Battlegrounds Matchmaking.. why so bad?
Archit_1812
Member Posts: 591 ★★
Kabam, on what grounds do you initiate a viable match in battlegrounds? I'm pretty sure it would be if your opponent has an EQUAL DECK. Instead, what do we actually have? I'm glad you asked. In the last 11 games i've played in BGs season 17, I, as a TB with only 1 6* Rank 4, am up against Valiant players with atleast 3 7* rank 3 champions! I wasted 990 elder's marks, all of which could have been used against EQUAL PLAYERS to grant infinitely more points than what I actually received against said Valiant players. I ask you, it is fair?
1
Comments
just rankup champ & go deep into story don't play BGs
@xLunatiXx lmfao
Since you asked, Kabam should input a code in matchmaking that allows players to fight only against other players of the same top champ rating. For example, if the top champion in your deck is a 6* Rank 4 Hercules sig 150, the champ rating is about 19500. So, the other player's top champion should be in the same bracket, + or - maybe 300-400
Let's try this then. If you are in a league with 20 different opponents, aren't you supposed to play against them ALL?
But again, you're in competition with other summoners. You're all in the same league playing for the same rewards. It's been this way for many seasons now.
Second, you have to understand that BG is a competition. Unlike in most content in this game, every time you win, someone else loses. The game mode is *explicitly designed* so that half the players are always losing. Statistically speaking, a quarter of all players are losing twice in a row, and one percent of all players have to be losing like seven times in a row. But actually, BG is not random. The stronger players win far more often than random chance would dictate, of course, which means everyone else has to be losing far more often. If there are players winning 80% of the time, there have to be players losing very often to balance that out, because of course the overall win percentage of all players is 50%. Every time someone wins, someone else loses.
Third, in this game, roster matters. The game doesn't autoscale difficulty to your roster. If you don't have the roster to do Act 6 or 7, then you just have to build roster until you do. If you don't have the roster to do Necropolis, that means you just have to wait until you do. If you don't have the roster requirements to become Paragon or Valiant, you just have to earn them and until you do, the game will simply force you to wait until you do.
Roster matters in BG as well. Stronger players are players with more skill, more knowledge, and stronger rosters. If you want to promote upward from Bronze to Gold to Vibranium, you have to beat the players in front of you. Many of those players will be Valiant players, or strong Paragons. Everyone is moving up the ladder, trying to get to GC, whereupon everyone is competing for the top spots in GC. To move up, you have to beat the level of strength that is above you, and around you.
Competitions are not about fairness, in the sense that the competition owes you a fair fight. A fair fight is one in which both sides have a 50/50 chance of winning. That's not a competition, that's a lottery. In a competition, if the other guy is stronger than you, faster than you, smarter than you, then you're probably going to lose. To win, you have to get faster, get smarter, and build stronger roster over time.
If you don't think this is fair, not only is BG not for you, competitions in general are not for you. Yes, you or someone else will start throwing examples of how competitions are limited in other sports, but the bottom line is that's cherry picking. In any sport or game or competition, you're going to be placed against someone much better than you. They'll be better than you because they are smarter, because they are more experienced, or because they spent more money to get there. And you can do your best, or you can quit. Its your choice, but the world of competitions will not shed a tear for you either way.
In BG, half the players lose every fight. Most of the players lose their quest to reach GC. For a competition, that's normal. And if you lose because the other guy was just much stronger than you, that's also entirely by design. They beat you, because they should beat you. And if you want to advance past them, you have to learn to beat them instead.
First: matching by roster. Kabam does that. Originally they did that universally across the entire VT. But that created the problem that there were tons of UC players getting into GC without ever having to face anything except other UCs. That made it far easier for them to promote than players with stronger rosters who had to face stronger competition. Now, there are still players out there who think this was and is totally fair. However, the game developers disagree, as do the majority of the competitive players of the game. This is perverse, and would make BG a laughing stock of a competition compared to pretty much anything else on Earth claiming to call itself a competition.
What made this so obviously perverse is the fact that many players have alts. Lower accounts they play less often. I do, for example. In the era of roster matching throughout VT, strong players all noticed that when they played their low alts, BG was much easier. Same player, same game, lower roster, and competition was easier. When we say that there was a penalty for having a stronger roster, that's what we mean. When players say no no, this is all fair that UCs face UCs and Valiants face Valiants, we could see with our eyes how that wasn't true: that when the same player played a weaker account they had an *easier* time promoting. That's blatantly wrong.
Kabam removed roster matching, or rather limited it to the lower half of VT, for this reason. A competition cannot be *easier* for *weaker* players, and with roster matching throughout VT it was provably so. We now only do this in lower tiers, to give weaker players a chance to make some progress and participate. But in the higher tiers of VT, they have to compete against everyone else if they want to promote upward and have a chance to reach GC.
Now, the post doesn't just mention roster matching, it actually mentions deck matching. Kabam did that one also. In this case, I doubt if the OP even understands what they are asking for. Because when the game was using deck matching, stronger players could just make weaker decks and match against weaker players. I didn't even use any of the deck manipulation exploits and just made a nice, simple, 4* deck, and was winning at a better than 75% win rate all the way up to GC. Because if you match by deck, no one is going to make a strong deck. They are going to make a weak deck, and force everyone else to match them on skill, knowledge, drafting, and overall strategy. And as I said, when given an opportunity to never ever ever face someone with a stronger deck than me, and most of the 200,000 players who participate in BG know less about the game than me, that's basically a free pass to GC.
I loved deck matching. It gave the vets a huge advantage. But it disincentivized actually ranking up anything, which made it counter productive for a game that supports itself on players chasing after new champs and rank up materials.
You're never going to get deck matching to come back. However, by all means keep trying.
It's just the way the mode is currently setup. It has been setup differently before. Kabam changed it a few different times.
But this is the version Kabam is currently using. They prefer the outcomes that occur with this setup.
There are a lot of people who don't like it. And if is often complained about in comments sections and forum posts of social media. And then often when someone complains, someone else will comment or post against them.
There is a lot of lobbying in games. I don't subscribe to these notions. To each their own. I don't subscribe to this sentiment. I also don't think "the world of competitions" or shedding of tears are elements grounded in practicality or objectivity context-wise. To each their own.
As for quitting without trying, i dont have that kind of time where i lose 50 matches just so i can "get better". Each battleground match lasts 8-10 mins. 25 matches = 3h20mins - 4 hours. Where I quit 25 matches in 25 minutes, I'd have to spend 3 and a half hours wasting my time in matches that aren't even close to my metaphorical weight class. I'm in my third year of college and engineering is not exactly easy. I'm not saying it's anybody's fault, all I'm saying is that the matchmaking is unfair and perhaps it would be a better use of anyone's time to play againt equal or even slightly higher decks, just not decks that are several light-years ahead.
Back when Kabam had first implemented roster matching and used it throughout VT (instead of just the bottom half of VT now) the complaint was that the game was penalizing players for ranking up champs. This got to the point there were many players recommending that players stop ranking up their champs, because ranking up champs would just make things worse in BG. And there was some truth to this. It was obvious to almost everyone that downgrading your roster by playing a lower alt made progression through VT much easier most of the time.
You have players complaining match making is not “fair” because they deserve to have equal roster strength competitors. And you have players complaining that the game is actively penalizing players who grow their roster when roster matching is implemented. These are not just arbitrary complaints. One of them actively runs counter to the foundation of the game, namely that the game rewards players who grow their roster, as that is a fundamental part of progression in this progressional game.
No amount of “lobbying” is going to convince the devs to reinstate a mechanism that was actively convincing players to stop ranking champs.
So, if everyone would (and it's not an if, according to you) have an issue with "ranking up champions because it makes things worse in bgs", it's not a problem. It's a norm. It gives more scope for strategizing rankups. And, isnt that what the game is about? Sheer strategy?
Equal roster matchmaking would mean competing with the same weight class. You cant ask sumo wrestler to go up against a skinny underweight and expect the underweight to win, or even "get better".
Weight classes exist in boxing and other martial sports because weight mobility is not presumed. There is no specific incentive in those sports to encourage competitors to "advance" to higher weight classes. Higher weight classes are not even presumed to be "higher" in the sense of being "superior." Heavyweight fights are often more prestigious, but not always. Progression titles and roster strength in MCOC are not a type of player, they are steps on a ladder everyone is presumed to go through. Everyone eventually becomes UC, everyone eventually becomes Cav, everyone eventually becomes Paragon (unless they quit before they reach those points).
Weight classes also exist in part to protect the competitors from serious injury, a possibility that does not exist in MCOC Battlegrounds.
And funny you should mention sumo. Professional sumo does not have weight classes. Higher weight confers an advantage, but it is not an advantage that is seen as unfair. If you compete against an opponent twice your size, you are expected to find a way to win by technique. If you can't, then you lose. International amateur sumo has weight classes, but not professional sumo.
The game is also not about "sheer strategy." It isn't about pure skill, it isn't about pure anything. The game is what it presents itself to be. It is a game about collecting and ranking champions, and using those champions to complete content. Battlegrounds is a competitive game mode where players are allowed to use their rosters, skill, and knowledge, to see who's the stronger competitor and how each player compares to the rest of the competition.
If the game was about sheer strategy, it would be a turn-based game. And we wouldn't have to worry about roster mismatches, because everyone would be handed the same identical roster in BGs. But BG is not about who can drive the same deck the best. It is about who can build the strongest deck and then use it in the best possible manner.
Building, then using. That's what virtually every part of the game is about.
There still is matchmaking. The matchmaking strategy is that you can match against any other account in your bracket (or a nearby bracket if there are no matches available in your bracket).
As @DNA3000 has patiently explained several times, this is what makes sense for a competitive mode. People are *supposed* to have an advantage in this game for building stronger rosters. That's the point of the game, and it's how the game makes money (which in turn keeps the game going).
Competitive modes are stressful. I am not a huge fan of them myself. I honestly only play BGs for the rewards. But bracket-based matchmaking is the only fair and equitable way to run a competitive mode, and i think Kabam has made the right decision to do this.
* The fact that the ladder resets every season means everybody needs to climb back into their spot. Smaller accounts get battered by bigger ones during this sorting process. This issue was worse than usual this season because of the seeding bug.
* Kabam puts a lot of juicy rewards in BGs. I think there are a lot of players that want those rewards but don't actually want to play a competitive mode. For these people, the act of playing that mode is very stressful, and losing is very demoralizing because they didn't want to be playing BGs in the first place. This issue was also worse than usual this season because there are extra-juicy rewards waiting at the top of the victory track.