**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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Lmao, if your going to blindly fight something, at least stay true to your own arguments that you introduced.
What I've said for months now (even before most recent changes) is that if we are all fighting for same rewards then everyone in that bracket should be fair game. Ihoweber I've said numerous times that if they changed the bracket structure to where there were lower rewards for those facing lower accounts then that is perfectly fine with me, however , we know most lower players won't be okay with getting less rewards.
They do allow poorer teams to play richer teams.
If the poor teams have enough talent, they have a chance to compete for the Superbowl.
Being Paragon doesn't put us in a different league of talent, just different resources.
And again, all NFL teams only play NFL teams during the season. These weaker players are only playing other weaker players all victory track and then advancing to the "playoffs" (GC) without ever beating a strong player or team. I really don't think you watch football and should layoff the football analogies because yours are just bad.
The difference between a top Paragon and a new UC or CAV is huge. Poor teams are still ma up of professional athletes and there is a salary cap so your "point" makes even less sense.
If the intent was to encourage players to work harder to win, to "develop talent" as it were, then using a match up system in which players are locked into certain match ups by prestige would be the absolute worst way to go about doing that, because of the way the victory track works. Because it takes multiple wins in a row to progress upward, and because the vast majority of the rewards in the VT come from progressing upward in tiers and not just simple victories, if a player ends up winning, say, 30% of their matches instead of 50%, their ability to advance isn't penalized by that 20%. The odds of them stringing three wins in a row drop dramatically, by orders of magnitude in the long run.
In alliance war, if you lose too many times in a row, signaling to the game you are weaker than your competition, you get matched against similarly weaker foes. You will eventually find similar alliances to yourself, where you will probably start winning about half the time. This doesn't make it easier to simply walk up to the Masters bracket, however, because as you win wars you start matching against stronger competition again. If you're weak, you are allowed to fight similarly weak alliances rather than get constantly curb stomped. But to climb the season brackets, you do eventually have to face those stronger alliances. This is a reasonable balancing act. Weaker alliances can still participate and get something out of it, and *if* they get better, *then* they get matched against better alliances and gain access to better rewards.
In BG, if you're losing a lot, the odds are that you will keep losing. Sure, you can "git gud" but so can everyone else. If you can get 20% more skilled, so can your competition. And what if everyone gits gud, but you git just a little less gud? Then you fall behind, and that skill change isn't reflected in the match ups (at least so far as I've seen). Which means you can get better, and still lose more often. In fact, statistically speaking, half of everyone that gets better should fall behind the other half that got just a little more better.
And how long does it take to git gud? How many losses do we expect the average player to sustain to git gud. Ten? Twenty? Fifty? If anyone wants an idea of what impact win percentage has on the average number of matches it takes to promote, I did the calculations here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/314592/battlegrounds-math-how-hard-is-it-to-progress-through-the-victory-track/p1
There were a couple of calculation errors that I corrected here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2164795/#Comment_2164795
Short version: the difference between 33% win rate, 50% win rate, and 75% win rate in progress speed through VT is the difference between 75 matches to reach GT, 188 matches, and 645 matches. Which means the difference between Alliance War-style matching that tries to find roughly 50/50 match ups and experiencing, say, a 33% win rate instead (which is just the difference between winning 3 out of 6 matches and winning 2 out of 6 matches) is a difference of almost a three times slower progress rate through VT.
One less win, three times slower. Does this encourage players to fight harder? In my opinion, it probably encourages players to do the absolute minimum to snag the easy milestone rewards and then sit it out for two days. How much energy would the average player invest in trying to get better at a game mode with these sorts of progression mechanics? I don't have the data, but I wouldn't guess a lot.
We had the best example to compare in game recently:
AW Prestige Matchmaking
This is the exact same situation:
Small accounts overachieving while bigger accounts placing lower than they should be.
People will realize what’s happening right now at BGs sooner or later and Kabam will eventually change matchmaking to random, like it happened at AW and like it should be at the very start.
If someone had checked last season’s rankings, he would have noticed how many UC 200k or less accounts were at URU tiers, while so many Paragon accounts left stuck fighting each other at some VT tier.
How fair is that for these players, that have spend thousands of hours playing the game or thousands of $, see UC accounts of few hours of play, placing higher and getting ranked rewards, while they don’t?
And I will give my own experience again:
My alt 600k Cav account cruised through VT and is already at GC from first week, by matching only similar small, mainly noob accounts, while my main 3,6mil 15,5k prestige account struggles at Gold3 atm.
Same person, same skills, different accounts.
Smaller account has a huge advantage over the bigger.
That shouldn’t be happening.
In fact, in a progression based game the opposite should happen.
A bigger account should be an advantage, not a disadvantage.
This example shows, how broken Prestige matchmaking is.
Kabam should be aware of that 🤔
It's more frustrating as this situation was causes bases on their overly coddling responses to the weaker players complaining about pretty much everything in BG matchmaking starting in season 1. This currently broken situation is a result and can't even get acknowledged.
No matter what suggestion you come up with, allowing people to grossly overpower others, or allow the system to be manipulated with 2*s, or whatever other alternative you can think of, is not better. If the Rewards are the argument, which to be frank only applies to those going for competitive Ranking, then that needs to be addressed. Not by letting people ruin reasonable progress for the people much earlier on in the game. That's not just "whining". That's a request for the ability to play where they're at and advance appropriately.
The argument has never been Rewards. It's been the stability of the Matches. People don't just want "easy Rewards". They want a system that places them in Matches they can compete with. It isn't even possible to carry over like War, where War Rating balances out to an appropriate spot. Each Season starts at 0. Not the same thing at all.
It is a likeable idea. It is also completely broken, which is why no one does it. Even Kabam came to that conclusion for war. It is a nice idea in theory to match alliances against each other based on some notion of "fairness of strength." But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, so they changed it but only after they tried to salvage their nice idea for a couple years.
It is a nice idea in Battlegrounds also. Still horribly broken, but still a nice idea so when given a chance to try it again, they decided to try it again. It is provably broken, but while you can prove this on paper, game developers typically prefer to prove water is wet by drowning in it.
Alternatively, if deck matching was out, then I would match players by ELO. You know, like how players are actually matched in the Gladiator track. But instead of starting everyone at zero, which would allow super strong players to match against weak ones, everyone's ELO would be seeded with the average ELO of players around their roster strength based on prior seasons' data. So if, say, we decide to use something similar to what they are doing now with some super-prestige system that counts more than top five champs, we calculate everyone's BG-prestige, and if mine was say 13000 then my starting ELO next season would be the average ELO of all 13000 players this season. But from there ELO would be allowed to float with wins and losses.
I should point out that these are starting ideas (and a bit simplified for discussion). Which is to say, I don't know how their match system works in detail. There could be modifications in their system unknown to us that try to account for various priorities of theirs based on the data they have. These would be baseline ideas that themselves would need to be tweaked to account for whatever the devs priorities are, which I'm not a party to, but which I'm assuming can be accounted for using these types of systems as starting points.
Matching by ELO has issues due to the way progress and rewards work. Without getting into the weeds, I know this is not straight forward. And I should also point out that I was the one that proposed the +2/+1/0/-1 points system, which was intended to tackle some of the more oppressive issues with the VT track progress system. But if ELO matching *and* 2/1/0/-1 points were implemented simultaneously, there would probably need to be changes to the reward structure. And there's a completely separate exploitive tactic that becomes viable, which would need additional guardrails. But that gets farther and farther afield of where we are now.
Which is all to say I know things are not as simple as I might appear to be portraying, but I would start with a system I know works first, then modify it to account for the various issues that arise. I wouldn't start with a system known to be broken but that seems to address some of the thorny issues associated with other matching systems. Because in my opinion it doesn't matter if you address those, if the fundamentals don't work.
Thronebreaker and Paragon can only have 5* r4 or higher and 6* or higher champs in their deck.
Uncollected and Cav can go down to 4*r5, and 5* and 6* rarities.
Proven and Conquerer can have whatever they want.
From there, match on deck strength just like last season.
Will you still have corner cases where someone is gonna get crushed? Probably, but it will be because that someone has progressed to a VT tier where the only match available was against someone with a "weaker" Paragon type deck.
That prevents the deck manipulation but still keeps the likelihood of everyone fighting everyone else.
At least that works in my head.
Same thing happened last season. It's ridiculous some dude just make a big complaint post complaining to Kabam hea facing paragons in diamond when he only has 3 r3 6 stars.
Meanwhike we have lots of paragons still stuck in gold and platinum and this dude comaimong about matches in diamond tier when he belongs way lower.
Kabam really needs to reevaluate this nonsense system.
With a small account around 800k, I have a much easier time moving up and surpassing my main account.