose champs from basically the same "roster" of champs, and no champ shows up on both sides. If I take them, you can't and vice versa. This would make the draft a whole lot more interesting, and mostly neutralize the roster advantage one side had over the other.

By itself, this makes more sense in GC than VT, because in VT you're more likely to run into wildly imbalanced rosters that would not only make the draft look weird, it would overly penalize players with strong rosters. Which a lot of people don't like, and Kabam has already declared incompatible with how MCOC works. To make things more interesting and also return some of that roster advantage, you could add one additional rule. If both players possess the same champion in their decks, then if either side picks that champ they get the champ as it appears in their roster. So if I have an R3 Serpent and my opponent has an R4 Serpent, if Serpent appears in the draft pool and I pick him I get him at R3, but if my opponent picks him he gets him at R4. If the champ only exists in one player's deck, either player picking that champ will get the champ in whatever configuration they appear in for the deck it exists in. So there's a bit of a roster advantage, but not an overwhelming one. And it creates an interesting question of whether to include a champ or not in your deck. If you have an R5 Serpent and you include him, if your opponent includes an R2 Serpent you'll have a big advantage if he ends up in the pool. But if your opponent decides his R2 is too low and just doesn't include him at all, then if he shows up he'll be R5 regardless of who pulls him which means there's no advantage there.

It's a crazy idea actually. This doesn't so much shake up the meta as it throws it out the back of a truck at freeway speed.