Climb to GC: Comparing S18 v S19
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,677 Guardian
TL;DR: Season 19 was more grindy (due to the seeding error), but much less stressful and frustrating, and much more pleasant overall, at least for moderately strong GC-caliber players (like me).
Season 19 changed the Victory Track in two fundamental ways: it now awards two medals for every win all the way to Vibranium 1 (it used to do this only up to Gold 1), and it significantly restructures the VT tiers to add more tiers and (usually) reduce the number of wins required to promote out of each tier. So while VT is now longer, players should promote both quicker and more importantly, more often, potentially reducing the frustration of being "stuck" in a VT tier. So how did it go for me this season?
Well, first, the elephant in the room. S19 did not go as it was designed to, because players were incorrectly seeded. Prior to S19, players were seeded six VT tiers lower than they finished in the previous season, but no higher than P1, the seeding cap. So if you finished in say Diamond 1 in S17, you were seeded in Platinum 3 in S18. But everyone from V2 to GC seed in Platinum 1, because V2 drops six tiers to P1, and everyone higher seeds in P1 by default (as that's the seeding cap). In S19 with all the changes, players were supposed to seed eight tiers lower but with D5 being the seeding cap. That's not what happened. Instead, GC players were seeded down to G5, with some complex exceptions we'll ignore here. This is ten tiers lower than intended, which means the climb to GC in S19 is ten tiers more than intended for GC caliber players.
So how did the combination of the design changes trying to make it easier combine with the seeding bug causing the amount of effort to substantially increase? Well, I have numbers. Lots and lots and lots and lots of numbers:
But the numbers don't really capture the changes well. So I decided to create charts instead. This is every match I played up to GC starting from the GC seeding position in S18 (P1) and the bugged GC seeding position in S19 (G5), showing which tier I was in at the time, which essentially shows how much effort it took to promote for every VT tier up to V1/GC:
Blue is S18, Orange is S19. The VT tiers are normalized to the same scale, so basically you're seeing VT tiers as percentages of the total climb from start to GC. As you can see, it took more matches to reach GC in S19 (matches go from left to right). 118 matches in S18, 149 matches in S19. That's 31 more matches, or 26% more matches. In terms of matches, it took significantly more effort. However, you can also see something else. Each promotion in S19 happens quicker than in S18, especially for the Vibranium tiers. Those long stretches of blue dots moving straight to the right are the long stretches of matches where I was "stuck" trying to promote to V3, V2, and finally V1. Those long stretches of matches without being able to promote never happen in S19. Just eyeballing things, the number of matches it took to promote from V2 to V1 in S19 was about half as many as it took in S18 (18 for S19, 38 for S18).
So in terms of effort, it took more effort to reach GC (and much of this is due to the seeding error), but I was promoting at a much more frequent pace, relative to the number of matches I was doing. A lot of the frustration due to being "stuck" was removed, because I was stuck less often and for less matches.
But there was another way in which the climb to GC was less frustrating, and that is that the climb was easier. In what way? Well, we can see more clearly by looking at my progress to GC in terms of time rather than matches:
This is the same match data, but with the horizontal axis measuring time and not matches. Here we can see that in S19 I was climbing VT much faster in terms of time. So even though I did more matches, I did them in less time. A lot less: I reached GC in 23 days of effort in S18 (and I started two days after the season started, so I ended on day 25) but it only took 17 days in S19. Now, this data by itself has lots of potential explanations, but in both seasons I played in a similar fashion that adds important context. I do push in VT, but only when I think it is worth it. I'm not going to push over and over if I'm constantly losing to either accounts much stronger, or players much better. If I'm consistently losing to much stronger decks, I eventually call it a day. If I'm constantly losing to similar strength decks but by huge point margins, implying those players are just much better than I am, I will also tend to call it a day. So if I am playing more matches per day, that implies that I'm seeing more matches I believe are at least nominally likely I will win.
Conversely, I don't slow play VT. I do not do the minimum and keep drawing weaker opponents. If I'm winning, I keep playing until I start losing. So the curves above represent, in a sense, the best upward progress curve for me. Most of those matches are not easy (I rarely got any forfeits in S19), and not ridiculously bad either. What you're seeing is, in effect, the difficulty curve of VT for players like me. When I run into stronger players I slow down, when weaker players catch up to me I speed up. On a tier by tier basis, S19 VT tiers seemed to "sort out" much faster than S18, causing most stronger players to promote, leaving weaker players with lower competition sooner than in S18.
To put it another way, most of the players better than me were promoting faster this season than last season, which allowed me to promote faster as well.
All of this data agrees with my subjective impressions of S19. It was more grindy, but that was due to the seeding error. It was much easier to promote, and promotions happened more frequently which reduced the frustration of the mode. And the tiers seemed to sort themselves out quicker in S19 than S18, which meant I was facing players closer to my strength even while climbing faster, which meant it was more obvious to me that I would reach GC well within the time limits of the season. When you're stuck for long periods of time in Vibranium and you're in the last week of the season, there's a strong feeling of needing to push before you run out of time. When you're on track to get there halfway through the season, that source of stress completely disappears.
Incidentally, when the season started and I saw the seeding error, I did some calculations to estimate how much more matches it would take for someone like me to promote to GC. Without going into all the calculations, because there's a ton of them, my calculations estimated 113% to 141%, with the best estimate at 23%. I consider that to be a bullseye.
I have two alts I'm still playing in S19, and I will analyze those once the season is over. But the sneak peak seems to be: they progress reasonably well for accounts of their strength, if you play VT strategically well. In other words, you pace yourself accordingly. So this experience doesn't seem to be limited to only GC-caliber players.
The goal of the S19 changes, as stated by the devs, was to improve the VT experience overall, and absent the seeding glitch my own results across three different accounts of three completely different strengths seems to be a qualified success. We will need to see how the seeding glitch sorts itself out over the next season or two, and we need to see how promotion pace changes when there isn't a Deathless piece as the GC carrot. But I believe the fact that VT promotion is easier, happens more frequently, and sorts players by strength quicker than S18, all point to VT being better, for the most part, for most players. Of course, with 200k+ players in BG, not everyone will have the same experience, and not all players are playing in a way to maximize the benefits of the S19 changes. A lot of weaker players are pushing harder than their strength level will allow, essentially pushing out of their difficulty curve, and thus experiencing much stronger matches. But that's intentional, and players who experience this will have to accept how fast the average player of their roster strength promotes, and try not to outrace them. Players who "keep the pace" will generally tend have a much better experience in future seasons than in seasons prior to S19.
Season 19 changed the Victory Track in two fundamental ways: it now awards two medals for every win all the way to Vibranium 1 (it used to do this only up to Gold 1), and it significantly restructures the VT tiers to add more tiers and (usually) reduce the number of wins required to promote out of each tier. So while VT is now longer, players should promote both quicker and more importantly, more often, potentially reducing the frustration of being "stuck" in a VT tier. So how did it go for me this season?
Well, first, the elephant in the room. S19 did not go as it was designed to, because players were incorrectly seeded. Prior to S19, players were seeded six VT tiers lower than they finished in the previous season, but no higher than P1, the seeding cap. So if you finished in say Diamond 1 in S17, you were seeded in Platinum 3 in S18. But everyone from V2 to GC seed in Platinum 1, because V2 drops six tiers to P1, and everyone higher seeds in P1 by default (as that's the seeding cap). In S19 with all the changes, players were supposed to seed eight tiers lower but with D5 being the seeding cap. That's not what happened. Instead, GC players were seeded down to G5, with some complex exceptions we'll ignore here. This is ten tiers lower than intended, which means the climb to GC in S19 is ten tiers more than intended for GC caliber players.
So how did the combination of the design changes trying to make it easier combine with the seeding bug causing the amount of effort to substantially increase? Well, I have numbers. Lots and lots and lots and lots of numbers:
But the numbers don't really capture the changes well. So I decided to create charts instead. This is every match I played up to GC starting from the GC seeding position in S18 (P1) and the bugged GC seeding position in S19 (G5), showing which tier I was in at the time, which essentially shows how much effort it took to promote for every VT tier up to V1/GC:
Blue is S18, Orange is S19. The VT tiers are normalized to the same scale, so basically you're seeing VT tiers as percentages of the total climb from start to GC. As you can see, it took more matches to reach GC in S19 (matches go from left to right). 118 matches in S18, 149 matches in S19. That's 31 more matches, or 26% more matches. In terms of matches, it took significantly more effort. However, you can also see something else. Each promotion in S19 happens quicker than in S18, especially for the Vibranium tiers. Those long stretches of blue dots moving straight to the right are the long stretches of matches where I was "stuck" trying to promote to V3, V2, and finally V1. Those long stretches of matches without being able to promote never happen in S19. Just eyeballing things, the number of matches it took to promote from V2 to V1 in S19 was about half as many as it took in S18 (18 for S19, 38 for S18).
So in terms of effort, it took more effort to reach GC (and much of this is due to the seeding error), but I was promoting at a much more frequent pace, relative to the number of matches I was doing. A lot of the frustration due to being "stuck" was removed, because I was stuck less often and for less matches.
But there was another way in which the climb to GC was less frustrating, and that is that the climb was easier. In what way? Well, we can see more clearly by looking at my progress to GC in terms of time rather than matches:
This is the same match data, but with the horizontal axis measuring time and not matches. Here we can see that in S19 I was climbing VT much faster in terms of time. So even though I did more matches, I did them in less time. A lot less: I reached GC in 23 days of effort in S18 (and I started two days after the season started, so I ended on day 25) but it only took 17 days in S19. Now, this data by itself has lots of potential explanations, but in both seasons I played in a similar fashion that adds important context. I do push in VT, but only when I think it is worth it. I'm not going to push over and over if I'm constantly losing to either accounts much stronger, or players much better. If I'm consistently losing to much stronger decks, I eventually call it a day. If I'm constantly losing to similar strength decks but by huge point margins, implying those players are just much better than I am, I will also tend to call it a day. So if I am playing more matches per day, that implies that I'm seeing more matches I believe are at least nominally likely I will win.
Conversely, I don't slow play VT. I do not do the minimum and keep drawing weaker opponents. If I'm winning, I keep playing until I start losing. So the curves above represent, in a sense, the best upward progress curve for me. Most of those matches are not easy (I rarely got any forfeits in S19), and not ridiculously bad either. What you're seeing is, in effect, the difficulty curve of VT for players like me. When I run into stronger players I slow down, when weaker players catch up to me I speed up. On a tier by tier basis, S19 VT tiers seemed to "sort out" much faster than S18, causing most stronger players to promote, leaving weaker players with lower competition sooner than in S18.
To put it another way, most of the players better than me were promoting faster this season than last season, which allowed me to promote faster as well.
All of this data agrees with my subjective impressions of S19. It was more grindy, but that was due to the seeding error. It was much easier to promote, and promotions happened more frequently which reduced the frustration of the mode. And the tiers seemed to sort themselves out quicker in S19 than S18, which meant I was facing players closer to my strength even while climbing faster, which meant it was more obvious to me that I would reach GC well within the time limits of the season. When you're stuck for long periods of time in Vibranium and you're in the last week of the season, there's a strong feeling of needing to push before you run out of time. When you're on track to get there halfway through the season, that source of stress completely disappears.
Incidentally, when the season started and I saw the seeding error, I did some calculations to estimate how much more matches it would take for someone like me to promote to GC. Without going into all the calculations, because there's a ton of them, my calculations estimated 113% to 141%, with the best estimate at 23%. I consider that to be a bullseye.
I have two alts I'm still playing in S19, and I will analyze those once the season is over. But the sneak peak seems to be: they progress reasonably well for accounts of their strength, if you play VT strategically well. In other words, you pace yourself accordingly. So this experience doesn't seem to be limited to only GC-caliber players.
The goal of the S19 changes, as stated by the devs, was to improve the VT experience overall, and absent the seeding glitch my own results across three different accounts of three completely different strengths seems to be a qualified success. We will need to see how the seeding glitch sorts itself out over the next season or two, and we need to see how promotion pace changes when there isn't a Deathless piece as the GC carrot. But I believe the fact that VT promotion is easier, happens more frequently, and sorts players by strength quicker than S18, all point to VT being better, for the most part, for most players. Of course, with 200k+ players in BG, not everyone will have the same experience, and not all players are playing in a way to maximize the benefits of the S19 changes. A lot of weaker players are pushing harder than their strength level will allow, essentially pushing out of their difficulty curve, and thus experiencing much stronger matches. But that's intentional, and players who experience this will have to accept how fast the average player of their roster strength promotes, and try not to outrace them. Players who "keep the pace" will generally tend have a much better experience in future seasons than in seasons prior to S19.
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Comments
I had a similar time. Went from bronze 5 to GC losing only 5. I will say early on I had a fair amount of immediate forfeits. I haven't done bgs since the last deathless piece. Despite this path being rather effortless, still not a bgs kind of guy. I definitely understand the frustration of lower accounts, but still feel this newer system is the way it should if been since seeding was introduced. It's most likely going to take a few seasons to work out & hopefully the matchups will balance out...
Faced only 2 matches where I knew I'll lose just by looking at deck 😞
I only have three 7r3
got a 7* mangog frm the d1 7*. useful for defense so ill take tht for the grind.