**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.
Fix Battlegrounds in three easy steps (that we can argue about until the end of time)
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Secondly, you don't want a system that makes it just as advantageous to camp out in the VT as trying.
1. “ First off, you want to reward Wins, and that should be the majority of Rewards in a competition.”
Wins will still be rewarded, perhaps the same amount or even more so via objectives that focus on winning. Nothing about the principle that wins get rewarded changes. The adjustment is to make failure to win consecutively less punishing. Why? So people will keep playing and the mode will succeed.
2. “ It really shouldn't be more advantageous to just play and lose, as opposed to play and win.”
No one is proposing rewards for losing. If anything, this thread has suggested rewards—or at least non-penalties—for close matches or rewards for fight victories (see the very first post). It has also proposed cumulative rewards for winning fights beyond what’s currently available. Why? Again—so people participate and compete, which we all want.
3. “Secondly, you don't want a system that makes it just as advantageous to camp out in the VT as trying.”
That’s not what’s been suggested. What’s been discussed is a system that encourages players to participate in VT so they try to play and win. No one actually plays BGs just to see a cool fight here and there—it isn’t a movie you watch. People play to compete and earn rewards. If the mode is viewed as a waste of time, people stop playing. In PVP, that’s poison.
Hope that helps to clear up some things.
Dr. Zola
If this is some small additive, that would be somewhat benign, sure. If you're talking about allocating the Rewards in the VT Tiers for this, all that's doing is redesigning the actual competition because people don't like losing.
This thread has been a little hard to follow over the last few pages. Is the point of having objective based rewards to provide a sense of fulfilment for those that are not progressing through VT, but can still earn rewards and have a motivation to play (outside of 3 matches every other day). Whilst for those that want the juicy rewards of Gladiators circuit still have that as a goal to climb to?
If I’ve read that correctly a concern would be there would likely be an upper limit to level of rewards available as objectives. If to reach the top objective required 200 wins (for arguments sake, or if you get to GC in less, you auto claim all objective rewards) what happens if players in the first week of a BG season have won 200, lost 200 times, stayed in Bronze 2 of victory track. The incentive to play is lost and are we at square one again? Or have I missed the point?
2 seasons ago, won 50, lost 50.
Last season. Won 35, lost 35.
My incentive to play is almost zero. I'm a 15k paragon, alliance leader, casual spender, daily player. 2 more eop runs to go. The win then lose cadence of battlegrounds, without feeling any progress, sucks. Big time.
Would milestones help me stay in? Maybe, yes. But... Loss aversion is very strong though. While there's a loss of token/progress baked in and feeling of dead time, I'm not sure if even milestones will keep me playing.
It's strange how the psychology of BGs being, potentially, from match to match a complete waste of my time, is impacting my enjoyment of the game.
Good questions…short answer to the 200 wins question is no, not if it is an objective that resets every two days. That way, we encourage participation throughout the season.
Most people have suggested only marginal reallocation of rewards from
VT progression to recurring objectives, although a couple have suggested moving all to objectives. I’m not sure I think moving everything can work, but it’s one of the suggestions.
What would marginal tweaks look like? Changes to objectives to increase participation—namely, making all the current Win 1/2/3 objectives available up the top progression titles from the start. I also suggested adding some additional objectives that renew every two days—for example, one based on total fights (not matches) won in that span. There are other iterations, but over a season the additional tokens would increase participation take home by a small but meaningful amount.
What’s the rationale behind tweaking objectives?
(1) As a PVP mode, BGs need participation to exist.
(2) The current structure places too much emphasis on winning consecutively versus playing the mode frequently. In nuke metas, something as simple as a DC or a lucky draft can freeze your progress.
(3) While the season rewards are nice, outside the top 500 most players get a mix of shards and stones—the value proposition of the BG store is for many players the main attraction.
(4) Encouraging increased participation by tweaking objectives alleviates more than one issue—fewer mismatches, reduced stagnation frustration, and decreased sense of wasted time.
(5) Tweaking objectives is incremental, adjustable and reversible.
Aren’t the devs already doing something?
Yes and no. There’s something in the works, but it appears to be months away and requires building new tech. There’s no way to know if the seeding system will work or if it will spawn new issues. And tweaking objectives now doesn’t preclude adding a seeding system or other features.
This doesn’t seem like much. Why will it work?
No guarantees, but it shouldn’t take much. Marginally realigning incentives can have a significant impact on when, how much and how often people play BGs. It is possible the team will claim something like “BGs have never been more popular.” Perhaps, but ranks from last season suggest decreased interest.
That’s the gist of it. Others probably have different thinking, but that’s mine more or less.
Dr. Zola
It is psychologically strange, but I’m in a similar boat. Normally I’d be hitting some of all the content, but I’m just knocking a TB EQ lane pit now and then and even that is at about 50% explore. I’ve had a nice tear to start BGs but hit a losing skid and now I’m back in the .500 club.
I do not think we are the only ones.
Dr. Zola
I’ve had a similar BG pattern to @Moosetiptronic got into GC first 2 seasons. Then each subsequent season I just can’t seem to do anything. Last season after a horrendous first 5 BG matches I decided to stop playing the whole game for a while. Despite not currently playing I’m still emotionally invested and want to see a positive change so when/if I pick the game up again it will be an enjoyable positive experience. Like quite a few I started to only play BG in line with the objectives every other day, but if I got a good win streak I’d continue to see how far I could take it. So I can see how more objective based approach would have incentivised more gameplay, which like you said Kabam could implement now whilst they are building the new tech.
- DO NOT remove the tokens when losing a match
- Increase the number of tokens needed to go up in ranks. For instance 4 wins needed to go from silver3 to silver 2, etc.
I think this will solve alot of the issues and frustation and stress.
Same total rewards available per tier, a small amount per win to keep you motivated when you play the "win 2, lose 5" game.
But it's gone bonkers since the second BG season, with all the people quitting citing burnout as one reason why. This is people with big accounts, many of whom spend.
BGs for an alliance like ours, is something people feel they "should" play to help the others in the alliance, but the frustration of dead time in this mode if you lose, is frequently posted about in our chat.
It’s nice the team said something. But wait three months for things to maybe get better, for bugs to maybe improve, for cheats to maybe get punished?🤔
Dr. Zola
I’m trying to catch @DNA3000 for most words typed into forums…
Dr. Zola
Secondly, it's still a competition. Just because higher Accounts can't make mince meat out of the lowest ones doesn't mean it's not a competition.
I'm not digressing, so I'm just going to say I disagree. People are still competing. Just not with every Player in the game, in the beginning stages of ascension.
I think you may both be technically correct according to your own definitions.
The current BG version is “competitive” in that people play for prize(s) and win or lose doing so. That more or less defines a very simple version of “competition.”
But…the current version doesn’t allow for full competition among all competitors. Classes of people are either prevented or protected (depending on your perspective) from competing with every other class of people. Nevertheless, they are all playing for the same prize(s) and under the same basic rules. In that sense, it is a limited form of game that actually places significant restrictions on competition such that it can be “won” without facing the top competitors.
I think you understand this. I also think trying to provoke people into a “what is competition” debate really isn’t the thrust of this thread.
Dr. Zola
If it's not, I'm quite happy to move on.
Dr. Zola
It’s a tough nut to crack, that’s for sure. I hope the discussion above is still being followed along it salient points as BGs is my favorite game mode. And while I want to beat the best of the best I also acknowledge that participation drives it.
It would be cool in a sense to see it broken up into leagues. Majors, AAA, AA, A, where you battle for career succession rather than individual seasons with a single champion.
We already sort of have a competitive game mode, the GC. So in a sense you could argue everything we're doing is compromising that competition to encourage participation. But I see it more as a holistic compromise: the GC might theoretically be a competitive game mode, but it is an unsustainable one in isolation so it can't be considered a viable competitive game mode by itself. The game mode as a whole contains a balance between encouraging participation and promoting competition, but that balance appears to be off. Finding the right balance should be the goal of any structural changes to BG.
(I say "structural" because the two other critical issues with BG - cheating and bugs - are not problems you would necessarily resolve by changing how BG is designed to work, but rather change how the mode is managed however it is implemented).
We can focus on any one piece, provided we play fair and remember that piece is a piece of a larger whole, and we can't break the whole just to fix one piece. The perfect competition is a tournament: everyone plays everyone and the winner is the player with the best record. But we can't do that, so we have turnstiles and a match maker. We need to find a matching system that best replicates the results of a tournament within the limits of how players play the game. But even that creates a participatory problem where the vast majority of players won't bother to play, knowing they have no chance to place well. So we structure the competition in a way that encourages participation and allows players to strive for something even if it is not winning the competition, without compromising the core competitive elements of the game that still strive to se who is the best competitors.
And so on, and so on, and so on. We should never forget BG is supposed to be a competition, but in my opinion within that boundary we should try to make the game mode accessible enough that that competition can justify its own existence. The more people who play it, the more resources the devs will devote to it, and the better that will be for all participants.