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Battlegrounds is by far the most unhealthy thing MCOC has introduced to its playerbase, and I'm tired of pretending its not.

Battlegrounds: a mode where you and another player duke it out to complete a fight in the quickest (and previously healthiest) time possible. Adapt your roster to the nodes presented with progressively scaling difficulty as you climb the ranks, or perish. Sounds fun, right?

Battlegrounds is inherently flawed for 2 main reasons; the matchmaking system and the nature of how mcoc functions at its core.

The matchmaking system is straight garbage. It's not relative to your PI. I'm valiant with one rank 5 7 star champions and I've faced people who dont have Rank 5 5 star champions. This is more prominent in low elo, but it shouldnt be possible for me to see these people in matchmaking. There's a flip side to this too since there's definitive niche of players that spend boatloads of money and have more top ranked champions than anybody in the game. At the level I play at, its a borderline waste of resources to play against these people.

Second, MCOC is a game where you're at the mercy of RNJesus to bless your roster with strong champs. Battlegrounds promotes an unhealthy "meta" where if you dont have the 10 strongest characters of that season and have them ranked up, you're stalling out and getting hard stuck.

But every person having a different roster SHOULD balance it out, right? Surprisingly, no. It definitely helps keep a level playing field, but if you want to climb then you're toast because everyone at the top ranks has the same base 10 characters.

But the rewards are good? They are! But they're so good that you cannot keep up unless you play Battlegrounds. If you dont play Battlegrounds, you get left behind unless you bust out the platinum card. It's dumb as heck that this mode is as incentivized as it is considering you're at the mercy of 5 different things to get a win, and the last thing you're reliant on is your own skill.

This mode also has had ripple effects on champion balance because it every character needs quick and accessible burst for the mode or they are almost automatically out of favor with a broader audience. If they don't have good burst, they need something extremely annoying on defense in order to be viable and it's amplified the pattern of "Trend chasing" in Kabams balance. Remember Onslaught on launch? He had like 3 reliable counters and he's had 2 characters dedicated to stopping his reign over the contest. Its a matter of time before something absurd comes along and breaks the balance again. Admittedly, this has always been a thing (remember Blade, Ghost, corvus glaive, and archangel) but now it's worse because there's competitive incentive behind some of the best rewards in the game.

I'm extremely tilted from a 14 game loss streak, but Kabam had to put a stellar forge item in vibranium. No reward like that should be tied to my ability to overpower 17 matches against "whalewallet67" when he has 20 R5 champs. Skill issue? Somewhat. But this amount of variables I'm relying on to progress to what should be a moderately difficult reward to obtain at my rank, not legitimate agony.

Thank you for reading, screw Battlegrounds. This mode is legit dog cheeks