BG crazy suggestion #1093: Allow players to play unranked matches (plus a trophy reward tweak)
First, the main suggestion: let players play unranked matches in Battlegrounds. Unranked matches always match against other players of similar roster strength and progression (similar to how match making works in Bronze) but you never gain trophies for wins and you don't lose trophies for losses. However - and you'll have to read to the end - there's also a way for unranked matches to earn trophies, to a point.
Okay, so what? Why bother? Well, that will take a bit of explaining.
First of all, I've been tracking BG numbers for many seasons in a couple ways. For one, every other season or so I take my low alts and deliberately score very low points with them. The reason is to gauge overall player participation. Just a few seasons ago we had many players claim BG was dying, because fewer and fewer players were playing. It turns out that was not true. *Slightly* fewer players were playing, but according to the solo milestone leaderboards, there were still about 200k players playing at least one match in BG. The counter argument could be that of course a player might just play one match, get disgusted, and quit the mode, but that was also not possible because this behavior persisted across multiple seasons. Hundreds of thousands of players could not be playing BG a little and then quitting permanently, because there are not enough players playing MCOC for that to happen season after season. There might be a small number of players doing that, but most players were playing a few matches and then quitting for the season, but then coming back season after season.
What was changing was how many matches those players played. There's a huge difference between 200k players most of whom play dozens of matches, and 200k players most of whom play only a few. That would make the mode look a lot more empty. Moreover, it wasn't simply a matter of players playing a few matches and then stopping for the season either. They were focusing their matches towards the end of the season. We could observe this by looking at GC leaderboards and seeing how many players were entering GC. In earlier seasons we would see many more players entering GC than in later seasons, but if you waited until the last day to observe, you'd see a very large influx of players entering GC in the last few days, and especially in the very last day. There might still be fewer players in GC, but the difference was lower when comparing the last few hours and comparing in the middle of the season. GC in the middle of the season has at times seemed like it wouldn't even fill up all the tiers.
So the data was saying that BG still attracted a lot of players, hundreds of thousands in fact, and players were still willing to play and push to GC, but the difference was that fewer players were seeking matches throughout the season. And it seemed like this affected lower progress players more than higher ones, which affected their match making in lower tiers - they were getting unbalanced matches somewhat more often earlier in the season.
So BG does have a participation problem, but it isn't because players are no longer playing because they are, and it is not because the rewards themselves are dramatically too low because players are still pushing for those rewards, just moreso at the end of seasons than the beginning. To be fair we've seen a significant jump in overall participation in the past few seasons with the enhanced milestones. It isn't a huge reward jump and the effort required to get those higher milestones is very largee, but we still see it have a noticeable effect on participation. But we also know reward boosts do not have lasting impacts on participation: when players get used to them, their effect diminishes. And we still see participation gaps in the mode, where lower players are still seeing unbalanced match ups in very low VT tiers.
There's always going to be players who lose more often than they win. Even with roster-based match ups, that's going to be true, For a given player population, some players will just be better, and some worse. How do we encourage the players who tend to lose that they should participate more? We have BG milestone rewards, but they don't seem to be enough to consistently drive participation. If they were, we wouldn't see participation shift so much towards the end of the season. Participation shifts to the end of the season, because that's when the competition is the most favorable - or used to be - because that's when it is most likely the strongest players will have promoted out of VT. However, when *everyone* waits to the end, that doesn't happen like it used to, for obvious reasons.
So how do we encourage players to play early, and often? Here we go: we create an option for a player to play an unranked match. Unranked matches have two properties. First, you do not gain or lose trophies, whether you win or lose. But these do count for BG milestones. So with unranked matches, you can earn BG milestones without losing trophies.
But since you can't gain trophies for wins, what's the point? Whether you gain and then lose, or just don't gain or lose, aren't you still stuck in the same place? Yes, but we're going to make one other change. The BG objective that requires three wins? We're going to add one BG trophy to that objective. If you win three times and get that objective, you'll get one BG trophy.
There are 28 days in a BG season. There are thus 14 such objectives, and it is possible to earn 14 trophies just from those objectives. But *only* if you play starting from the beginning of the season. You cannot wait to the last day of the season and then snag 14 trophies from BG objectives. You can only get one. So if a player feels they cannot win, they can still play nothing but unranked matches and if they play enough and win at least three matches in two days, even if they lose twenty, they will still gain one trophy they cannot lose so long as they continue to just play unranked matches.
Theoretically speaking, if the player started in P1 (the highest you can start in a season) the maximum possible benefit would be to get to V3. This is not enough to get to GC. And if you lose a lot this still requires a ton of effort to get the 42 wins required to maximize this benefit. And it must be spread out across the entire season.
Because this requires player to play to get the benefit, this encourages participation. Because you can only get the benefit once every two days, it encourages participation across the entire season. And because the benefit is something even lower skill players can achieve, it encourages them to actually play more matches to earn more rewards. And it does so without skewing the competition too much. Players who choose this path will be progressing upwards through VT very slowly.
Admittedly, this does add more trophies into the system, and that might require tweaking the number of trophies required for promotion, because players who play regular matches will also be getting that one extra trophy every few days. How much depends on whether Kabam thinks current promotion rates are fine (in which case more required trophies would need to be added to VT) or could use a slight boost (in which case things might be fine as they are).
To summarize:
1. Let players play unranked matches. Unranked matches do not gain trophies when the player wins, and do not cost trophies when the players lose. Such matches always use the same match algorithm as in Bronze, where players are matched against other players of similar roster and progression title when possible, regardless of what VT tier you are in.
2. Award one VT trophy in the BG objective "win three BG matches." This trophy is awarded to any player that completes that objective, whether they are playing unranked or regular matches.
3. If necessary, tweak the number of trophies required for promotion in higher VT tiers, because now players will be earning a bit more trophies for the same game play.
This does three things that I think would be a positive for Battlegrounds:
1. Lower skill players are encouraged to participate. This means they can earn BG objective rewards, and they can even progress slowly *if* they play early and often. They can't reach GC in this way, but they can promote in VT to a point, even if they can't string enough wins in a row.
2. Players have a way to play "casually" while providing competition for other players. Suppose you are in D1 with three trophies. You have a few minutes and you like playing BG, but you're worried about losing and backsliding. You just want to play a casual match. You flip the unranked switch and you can now play a casual match that counts for BG objectives, but won't cost you any trophies. Maybe you just want to play for fun for a while until later in the season when you think you'll be in a better position to promote, or maybe you just want to wait for a better time to fight "for real." Either way, while you're playing a casual match, other players have another opponent to fight against.
3. This incentivizes playing at the beginning of the season. The mechanics of Victory Track means there's a significant incentive to play at the end of the season. I've covered this effect many times myself, and I'm probably significantly to blame for popularizing the "wait to the end" strategy. This counterbalances that effect, by created a reward incentive to play early in the season, by making the BG objectives - that do not stack up and must be claimed or lost over time - contain rewards worth obtaining by playing early (namely, VT trophies). And interestingly the stronger you are the less incentive this is, because VT trophies aren't worth as much to someone who is going to promote quickly anyway, but weaker players will find this much more valuable, much more willing to pursue, and thus worth jumping in and playing even if they are likely to lose a lot.
