Proposed change to BG

I've been quite vocal on the subject of Battlegrounds and there's a reason for that: I love the game mode, I think it's got so much potential to become the dominant mode in the game and that there's also potential for Kabam to use it to properly carve out their niche in the e-sports world.

There's two main problems with the game mode as I see it:
- Modders/cheats
- Matchmaking structure

I obviously can't do anything about the former, but I think that the latter is a solvable issue.

The issue right now lies in the potential imbalances in matchmaking. Kabam needs this to be a positive experience for everybody; from the whale to the F2P player and from those of us who’s thumbs are one with the touch screen and those who’s thumbs may as well be toes.

The crux of this issue comes in that in order to get to the gladiator circuit we have to complete the victory track, which is actually a punishing ladder, certainly once you hit the later stages. It would appear that to maintain a fairly positive experience the matchmaking algorithm attempts to match you with decks of a fairly similar size, something which works up until Paragon where there’s no power ceiling. The gripe of course comes when experienced and skilled players are hitting a brick wall whilst uncollected and the like are able to slip through the net. This is something I tested and showed in my previous topic on Battlegrounds https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/319977/matchmaking-in-bg-needs-real-examination#latest so I don’t want to talk it to death here.

With the current system essentially being a race to the Gladiator Circuit there’s no real way around there being a negative experience for players – either the whales are going to smash the paragons, who will smash the Thronebreakers and so on, or the whales/paragons will smash everyone else indiscriminately.

So I propose a change to the system and the structure.

All the players are broken down into divisions, and will only fight other players within that division and in extremis, the top 10-20%/bottom 10-20% of the divisions either side if matchmaking is impossible. Deck power would not come into it, the only factor would be your bracket, ideally playing those around you within the bracket where possible, to allow for you to climb over the bodies of your peers as it were.

I would propose all of the rewards are folded into the end of season rewards – so there’s no victory track rewards, the rewards come at the end of the season and through the 48 hour objective that are currently in game.
At the end of each season the top 20% of players from Mysterium and below get promoted, whilst the bottom 20% from Celestial and below are relegated, though they would be guaranteed that bracket’s rewards for that season as they did manage to earn their position there the previous season.
To increase fluidity up and down the divisions and to maintain activity, I would reduce the season lengths to 3 weeks, maybe even 2, if there was staff capacity to maintain a valid leader board. Obviously the rewards would be reduced to reflect the shorter period that the player has worked for them.
I think that we should consider the AW leader board as an example of how one can climb or fall: it takes a good few months to build a T1 alliance from scratch unless you already have a high war rated shell to start from, but even then it’ll probably still take a few seasons to reach T2/1 and I think that it should be a similar process in this game mode.
The benefit of this is that players will play players with similar abilities and similar(ish) rosters, those who are good enough to progress will progress, those who can’t hold their own will fall. New players starting out would
I personally like the idea of titling your position at the end of seasons to show a player’s progression and achievements, for simplicity’s sake I just used Roman legion ranks but I think it’s an important part of the game’s informal kudos system.
I would implement this during the turnaround period of a season with your final placement being your start point for this new division system.

Comments

Moosetiptronic

I was waiting for this, as I was going to ask in your other thread, what it was that caused kabam to change the war matching away from prestige and back to just war rating and whether it was blowback from the top alliances that were being squeezed out?

I really like your suggestion, with the only change being that I quite like the drip of rewards as you play through, rather than the big chunk at the end. The weekly drop from AQ is better than the monthly from AW, in my view. Shorter seasons would be better from that view point.

If they did do this, it would also be pretty easy to have a pure skill league, where it is capped at, say, 3*s, which has, for example, only tokens as rewards, or similar and caps fights at say 20, for a really short event drop in and play.

Mauled

I was waiting for this, as I was going to ask in your other thread, what it was that caused kabam to change the war matching away from prestige and back to just war rating and whether it was blowback from the top alliances that were being squeezed out?

I really like your suggestion, with the only change being that I quite like the drip of rewards as you play through, rather than the big chunk at the end. The weekly drop from AQ is better than the monthly from AW, in my view. Shorter seasons would be better from that view point.

If they did do this, it would also be pretty easy to have a pure skill league, where it is capped at, say, 3*s, which has, for example, only tokens as rewards, or similar and caps fights at say 20, for a really short event drop in and play.

Apologies for the slow reply.
War matchmaking moved away from having prestige as a matchmaking factor because alliances were supressing their prestige to prevent matching the likes of NewN and KenoB, for easier wars. It resulted in there effectively being two divisions at the top of AW, a sub-10k prestige stream and a 10k+ prestige stream. It came to a head when one of the smaller alliances placed top without actually playing any of the 10k+ alliances across the whole season, with them being matched as low as P2/3 to get wars that fit the parameters. Needless to say the one time that this small alliance did match KenoB they got smashed.

I like the idea of something like a best of 20, with that being your season. I'm not a game designer so am not going to pretend that I know the solution but I do think that fixed divisions, combined with shorter seasons and reasonable windows for promotion/relegation would allow for a level of flexibility and more appropriate matchmaking.

Currently I'm virtually only coming across masters/P1 players and a smattering of whales in AQ alliances at Celestial 6, which is how it should be as I'm playing for one of the higher reward sets. It feels a bit wrong for a newly knighted Thronebreak to have these same matchmaking parameters when they're just trying to get to the Victory track. On the other hand, they're playing for the same rewards as me, so why shouldn't we have equally tough matches? The solution is seeding to avoid matchups like this, but the access to rewards needs to be adjusted accordingly - otherwise why are we spending money and effort refining our rosters?

Moosetiptronic

That's annoying, as this is a solo game mode, so unlikely to have that critical mass of big spending voices decrying the matchmaking system, particularly when they can spend to bypass it.

But if they don't, the masses may stop playing and then it becomes a relatively dead area of the game.

Anyway, I like your suggestion.