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Fix Battlegrounds in three easy steps (that we can argue about until the end of time)
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There have been numerous complaints about this.
It goes the other way too, there are cav players who complain about matchmaking in GC because they're no longer just being matched with their roster protections they had in VT. These roster protections have allowed them an easier pass to GC than fresh paragons who are stuck fighting people like me who have 15+ r4s to crush them with.
This discussion keeps flipping between general complaints and specific complaints. You’re arguing that the complaints people are making are wrong in general then claiming to have proposed solutions that also don’t work in general, they only work in very specific circumstances. If someone says roster matching is unfair you say they are wrong and it is non-roster matching is unfair, then you claim it would be fair if it was done in a limited fashion. Which means you do think it’s fair, but you still want to object to anyone claiming it’s unfair.
One of the reasons for my post was to attempt to avoid these kinds of slippery debates. Instead of discussing whether certain ideas work in general, we can all agree to discuss whether they work in a specific configuration or not. I content that ELO matching (ignoring roster) is fair, regardless of how people attempt to portray it. If someone wants to attack it, they should attack how I suggest using it specifically. If the argument is “it’s just an attempt to allow stronger rosters to beat up weaker ones” they should attempt to make that argument in the context of how I suggest using it, if they can. Anyone who has to resort to “of course it is” without being able to construct examples that make sense in the context of this thread can be judged accordingly by the readers of the thread.
I believe this kind of specificity can focus the discussion, not just around my ideas but around everyone’s productive ideas. If someone has an idea they think is better, they don’t need to come up with a gigantic justification for it. They can simply try to show how it does something better than mine, or avoids a problem mine has. And then see how many people agree with them.
Specificity matters here, and I think it will help keep the conversation on a constructive track. There might be much better ideas out there, and if so maybe this is where they get a chance to show themselves.
And now I have to ready myself for take off (literally). Let’s see how things continue on now that we’ve bought ourselves some additional spotlight attention. Let’s try to keep things focused. A lot of people who don’t necessarily agree with me all that often seem to think these ideas, however imperfect they might be, are worth at least thinking about. That’s promising in and of itself, even if I don’t get perfect agreement everywhere.
a. Keeping the highest Accounts from decimating the lowest in the beginning Tiers is somehow unfair.
b. Starting people ahead in a Season that is designed to measure progress within a Season is a fair measurement.
We can debate the term fair ad infinitum, but it's not a vague term.
In the victory track the game is matching NBA teams with NBA teams, college teams with college teams, high school teams with high school teams. Not #1 with #2.
You think these high school teams are better, and deserve to place higher than the eliminated NBA teams?
Fair means a fair competition for everyone. As close to it as possible. It means the playing field is not based on people taking advantage of others, or the system. It means not setting people up for Matches that guarantee their Loss through no doing of their own, at the gate. That's not based on Win/Loss ratio. That's based on Rosters they literally have no chance of winning against. Fair means they reasonably meet that after climbing as far as they can, not being placed in that situation from the beginning by a system that uses them as fuel for the highest Players. Fair means if you're going to have a measurement of Rankings from the beginning of the Season to the end, those Rankings aren't predetermined by placing people higher before it starts. Fair isn't that subjective. People just don't like when fair doesn't come at the expense of others.
As I said in my previous post, the reason why I’m not fond of sports analogies is because they lead to side tracks that aren’t always productive. But, my fault for mentioning them in the first place, so let’s dive in.
I did not, and was pretty clear about it, attempt to compare the specific methodology of matching in March Madness and how BG works, nor do I know how anyone who actually read my post could conclude that. I specifically stated for purpose of discussion that competitions do not always equate fair individual match ups with fair competitions overall, and I used the analogy of March Madness tournaments to discuss this within a framework that many people would likely be familiar with. In particular, people are likely to be familiar with the concept of tournament seeding, where in a presumably fair competition competitors are matched up against each other not in ways designed to match them against the most likely equal competition, but in almost the exact opposite of that. These competitions are nevertheless generally seen as fair.
In basketball tournaments where #1 faces #TheLast the justification for this is that the tournament is a continuation of the regular season, and the point of the regular season is to win seeding. There is thus the belief that high seeding can legitimately offer an advantage without being an unfair advantage. There is thus a motivation to do well during the regular season. If this incentive didn’t exist, the notion goes, this would devalue the competition during the regular season. So global competitive goals can, and often do, override local competitive match concerns.
While the mechanics are completely different, the analogous force operating in BG is that players who develop roster - something the game incentivizes as a foundational aspect of the game, underpinning pretty much all aspects of the game modes and the monetization that supports the game itself - do not get any advantage for doing so. Instead, they are disadvantaged by facing stronger opponents in lock step with that roster development.
I believe this is sufficiently analogous to *describe* the situation to others in a way they would understand. However, the very nature of analogies also makes them vulnerable to being nit picked by people who aren’t interesting in understanding but rather refuting, and can’t refute the argument so they instead target a softer explanation of the argument that isn’t intended to be a strong argument but rather is intended to be expository. That’s why, as I said, I’m not fond of the sports analogies when it comes to BG. They are useful to trade ideas among those interested in trading them, but aren’t suitable for making cases in otherwise hostile environments.
Setting all of that aside, the VT is not matching the NBA against the NBA and the college teams against the college teams. The reason why the NBA doesn’t play college teams is because the NBA as a sports league supports a competitive environment that is completely separate from the NCAA. They are playing under different rules, in different circumstances, and for different prizes and awards. No college team, however good, is ever going to be declared NBA champion. It doesn’t matter how good they are, it doesn’t matter what their record it, it doesn’t matter how many games they win. They are literally ineligible to get first place, last place, or anything in between. They can’t win draft picks, trophies, rings, nothing. Similarly, no NBA team can become NCAA champion. NCAA basketball and NBA basketball share similarities, but they are different sports played in different leagues for different prizes. They are mutually exclusive competitions. The NBA doesn’t only match against NBA because it would be unfair to match against college teams. The NBA matches against NBA because the NBA is a sport which contains competitors all of which are NBA teams, which have NBA requirements, and play by NBA rules, and they are the only competitors eligible to compete in the NBA. Fairness has nothing to do with it. To compete in the NBA, you must be an NBA team. To compete in the NCAA tournament, you must be an NCAA college basketball team.
There is no “mostly 5* with a couple 6s” Battlegrounds league. So there shouldn’t be a “mostly 5* with a couple of 6s” isolated competition ring. Unless Kabam wants to make one. And I am on sufficiently good terms with the Law of Unintended Consequences that he tells me the mostly 5* crowd is unlikely to appreciate what would happen if Kabam chooses that route. They have no idea what Mr. Law intends to put in their bowl, but I can tell without looking that it is not going to be as much as everyone else’s.
In my specific suggestion, Paragons and UCs will not initially meet at all. They would be segregated by roster strength, per the suggestion. This is not out of fairness, this is out of the need to compromise the competition to promote participation, and it is considered a small price to pay initially, and by “initially” I mean in the case where both players have never played BG before, and we thus know nothing about their playing strength.
Over time both players will shift from matching by roster to matching by rating. During this shift, lower roster players will begin to get exposed to higher roster players. But this will start out infrequently, and it will tend to be the stronger low roster players facing the weaker high roster players. These will still be reasonably close matches only instead of “close” in terms of roster, they will be “close” in terms of ELO, and ELO is designed to match opponents at near 50% win rates. So low roster players will see their match ups shift from equally strong roster to equally strong player, and their win rates shift from whatever they start off with towards 50%, either going up or down to converge.
Low roster players with low win rates are not going to ever see Paragons of any kind. High win rate low roster players will start off seeing higher rosters, then higher, then even higher, but only until they start to lose to them, whereupon they will stop seeing increasingly higher competition. At no point will a low roster player get “stomped on” consistently by higher roster players. First, because they will never see them, and then later because the only high roster players they will see will be ones they can beat, high roster or not.
In successive seasons stronger high roster players are not just going to have higher ELO, they will be starting in higher tracks, which means the low roster players aren’t just unlikely to match against them, they are unlikely to be the same track as them to get matched at all. So once again, there’s no opportunity for strong high roster players to “beat up” lower roster players.
Nothing is perfect, and even ELO takes time to converge, and ELO presumes strength is transitive (in BG, that’s not established) so players will sometimes see overwhelming competition. But in general, that’s not going to happen. It is actually roster matching that can cause a player to get stomped on over and over and over again. It is happening now. This is impossible with my roster x ELO match proposal. The only low roster players that will be facing high roster players are low roster players so strong they regularly beat high roster players in actual fact, and high roster players that are so bad that they can be beaten by average low roster players. ELO prevents anything else from ever happening.
In this sense, my suggestion is even better than the AW system. A brand new alliance starts at ELO zero. This alliance *must* beat up lower alliances to climb in ratings and reach their intrinsic ELO. In my suggestion, a player new to BG won’t start at ELO zero and immediately start beating up low rosters. Instead, they will be matched against equal strength roster players until the game gathers enough data on them to begin matching them against more appropriate opponents.
We can debate the representation looks like (or if it even needed), but to assume that players with lower progression will invest time in BG without having any hopes of representation is optimistic. And there will never be a point where the top title alone will be able to a PVP mode in the game, at least not on current numbers.
Sometimes you'll have a surprise winner and sometimes you'll have an expected winner.
Dr. Zola
And your analogy is meaningless unless you're in some sort of bowl-size competition w/ your neighbor.
On whether sports analogies are helpful. You can discount that it exists in sports and restrict the discussion to "gaming" only for the sake of this conversation - it may be personally helpful to you but may not be helpful to others. Not all of us think in exactly the same way, which is the crux of the debate about "fairness".
In many cases, solutions to complex problems come from outside the specific domain.
Your original post was well constructed and addresses most if not all of the concerns I have with battleground's design.
If you think my concern is me fighting Players like you, you're not following.
You can certainly avoid them meeting Top Players AT 0. I am so tired of the hypocrisy of this entire subject. I'm going to lay it out flat.
This whole excuse about people being given an easy street because they can't take advantage of the system is just plain manipulation. People can twist perspectives until they become Popples, but the only people who want easy Wins are the ones pushing to bash people about "starting from 0". What's more is they actually have the nerve to call that a fair system because it's random.
I've had enough of the Sports analogies. This is nothing short of arrogant entitlement. You want to beat the lowest Players? Do it when they fight their way up. Not at the door, so you can fast track your way to the GC.
That's the exact problem with the system that currently resides in War. People have become so entitled to overpowering others and calling it skill that they're thoroughly offended at the thought of fighting someone their own size. There are enough Alliances in War that they still play but stopped caring, to make that system possible. Wait until that happens to BGs, and people stop caring. Good luck running the system with those few numbers caring. You'd have the same people coming up against each other either way because it's become so isolated.
You talk about silos. Let's talk about the silo of "Top" vs. anyone else scavenging for enjoyment when the entire game mode serves ONE demographic. Go ahead and silo progress into homeostasis and see how long Players bother with it. I guarantee I've seen it happen before. There is a range of Players to account for, and their progress and experience matters just as much as the "Top". Which only exists because the numbers of everyone else support them.
I'm not concerned about coming up against anyone's Account. I'm not the one that's offended by losing Fights I could reasonably win. When I'm beat, I'm beat.
When the system ensures a guaranteed Loss because the numbers alone mean I'm so overpowered that no amount of skill will make a difference, at the START of a competition, that's not skill, buds. That's a set-up.
We don’t match MLB teams by roster cost and let the best record go to the World Series. That would be absurd. If you don’t want to face the Yankees or the Mets, you don’t ask to be matched against more fair teams. You just don’t play MLB baseball. You play all of them, or you play none of them.
World Cup competition is a bit different, because stronger and weaker regions are a matter of circumstance. In other words, we don’t write it into the bylaws of the WC that Asian teams always get to face easier competition. That’s happenstance. We match Asian teams against other Asian teams because they are in Asia. If I decide to play at 10pm HST I only match against other people playing at the same time. For all you know, that might be when stronger players happen to be playing, or that could be when much weaker players are playing. That could offer me a substantial advantage or disadvantage. But I think either way few people would consider that to be a fairness issue. It’s simply a practical necessity. Asian teams have to play teams regionally convenient, and BG players have to play players temporally present. Advantages might exist, but we usually consider that a concession to real world practical realities.
Special treatment is just that. It’s special, and by definition not fair. I think most people would be willing to make the very reasonable compromise to allow this unfair special advantage under special circumstances, I’ve laid out my own version of this, but i also think anyone unwilling to even call it an unfair special advantage in the first place and acknowledge the concession as a concession is someone we will ultimately have to abandon in the conversation, because without an honest appraisal of what the real world trade offs are, there’s no way to consider reasonable alternatives or the cost benefit of any suggestion.
This bears staring directly. ELO matching does not allow matching players so unbalanced that one side has no chance of winning. The only time that happens is when the ELO rating itself is horribly wrong. ELO matches players that have a 50% chance to beat each other. That’s it’s mathematical foundation. If I wanted to be as callous as some others, I would say anyone opposed to ELO is probably someone currently beating up inferior competitors at high percentage and is afraid of facing equal competition.
Let’s first define what we mean by a fair match up. My definition of a fair match up will be this: a fair match up is a match up where both sides have a roughly equal chance of winning before the match starts. I think most people will agree that’s pretty reasonable.
But how do we find these matches? Well, now we have to make some assumptions. Let’s first assume that everyone has some actual intrinsic strength that represents who they will beat more often and who beats them more often. Higher strength means they beat more people, lower strength means more people beat them more of the time. That also seems reasonable (in strict mathematical terms this isn’t a given, but for our purposes it’s fine).
Let’s also make one other assumption before we proceed. Let’s assume the notion of a fair competition is even possible. For this to be true it must be the case that there exists a way to sort the players by strength, from the strongest to the weakest. Again, in mathematical terms this isn’t a given. For example, suppose we have only three competitors, A, B, and C. And A always beats B, B always beats C, and C always beats A. In this case, strength is not transitive. A beats B and B beats C but that doesn’t mean A beats C, and thus there is no fair way to sort the competitors in order by strength. So in a sense there’s no fair competition really possible here. Let’s ignore this for now.
Okay, so we have a bunch of competitors, all with different strength. They all compete against each other, and in theory there is an order that would place them from strongest to weakest. How do we get there?
Let’s pick a random player and arbitrarily assign him a numerical rating of 1000. It doesn’t matter who he is or how strong he is. Strength is relative anyway, we don’t care how strong anyone is absolutely, we only care how strong they are relative to everyone else. We could theoretically have this person play everyone else and compare strength that way. Everyone who wins gets a higher than 1000 rating, everyone who loses gets a lower than 1000 rating. To figure out how much higher or lower, we have them play each other. Everyone who wins gets 2000 rating, and then as they play each other they go up and down, over and over until everyone has a rating that tells us who they beat and who they lose to. If we do this enough times, everyone will have a rating that tells us everyone with higher rating beats them and everyone lower than then loses to them, and everyone with the same rating wins roughly half the time. Now we just match everyone with identical rating.
Except this is impractical, for obvious reasons. We can’t actually match everyone against everyone. But we don’t really have to. We could assign everyone 1000 rating, and then follow the rule: match everyone against equal rating, increase winner rating and decrease loser rating. Now what happens is everyone starts at 1000, but over time the players who actually play at a much higher strength win more often, which causes their rating to rise until they start winning only half the time, whereupon their rating starts bouncing up and down around some average value. This causes everyone to converge on a rating that actually represents their true strength.
But even this is problematic for a couple reasons. First, if we start everyone at the same rating most players ratings will initially be “wrong” because we’re making the assumption everyone is equally strong, which they are not. Gameplay over time will correct this, everyone’’s ratings will *eventually* be correct, but for a time they won’t be, and we will get uneven matches. We can mitigate that by instituting better initial estimates for rating, and for simply not trusting rating until the player has played enough games for us to believe the rating actually measures something.
We also have to deal with a further exploit. Someone could deliberately lose a lot on purpose in an attempt to temporarily lower rating and gain easier matches. To prevent this we can institute ratings floors which guarantee to player can manipulate their rating lower than some minimum value, which we will determine based on things like their intrinsic roster strength and their prior gameplay. Once they establish they are a certain strength, we will let them “get worse” to some extent as this can actually happen in reality, but we will throttle this to realistic levels.
One last thing. Up to this point I’ve placed no requirement on the ratings numbers other than they allow us to sort the players in order of strength. It would be nice if the numbers actually meant something. Since no one always loses or always wins, we usually have the case that when a stronger player faces a weaker player, they win some percent of the time, say 75% or 90%. It would be nice if the ratings reflected that, such that we could create a calculator whereby if we plug in the ratings of the two competitors A and B, what popped out of the calculator R(A,B) was not just a prediction of who would win, but also how often. But that’s a lot of math. Let’s hand that problem to the nerds to solve and get back to us.
So we have a rating that we use to decide who’s a fair match to who. This rating number is designed in such a way that if two players with equal rating face each other, the odds of winning are about 50/50. Higher rated players are intrinsically stronger than lower rated players and will win more often than 50%. A player is presumed to have some intrinsic strength we might not know, but the more they play, the more their in-game rating will move towards their intrinsic actual strength. We ensure that players ratings change over time to match their changing real world strength by adjusting rating upward for wins and downward for losses, and we ensure that ratings cannot be manipulated beyond a certain point with deliberate losses using ratings floors and collars. We ask the nerds to make the math work out so that not only can we predict who is likely to win, but how often, using mathy math. Then we just match everyone by this rating number, equal rating means equal match.
That’s basically how ELO works.
As for the rest, we can disagree until the cows come home, but War is now centered around one demographic. The Top. The recent changes are an example. The Rewards increase, the Matchmaking allowing absolutely no reason with the sizes, you name it. It's been structured to benefit the Top, and that's it. I'm not going to debate that. It's apparent in every change that comes.
You can't do that with a PVP mode that involves Players with such a range. They will stop playing it. They will stop caring.
I wasn't rebutting your suggestions. I was responding to the OP's suggestion to have random Matches from the beginning. I'm quite honestly, tired of people claiming others have an advantage just because there is protection from them TAKING advantage of them.
I’ve fought for years to nudge the mode in that direction, sometimes in ways other players liked and sometimes in ways where the majority of players thought I was insane. And I wasn’t the only one by far. But however it got there, it is there now. The same thing can happen to Battlegrounds. It won’t get there because I say so, and it won’t likely get there in exactly the way I say so, but the point is it can get there, because if there is at least one way to get there, it is by definition not impossible.
But we have to be realistic about how we get there, and what the trade offs are going to be to get there. We can’t keep backsliding into moot arguments over how things are unfair in general. It just puts us all back to square one every time the wind blows. To solve the progression specific issues with BG mode progression in the context of a progression game with progression rewards, the discussion itself has to ultimately make progress forward. Progress we don’t lose after every single engagement.
In any competition in which this option is practical, everyone faces everyone else, at least once. This is generally considered fair. It becomes impractical when the number of competitors gets too large, but I would love to see someone show up to a round robin competition and declare that they would not face certain competitors because it was unfair for them to do so. I’d like to see someone attempt to make that argument anywhere outside of an Internet forum.
We don’t do round robin because it is obviously impractical. But the fact that round robin competitions are intrinsically fair cuts the legs out from under the argument that allowing such match ups is unfair. We don’t suggest such things because they are impractical, because they hurt other interests, because they can’t be reasonably implemented in ways that eliminate troublesome side effects. But not because they are unfair.
If it was magically possible to conduct a full round robin tournament between everyone, I’d vote to do that. We’d be here until the sun burned out, so very strong magic would have to be involved, but I’d do it. And I would dare anyone make the argument that this was unfair in a setting where they couldn’t hide behind the limits of Internet forums.
It isn't just a full round. It's Fight after Fight because the people who are running it competitively are doing so from the onset, and by the time everyone pushes forward, there's about a week left to progress. That is, barring anyone waiting to start themselves. Then the process is pin ball.
People get too wrapped up in the word fair, but in actuality, it is wrong. It is wrong to include Players that are using Rosters that have no chance of winning, and expecting them to continually try and fail for the ease of Players with larger Rosters. Their gaming experience, their progress, matters more than that. They're not sacrificial lambs. They're human beings trying to play the game mode.
Again, there is a fine line between competitiveness and taking the desire to even play it because no matter what these Players do, they can't win out the gate. Numerically, they can't. Unless you have someone throwing a Match or absent-mindedly not paying attention, they're never going to do as much Damage as their Opponent. The differences in Champions make it so.
Just because it's a competition doesn't mean the gaming experience of Players who are using lower Accounts is not valid or significant. That's always been my point. You cause the majority to be disinterested, and let's be honest they're the majority because the minority is the Top, then you have a dwindling system.
However, it's not about "us vs. them", and it's not about favoring one demographic over the other. It's about having a game mode that's reasonably challenging, and at the same time enjoyable, for as many Players as possible. That's fairness.