**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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Fix Battlegrounds in three easy steps (that we can argue about until the end of time)
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For example, most first time bans are a week. I would make the first time ban for cheating in BG be banning from an entire season. To do that now you'd have to ban a player completely for an entire month, which the Powers That Be might be less inclined to do. But simply blocking a player from participating in a mode they cheated in for a complete season might be more palatable.
Personally, I would just nuke them from orbit. But to do that, we'd probably need to first
shootretire to a farm upstate the lawyers and then possibly some of the brand guardians. But then they'd just replace them and we'd be back to square one. So we need to find long term solutions that accommodate them.The problem with any sit-out punishment is the player might not care: they could just sit out and wait for the ban to expire. So I think it is worth considering a debt-style punishment. Other games implement debt systems in various contexts, and MCOC does for the case involving Contest Credits (i.e. negative units). Maybe if someone cheats in BG, on top of banning they could get "negative trophies" applied to their account, which would force them to actually work off the debt to clear their account punishment. Let's say an account was caught cheating and they cheated in eight matches. We'd slap them with eight "trophy debt." During the next BG season they were eligible to play in, they would work off the debt in some fashion, by say having every other win go towards paying off the debt. So they could still progress, but only much slower as only half the wins would go towards progress (and the need to keep up a streak would make things even more difficult, as losses continue to subtract real trophies).
The advantage of trophy debt is you cannot just sit out the penalty and things go back to normal. You have to pay off your debt to society, and that debt stays with you forever until you pay it off. If you don't want to pay it off, that's effectively a permanent ban on the game mode, but one that is voluntary on the part of the player, not technically enforced by Kabam.
Dr. Zola
I would emphasize the italicized phrase “specific and actionable” in that excerpt. You gave your reply. Now let’s keep the thread on track this time.
Dr. Zola
I included #2 mainly as one of my guiding principles—each of which was included to demonstrate how easy it is to say “things should be like this!”—all the while acknowledging how hard it is to make the system that reliably gets you there.
Again—I think you wanted to (and I’d like to) focus on specifics here if we can. This thread derailed a lot the past couple of weeks.
Dr. Zola
A reasonable start isn't that ambiguous. It means the variation in strength between Accounts doesn't exceed a certain point. That doesn't necessarily have to look like completely equal metrics, but it doesn't mean anyone can match with anyone. Reasonable, as in there's no logical reasoning behind having such extremes in sizes at the onset of the competition.
Roster strength seems to be used in some arguments and tossed aside in others, but I won't digress. In the system I proposed, the results would be based on Win/Loss after a certain number was achieved. Which is what everyone has been saying they want. I suggested numbers because they accommodate for more situations than Coins, and they're more easily adjustable depending on the progress marker a Player is at.
Basically, it allows for a competition based on results where Players can progress or fall, regardless of what Title they have, but it makes it more advantageous to be higher up.
Now, while your question was not about my suggestion, I was demonstrating that I am aware that those are factors. However, skill in BGs pertains to the skill in the competition itself. Knowledge of their Champs, and diversity, is already baked into it, so-to-speak. We're making use of what we have, and using Bans, to maximize the Nodes-du-jour. We're not being rewarded for everything else we've done in the game. BG skill is skill in BGs.
Because consensus is so hard to actually achieve, and so fragile when it is formed, if we can all agree that a suggestion is reasonable and appropriate, whether we each individually agree on the specifics of why its reasonable given our diverse perspectives and goals is less important than whether we can coexist comfortably in something new and debate why its good after we get it.
This is also practice for when the devs do whatever they are going to do. The odds of them implementing my suggestions in full are not high. They might do better. They might do equally well but in a completely different way. And they might just fall flat on their faces. It is important for us to be prepared to give their changes a fair shot, but also to focus on what's wrong if we think it is wrong. If we spend the first four weeks after changes are released debating about whether its wrong because it gives too much assistance to too many Uncollected players or punishes too many Paragon players, the devs will simply presume there's no consensus at all about anything, and thus their changes are just as good as any other.
If we can focus on the key things most of us all seem to want in at least some measure, and target criticism in those key areas, there's a window of opportunity that will open when the devs decide to take action. If they release major changes to the game mode to try to address these issues - or the issues as they see them - that means they will also have allocated significant resources to working on the mode. That will be the moment when our feedback can have the largest potential impact. That window doesn't stay open for long. Probably weeks, not (many) months.
We've all seen how the discussion can get side tracked, and we've seen where those side tracks go. Maybe when it counts the most, we can all try to avoid those more and concentrate the majority of our discussion at the game mode, and what we want from it, and why it does or doesn't achieve those goals.
Dr. Zola
I just hope the developers are listening.
I’m not nearly as steeped in development theory as @DNA3000 but this is an aspect that has struck me (and I suspect others) as a weakness with this game mode.
For me, the real prize in BGs is the store. Some make a big deal about GC being the end goal. Maybe, but for me it is because of what I get along the way—at the end, my season prizes are largely just icing on the cake.
I realize this won’t be the case for players who score at the very top of GC, but that’s not most players. In fact, it’s really anyone who’s not top 500. Starting at rank 501 through rank 50,000, season prizes are a matter of 10K 6* shards plus some amount of 6* sig stones.
Alliance rank prizes aren’t that dissimilar, with rewards beyond the top 20% comprised of items largely available elsewhere in game for veteran players.
So where does this all leave me? One thing I have come to believe is that the rewards for participation alone—not just winning—need to be enhanced, either by increasing their absolute amounts or the frequency with which they can be earned.
Now, before anyone accuses me of being part of “participation trophy culture” (in real life, I’m as far from that perspective as you could imagine), I will make these points:
1. BGs is a mode that absolutely requires participation in order to exist.
2. Lower participation can ultimately doom BGs.
3. The BG store is the absolute best value in game today precisely because participation is so important for the mode to exist.
4. As long as other modes are going to continue to offer lesser prizes relative to BGs, then players should have more opportunities to obtain the BG currency.
5. A rewards system that essentially fast tracks accounts that do BGs versus those who don’t isn’t good for MCoC.
Keeping with my request for specific proposals, I would suggest either (1) more frequent BG objectives and/or (2) additional objectives based on type of champs used or total fights (not matches) won or matches won against “larger/bigger” opponents or some other metric.
None of this would have anything to do with matchmaking—that thorny knot of a problem could continue just as it is today. And none of it would impact prizes won along the way by progressing through VT or season end prizes for the very top competitors through the scrubs. And it would be available to everyone.
Bottom line: I think it would make what is currently a zero-sum game mode seem more rewarding to play and encourage participation.
That’s my suggestion. I’m sure it’s riddled with problems (game economy, participation trophyism, etc.) that others will point out. I will go ahead and tag @DNA3000 here to show me the error of my thinking. But it is the simplest way I can think of to boost participation and shift the frustration a number of players feel about a game mode the team readily admits will likely be a losing experience for the vast majority of players.
Dr. Zola
1.) Modding runs rampant and get rewards for it
2.) Bugs like immediate KOs or you finish a fight only to get the spinning wheel of death, just for that fight to start again exist in moderate frequency in this game mode
Players will continue to feel that this mode is broken. Especially when it’s been made very grindy and time consuming. So while I applaud the current conversation it does feel a bit like ignoring the forest for your favorite trees
As for modders, you’d think the eye-test would be sufficient for 80% of the cases but apparently it isn’t. Who knows why?
Dr. Zola
It is important to not miss the forest for the trees, but I would argue that if basic participatory pain points are not addressed, the top tier players won't have modding to worry about any more because the game mode will die. A competitive game mode must first and foremost be a reasonable competition or it is pointless, but a competitive game mode that relies upon player density to exist that fails to be tolerable to the wider playerbase simply won't exist at all.
This is the same dynamic we see with balancing the whales against the F2P players in a microtransaction supported game. Without the whales and other spenders, the game cannot exist. But without the 95% of F2P players that are going along for the ride, the game wouldn't exist.
It is possible to have a competition that caters only to the top competitors. But it is not possible to have a competitive game mode that must justify its existence in a monetized F2P game that caters only to the top competitors. The expense to manage it would be impossible to justify.
An irony here is that the most competitive players are also on average the most resilient. They will continue to compete and push for higher ranks even if the game mode is problematic. That doesn't mean they are willing to tolerate anything and that doesn't mean we won't lose a few, but history shows they are more likely to keep coming back over and over and over again no matter the pain, because that's how top competitors treat pain. It is everyone else that won't do that. Most players will not tolerate even relatively small amounts of game play pain before they decide to move on. That's true for game modes and entire games. Battlegrounds is especially sensitive to this, because of its turnstile. MCOC as a game can survive with 10% fewer players, and even 40% fewer players. But BG as a game mode cannot survive below a certain minimum density where matches become too hard to find. At that point, as other games have discovered, you can enter a death spiral where every player that quits makes the mode harder to maintain, causing other people to quit.
Others may disagree, but in my opinion these issues are the keystone issues for BG. They aren't targeted at my favorite trees, they are targeted at the minimum effort necessary to make sure the forest itself survives.
Related to this but separate from this, rewards are like a drug. Players get used to them. No matter how high you make the rewards, players will eventually normalize around them and their ability to incentivize participation will disappear. Some of this is due to game inflation, but a lot of it is due to player psychology. Once players know that a certain level of rewards is achievable, they ratched their expectations upward. If *that* is not impossible to get, then something *even higher* should be reasonable to expect.
In my opinion, you can incentivize content that is otherwise uncompelling with increased rewards. But when you try to incentivize content that is hostile with increased rewards you're playing with fire. What starts off as player bribery will eventually turn around and become developer extortion. And while you could say that about all in-game rewards, I think on a more nuanced level there's a difference between incentivizing and overwhelming reward bribery, even if it is difficult to quantify.
As we saw with Dungeons, this can also dramatically accelerate burn out. When a game mode is hostile to players but the rewards compel players to play it anyway, this can become a problem unto itself. Players begin to see the problems in the game mode as not things to avoid but as problems that are unavoidable. And I think that's also something we want to try to avoid to the best degree possible in BG. I suspect this is one factor explaining why BG objectives are every 48 hours not daily. The devs wanted the objectives to not be something players felt compelled to chase continuously.
I think that’s why I would calibrate slowly, perhaps even by progression level.
Two complaints that are “popular” on forums today are (1) that people may delay rankups to stay in advantageous competitive silos and (2) that the mode feels punitive because it is literally a zero sum game and veterans smashing each other in the face in Bronze can be discouraging.
Why do Bronze BGs have fewer objectives? Likely because the team wanted to incentivize VT progression. But doesn’t the incentive structure at each tier do that already? What if Paragons (who, quite honestly, face the stiffest competition in BGs) had the full set of objectives starting at Bronze instead of adding more each nominal tier?
If overall rewards are the concern, rebalancing rewards between progression and participation could also an area to explore—by allocating more tokens to more participation and total win objectives at the lower tiers (Bronze/Silver) and away from actual VT tier progression at those same tiers.
Fixing matchmaking would be great. But it’s complex. Shifting rewards early on to favor participation more and relieve initial frustration is far easier and doable now.
Dr. Zola
Their INVESTIGATION is killing the game in terms of BG. While they INVESTIGATE 10 or maybe 100 more cheat accounts go unnoticed.
Its like going to a bank wich successfully gets robbed every week. If i was a new player and i heard that the game devs cant keep cheaters from cheating in most competitive pvp mode it has i would NEVER trust this game with my time or money. Back in the day i thought there were VERY few cheaters in AW and i had no problem with someone exploring abyss and getting banned after. But this SOFT SOFT WEAK!!!! policy on cheating in BG is blowing my brain up.
No need to INVESTIGATE the most obvious cheaters that a 10 year old can spot.
I agree with you i would NUKE them to orbit. One month ban on BG first time and SECOND TIME lifetime ban. FOREVER! Kabam underastimates the importance of a cheater cheating SECOND time. Thats not A LITTLE more than one timer. It shows intent and resolve that they got nothing to loose a.k.a they dont give a damn for the account because if my account got banned one time i would be CAREFUL BEYOND BELIEF cause its a huge stack of my money and time and emotions connected to journey.
Next, would it be possible to understand the distribution of competitors vs. casual player on a spenders / F2P grouping? I would think that the whales and heavy spenders are not the most affected by the BG set up. Its the heavy competitors who don't spend or spend minimally. They are high enough on the progression tier but are some way off from the top. Most of them, as you pointed out, will probably continue to participate because they are competitive. Whatever solution is implemented would look to keep casual players who are spenders happy and try to retain a reasonable proportion of casual F2P players. Increased hostility feels like a poor way to keep those players on.
This suggests that overall progression rates in BG would have to go up for BG to be a competition in the real sense. Without that casual players will reduce participation.
The overall progression rates in BGs need to go up, else participation will drop and the mode will enter the death spiral.
The mode won’t survive for long with the 65%+ win ratio needed to advance at VT (in a pace that makes time to rewards ratio reasonable).
Kabam needs to rework the win/lose number of shields, or restructure VT at all, in order to ensure that percentage drops from 60%+ to ~40%.
Also to help this way, they need to rework Victory Shields to persist until you actually lose a match, and lower their price so they will be more affordable, and an efficient solution for those who have very low win ratio.
Battlegrounds participation has already start dropping, and that’s not an opinion, that’s data.
People are getting tired of the zero sum game.
Kabam needs to act fast, before BGs become Incursions 2.0.
This is what I attempted to do, to see if it was even achievable. Some subset of people like my ideas. Some different subset of people don't especially like my ideas but think its better than the current system and could live with them. Hopefully only a small group of players outright hate them and couldn't live with them. I think that number is small, but the forums can only go so far in determining that. We are not a perfectly representative group of players. But I think while we aren't statistically representative, we do tend to at least encompass a wide range of contradictory viewpoints, such that if there was someone out there that hated these ideas, there's probably at least one person in here who hates them just as much for similar reasons.
Hypothetically, if I was God of Video Games and I could command all game designers to do my bidding and I was answerable to no one and everyone feared my power, then yes this would be easier. However, in practice I'm barely Gopher of Video Games and the only thing game designers fear is a producer might assign them to read one of my posts.
Because balancing rewards in the way you're describing is as much a matter of judgment as it is objective reality, there's no particular reason for a game designer to trust my judgment over their own. They have the data I don't have, they have the systems information I have at best crude models of, and they have balance objectives I'm unaware of. I would be trying to win a hand of poker while only being dealt three cards.
No one wants to see players banned accidentally. But if we aim for perfection, the system won't work at all. We need a system where there's no *reasonable* doubt, perhaps with an explicit appeal process, but we cannot require absolutely no doubt.
I would not advocate for skipping steps in TOS investigations. I don't advocate for Kabam speeding up the process at the cost of investigation accuracy. But when they make the call, they have to stand by the call and act accordingly. They can't say "well, we just don't know, and we will never know." You put yourself on the jury, and you decide the defendant is guilty or innocent. And you will never know if you were right or wrong. But you make the call, or you tell the judge right up front you're incapable of serving on juries.
Or maybe none of that and the balance between rewarding participation versus rewarding victories is off. And it’s off to an order of magnitude that players who ordinarily would be loyal BG players are instead playing it tue same way people do things like flossing or eating broccoli. Or worse—they aren’t playing it (and they aren’t flossing or eating their broccoli either).
Ultimately, I don’t think the easy part is convincing the team to make a particular change—in fact, I think it’s safe to say the team feels pretty confident things are just fine. The oft-proven rule of this game is that change rarely comes unless things are literally on fire—and in the case of the phone-melt fiasco a few years ago, even that didn’t merit quick attention.
But I do think a quantitative adjustment to rewards is—from an implementation perspective—easier than computing a “fair” matchmaking system. You’re right to note that convincing the team change needs to be made is nowhere near as easy.
Dr. Zola
What concerns me isn't the process. It's the idea that the alternative is anyone having anyone banned without due process. Is there room for improvement? Sure. Given the choice, I'd say it's a permanent ban, when that process has found as verifiably as satisfies their criteria. That's not up to me, and I suppose it allows Players a chance to rectify their behavior if they choose. I don't think relying on scrolling through the Leaderboard is sufficient evidence without some kind of data to back it up. That's more of a hair trigger approach from my point of view.