BG matchmaking
Narutouzumaki
Member Posts: 9 ★
This is probably the games biggest issue. Im literally Thronebreaker and I’m getting Valiant players back to back to back. Every time I’m one win away to progressing to the next rank, a Valiant player is throne my way. It’s gets annoying and repetitive and to be fair, makes the game mode itself boring, because it’s not fair. This should be one of the MAIN things y'all work on. Please fix the matchmaking.
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Comments
Matching based on deck strength wasn't working because people were manipulating the ratings by sandbagging with 1* champs.
Matching based on progression or overall account strength is far from fullproof as well - there's a player in my alliance who has a significantly higher account rating than me because he ranked up way more lower-tier champions, while my BG deck is noticeably stronger.
Matching so that stronger players only play stronger players and weaker players only play weaker players completely devalues the competition.
It is now set that you only match up with players in the same tier - so if you're in Diamond III, you'll be matched against someone else in Diamond III.
That's all there is to it.
Guess as TB, that is more or less where I will land with my roster and sub-skill (on the rounds I managed to stay alive, my opponent have more points).
Keep in mind, the operating premise is that everyone is competing for the same rewards as they are today. If you choose to change the premise of that reward system to meet your system of fairness, please specify that.
Come back and let us know how you go.
Also you need to do some story quest and progress. Otherwise BG alone will not help your situation. Become a Valiant yourself, it is easier soon with another rank 3 opportunity via the Crucible.
If you are matched up against a stronger opponent in Battlegrounds (who is either in the same tier as you, or 1 higher or lower) then you either have a go and hope it works in your favour, or forfeit and try again. If you're about to advance to the next tier then think about using a Victory Shield to protect you.
It's how the game mode works. Nowhere has anyone claimed that you should be able to win every match, because every match has to have a winner and a loser.
I've beaten opponents with stronger decks, and I've lost to opponents with weaker decks - anything can happen.
Same competition
If you want easy competition then ask Kabam for seperate tier with nerfed rewards.
We don't have to do this every single week.
One thing to keep in mind is that players at the ceiling rarely have a ceiling that moves and players with room to grow are more consistently able to improve their rosters. With enough time and effort, every player has an opportunity to become more competitive with the rosters they have a hard time against now.
There are people who judge the system’s fairness based on whether they get “fair matches.” But this is a competition. The stronger players should tend to win and the weaker ones should tend to lose. The result of allowing players to only match other players that look like them is weaker players have an easier time promoting than stronger players, which makes a mockery of the competition.
They tried to compromise by allowing players to match by deck strength. That went awry for a number of reasons. It was exploitable, it didn’t actually help weaker players, and most importantly it gave the impression that ranking up champions was actually a disadvantage, because in many cases it was. A progressional game where players are actively posting messages everywhere telling players not to rank up champs because BG punishes rank ups is counter productive to say the least.
They implemented roster matching next, but they implemented it throughout all of VT. This was highly problematic because both the devs and the players were seeing perverse results in the VT ladder where Uncollected players were entering GC while Paragon players were getting stuck in much lower tiers, because the UC players only had to beat up other UC players to get into GC, while Paragons were fighting each other and having much higher difficulty getting enough wins to promote. This is completely unacceptable. There are people who think this is “fair” that the lower strength players get to promote higher than the higher strength players because their fights were “fair” but this is a completely perverse perspective on what a competition is. It is not about seeing who’s the most skilled UC player. It is about finding the strongest competitor, period.
They removed roster matching in the higher tiers of VT and kept it in the lower tiers as an additional compromise, but the devs were still seeing problems with stronger players having much more difficulty promoting than much weaker players. And the shift from roster matching to completely free matching created a logjam of difficulty in the Platinum tiers. Lower tier players were getting used to seeing roster matching, and then were suddenly thrown into stronger matches when the roster matching protections vanished. They began to feel entitled to the easier matching, and the notion that they should be allowed to have that indefinitely as they did before.
The current system just does away with roster matching completely, to avoid both the unfair protections that lower tier players were getting and to eliminate the sudden jump in difficulty in Platinum that was confusing players and giving them the false impression that this jump was some kind of bug.
You can say this is unfair and the devs need to “try again” but that ignores the fact that we are here not because the devs haven’t tried to make ‘fair match ups” it is because they did try, and it was a dumpster fire. So much so that even when they tried to compromise and only implement “fair match ups” in the lower half of VT, the result was still a complete dumpster fire.
We tried deck matching, we tried roster matching, and we tried partial roster matching. In every case the result was completely unacceptable. And thus here we are.
Also, this was completely predictable. Years ago Kabam tried to do the exact same thing in Alliance war, matching alliances by roster strength instead of by war rating. The result was, you guessed it, a dumpster fire. Alliances with a bunch of Uncollected players were placing top ten in alliance war season, because they were winning every war because they never had to face real competition. It took *years* to convince Kabam to change it, and now that form of war matching is gone. Why they tried it again for BG I will never know, but the result was the exact same dumpster fire, and now it too is gone for good.
Honestly, people keep saying Kabam needs to try harder, but the worst thing they ever did in Battlegrounds was try harder. They should have learned the lessons hard fought for in Alliance War and not repeated those mistakes. Doing so gave way too many players the impression that it was both possible and fair to have a competition in which they could be insulated from facing the actual competition and still have a fair competition environment. I think they thought it might have been too harsh a lesson to learn for our player community that if you’re not as strong as the competition, you’re going to lose a lot. But in retrospect, teaching them the opposite, that you can just ask Kabam to have weaker match ups and they’ll do it created a problem that will probably take years to exorcise from the player base.
Maybe by 2028 “match ups are not fair” will be the “crystals are rigged” of that time.