Battleground Matchmaking and rewards based on story progression
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Though those Cavs are likely now TB due to the new progression path
BG rewards are not progression locked. You get the same rewards regardless of what your progression title is. Some of those rewards are currency, and currency stores are often progression tiered, but the actual rewards are not.
Now, you might say, so what? Since *ultimately* the currency has to be spent in a progression tiered store, that is the same thing as saying the rewards are themselves tiered. But that's not how the game mode is designed. The game mode is designed to be progression-blind, and that has consequences. An Uncollected player that lands in GC takes a spot away from some other player, regardless of their progression title. There are no reserved spots in GC for some quota of UCs and Cavs and so on. We don't care, we allow all players to rise to the level of their competitive strength. So we also don't care about progression when it comes to handing out marks or relic shards or trophy tokens. The game can set those rewards with the understanding that we don't care if an Uncollected player gets the same amount of relic shards as a Valiant player.
Trophy tokens are the specific part of the rewards that are placeholders for progression significant stuff. You have to use them in a store that is itself progression tiered. However, progression tiered rewards are NOT intended to give "less stuff" to lower players. They are intended to give appropriate rewards to players.
If I give a 6* Nexus to a bunch of players, they all get the same actual reward, but if they are all different progression the *value* of that reward is completely different. There's a huge difference between giving a 6* Nexus to an Uncollected player and a Valiant player. It is a nice trinket to a Valiant. It is a potentially game changing reward to an Uncollected player.
The thought process behind progression tiered stores is that when the game hands a reward to a player, that particular reward should have the same *relative* value to players of different progressions. A 5* crystal to a Proven can be (roughly) equal in value as a 6* crystal to an Uncollected and a 6* Nexus to a Thronebreaker. The progression tiered stores attempt to normalize in the best way possible the reward relative values. Different people might disagree with how the stores do that, but that's the design intent.
So when a UC player gets rewards from BG, those rewards are identical to the rewards that a Paragon player gets in all respects. And then when they go to spend their trophy tokens, the relative value compared to their progression is represented by the offers they are presented in their respective stores. The game mode hands out *identical* rewards, and then the progression tiered stores adjust for the "cost of living" for the different progression players. This allows the devs to design the game mode without having to think about progression, and then only think about progression when they design the stores, where that progression matters.
Disagree? You'll have to take a few game economy design courses before you have the vocabulary to argue the point with any game economy developer of any game.
Once upon a time, war match making factored in the alliance roster strength. Alliances were matched by alliance rating and/or prestige. The idea was that this would make matching "more fair." However, it was a disaster. When you only or predominantly match against other alliances of equal rating, very low rating alliances can match only other low rating alliances and work their way to the literal top of the leaderboards. We were seeing super low rating alliance show up in the top 100 consistently, because when low alliances only face each other, *someone* has to win. There has to be a low alliance that is better than the other low alliances, and that alliance can win twelve times and go undefeated, get a super high score, and end up near the top.
This was considered absurd.
So eventually, after trying to fiddle with it for literally two years, Kabam eventually turned that off. Now, alliances match each other only by war rating, which is determined purely by wins and losses. It doesn't matter if your opponent has twice the alliance rating you do or half the alliance rating you do. If you have the same war rating, you match.
This is exactly how Battlegrounds Gladiator Circuit works. Matches happen by rating only, regardless of how much prestige or rating the players have, and regardless of what their decks or rosters look like, or what their progression title is. If you have the same rating as your opponent, that's considered a fair match up.
VT does not work by rating, because VT has a ratchet. You can only go up, you cannot go down. In GC, if you lose enough you can fall all the way to the bottom. In VT, once you promote you are safe from ever going back down again. You can fall to the bottom of your VT tier, but no amount of losses can drop you from Gold to Silver. Matching within your tier is the VT-equivalent to matching by rating in GC. If you reach Diamond 3, you should expect to face everyone else in D3, regardless of your prestige or rating or progression title or roster or deck. VT tier is a pseudo rating that you cannot ever lose, and requires a certain percentage of wins and losses to promote out of.
Also: Platinum and Silver are war brackets in alliance war, not alliance tiers or strengths. Alliances are given a war rating based on their wins and losses, and that war rating is separated into numerical brackets. There are tier 1 alliances, tier 2 alliances, and so on. An alliance that scores in the Platinum bracket is not necessarily that much stronger than an alliance that scores in the Silver bracket. Brackets are based on points, and an alliance that only runs one war group will score far less points than an alliance that runs three. A very strong alliance that only runs one group and does only one war can conceivably end up in Silver, while an alliance that is much weaker but does three groups can place in Platinum. Granted, that's an extreme example, but it is not uncommon for three group tier 8 alliances to overtake one group tier 5 alliances. Tier is based on wins. Bracket is based on points.
In BG, this would be like comparing a player that scores 300k points in the solo milestones and a player that scores only 100k. It is entirely possible that the player that only scored 100k is a much stronger player that ended up in GC, while the player that scored 300k grinded those points in Diamond and never made it to GC.
It is the alliance war experience that makes me wonder why Kabam ever toyed with roster matching in the first place. It has very obvious consequences that were unacceptable for alliance war, and it was inevitable those same consequences would reappear in BG when roster matching was used there. It is fine as training wheels for the bottom half of VT, but as the means to promote to GC it is completely unworkable.
Rewards are what they are, because there is enough engagement with the current reward structure. When engagement levels fell, stores were updated and rewards for solo event were increased.
Any change you want in the game will need to consider that almost all influential members of the player base are Valiant/end-game and rewards will be tuned to the minimum acceptable level to maintain a certain engagement level. In almost every game mode, the concerns of the players who are not at the top progression level is practically immaterial. Luckily, BG is one game mode which requires participation from lower progression players to be viable and provide fodder for larger accounts to progress.
If you want better rewards, finish story content and get to higher progression. Or stop playing the mode, if enough lower progression players stay away the Cavalier/TB/Paragon stores will be improved. That is pretty much the only bargaining chip available to you. No other change is coming to BGs on matchmaking or rewards.
Another logic is it's a competitive mode - others have prepared there decks after doing story content & other content & making it to valiant title.
U came unprepared u reach Diamond be happy lol - I am valiant 2 R3 I match vs 7-8 r3 they are also valiant
If the rewards were based on progression and the players were segregated by progression, that would penalize *all* good players. The best Uncollected player can beat Cavs, TBs, and even Paragons. But we’d be forcing him to only compete against other UCs, and only get UC rewards. In a competition, we don’t penalize the better players just to give the weaker ones “equal” chances of winning just to make them feel better.