Dev Diary: Battlegrounds in Focus
Kabam Crashed
Member, Game Team Game Team › Posts: 355 ★★★★★
Hi everyone. When I started writing this post a few weeks ago, I intended for it to be a discussion of all of our live content. As I got into it, I realized doing that was going to turn into a 50 page report, and trying to do so would delay this post by probably a month. So I decided to go ahead and focus on Battlegrounds, as it’s one of the places the biggest changes are coming.
I’m going to do in this post what I try to do with my Banquet posts, peel back the curtain as much as I can to let you know what the game team is thinking and how decisions are being made. I’m sure lots of you will disagree with some of these decisions, and that’s OK.
Before I get into it I want to say that I won’t be talking about bugs, gameplay issues or anything else like that. The team is currently working on a post about the AI and our plans for it, but that is outside of my purview so you won’t see any of that discussed here. Additionally, in many cases I’m going to be simplifying large topics into one or two lines. Just because I don’t mention something doesn’t mean the team isn’t thinking about it – my intent here is to focus on the things I think are most important to understanding the planned changes coming to Battlegrounds.
Problem Space
I’m going to start by describing some problems and challenges that have driven the changes we are planning to make. Some of these are inherent to the Battlegrounds mode itself, some of them are more game-wide issues, and some of them are operational challenges on the game team.
The Battlegrounds meta system design isn’t working
When I say Battlegrounds meta system, I am talking about basically everything outside of the match experience itself. I know this is using the term “meta” in a way that players generally do not, but it’s how we on the game team describe things like the various Battlegrounds events and objectives, Battlegrounds resources and currencies, and the seasonal structure as a whole.
There are a few reasons why this system isn’t working, I’m going to do my best to summarize them here.
First, the Solo and Alliance events have never really worked as intended. The original design assumed that, while some players would try to game the system, most would play the mode as intended – that intent being trying to win every match. It hasn’t turned out that way, and over time we are seeing more and more players trying to game the system. We have occasionally taken action against “farming”, but at the end of the day we have to be accountable for the incentives we provide players, and right now those incentives do not line up with how we want the mode to be played. It’s a design miss on our part.
Second, because of the way the mode is structured, there is no benefit to pushing to the Gladiator’s Circuit and beyond as soon as you are able. Where you end up when the season ends determines almost the entirety of your reward payout. This causes a number of problems, including very uneven matchmaking as players have no incentive to compete to their level for the majority of the four week season.
Third, the restructure of the Victory Track allowed a large number of players into the Gladiator Circuit which wasn’t originally structured to accommodate the influx.
Battlegrounds is a niche game mode
Everything else on this “Problem Space” list will probably make sense to most of the people reading this, but I’m assuming this one will be a surprise to a significant number of you. I’m assuming this based on the dozens of forum posts and YouTube videos I have seen that were some version of “Kabam is killing the most important game mode” (yes I’ve read and watched them all).
Despite its importance in the public domain of our game, Battlegrounds is a niche game mode. The vast majority of our players do not, nor have they ever, played Battlegrounds seriously, even when the rewards were top of the game shortly after it launched. I’m sure some of you are thinking “OK, but Battlegrounds is how you make your money because it’s the only thing driving players to spend on their rosters” but again, that’s not correct. The vast majority of our revenue comes from players who do not, nor have they ever, played Battlegrounds seriously.
Thinking Battlegrounds is the most important game mode is an easy trap to fall into. I know this because I myself fell into that trap. For the first year after launch, I was certain Battlegrounds had taken over the game. My colleague Numbers (who?) used to tell me I was overestimating the importance of the mode but I was convinced.
Now looking back I’m not sure exactly which cognitive fallacy to ascribe it to – I think it was some combination of confirmation bias, visibility bias and the bandwagon effect. If you look at what our content creators are streaming and what people are talking about on social channels, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that Battlegrounds is the Contest. This isn’t surprising, it’s obviously the most engaging game mode to stream. A group of hardcore competitive players, many of whom play the Contest as their primary hobby, or even their career, love it. But it’s not for everybody, and the more I dug into the data the more I came to realize I was wrong. Despite my love for the mode, it was not the core experience, and we had been neglecting that core experience.
Prioritization of more casual audiences
Time for some honesty that I’m sure I’ll get some DMs about. I’m in a position where if I had decided last year that addressing the core issues with Battlegrounds was my priority, we would have at least taken a crack at addressing them. I made the decision not to prioritize it. I’m not the only one in that position, and I’m not going to provide an exhaustive list of everyone who could have focused on the mode and their motivations, but I’m going to share why I made that decision.
The vast majority of live service games saw a large bump in both players and revenue during COVID, as people sat around at home with nothing to do. Contest was no exception. Like basically all tech companies, Kabam used these gains in players and revenue to expand. I was hired right at the tail end of this expansion around 3.5 years ago. As with all good parties, the hangover to this NEW NORMAL!!! was rough. At Kabam we experienced three rounds of layoffs, went through three different CEOs, and like almost everyone else in the industry struggled to deal with the declines that followed.
Around 18 months ago I was tasked with a goal – to come up with and implement ideas to stop the decline of our player base. As I set out a plan I decided on three areas where I wanted to focus:
I have seen many people suggest that “Kabam hates Battlegrounds” and I can tell you at least for me it couldn’t be further from the truth. I have made no secret that Battlegrounds is my favorite game mode. I have always been attracted to competitive environments and personally, in many ways, Battlegrounds is the Contest. For me, like many of you, it is the most important game mode.
However, after digging through the data I determined that, contrary to my own personal interest as a player, focusing on Battlegrounds would do nothing to solve our problem of a declining player base. Indeed I even uncovered some evidence that better rewards in Battlegrounds led to worse overall player retention. Conversely, our highest retention rate is among competitive Battlegrounds players – basically, the better someone is at Battlegrounds the less likely they are to stop playing our game. Our data team looked at it and found over an 8-month period three Celestial players had stopped playing the game. Not 3%, literally 3 players. This does make sense, it’s basically another way of saying the players who have the most time invested in our game are least likely to leave. At any rate, despite the fact the rewards are now nowhere near the top of the game, this trend hasn’t changed. The retention rate among competitive Battlegrounds players is still very, very high.
“But why can’t you at least update the rewards?” is a fair question. When I had some spare capacity, I decided we could manage an update of one of the reward channels. I chose the store, because that impacts everybody who plays the mode and is less susceptible to the problems with the meta systems I described above.
“But surely you can do more?” Also fair. It’s really hard to understand the lift it is to keep a game like Contest running from the outside. The priorities listed above led to a bunch of extra stuff on top of my regular duties that I designed or provided guidance for last year including:
The game is too big
We have come a long way from when Story and Arena was the contest. As the game has grown, the economy has struggled to keep up for three core reasons:
There are too many reward channels to make them all valuable
We are in a strange situation right now where two seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time: player accounts are progressing faster than they ever have before, and many players are unhappy with the rewards across the game. Unfortunately I don’t have a good data view to show you this, I was going to request one from the data team, but that would have delayed this post by a few weeks and the community team thought expediency was more important. But if you are an end-game player who completes most content, you should be able to take a step back and realize how fast you are progressing. Two years ago, 7-stars didn’t exist. Look at your roster now. How can it be the case that you have progressed that far if the rewards are bad?
On the surface this seems contradictory, but I think it comes down to value for time. While there are more rewards available than ever before, the actual value of a Summoner’s time in most quests and game modes has gone down. Certainly the first hour spent in Battlegrounds is worth less than two years ago. Obviously the same is true in the Event Quest and Side Quest. So I don’t think it’s a problem with the total rewards available, I think it’s a problem with those rewards being spread so thin across such a large game.
There are too many reward channels for us to keep updated
Even if we did have enough rewards to make every mode valuable, we simply don’t have the internal resources to keep them all updated. There are hundreds of places Summoners get rewards across the game. Updating rewards isn’t as simple as just updating a spreadsheet, for some modes and events it can be a pretty involved process. We simply don’t have the capacity to keep everything up-to-date for every type of player at every progression across the game.
There are so many reward channels that we don’t want players to feel like they have to do it all
Even if we did have enough rewards to make every mode valuable, and even if we did have the resources to keep them all up-to-date, we still wouldn’t want to because it would ask too much of players. We don’t want players to feel like the Contest has to be a full-time job to keep up.
Cancellation of Battlerealm Brawl
It’s not surprising to me that Lagacy, Andrew, Trap and others at their level are extra salty with us about the current state of the game mode they dominate. In addition to everything listed above, the plan to keep players in this rarified air happy was always to focus on the world championship. Last year, we had made substantial progress in planning a bigger and better Battlerealm Brawl, and we were at a stage where we had started to talk to some of the Content Creator Program about it. Then a decision made due to factors outside the control of the game team to cancel our plans.
It was a hard decision that I’m still sad about, but we are hopeful we will be able to return to hosting a world championship. We have a lot of plans to bring the whole Contest community together to provide excitement both for those who can attend in person and those who won’t be able to make it. We have things planned that we have never explored before.
Other BG-specific issues
Planned Changes
With the context out of the way, let’s get down to the changes we are planning to make. The overall goal of these changes is to lean into the competitive nature of Battlegrounds and make the goal to win matches, and to do so frequently.
1. Removal of the Solo Event - This change is related to restructuring the meta-systems. We will be removing the Solo Event and distributing that reward budget between the Victory Track and the Gladiator’s Circuit, with most of the milestone budget going to the VT and most of the ranked rewards budget going to the GC. It won’t be a 1:1 mapping of rewards, but it will mean both progress in the VT and GC are more rewarding.
Target Timeline:
2. Creation of Radiance, a new competitive currency and store - This change is related to solving the problem above, that the game has become too big. The plan is that Radiance will eventually replace a substantial portion of the ranked rewards in all competitive modes. This solves all three problems I mentioned above:
Target Timeline:
3. New objectives to reward pushing higher, faster - This change is related to solving the issue of lack of incentive to play Battlegrounds early in the season and create a more even matchmaking experience. We will be creating objectives that reward early success on the Gladiator’s Circuit. Exact details are still being worked out but it probably looks something like:
Target Timeline: Season 28
4. Restructure Victory Track to make it easier to gain progress - This change was implemented to increase the accessibility of the mode and make it possible for more players to engage in our desired behaviour of a focus on winning matches to progress. We changed the Victory Track so that you always get more medals for a win than you lose for a loss, dramatically increasing the viability of a climb for tens of thousands of players.
Target Timeline: Already implemented.
5. Rating decay - This change is related to solving the issue of lack of incentive to play Battlegrounds regularly for competitive players. Exact details are still being sorted out, but the idea is that if you don’t play Battlegrounds for a certain number of days your rating will begin to decay. Rating decay is very common in competitive games.
Target Timeline: TBD, will be introduced alongside #6
6. New ELO tuning and matchmaking settings - This change is related to solving the issue of players at the top running away from the field and having trouble finding matches. Obviously making sure players can always find a match will become even more important once we introduce rating decay. The way this will work is players’ ratings will move less the higher up the ladder they are, keeping the field closer together. Players at lower ranks will also have a larger bias towards winning, in the sense that they will earn more rating for winning than they lose for losing. It means generally that more participation will be better. This will not however apply to the top of the leaderboard, the best player will still finish on top.
We also intend to implement a system that will open up matchmaking to larger rating gaps faster. We know the impact this can have on match risk, so we are also going to look at that scenario to make sure the system feels fair.
Target Timeline: TBD, will be introduced alongside #5
7. Restructure Gladiator’s Circuit rank buckets - With more incentive to push and the changes to the Victory Track medal economy, we expect many more players to reach the Gladiator’s Circuit than it was designed to support. So we will be restructuring the buckets with the intent that more players will finish in the ranks above Uru 3.
Target Timeline: GC Rewards Overhaul: Season 28
More below (of course I'm over the limit again)
I’m going to do in this post what I try to do with my Banquet posts, peel back the curtain as much as I can to let you know what the game team is thinking and how decisions are being made. I’m sure lots of you will disagree with some of these decisions, and that’s OK.
Before I get into it I want to say that I won’t be talking about bugs, gameplay issues or anything else like that. The team is currently working on a post about the AI and our plans for it, but that is outside of my purview so you won’t see any of that discussed here. Additionally, in many cases I’m going to be simplifying large topics into one or two lines. Just because I don’t mention something doesn’t mean the team isn’t thinking about it – my intent here is to focus on the things I think are most important to understanding the planned changes coming to Battlegrounds.
Problem Space
I’m going to start by describing some problems and challenges that have driven the changes we are planning to make. Some of these are inherent to the Battlegrounds mode itself, some of them are more game-wide issues, and some of them are operational challenges on the game team.
The Battlegrounds meta system design isn’t working
When I say Battlegrounds meta system, I am talking about basically everything outside of the match experience itself. I know this is using the term “meta” in a way that players generally do not, but it’s how we on the game team describe things like the various Battlegrounds events and objectives, Battlegrounds resources and currencies, and the seasonal structure as a whole.
There are a few reasons why this system isn’t working, I’m going to do my best to summarize them here.
First, the Solo and Alliance events have never really worked as intended. The original design assumed that, while some players would try to game the system, most would play the mode as intended – that intent being trying to win every match. It hasn’t turned out that way, and over time we are seeing more and more players trying to game the system. We have occasionally taken action against “farming”, but at the end of the day we have to be accountable for the incentives we provide players, and right now those incentives do not line up with how we want the mode to be played. It’s a design miss on our part.
Second, because of the way the mode is structured, there is no benefit to pushing to the Gladiator’s Circuit and beyond as soon as you are able. Where you end up when the season ends determines almost the entirety of your reward payout. This causes a number of problems, including very uneven matchmaking as players have no incentive to compete to their level for the majority of the four week season.
Third, the restructure of the Victory Track allowed a large number of players into the Gladiator Circuit which wasn’t originally structured to accommodate the influx.
Battlegrounds is a niche game mode
Everything else on this “Problem Space” list will probably make sense to most of the people reading this, but I’m assuming this one will be a surprise to a significant number of you. I’m assuming this based on the dozens of forum posts and YouTube videos I have seen that were some version of “Kabam is killing the most important game mode” (yes I’ve read and watched them all).
Despite its importance in the public domain of our game, Battlegrounds is a niche game mode. The vast majority of our players do not, nor have they ever, played Battlegrounds seriously, even when the rewards were top of the game shortly after it launched. I’m sure some of you are thinking “OK, but Battlegrounds is how you make your money because it’s the only thing driving players to spend on their rosters” but again, that’s not correct. The vast majority of our revenue comes from players who do not, nor have they ever, played Battlegrounds seriously.
Thinking Battlegrounds is the most important game mode is an easy trap to fall into. I know this because I myself fell into that trap. For the first year after launch, I was certain Battlegrounds had taken over the game. My colleague Numbers (who?) used to tell me I was overestimating the importance of the mode but I was convinced.
Now looking back I’m not sure exactly which cognitive fallacy to ascribe it to – I think it was some combination of confirmation bias, visibility bias and the bandwagon effect. If you look at what our content creators are streaming and what people are talking about on social channels, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that Battlegrounds is the Contest. This isn’t surprising, it’s obviously the most engaging game mode to stream. A group of hardcore competitive players, many of whom play the Contest as their primary hobby, or even their career, love it. But it’s not for everybody, and the more I dug into the data the more I came to realize I was wrong. Despite my love for the mode, it was not the core experience, and we had been neglecting that core experience.
Prioritization of more casual audiences
Time for some honesty that I’m sure I’ll get some DMs about. I’m in a position where if I had decided last year that addressing the core issues with Battlegrounds was my priority, we would have at least taken a crack at addressing them. I made the decision not to prioritize it. I’m not the only one in that position, and I’m not going to provide an exhaustive list of everyone who could have focused on the mode and their motivations, but I’m going to share why I made that decision.
The vast majority of live service games saw a large bump in both players and revenue during COVID, as people sat around at home with nothing to do. Contest was no exception. Like basically all tech companies, Kabam used these gains in players and revenue to expand. I was hired right at the tail end of this expansion around 3.5 years ago. As with all good parties, the hangover to this NEW NORMAL!!! was rough. At Kabam we experienced three rounds of layoffs, went through three different CEOs, and like almost everyone else in the industry struggled to deal with the declines that followed.
Around 18 months ago I was tasked with a goal – to come up with and implement ideas to stop the decline of our player base. As I set out a plan I decided on three areas where I wanted to focus:
- Creating progressively challenging PvE content for endgame players
- Creating long-term goals for endgame players
- Providing an improved value proposition for progressing players
I have seen many people suggest that “Kabam hates Battlegrounds” and I can tell you at least for me it couldn’t be further from the truth. I have made no secret that Battlegrounds is my favorite game mode. I have always been attracted to competitive environments and personally, in many ways, Battlegrounds is the Contest. For me, like many of you, it is the most important game mode.
However, after digging through the data I determined that, contrary to my own personal interest as a player, focusing on Battlegrounds would do nothing to solve our problem of a declining player base. Indeed I even uncovered some evidence that better rewards in Battlegrounds led to worse overall player retention. Conversely, our highest retention rate is among competitive Battlegrounds players – basically, the better someone is at Battlegrounds the less likely they are to stop playing our game. Our data team looked at it and found over an 8-month period three Celestial players had stopped playing the game. Not 3%, literally 3 players. This does make sense, it’s basically another way of saying the players who have the most time invested in our game are least likely to leave. At any rate, despite the fact the rewards are now nowhere near the top of the game, this trend hasn’t changed. The retention rate among competitive Battlegrounds players is still very, very high.
“But why can’t you at least update the rewards?” is a fair question. When I had some spare capacity, I decided we could manage an update of one of the reward channels. I chose the store, because that impacts everybody who plays the mode and is less susceptible to the problems with the meta systems I described above.
“But surely you can do more?” Also fair. It’s really hard to understand the lift it is to keep a game like Contest running from the outside. The priorities listed above led to a bunch of extra stuff on top of my regular duties that I designed or provided guidance for last year including:
- Sagas and Saga chase champions
- The Deathless Chase
- AWES
- Saga Incursions
- The Crucible
- Daily Super Event
- Level Cap Increase
- Realm Events
- Supply Drop Calendars
- 10th Anniversary
The game is too big
We have come a long way from when Story and Arena was the contest. As the game has grown, the economy has struggled to keep up for three core reasons:
There are too many reward channels to make them all valuable
We are in a strange situation right now where two seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time: player accounts are progressing faster than they ever have before, and many players are unhappy with the rewards across the game. Unfortunately I don’t have a good data view to show you this, I was going to request one from the data team, but that would have delayed this post by a few weeks and the community team thought expediency was more important. But if you are an end-game player who completes most content, you should be able to take a step back and realize how fast you are progressing. Two years ago, 7-stars didn’t exist. Look at your roster now. How can it be the case that you have progressed that far if the rewards are bad?
On the surface this seems contradictory, but I think it comes down to value for time. While there are more rewards available than ever before, the actual value of a Summoner’s time in most quests and game modes has gone down. Certainly the first hour spent in Battlegrounds is worth less than two years ago. Obviously the same is true in the Event Quest and Side Quest. So I don’t think it’s a problem with the total rewards available, I think it’s a problem with those rewards being spread so thin across such a large game.
There are too many reward channels for us to keep updated
Even if we did have enough rewards to make every mode valuable, we simply don’t have the internal resources to keep them all updated. There are hundreds of places Summoners get rewards across the game. Updating rewards isn’t as simple as just updating a spreadsheet, for some modes and events it can be a pretty involved process. We simply don’t have the capacity to keep everything up-to-date for every type of player at every progression across the game.
There are so many reward channels that we don’t want players to feel like they have to do it all
Even if we did have enough rewards to make every mode valuable, and even if we did have the resources to keep them all up-to-date, we still wouldn’t want to because it would ask too much of players. We don’t want players to feel like the Contest has to be a full-time job to keep up.
Cancellation of Battlerealm Brawl
It’s not surprising to me that Lagacy, Andrew, Trap and others at their level are extra salty with us about the current state of the game mode they dominate. In addition to everything listed above, the plan to keep players in this rarified air happy was always to focus on the world championship. Last year, we had made substantial progress in planning a bigger and better Battlerealm Brawl, and we were at a stage where we had started to talk to some of the Content Creator Program about it. Then a decision made due to factors outside the control of the game team to cancel our plans.
It was a hard decision that I’m still sad about, but we are hopeful we will be able to return to hosting a world championship. We have a lot of plans to bring the whole Contest community together to provide excitement both for those who can attend in person and those who won’t be able to make it. We have things planned that we have never explored before.
Other BG-specific issues
- Staleness of the match experience - We are now in Season 27, and minus a few relatively small scoring changes the in-match experience in Battegrounds has been determined almost entirely by nodes and champion rosters. The original vision for Battlegrounds was to vary the match experience much more than we currently do.
- Shuffles not working properly - Show me some new options! *gets shown the same options again*. Also it’s always nice to see your opponent pull a draft pick from the ether.
- Match declines are a problem at the top - The current system allows players at the top to, among other things, avoid matching specific competitors or win trade.
- Matchmaking times are a problem at the top - Players at the top have to wait way too long to get a match.
- Pausing can be an advantage - There are certain circumstances where pausing a match can be beneficial to a player.
Planned Changes
With the context out of the way, let’s get down to the changes we are planning to make. The overall goal of these changes is to lean into the competitive nature of Battlegrounds and make the goal to win matches, and to do so frequently.
1. Removal of the Solo Event - This change is related to restructuring the meta-systems. We will be removing the Solo Event and distributing that reward budget between the Victory Track and the Gladiator’s Circuit, with most of the milestone budget going to the VT and most of the ranked rewards budget going to the GC. It won’t be a 1:1 mapping of rewards, but it will mean both progress in the VT and GC are more rewarding.
Target Timeline:
- Removal of the Solo Event: Season 28
- Buff to VT Rewards:
Season 28Season 27, we managed to sneak it in for this coming season - GC Rewards Overhaul: Season 28
2. Creation of Radiance, a new competitive currency and store - This change is related to solving the problem above, that the game has become too big. The plan is that Radiance will eventually replace a substantial portion of the ranked rewards in all competitive modes. This solves all three problems I mentioned above:
- It allows us to control the total reward distribution while better valuing Summoner time
- It allows us to update the ranked rewards across the game by updating a single store
- It allows Summoners to “choose their own adventure” when it comes to which modes they want to be competitive in and which they don’t
Target Timeline:
- GC Rewards Overhaul: Season 28
- AW and AQ to follow later this year
3. New objectives to reward pushing higher, faster - This change is related to solving the issue of lack of incentive to play Battlegrounds early in the season and create a more even matchmaking experience. We will be creating objectives that reward early success on the Gladiator’s Circuit. Exact details are still being worked out but it probably looks something like:
- Reach the Gladiator’s Circuit by the end of week one of a season
- Reach 100 Rating on the Gladiator’s Circuit by the end of week two of a season
- Reach 200 Rating on the Gladiator’s Circuit by the end of week three of a season
Target Timeline: Season 28
4. Restructure Victory Track to make it easier to gain progress - This change was implemented to increase the accessibility of the mode and make it possible for more players to engage in our desired behaviour of a focus on winning matches to progress. We changed the Victory Track so that you always get more medals for a win than you lose for a loss, dramatically increasing the viability of a climb for tens of thousands of players.
Target Timeline: Already implemented.
5. Rating decay - This change is related to solving the issue of lack of incentive to play Battlegrounds regularly for competitive players. Exact details are still being sorted out, but the idea is that if you don’t play Battlegrounds for a certain number of days your rating will begin to decay. Rating decay is very common in competitive games.
Target Timeline: TBD, will be introduced alongside #6
6. New ELO tuning and matchmaking settings - This change is related to solving the issue of players at the top running away from the field and having trouble finding matches. Obviously making sure players can always find a match will become even more important once we introduce rating decay. The way this will work is players’ ratings will move less the higher up the ladder they are, keeping the field closer together. Players at lower ranks will also have a larger bias towards winning, in the sense that they will earn more rating for winning than they lose for losing. It means generally that more participation will be better. This will not however apply to the top of the leaderboard, the best player will still finish on top.
We also intend to implement a system that will open up matchmaking to larger rating gaps faster. We know the impact this can have on match risk, so we are also going to look at that scenario to make sure the system feels fair.
Target Timeline: TBD, will be introduced alongside #5
7. Restructure Gladiator’s Circuit rank buckets - With more incentive to push and the changes to the Victory Track medal economy, we expect many more players to reach the Gladiator’s Circuit than it was designed to support. So we will be restructuring the buckets with the intent that more players will finish in the ranks above Uru 3.
Target Timeline: GC Rewards Overhaul: Season 28
More below (of course I'm over the limit again)
91
Comments
Target Timeline: Later this year, after championship qualifiers (should they happen)
9. Seeding review - We would like to be able to seed players on the Victory Track based on their placement the season before in the Gladiator’s Circuit. This will obviously help with the uneven matchmaking problem, and make an early climb to the Gladiator’s Circuit faster for elite players. Unfortunately this requires substantial new tech, so at this point we are still reviewing the requirements before making any firm plans.
Target Timeline: TBD, under active exploration
10. Remove the Match Accept flow - The plan to address the match decline problem is to simply make declining a match not an option.
Target Timeline: TBD
11. Fix Shuffle Signets - Shuffle Signets will be fixed or restructured to always provide more choice to players. We also are looking into an additional server call that will let an opponent properly see the draft choices the Shuffle user can see.
Target Timeline: TBD
Final Thoughts
I said above we didn’t prioritize Battlegrounds last year, so why is it the focus now? I’m confident in our playbook to engage the players we focused on last year. With this playbook and with imminent changes to both the Event Quest and Side Quest coming, I believe it’s time to refocus on our competitive ecosystem.
What about the Alliance Event? For now, we are going to leave that untouched. We want to implement the Solo Event, Victory Track and Gladiator’s Circuit rewards changes and see how that all feels and looks in the data. We do have some ideas for how we could change the Alliance Event if it comes to that. Could the Alliance Event Ranked Rewards be based on the sum of the Gladiator’s Circuit rating for all Alliance members? Maybe, maybe not, we shall see. One thing I can say is at some point in the not-too-distant future we have to reevaluate the Elder’s Mark economy as obviously removing the Solo Event devalues that currency.
What about pausing? That’s the one thing I outlined with no planned solution. We have explored this and will continue to, but our engineers have told us there is no way to keep our app running in the background, so even if we remove the pause button players will still be able to pause the game by switching out of the app. So this is something that remains very explorative at the moment.
Finally, while I mentioned we intend to explore new scoring formats, we hear the community’s feedback that the change we announced for this season was not a positive one. Since we decided to tinker with the Season 27 settings to update the Victory Track rewards, we decided to also revert the change to the scoring for the time being.
Guess only time will tell how this gonna go
I see a decent few changes that people have asking to have for a little while now. Incentive to push gc early, no more decline button, more variety to the seasons, etc. Very impressed with the concepts here, I just hope they’re equally well executed.
I do appreciate the work that went into writing this, I hope that Kabam realizes there is a lot of passion behind this game and most of us want to see this running for at least another 10 years.
Oh, and as for this... Seriously hoping this reduces the matches where I'm playing against someone who's racing to get their minimum points needed to meet ally requirements... You know the ones... Where you're watching every single clock countdown to the very end from team selection, to defender/attacker selection, to pre-fight confirming... Cause they're literally doing something else while navigating matches with 1 hand/1 eye... Just wasting others time.
1: Moving solo event milestone rewards into VT and ranked rewards into GC
2: Creating a currency called “radiance” to help streamline BG rewards.
3: Incentives to push as high as you can as fast as you can as opposed to hitting your comfortable gc placement at the end of the season.
4: Adding a “Rating Decay” basically if you park for too long you start to lose points.
5: Elo and matchmaking changes with the priority of finding matches faster.
6: Restructuring GC tiers
7: Experiment with new match formats. Basically adding new formats that adjust things like draft & deck size. Regular bgs will be called “Standard Battlegrounds.”
8: Seeding changes (details unknown atm as they need new tech for it so it will be later done the line)
9: Removing the option to decline matches.
10: Adjusting shuffle signets so that players get more options. Also looking into tech to let you see when your opponent has used a shuffle signet.
11: They will be reversing the scoring changes for season 27.
That’s about all of it, I still encourage everyone to read the full post as it’s very well done, and it’s possible I got some things wrong. Use this as a TLDR for those who want it.
### **Problems Identified:**
- The current *Battlegrounds* meta system isn’t working, as players game the system instead of playing competitively.
- The mode remains niche, with most players not engaging seriously.
- Rewards and incentives don’t encourage early competition or sustained engagement.
- The game has too many reward channels, making updates difficult and diluting value.
- Competitive issues like matchmaking problems, rating imbalances, and match declines persist.
### **Planned Changes:**
1. **Removal of Solo Event** – Rewards will shift to the *Victory Track* and *Gladiator’s Circuit* (Season 28).
2. **New Competitive Currency (*Radiance*)** – A store-based reward system to streamline and balance rankings across modes.
3. **Early Season Objectives** – Incentives for players to climb faster and push higher (Season 28).
4. **Easier Victory Track Progression** – Players gain more for wins than they lose for losses (already implemented).
5. **Rating Decay System** – Players lose rating if inactive (TBD).
6. **New ELO & Matchmaking Adjustments** – Prevents top players from running away from the pack (TBD).
7. **Rank Restructure in *Gladiator’s Circuit*** – More players will place above *Uru 3* (Season 28).
8. **Experimental Match Formats** – Different scoring, deck sizes, bans, etc. (Later this year).
9. **Seeding Based on Previous Season** – Faster early climbs for elite players (Under review).
10. **No More Match Accept/Decline** – Players must accept matches automatically (TBD).
11. **Fix *Shuffle Signets*** – Ensures true variety in draft choices (TBD).
The changes aim to refocus *Battlegrounds* on competitive play, improve matchmaking, and balance rewards to enhance the overall player experience.
I agree that battlegrounds is a niche game node and would go further to state that itis dominated by end game players. The prospect of new players attempting a mode ruled by big accounts is a daunting on. I, however, would like to reiterate that BGs is one of, if not the most important game modes for players who are at the very top in terms of excitement and engagement. You cannot ignore it simply because it is niche, it is the mode that keeps most of the high end players still playing.
There are too many unenjoyable modes in game for valiant players. EQ is stale, SQ is unremarkable, aq is a relic from the past. Only AW holds some appeal to us and everest content barely papers over the cracks of boredom.
I understand prioritising the growth and sustainability of the gamefor years to come but you also need to retain your CURRENT audience before thinking about attracting a new one!
If anything, the decline of the game is due to the overaggressive monetisation , the seemingly endless bugs and flawed content releases and the lack or transparency from the game team. On the point of monetisation, it comes across that the company only cares about selling stuff to us instead of ensuring the current modes and champions we have are running smoothly.
All that we are asking for is that you spend as much time as you do on monetisation on fixing bugs, updating the existing contents to appeal to us as well and not just to new players.
We acknowledge that game development is hard, however you cannot ignore the role that the company has played in getting us to this point.
Hmm, I wonder if these 48 hour events fall into the solo missions he's talking about (or perhaps *could*)? Or if that's strictly the "main" bg solo event in the far right tab (I still don't know what it's called lol)
... Agree with you though on this!
I’m no celestial player myself, but it’s not surprising people “park” during week 4 because of terrible metas, matchmaking timers, rewards, terrible AI or a mix of all four. But maybe rating decay won’t be as much of a problem once the above proposed changes are implemented?
They should just buff everything i don't trust them less things for rewards as well as it being moved to vt/gc means the buff could be meaningless and not enough people are still going to farm for alliance event so the reason is to not give more rewards not to stop farming
Trembling I see!
Not enough and too late.
Be more transparent!
We can not read your mind so YES you have to speak it.
So frustrating that we have to complain so loudly till we hear an actual statement from you all.
Be better!
When I say incremental update, I mean both information sharing and game changes