**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
"You're Bad at Battlegrounds." Thoughts?
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Comments
If you only matched against players of the same progression title, that would mean you could get all the way to GC facing only players of the same title. That would mean Valiants would have to beat nothing but other Valiants, while Uncollected players could reach GC without ever having to face anything except for other Uncollected players. The matches would be more even, but the competition as a whole would be completely unfair, because some players would have a much easier road through VT than others.
Some people think that's not true, that everyone would have the same difficulty, because everyone's matches would be "even." But that's looking at each match relative to the strength of the player. But that's not how competition works. We don't say that a weaker competitor who beats a lot of other weaker players is just as good as a strong player beating a lot of other strong players.
People keep bringing up things like competitive divisions, or weight classes, or other ways in which competitions separate competitors. But those divisions *separate* the competitors completely. Lightweight boxers do not beat other lightweight boxers and become the heavy weight champion. They are essentially competing in a completely different sport, a sport with different rules, different qualifications, different competitors, and different prizes. There's no overlap between them. But all BG competitors ultimately compete for the same Gladiator Circuit placement and prizes. The Gladiator Circuit has only one prerequisite: completing the Victory Track. We can't have one set of players facing weaker competition to enter the GC while other players face much stronger competition to achieve the same thing.
Most of the people who think equal matching is more fair will never be convinced it is. So let's set fairness aside. Equal matching penalizes roster growth. This is unambiguous and objective. Anyone who has run alts through VT knows this, and anyone who was competing when equal roster matching was global knows this. A player that plays a lower roster strength alt inevitably has an easier time promoting while equal roster matching is in force. Same player, same skills, same knowledge, same tactical and strategic experience, just a *weaker* roster. And it is easier. Why? Because all other things being equal, your competition gets weaker relative to you. Uncollected players are, in general, statistically weaker than Cavalier players, who are statistically weaker than Paragon players. This is not universally true: many UCs are stronger than many Paragons. But its sufficiently true to offer a large advantage to players who play low alts.
This is tantamount to saying that when a player *grows* their roster and promotes to higher progress tiers, their competition gets stronger relative to them. Equal roster matching creates a roster growth penalty.
Penalizing players for ranking up their roster is not something the game wants to do, period. This was explicitly stated as one of the reasons equal roster matching was changed to be limited to only the bottom half of VT. No amount of complaining about this being "unfair" is ever likely to change this, because penalizing players for growing roster is so awful of a thing to do in a game that is built upon and supports itself through the monetization of roster growth that it is more likely the devs would completely eliminate the game mode than they would penalize players for growing their roster while competing in it. It is more likely Kabam would move their headquarters to Pluto.
It is more fair to require players to face the competition that is there than sheltering them from it, and most players seem to understand this. For the players that refuse to do so, doing it their way would penalize players for growing roster, and *that* is never going to happen so their notion of what's fair is dead in the water, period.
I really don't care if I get to GC. I like being casual, makes it a lot easier to not stress about completing content or getting rewards.
While some metas are fun (in my opinion) and some are annoying, it is the constantly shifting meta that makes BG interesting in the long run. And wouldn’t you know it but the players who end up near the top of the leaderboard tend to be a lot of the same players season after season. Almost as if skill had something to do with being successful every season regardless of nodes.
RNG plays some role match to match, but I could play BG until the sun burned out and I don’t think I’m beating those guys to the podium no matter how many 7s I roll. In the long run, RNG affects everyone. RNG averages out. Skill does not.
The availability of multiple options does not mean you have to, or can use them for difficult fights, rng isn't shared across players, and i'd rather take consistent boring matches over the unknown matches any day.
Battlegrounds as a gamemode only provides the minimum in deciding the matches to the players and the majority of it is then placed to the rng gods, which is not fun and doesn't follow the reasoning to then blame the players if they are not good at battlegrounds
I’m on board. I love the FO to the players.
May as well just go into practice mode at that point...
The nodes are legit there so you actually have to use strategy building your deck, drafting the right champs for the right situation, and makes you pay attention.
Nodeless champs you're just gonna smash through like they're nothing.
Seriously.... 🤣
I would really like to see a season with no nodes to empower defender and attacker, it's just pure offense.
Again, battleground is PvP mode, so it should be like Boxing base on at least some equal criterial to have more competitive match, here is Title. This is where people show their skills and knowledge, not just roster when some dumb matching like a Paragon match with Valiant in Victory track. Many players play BG not just for reward but mostly to enjoy a fair match actually.
https://reddit.com/r/ContestOfChampions/comments/1cvm5nw/yep_its_working_as_intended/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
You would have a point if they had originally had said that BGs was going to be progression based in the beginning but they didn't.
What happens if you become TB in the middle of the season? How would it work? You have to start over in the TB class? Should all of your easier Cav class progression be converted into TB?
Also, why do you and others keep throwing out "fair match" all the time? If you're both in Diamond 1, why can't you be matched? You're in the same bracket, you're in the same competition. You're both going for the same rewards. A fair match is getting matched with someone in the same bracket as you. An unfair match would be getting matched with someone in Celestial 1 while you're in bronze 2.
Back to boxing, do you think all fights in weight classes are fair? If one opponent is stronger and faster than you, is it fair or should only face someone that can punch as slow or fast as you do or weighs the same? There's a difference of 60 pounds between Light Heavyweight and Heavyweight classes in boxing. Is it a "fair" match I'm 205 and my opponent is 260?
Lmfao
This is a game mode in a free to play mobile video game. It is designed as a ladder, where each rung has further rewards. You compete to climb that ladder, and eventually you reach as high as you can reach, and that’s it for you.
If you put in substantial time/effort/money, you can develop your skill/roster enough to climb higher on the ladder on successive attempts. That’s the nature of this beast. It is not changing. It should not change. It is meant to encourage players to put in the materials/efforts described above so that they can reach that next rung.
What you’re asking for is the creation of an entirely different ladder. And not just one, but several. And what you aren’t realizing is that every ladder underneath the top available ladder would have to have terrible rewards. Because the only way to avoid discouraging roster progression, which is a cardinal sin of game design, would be for the best rewards of one tier to be worse than the worst rewards of the next ladder up. This would be miserable for everybody except those at the top. Is that really what you want?
This is also a reason why the change to progression title was a mistake. People use progression titles as an identity in the game. There is nothing but youself stopping you from getting a better roster, getting better rank up and so on.
You keep comparing BG to boxing, but you cherry pick the comparison. You say there are weight classes, so BG should have weight classes. But again, those weight classes are completely separate. A boxer on one weight class cannot compete in another weight class. If we make BG like that, then all the UCs will *only* compete against each other, and only for UC scaled rewards. Even though the best UC player can almost certainly beat the worst Cav player, the UC player will never be able to challenge them and will never get access to the same rewards.
And we can’t have those players entering the same GC as the Valiants either. So not only do they get segregated into their own weight class in VT, they also get put into their own weight class in GC, where the rewards would almost certainly be lower. Not just lower in general, we can’t have the top finisher on the UC weight class getting vastly larger rewards than most of the Valiant BC finishers. Because this is a progressional game. The moment you decide to segregate lower progress tier players from higher ones, their rewards drop.
This is what the people who suggest splitting up BG are really asking for. The best players in *every* progression tier get punished, because they can beat higher progression players but will never get the chance to even try to do so. And their rewards will be lower, because they will not get the chance to compete against higher players for those higher rewards.
Of course, they wouldn’t say so. They would say they want the competition to be neutralized (“made more fair”) but segregating the players, but then try to argue how that still justifies getting similar rewards. Because if you tell lower progress players you’re going to nerf their rewards for their own good, chances are you’ll get a lot less likes on your post.
Matchmaking? Who knows what goes on there and how to fix it. I don't really pay much mind when I face accounts slightly larger than mine - but I don't understand when in certain brackets I'm put against accounts massively smaller than mine (not complaining tho lol).
My beef with BGs is the medal system. I wish it wasn't win one lose one - not to make it easier, but just so it's not utterly demotivating most of the time.
The fun factor is to feel you're advancing by playing the game. But if, you're playing a bunch and you're still endlessly stuck: it's not fun.
I play this game for fun, hence I'm not a fan of BGs anymore coz the grind is ridiculous. Once you've hit the 2 day objectives, if you're at those stages where you're stuck there is just no point in playing.
So my wishlist for BGs is simple: please sort out the medal system.
Bonus request: fix the blessed fight timer that is almost never there too.
Advancing is what gets us hooked.
For example, talk about Level 60 has resurfaced recebtly and heck yeh, of course we'd love more levels. It's been years that all of us look at that 60 up there and just sigh. I don't understand why we're not at level 400 in the year 2024 lol
I'm not even going as far as to dream about masteries. If I'm not wrong, kabam Mike has touched upon that recently and yeh... not happening.
The rewards for each level accomplished could be really simple, like the stuff from calendars - and then sure say every 10th level give us something really decent - and title based (or nobody will actually bother with the thing).
I've had 0 issue climbing to GC and again, usually do it with a pretty high win %. But that doesn't take away from the fact random drafting is anti-competitive. One player is handed an advantage on a game by game basis by selectively having champions essentially removed from play, on top of the 3 bans, bans are actually a competitive way to limit your roster, RNG is not.
Also to counter your point, there are nodes and metas that already restrict your roster, that's literally how competitive modes work,each season has a new meta, with certain characters shining and some taking a backseat. As for your photon mantis point, that's exactly why it's not competitive, I lock in photon or bullseye, then the game decides to hand you 0 counters for either, yet my RNG picks dunk on your team you lose unless you're facing a thrower or literal potato.
Sometimes people get offended for no reason, and other times people get offended because people are being offensive.
Impractically but provably complete would be to force every player to play every other player in every credible situation, to demonstrate who was the best player overall across many different metas and many different roster constraints. This is impossible to do, but it is provably obvious that any such competition done at a small scale would determine who was the best competitor.
We can’t do that, and we don’t want to have narrowly predictable and repetitive competitions, so we use randomness to introduce stochastic sampling. The matches that every player competes in contain random differences between matches that test their ability to deal with those situations. On small scales this randomness can feel unfair or dilute skillful play, but in the long run randomness averages out, while skillful play does not.
Without random drafts, drafts would become predictable, eliminating the opportunity to demonstrate strategic drafting skill. And if drafts become predictable, the opportunity to demonstrate strategic deck construction also disappears. Random drafts are the micro analog to shifting metas, which shake up different seasons as random drafts shake up different matches.
There’s actually a real world demonstration of this principle in action. When computer chess programs compete against each other, it is actually possible to do what I described above as impractical. They have the programs play hundreds of games against each other starting from a range of different starting positions. Rather than let the programs start the game however they want, they test the ability for the software to deal with a variety of positions that they might otherwise not ordinarily use. Those positions are not always known in advance to the software so they can’t pre-prepare for them. In effect they are given random (in the sense of unpredictable) situations to compete within.
Now, actual computers can do the impractical. Humans can’t, so we use randomness to present a statistical cross section of the entire set of possibilities to the players to deal with. And just recently FIDE held an invitational chess tournament called the Casablanca 2024. In it, players were presented with a set of historical positions from the past that the competitions had to deal with, rather than open the games as they usually do. The intent was to shake up the game, and showcase strong competitors in otherwise less familiar territory. This forced them to be, in the words of both the tournament and the competitors themselves, “more creative.”
Telling the players “you don’t get to open the game they way you want, we will open the game for you using an opening sequence you won’t know in advance with certainty” sounds very much like saying randomness eliminates skill: you’re taking away the ability for the players to decide how to play the game in the beginning, and yet this was seen as *showcasing* skill, not diluting it.
I’m sure someone will miss the point and point out in those cases the shake up variables are not random, but as I said that’s missing the point. We can’t have perfectly even variables in BG, because BG is not a tournament with scheduled prearranged match ups. The match ups are random (by virtue of only matching players against other players who happen to be p,among at the time) and variables can’t be offset. This is thus done stochastically. But the *principle* of taking some agency away from the player to force them to deal with the unexpected actually showcasing skill even more than when the player is under full control, is something other competitions recognize.
Also: real world examples of drafts with random elements include many fantasy sports leagues and actual esports competitions. MCOCs BG draft I’m told mirrors draft mechanics in many other games. It wasn’t invented out of whole cloth. Heck, the first time I encountered random draft mechanics was when I was like seven years old and played dodgeball as a kid. Sometimes we’d draft teams in alternating fashion, and sometimes the teachers would split up the teams themselves essentially making our teams “random.” Sometimes teachers would just swap members around on the middle of the game. You just had to deal.
Randomness is really about unpredictability. No competition wants to be completely random, but absolute predictability can also be bad. A small ratio of unpredictable to predictable factors tends to be optimal. And the fact that we see the BG leaderboards tending to contain similar sets of players from season to season and not completely different players implies that randomness is not a major factor in long term success in BG, and isn’t interfering with skill to a material degree in general.
There's a certain flavor of disdain for the playerbase that I can't help but notice coloring everything.
Not every complaint warrants an official response.
The post that some people seem to be taking offense at is the kind of thing I’ve seen from every game operator that even *tried* to engage with its player community. Not all game operators even bother. And if you can’t see the humor in it, and the message wrapped within that humor, that’s a you thing. One of the first things I learned about writing, speech, and presentation delivery is all communication requires a meet in the middle between both parties. The speaker must make an attempt to reach the listeners where they live. And the listeners must attempt to interpret the speaker in the most useful light to communication, to give the benefit of the doubt that all communication is imperfect and some reasonable effort must be made to try to understand the perspective of the speaker.
And I learned if the listener is not going to do that, or actively work against that, you shouldn’t try to connect with that person. You should instead spend your effort connecting to those that want to work towards that connection instead.