One of the things I enjoy doing is metagaming. Once upon a time that's what "meta" meant, before it became the lazy way of saying "the state of the game." I enjoy thinking about how the games systems - the random crystals, the economy design, the resource balance, etc - function, and sometimes I try to use that analysis to my advantage. And nowhere has that been more interestingly useful than in Battlegrounds. I don't discuss it much - specifically because we're talking about attempting to get competitive advantages - but I have discussed some of my thoughts privately, and hinted at some of them here. But this is the first time I'm going to articulate a complete line of thought of the game mode and how I chose to test the limits of that analysis on the forums. This is the story of how I got into GC for the first time.
I'm going to be covering subjects that have been controversial on the forums in the past. This is not the place for addressing those controversies. I'm simply going to state the facts as I see them, without much judgment. For the purposes of this discussion, I am just showing how I play the hand I'm dealt, not arguing whether the game is fair or not.
When BG moved away from deck matching they switched to a roster-strength metric of some kind. This meant that players were tending to match against other players of comparable roster strength. This has a net effect of placing significant downward pressure on players of higher strength rosters, relative to the statistically average case. We can simplify the net result of what was happening in an inaccurate but illustrative way. If UC players were matching against UC players, and Cavs with Cavs, and so on, then some percentage of UC players would be promoting upward, and a similar percentage of Cavs, and so on. It would be like there were a bunch of turnstiles, each with players of similar roster strength, and each turnstile was allowing some rate of players through. On the other side of the turnstiles was a roughly equal mix of players of different roster strength.
For reasons unnecessary to debate, Kabam began moving away from that type of matching to matches that were more statistically average within a tier - in other words, players were more likely to match against a random playerr in the tier, and were thus exposed to a random sampling of all players in that tier. They were, in effect, matching against the average player, not the average player of equivalent roster strength. At the moment, it *seems* like this really kicks in around Platinum. At Gold and lower, you are far more likely to match against players of similar roster strength. Above that you are far more likely to match against players of average strength in your tier.
This dichotomy can be seen as a kind of transition line. Below Platinum, the match system is putting downward pressure on higher strength rosters to try to "even out" who gets passed that point. But above that point, everyone starts to match against everyone else. And because of that, the stronger players with stronger rosters are very likely to start winning at higher rates, and accelerate through those tiers. The strongest of them have almost certainly catapulted to the end of VT and exited to GC by now.
Which means we should have a situation where many players with strong rosters are still working their way through the lower tiers, and still stuck below Gold. However, the tiers above Gold are likely to be depleted of strong players - because they have had enough time to reach GC. Which means Platinum through Vibranium are probably "weaker" in terms of competitive strength than you might otherwise think, because many strong roster players you might expect to be there are still fighting it out in lower tiers because of roster matching, and many other strong roster players you might expect to be there have benefited from stochastic (random) matching and have left VT entirely.
*If* you buy this analysis, then now's the perfect time to attempt to get into GC, if you have a reasonably strong roster and at least some minimum amount of skill. It is entirely possible that Platinum through Vibranium is currently *easier* for Paragon players than Gold is at the moment, because of the way the current match and points system treats strong roster players.
So how closely did my analysis match my experience. Well...
This is my final twelve matches on the run up to GC. Three immediate forfeits, two give ups after the first fight, six 2-0 sweeps, and one 2-1 win. Now, clearly some of those guys were significantly lower than my roster. But others were not. The forfeit just before my last victory was a Paragon player with similar prestige and the Zone 25 title, not an underpowered roster. And some of those wins were not against players with weak *roster* but weak *skills*. Players with a scary roster but did not draft well or play well.
What I'm seeing are players with weak roster and strong skill who got there by virtue of the match mechanics, and players with strong roster and weak skill who haven't made it out of VT yet. And if you are a player with A- roster and B+ skills, that's exactly who you want to fight.
I don't know how long this dynamic will last. The population of the upper VT will probably continue to evolve over time. Stronger players with stronger rosters will eventually make it through the Gold/Platinum match maker bottleneck and statistically increase the strength of the average player in those tiers. More stronger players will end up staying in upper VT simply because they don't want to grind out enough matches, but are still formidable when you face them. And two or three of those matches were genuinely tough matches I could have lost, so my win streak does contain some luck.
To make this happen in the first place, I had to push through Bronze through Gold (well, Silver through Gold really) and then through Platinum where the match difficulty leveled off but was still significant. But I think there is a tier of player, like me, with strong roster and decent skills, that probably thinks BG is not worth it because of the roster disadvantage in the higher tiers. But *if* they are willing to push, and *if* they have at least some reasonable level of skill, and *if* they are willing to burn the time and energy, I think it could be worth it to get passed Platinum, where ironically the rewards get higher and the overall *statistical* difficulty might be lower. Random chance still applies.
Take this for whatever it is worth. This is much more of an intuitive analysis than a numbers-crunching one. And actually, I hope most people TL;DR this one, because every player that takes this to heart and gets to GC is probably gonna lower my own GC rewards. Which is why I don't discuss BG strategy too much in general, except where the discussion is necessary to discuss productive improvements to the mode.
Oh yeah, what does quantum physics have to do with any of this? Well, it only took 35 years, but I finally got to use my semiconductor physics education in a productive manner. I realized the Battlegrounds VT contains a
depletion zone, and this depletion zone would ballistically accelerate me to GC. Okay, the metaphor doesn't ultimately work very well, but let me have my fun. EE FTW.
