I don't think it has derailed. at all.. You are making assumptions as to why bigger accounts are where they are at and several are stating how/why they do it. My account is by no means small but it's decent w/o spending. BUT I 100% intentionally hang out in VT for as long as I can with the milestones given to me. There is literally no reason or motivation to go do more or go faster for me. BGs = Arena 2.0 for me. Put in some time to get maximized rewards that are relevant and do something else.
Kabam said they would monitor and ban accounts that purposely lose and prey on smaller VT accounts beginning of season 12. I assume that Kabam will do what they say they would do with this... they always do right?... 🧐
I don't think it has derailed. at all.. You are making assumptions as to why bigger accounts are where they are at and several are stating how/why they do it. My account is by no means small but it's decent w/o spending. BUT I 100% intentionally hang out in VT for as long as I can with the milestones given to me. There is literally no reason or motivation to go do more or go faster for me. BGs = Arena 2.0 for me. Put in some time to get maximized rewards that are relevant and do something else.
Kabam said they would monitor and ban accounts that purposely lose and prey on smaller VT accounts beginning of season 12. I assume that Kabam will do what they say they would do with this... they always do right?... 🧐
Yeah, that's the Kabam post I was referencing.
For all the folks who say they don't play at all until the end of the season, I'll reiterate again, cool. That's your prerogative.
I'm only asking if Kabam is still monitoring for folks intentionally losing to stay in VT as long as possible.
I agree with what others have said, that doing so doesn't necessarily give them MORE rewards. But it can give them those same rewards with less investment at the cost of those trying to climb.
I don't think it has derailed. at all.. You are making assumptions as to why bigger accounts are where they are at and several are stating how/why they do it. My account is by no means small but it's decent w/o spending. BUT I 100% intentionally hang out in VT for as long as I can with the milestones given to me. There is literally no reason or motivation to go do more or go faster for me. BGs = Arena 2.0 for me. Put in some time to get maximized rewards that are relevant and do something else.
Kabam said they would monitor and ban accounts that purposely lose and prey on smaller VT accounts beginning of season 12. I assume that Kabam will do what they say they would do with this... they always do right?... 🧐
I'm only asking if Kabam is still monitoring for folks intentionally losing to stay in VT as long as possible.
.... Why would they not be?
The amount of players who either don't play bgs at all, play them occasionally, or wait to play them is far higher than you're imagining
I don't think it has derailed. at all.. You are making assumptions as to why bigger accounts are where they are at and several are stating how/why they do it. My account is by no means small but it's decent w/o spending. BUT I 100% intentionally hang out in VT for as long as I can with the milestones given to me. There is literally no reason or motivation to go do more or go faster for me. BGs = Arena 2.0 for me. Put in some time to get maximized rewards that are relevant and do something else.
Kabam said they would monitor and ban accounts that purposely lose and prey on smaller VT accounts beginning of season 12. I assume that Kabam will do what they say they would do with this... they always do right?... 🧐
I'm only asking if Kabam is still monitoring for folks intentionally losing to stay in VT as long as possible.
.... Why would they not be?
.....Why would they be? Isn't that the point of asking a question?
For a while they were talking about all the bans for cheating via mods. They've never said a word about banning anyone for this topic.
My question is simply "Where are these guys the whole season?" They're clearly strong competitors, stronger than me for sure. So if I can make it to GC so much faster, while playing casually, how is it that these guys who are better than me don't start showing up in GC til the final 5 days of the season?
I can only assume it's because they're intentionally tanking in VT to maximize all the objectives there.
Will have to see what Kabam updates the Objectives/Milestones to be, but frankly they are not all that interesting (6-star shards) if players are able place high in GC. So I don't know that people are intentionally losing in VT just to be able to max out the Milestones.
And as was the original ask, I was curious if Kabam was still monitoring for that behavior or not.
I'm reasonably sure they are monitoring for that behavior on at least some level, as it is a bannable offense if done egregiously enough.
However, my own suspicions are that the increase in strength of opponents in the higher tiers of VT is a combination of two factors. First, players have been wising up to the strategy I've been mentioning for a long time now, since even before seeding, which is that since the stronger players tend to promote, the longer the season goes on the weaker the remaining competition becomes. Which in effect means the later you play, the weaker your average competition is likely to be. But if everyone waits till the end, of course the strength of competition will rise substantially.
Second, there are fewer competitors, particularly of lower strength. That's to be expected to some degree, when lower strength players jump in, if they aren't wise to how the VT works they can run into roadblocks, and that can discourage them from pushing too hard or even playing at all. So over time, you'd expect the strength of the average competitor to rise over time, as weaker players play less.
The combination of those two factors seems to have been at play for the past several season, since the last Battlegrounds boosted milestone season. And I don't think this is entirely horrible either. Very few players can play with consistent levels of intensity in a PvP ladder. To expect that all the players would be doing so indefinitely, or even that that number would actually rise over time, would be asking for too much. Instead, I think the idea is that Kabam will periodically incentivize BG play with things like boosted milestones to encourage players to play temporarily to revitalize the mode, and then let natural decay reduce the activity in the mode over time as players go do other things. That way when players do jump in, they are doing so relatively "fresh" and not exhausted from many seasons of grind.
This is probably part of the "more things than a player can do" strategy of content development Kabam is employing for MCOC. It is easy to get bored. It is easy to get burned out. But if there's more things to do than most players can do, and Kabam rotates the focus of the game from one part to another part, players will have less opportunity to play a mode into the ground. We don't want Battlegrounds to die, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing if Battlegrounds takes a nap for a while for many players.
Once I got the last set of objective rewards, I made a deck of 5* to intentionally lose. I still fought every match but I knew I wouldn't win. I did this to burn elder marks so I wouldn't have any go to waste when I was awarded a bunch after the first 5 matches of next season. Figured everyone would appreciate some easy wins.
The thing I don't get OP, is you're upset that people are intentionally losing to you? You'd rather they try and possibly beat you making your advancement that much more difficult? Not seeing where the downside is for you for your opponent to intentionally lose the match.
Once I got the last set of objective rewards, I made a deck of 5* to intentionally lose. I still fought every match but I knew I wouldn't win. I did this to burn elder marks so I wouldn't have any go to waste when I was awarded a bunch after the first 5 matches of next season. Figured everyone would appreciate some easy wins.
The thing I don't get OP, is you're upset that people are intentionally losing to you? You'd rather they try and possibly beat you making your advancement that much more difficult? Not seeing where the downside is for you for your opponent to intentionally lose the match.
I never said anything about anyone intentionally losing to me.
I pointed out that I play BGs from the start of the season, competing every other day to get the solo objectives, and that usually gets me to GC with about 10-14 days left in season.
What I noticed, and questioned with this thread, is that usually in the final 5 days of the season, I start seeing massive accounts in GC, and I was wondering where those accounts were all along, cause I feel like some of the these guys could breeze through VT.
As many have pointed out here, they don't even bother with BGs until the final week or so, and that's perfectly fine.
All I was questioning, is how many of those players were intentionally camping out in VT picking off lower accounts to get easier solo objectives.
My understanding was that Kabam was going to punish that behavior, so the only ask of this thread was a simple one "Is kabam monitoring and taking action on that?"
My guess is that they're not, not because they don't want to, but because they don't have a detection algorithm to determine if someone lost intentionally or genuinely.
But that's all I was asking. I make it to GC just fine every season, so I'm not complaining. I was just curious.
Apparently they do, considering they've already taken action on tankers in the past. What you're seeing is the result of people waiting until the last minute to push through, for the most part. I'm sure there's the odd tanker now and then, but in general, that strategy doesn't even yield Milestones lately, so it's less likely.
i mean, i also do that. I can reach GC in first week if i tried (i did it a couple of times in the past already) but i prefer slowly doing 3 matches everyday for the free tokens. Sometimes more than 3. It is basically the same reaching GC in day 7 or day 24 if the plan is only parking at quantum/mysterium anyway
All I was questioning, is how many of those players were intentionally camping out in VT picking off lower accounts to get easier solo objectives.
I don't think the solo objectives or milestones are large enough to make this worth it. You can get half the solo objective rewards just for doing three matches win or lose, and the solo milestones are so-so in that regard. To deliberately lose just to have a better shot at winning to get the other half seems like more work than the rewards justify. I'm sure someone does it, but I doubt a lot of players do it.
The alliance milestones maybe are worth doing that, for some alliances. Or rather, some alliances might pressure their members to score enough points, making this less a question of rewards and more a question of satisfying an alliance requirement. But I doubt that's very widespread as well.
@mgj0630 I guess your use of the term "sandbagging" confused me. I, personally, don't define sandbagging as waiting until the final week of the event to start.
@mgj0630 I guess your use of the term "sandbagging" confused me. I, personally, don't define sandbagging as waiting until the final week of the event to start.
I haven't met someone that would define sandbagging that way. There's numerous reasons to wait to play or hold off on bgs that I can't even remotely consider it sandbagging
For one that's not sandbagging. And 2, I'm one of those people that doesn't touch BGs until there's like 2 weeks left. Even then, I only do a few matches here and there. I haven't hit GC since the deathless piece
Sandbagging has a unique stigma in this game, cause the original form of sandbagging was deck manipulation.
To the world at large though, sandbagging is deliberately playing below one's capability.
So yes, if someone is intentionally losing matches in VT, that is a form of sandbagging.
Regardless of what you want to call it though, I'm just curious of Kabam was still paying attention to that.
If many players are genuinely waiting until the last 5 days to play BGs at all, then so be it. There's nothing wrong with that.
But if they're playing BGs every couple days to score objective rewards, but camping out (losing intentionally - sandbagging) to avoid stiffer competition in where claiming those objective rewards may cost more, that's a different story, and one that I recall Kabam saying they would be monitoring because it does in fact hinder other players ability to climb the ranks in VT.
What would make you think they've stopped monitoring? Because you're seeing more big accounts with stacked decks?
The new valiant early release bundles mean more pay to win accounts with 6r5 meta defenders that are dueling it out in VT. So, unless people are willing to drop units on tokens to get out. Given the rewards have gotten stale there is no incentive other than to just chill, you can clear your objectives, take your wins and losses naturally until you want to make a push for GC.
@mgj0630 I guess your use of the term "sandbagging" confused me. I, personally, don't define sandbagging as waiting until the final week of the event to start.
I didn't define it that way either. As said numerous times in this thread, no issue at all with people that legitimately aren't playing til the very end.
The sandbagging I was describing was about folks who are playing routinely throughout the entire season, but intentionally losing matches periodically to stay in VT longer.
I guess then @mgj0630 define "intentionally". I fully admit I got to Diamond 2 with 3 days left to go. I got my 4 objectives within the first few hours after they reset. At that point I knew I wasn't going to go any further and I needed to burn elder marks for the start of next season. I switched to a 5* deck and played to lose. Did I match and forfeit immediately? No. Did I match and go through the steps and do the fight? Yup. I knew I wouldn't win as I was going against opponents with much better champs in their current deck.
So technically by your definition, I sandbagged. I gave people wins so they could progress. Don't know how many weaker decks I may have faced, but I gave them the win all the same.
Tl:dr... I guess I just don't get what the issue is.
My question is simply "Where are these guys the whole season?" They're clearly strong competitors, stronger than me for sure. So if I can make it to GC so much faster, while playing casually, how is it that these guys who are better than me don't start showing up in GC til the final 5 days of the season?
I can only assume it's because they're intentionally tanking in VT to maximize all the objectives there.
But didn't Kabam say they were going to be looking for that and punishing that behaviour?
They mentioned somewhere in the "we'll be punishing point farmers" post that they're only looking at people doing it in victory track. As far as kabam is concerned you can farm to your hearts content in glad circuit, provided you have the account for it ofc. As for how many people are actually doing this? I don't think there are many people that are doing this, especially with the current bg milestones. The more logical explanation is the one everyone else has given in this thread, people wait till the last minute to push.
I still have r3 6*s in the deck and I only have 2 r5 6*s and one r2 7* and I made the gc, with 17 hours to spare and a few hundred units down the drain in victory shields lol, it’s not even a competitive mode at this point, just a roster size flex
My question is simply "Where are these guys the whole season?" They're clearly strong competitors, stronger than me for sure. So if I can make it to GC so much faster, while playing casually, how is it that these guys who are better than me don't start showing up in GC til the final 5 days of the season?
I can only assume it's because they're intentionally tanking in VT to maximize all the objectives there.
But didn't Kabam say they were going to be looking for that and punishing that behaviour?
They mentioned somewhere in the "we'll be punishing point farmers" post that they're only looking at people doing it in victory track. As far as kabam is concerned you can farm to your hearts content in glad circuit, provided you have the account for it ofc. As for how many people are actually doing this? I don't think there are many people that are doing this, especially with the current bg milestones. The more logical explanation is the one everyone else has given in this thread, people wait till the last minute to push.
Ignoring that you're talking about farming in the GC when op is talking about the VT.
Yeah, bgs is a mode that has fell off a cliff. No one wants to push when it takes more effort than it is worth. Wait till a lot of players already moved ahead then push. Or if you're me, wait until it's worth it, a la rewards update
In my alliance which is casual but finish p2 every season and top 45 aq. and we have a 350k minimum for bgs. With 7 days left in the season we aren't even half way to all alliance milestones and basically do at least the last 3rd in the last 48 hours. Most people in the alliance only play bgs because they have to, and wait until the last day or two.
So I scored my usual 420k solo score only using EMs. I have never ever bought them for units. So in a normal season, where more people participate, my rank falls into top 3-5k rank.
I'm at 1200 rank this season with 414k So please stop this sandbagging claims. People arent even playing, let alone sandbagging to farm solo score in VT. Numbers says it all.
Comments
Kabam said they would monitor and ban accounts that purposely lose and prey on smaller VT accounts beginning of season 12. I assume that Kabam will do what they say they would do with this... they always do right?... 🧐
For all the folks who say they don't play at all until the end of the season, I'll reiterate again, cool. That's your prerogative.
I'm only asking if Kabam is still monitoring for folks intentionally losing to stay in VT as long as possible.
I agree with what others have said, that doing so doesn't necessarily give them MORE rewards. But it can give them those same rewards with less investment at the cost of those trying to climb.
The amount of players who either don't play bgs at all, play them occasionally, or wait to play them is far higher than you're imagining
For a while they were talking about all the bans for cheating via mods. They've never said a word about banning anyone for this topic.
It's purely curiosity.
However, my own suspicions are that the increase in strength of opponents in the higher tiers of VT is a combination of two factors. First, players have been wising up to the strategy I've been mentioning for a long time now, since even before seeding, which is that since the stronger players tend to promote, the longer the season goes on the weaker the remaining competition becomes. Which in effect means the later you play, the weaker your average competition is likely to be. But if everyone waits till the end, of course the strength of competition will rise substantially.
Second, there are fewer competitors, particularly of lower strength. That's to be expected to some degree, when lower strength players jump in, if they aren't wise to how the VT works they can run into roadblocks, and that can discourage them from pushing too hard or even playing at all. So over time, you'd expect the strength of the average competitor to rise over time, as weaker players play less.
The combination of those two factors seems to have been at play for the past several season, since the last Battlegrounds boosted milestone season. And I don't think this is entirely horrible either. Very few players can play with consistent levels of intensity in a PvP ladder. To expect that all the players would be doing so indefinitely, or even that that number would actually rise over time, would be asking for too much. Instead, I think the idea is that Kabam will periodically incentivize BG play with things like boosted milestones to encourage players to play temporarily to revitalize the mode, and then let natural decay reduce the activity in the mode over time as players go do other things. That way when players do jump in, they are doing so relatively "fresh" and not exhausted from many seasons of grind.
This is probably part of the "more things than a player can do" strategy of content development Kabam is employing for MCOC. It is easy to get bored. It is easy to get burned out. But if there's more things to do than most players can do, and Kabam rotates the focus of the game from one part to another part, players will have less opportunity to play a mode into the ground. We don't want Battlegrounds to die, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing if Battlegrounds takes a nap for a while for many players.
The thing I don't get OP, is you're upset that people are intentionally losing to you? You'd rather they try and possibly beat you making your advancement that much more difficult? Not seeing where the downside is for you for your opponent to intentionally lose the match.
I pointed out that I play BGs from the start of the season, competing every other day to get the solo objectives, and that usually gets me to GC with about 10-14 days left in season.
What I noticed, and questioned with this thread, is that usually in the final 5 days of the season, I start seeing massive accounts in GC, and I was wondering where those accounts were all along, cause I feel like some of the these guys could breeze through VT.
As many have pointed out here, they don't even bother with BGs until the final week or so, and that's perfectly fine.
All I was questioning, is how many of those players were intentionally camping out in VT picking off lower accounts to get easier solo objectives.
My understanding was that Kabam was going to punish that behavior, so the only ask of this thread was a simple one "Is kabam monitoring and taking action on that?"
My guess is that they're not, not because they don't want to, but because they don't have a detection algorithm to determine if someone lost intentionally or genuinely.
But that's all I was asking. I make it to GC just fine every season, so I'm not complaining. I was just curious.
The alliance milestones maybe are worth doing that, for some alliances. Or rather, some alliances might pressure their members to score enough points, making this less a question of rewards and more a question of satisfying an alliance requirement. But I doubt that's very widespread as well.
The new valiant early release bundles mean more pay to win accounts with 6r5 meta defenders that are dueling it out in VT. So, unless people are willing to drop units on tokens to get out. Given the rewards have gotten stale there is no incentive other than to just chill, you can clear your objectives, take your wins and losses naturally until you want to make a push for GC.
The sandbagging I was describing was about folks who are playing routinely throughout the entire season, but intentionally losing matches periodically to stay in VT longer.
So technically by your definition, I sandbagged. I gave people wins so they could progress. Don't know how many weaker decks I may have faced, but I gave them the win all the same.
Tl:dr... I guess I just don't get what the issue is.
Yeah, bgs is a mode that has fell off a cliff. No one wants to push when it takes more effort than it is worth. Wait till a lot of players already moved ahead then push. Or if you're me, wait until it's worth it, a la rewards update
So in a normal season, where more people participate, my rank falls into top 3-5k rank.
I'm at 1200 rank this season with 414k
So please stop this sandbagging claims.
People arent even playing, let alone sandbagging to farm solo score in VT.
Numbers says it all.