Thoughts on Prestige Camping

For context, I became Paragon 2 months ago and have 4 R4 6 stars. My prestige is about 13,900. I do low stress AQ and AW but love battlegrounds. The rewards are satisfying and the game play is exciting. 2 Seasons ago I made it to Vibranium, then last season got to Platinum 1. This season felt like I was stuck in Silver forever. The matchmaking is definitely seems tougher than previously. I haven't seen any Cavalier opponents and only a handful of Thonebreakers. That's probably fair but do have trouble caring after a 6 match losing streak, lol.

I wanted to see if there was a trend regarding the strength of my opponents so I recorded the prestige info of my last 28 fights. I did 11 in Siler 2, 13 in Silver 1, 3 in Gold 3 and 1 in Gold 2. The lowest prestige opponent was 12,264 and the highest was 15,863. Interestingly in 15/28 of the matches my prestige was higher so I guess there was a bit of a bias towards be seeing by my losses. The average prestige of the opponents was just a touch above my own. It would appear that matchmaking allows an opponent to be up to ~15% higher than you. Not TOO outrageous but we know prestige is a funky metric.

So, If my matchmaking is organized this way, then keeping prestige low keeps opponents more manageable (to a degree). One problems is that my deck is a little top heavy with 4 R4s and 9 R2s. Top heavy decks really aren't great since prestige only cares about your top 5. A player could hypothetically have a deck full of R3 6 stars and have similar prestige. If I R4 another champ though, I risk bumping my prestige even higher and getting even tougher opponents. An online calculator showed that if I took all my R4 6 stars to 200 sig and added a 5th, I would be around 15,500 prestige without being any more competitive. My hypothetical opponents would be only accounts between ~13,500 and ~18,000. That's a nightmare. So what about camping?

Now that I am Paragon, rank up materials are easier to acquire, so I have no excuse to not R3 everything. But maybe I should avoid putting sig stones into my top champs or ranking any more high prestige champs. For example, I could take Hercules to R4 and try max his sig ability (15,723 prestige) or I could take up Galan and leave him as sig 20 (12,683 prestige). Both would be great a R4 but one makes BGs harder so why do it?

Any major disadvantage to this idea?

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Greekhit

Basically it’s the only way you can counter the unfair Prestige matchmaking.
Strengthen your account horizontally rather than vertically and wait for the competition to “outprestige” you.
That’s what I’ve started doing since last season when Prestige matchmaking was implemented.
I’m not putting signature stones at my existing r4s or any of the r4 candidates, holding doing high prestige r4s for now, and r3 as many champs as I can (currently near 50), so I have a full r3 deck suiting any meta.
And it seems to start to paying out.
My win ratio is gradually increasing.
I keep matching similar similar deck and prestige accounts, but I have a more meta appropriate r3 deck, than the vast majority of my opponents.
It’s super counter intuitive to the game’s philosophy of progressing all aspects of your account, but since Prestige is being penalised at the moment, it’s wise to to avoid it.
I hope you guys at Kabam read posts like these and realize what have you done with BGs Prestige matchmaking to the game.
@Kabam Miike

Crys23

Continue taking champs to R4. In season 2 of BGs I had 8 R4s in my deck. Now I have 24. All my drafts are basically R4 champs.
Goal is to fill your deck with R4s and then it's a matter of skill (and draft luck).

Chatterofforums

I actually had a very similar posting back during season 2 while they were experimenting with counters to sandbagging and it became obvious that it was going to be their solution to have it based on total pi or prestige or some combination of it. I made a post saying exactly what your saying now and was crucified for suggesting such a thing.

Ironically, as time has gone on, people are seeing what I was saying then as this has become extremely common for past season or so for many players. Personally, I've avoided all prestige moves (to include avoiding relics or putting sig in prestige champs) since about halfway into season 2.

JT_Supreme

I’ve been doing this, but this season is a nightmare. I think they changed matchmaking perimeters again. My prestige is 13.8k and last 9/10 matches I’ve gotten between 14.3-17.1k. The other match was 12k which makes even less sense. I don’t know if I’m just getting bad luck but I just wanna know what the accounts getting the opposite treatment are doing different lol.

Last season wasn’t bad since it wasn’t a Nuke meta, but this season benefits the stronger account more.

DNA3000

The system doesn't match based on prestige, so prestige manipulation is only going to have a limited impact on your matches.

The consensus best guess is that the game is actually using the strength of your top 30(ish) champs. It may or may not use the same calculation as prestige (which ignores things like masteries) or it may use a different calculation (the arena, for example, ignores signature levels in its match calculations), but the game is almost certainly looking at a larger number of champions. So if you are trying to stall your matching, you can't just try to keep prestige constant. You would have to stop ranking up across a very wide range of champs, which would be difficult to sustain. And without knowing the precise calculation parameters, it would be difficult to avoiid dodging what it counts without completely stalling out rank ups.

Nameless_IW

and the news is Kingpin almost always get banned. lol

Ngoalong711

i'm fpt and the r5 i got from eop really push my prestige a lot. now facing 16-17k+ prestige opponent is normal for me. but it's ok. made it to gc after 8 days. last season was 5 days.

Disthene_T

Yes, we definitely can't know what the system is. It doesn't seem to be based off of deck strength because that would mean sandbagging should work now. Would be weird to look at the top 30 champs you own too but who knows. All I'm doing is tabulating by data to look for trends.

Minor update on my "study", Played 12 more matches and got into Gold 1. For some reason Gold 3 and 2 were much easier than Silver 1. Maybe just luck? The distribution of prestige is starting to look like a bell curve at 40 matches. 50% of matches were with accounts within +/- 5% my prestige. I faced my first 16k accounts (+16% and +17% relative to my account) so the 15% model is clearly not too precise. Maybe really tough matches are just much rarer.

The average prestige is now almost exactly mine and the match ups are 50/50 higher or lower than me. Prestige isn't everything but it does affect my win rate. If the opponent is 5-10% lower than me, I win 83% of the time. If they are 10-15% higher, I only win 15% the time. There is a weird anomaly where I lose more often to 0-5% lower prestige than 0-5% higher.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep my prestige frozen and see how it goes. I still have a lot of 6 stars to R3 first. Will be interesting to see if opponents get harder as my deck improves or if it stays the same. Prestige is an impossible to reduce metric so you can't really manipulate it. However, if my guess is right, battlegrounds will suck if I upgrade recklessly. If I'm wrong, no harm.