**KNOWN AW ISSUE**
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
**KNOWN BG ISSUE**
We are aware of an issue with the seeding for the beginning of the BG season.
We are adding rewards to higher progression brackets to offset the additional grind.
More information here.
We are aware of an issue with the seeding for the beginning of the BG season.
We are adding rewards to higher progression brackets to offset the additional grind.
More information here.
**Arcade is being extra tricky with his Murder Box...**
It appears Arcade has been non-cooperative in his approach to this month's side quest and presented his clues in a nonsensical order. Lucky you, Summoners, we have our best and brightest on the case and those clues should now be a lot more straightforward. While messing around in Arcade's files we came across a phrase, highlighted and bolded, with sparkles and pointy arrows: "the abode for the dead" ... Maybe that will help you along the way!
It appears Arcade has been non-cooperative in his approach to this month's side quest and presented his clues in a nonsensical order. Lucky you, Summoners, we have our best and brightest on the case and those clues should now be a lot more straightforward. While messing around in Arcade's files we came across a phrase, highlighted and bolded, with sparkles and pointy arrows: "the abode for the dead" ... Maybe that will help you along the way!
Options
Fix Battlegrounds in three easy steps (that we can argue about until the end of time)
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
2. Use common leaderboard matchmaking with elo or any similar system. Cut the ratings by 1/2 or 3/4 or whatever, wich will compress players, making it more likely for players to win a match within some rating range basically for everyone except the very weakest players
That's it. Done. No need to random walk x steps to the right. To punish tanking, use not only final leaderboard position, but also lowest and highest ones, maybe add some natural rating decay.
Also thanks for quoting kbam, I day a good laugh reading it
The problem with this objection to allowing players to bypass tiers is that *first* you hand players the unfair advantage of avoiding match ups they don’t want, then say the advantage store is closed and no one else gets to shop. That’s intrinsically unfair. The fair thing to do if we are going to judge who is getting unfair advantages is take *everything* off the table first, and then decide what fair distribution of advantages and disadvantages is. That means we remove the roster protections for lower progress players, and then we ask them what they are willing to give up to get it back.
In game theory there is the thought experiment of the fair cake cut. Two people want to share a cake but neither one trusts the other to divide the cake fairly. The solution to the problem is to flip a coin (it doesn’t even need to be an especially fair coin) to decide who cuts the cake. But whoever cuts the cake in half, the other one chooses which side they get first.
The person cutting the cake is claiming their cut is fair. If so, they cannot object to the other person picking either side. Meanwhile the person picking gets to choose which side they get, so they can’t object that their side is unfairly small. Starting from zero, we build up the process of creating a fair division.
Fair is no one gets any special consideration. We don’t look at anything, and everyone matches against everyone else. This is ultimately what a full round robin tournament would do, and is completely fair. We can’t match everyone against everyone practically, so we’d do it randomly.
Every divergence from this is then a negotiated trade off. If you give anything to anyone, either you have to compensate elsewhere, or admit you’re deliberately putting your thumb on the scale and making things unfair for someone. Which is fine, if that’s your intent, but at least it forced you to be honest about it. Giving strong players a higher starting point is only an unfair advantage if you don’t count the other unfair advantages other players are already getting from the current structure.
What you call unfair advantage is the absence of an unfair disadvantage. Certainly at the start of the competition. The suggestion is essentially, let us dominate Players that have no chance of winning, or let us roadblock progress for everyone under by staking claim on spots before the competing begins. That's not a competition. That's a dictatorship.
The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.
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.