Actually to make it fair and competitive, 3* only bgs would be great. The problem is you don't get to monetize the game like that and the rewards for players can't have the same value. The community could agree to use 3* only champs by itself, but then there would always be people who would happily take a win using 5* deck. Otherwise you're more or less guaranteed to reach the place where you wouldn't be able to move up
Separate from everything else, there's this myth that if only everyone used the same decks, or were restricted to low rarities, then BG would be more "fair." That's laughable, and not just in theory. We used to do this, or rather we did something close enough that we don't need to guess what will happen, we know what will happen.
When BG used to match by deck, a lot of players (myself included) assembled 4* decks to consistently match against players with similar strength decks. No one could have a stronger deck than me, because I had all the 4* champs and I had them more or less ranked up. So every match was at worse more or less on equal roster terms. And I never had a better win record than in those seasons, because when you factor out deck strength, what's left is deck construction (which champs are best for the meta), the bans, the drafts, and the match selections. Oh yeah, and then actually fighting the fight. Most of the time I won my matches before the fights even started, because while I am not the smartest MCOC player around, the odds of a random player knowing more than me, knowing more mechanics than I do, knowing more champion abilities than I do, knowing more match ups than I do, is very low. In a "fair fight" between me and J. Random Cavalier, I'm going to win about 85% of the time. The other 15% of the time I'm going to be matching against some veteran's alt.
It is just a weird bias that players hate losing to someone with a stronger roster, because they think they had no chance to win in the first place. But the players who were, you know, having to pick one of their last three mystics to fight my Torch say, those players were just as doomed. They had no chance to win at all. They just didn't know that, precisely because they are new and have no idea how the game works.
If it is not obvious how deck matching actually hurt the lower players, look at it from my perspective. I'm not a lower player. Right now, there's a good chance I will match against someone with a lower roster, but also a chance I might match against someone with a higher one. With deck matching, the chance to match against someone with a higher roster becomes zero. All those matches where I would have struggled, well now I am much better off. My win rate is likely to rise, and in fact it did rise when deck matching was a thing. If my win rate is going up, whose win rate is going down? Its a zero sum game. Do you think it was the players stronger than me, or weaker than me, whose win rates went downward?
Having players match by deck is not a bad idea at all.
It's bad under the wrong circumstances in which you precisely explained, having end game valiant players like yourself with better developed skill sets (knowledge being one of them), match cavalier players with 4* decks.
What if matchmaking in VT worked according to progression?
New players would have a better experience and would actually have a chance to engage with the game mode because they would be constantly competing amoungst their piers.
The only logical way this would work is to have different rewards. If you’re only going to match valiant with valiant and tb with tb and cav with cav, that’s a decision but don’t give a player who fully progresses through cav VT the same rewards as a valiant player that progresses through valiant VT.
Every milestone reward should be progression based and since there has to be a challenge factor in VT, I even proposed the following matchmaking brackets:
Progression based players are already fractionalized, new valiants don't have nearly as much experience or knowledge than an end game valiant. No wonder cavalier players simply don't want to play the mode at all.
It's like if a Silver alliance had to match a Masters alliance, why would they even try to play that war?
One of the following accounts is a Valiant, one is a Paragon and one is a Thronebreaker.
If you don't know where this is going, I'd be putting all my units on betting the TB account would smoke the Valiant account.
The base issue is with an old game like this, you have compilers who can rack up a stacked deck without the aid of progression titles, and you have speed runners who can knock off progression titles in no time, but inherently have just the bare minimum of ranked champs, like in the case of the Valiant above who blitzed with a handful of key champs but can't field more than 15 champs before digging into 6r3s.
There's no perfect formula. Title? Watch the cav with the 200k account complain about the cav with the 2.3 million account, or the 1m TB vs the 5.9m TB account (as seen above). Title plus top 30 champ prestige? Sure, but if you're unwilling to expand the scope, you'll just be fighting the same accounts and anyone and everyone with superior accounts will raise quite a stink about why you'd get the same rewards as those who YaddaYadda. If you're cool with that, there's parity, and you never need to change anything about anything.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to implement a bit of matchmaking whereas lower ranks match you with players that have rosters/decks/prestige within a certain range of yours, with the range growing larger as you climb the ranks, perhaps going back to completely open by Vibranium.
It is trivial, because it was done twice before, with deck matching and roster matching. We don't do these things any more not because they are hard, not because the devs are lazy, not because we don't know how, but rather because we did them before and the results were bad enough that Kabam removed those features, and took the extra step to articulate in public statements why they were going away and were not coming back.
The problem is not a theoretical exercise of whether it is a good idea or not. It is that they lead to results that are unacceptable to Kabam. Unacceptable is unacceptable. It means they go away.
Here, I am referring both to the question of roster based matching, and the separate idea of phasing match making restrictions out at higher tiers. Both ideas separately have extremely bad side effects.
This is why roster strength is very important, specially in top tier ranks where players hardly make mistakes.
More generally, what you're saying is roster strength matters when everything else is close to equal. But it is supposed to be for obvious reasons.
When people complain about roster strength, it is usually within the general context of "roster advantage beat skill advantages." That would of course be true, when there are no skill advantages.
I would better define it like this:
Roster strength is a developed game component from competitor strength that can overcome all developed player skill set components within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower developed player skill set opponents. 2. When a player's roster is strongly over developed in comparison to an opponent's roster.
This is a weird set of caveats. You're saying roster strength can can overcome "all" player skill provided both players have similar skill. What does that actually mean? How can you say roster strength can overcome all player skill differences provided those differences are sufficiently small?
Let's flip this:
Skill can overcome all player roster advantages within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower rosters. 2. When a player's skill is strongly overdeveloped in comparison to an opponent's skill.
These are truisms. Roster beats all skill differences, provided you only look at the small ones. Skill also beats all roster differences, provided you only look at the small ones. You can replace that word with anything and these statements will always be true. Any advantage can overcome all other advantages, provided those other advantages are sufficiently small.
The question is not whether these advantages exist. No one argues they don't. The question is not whether there exists match ups where these advantages are decisive. No one argues against that either. The question is whether these advantages are fair to allow to exist. And the argument against roster advantage (or rather, one of them) is that it is impossible to overcome. But you cannot prove roster advantage is impossible to overcome by only looking at situations where no other advantage exists. That doesn't prove anything. It is only impossible to overcome when it cannot be overcome even when one competitor has a sizeable skill advantage over the other competitor. If even in those situations roster advantages are impossible to overcome, then at least the argument has some validity. But if sufficient skill can overcome roster advantages, then the argument that it is insurmountable is invalid on its face.
I'm not saying it is the only such argument. I'm specifically focusing on this one, because it is the one relevant to this line of thought. The other ones include things like players can buy roster advantages, which is a completely different discussion (in effect, this says spenders are cheating, but we let them in some parts of the game but refuse to let them in others, which is contrary to the game's principles which is that spending is fair, what you get from spending should be considered indistinguishable from what you get from game play, once you actually get it).
This flipped example you just brought up is actually false because in fact, skill can not overcome roster strength on certain thresholds even if it's MSD playing the match. Specifically point 2.
1. One rank difference in roster strength is already hard to overcome with knowledge, skill and strategy but it is possible. 2. Two rank difference in roster strength is on the boarder line of impossible unless a player has extremely good knowledge, skill, strategy and the opponent doesn't (MSD). 3. Any threshold equal or above three rank difference in roster strength is *impossible* to overcome simply because Time and HP are scoring factors which are strictly tied to champ's rank stat benefits.
I'm afraid you're wrong. For most matches at most levels where player knowledge and skill are still heterogenous, one rank difference is not a big deal. Match up knowledge is far more important. Two rank difference is now a big deal, you must have either significant skill, knowledge, or draft luck advantages to win, or the other player has to make a mistake (or more mistakes than you), which does happen.
Three rank differences is a very difficult one to overcome. My win rate against those players was practically zero at the start of the season, but rose to about 25% by the end of the season. The reality is most of the players good enough to guarantee you a loss with a strong roster advantage are just not going to be in VT by the end of the season. But I've had matches with Cav and TB rosters that have beaten very strong Valiant players. It isn't easy, but it is not impossible. I've taken 6R2/6R3 against 7R2/7R3 average rosters and won.
In GC, things change because there are a lot of sufficiently strong players simply slumming it in Uru. You're going to have a tough time winning with more than a one rank average difference in roster. Two rank difference is going to be very tough. But impossible? I mean, you're saying things are impossible that I've both seen and done. How much experience do you actually have fighting with intermediate rosters in intermediate BG, where the vast majority of players actually play? I can imagine no top 20 players would survive with a two rank deficit, but again, that's not because such an advantage is insurmountable, rather their competition has just as much skill as they do for the most part so achieving such a skill advantage to compensate is nearly impossible to achieve without time expenditures no one would bother attempting.
You keep saying things are impossible that I know are not because I've done them. I don't know what else to say about that, except they can't be impossible if I've seen them. Heck, I beat MSD in the beta once, which on paper sounds impossible and even I thought was him just joking around, but according to him it was a straight up fight he just didn't play optimally in. No one plays perfectly all the time.
Actually to make it fair and competitive, 3* only bgs would be great. The problem is you don't get to monetize the game like that and the rewards for players can't have the same value. The community could agree to use 3* only champs by itself, but then there would always be people who would happily take a win using 5* deck. Otherwise you're more or less guaranteed to reach the place where you wouldn't be able to move up
Separate from everything else, there's this myth that if only everyone used the same decks, or were restricted to low rarities, then BG would be more "fair." That's laughable, and not just in theory. We used to do this, or rather we did something close enough that we don't need to guess what will happen, we know what will happen.
When BG used to match by deck, a lot of players (myself included) assembled 4* decks to consistently match against players with similar strength decks. No one could have a stronger deck than me, because I had all the 4* champs and I had them more or less ranked up. So every match was at worse more or less on equal roster terms. And I never had a better win record than in those seasons, because when you factor out deck strength, what's left is deck construction (which champs are best for the meta), the bans, the drafts, and the match selections. Oh yeah, and then actually fighting the fight. Most of the time I won my matches before the fights even started, because while I am not the smartest MCOC player around, the odds of a random player knowing more than me, knowing more mechanics than I do, knowing more champion abilities than I do, knowing more match ups than I do, is very low. In a "fair fight" between me and J. Random Cavalier, I'm going to win about 85% of the time. The other 15% of the time I'm going to be matching against some veteran's alt.
It is just a weird bias that players hate losing to someone with a stronger roster, because they think they had no chance to win in the first place. But the players who were, you know, having to pick one of their last three mystics to fight my Torch say, those players were just as doomed. They had no chance to win at all. They just didn't know that, precisely because they are new and have no idea how the game works.
If it is not obvious how deck matching actually hurt the lower players, look at it from my perspective. I'm not a lower player. Right now, there's a good chance I will match against someone with a lower roster, but also a chance I might match against someone with a higher one. With deck matching, the chance to match against someone with a higher roster becomes zero. All those matches where I would have struggled, well now I am much better off. My win rate is likely to rise, and in fact it did rise when deck matching was a thing. If my win rate is going up, whose win rate is going down? Its a zero sum game. Do you think it was the players stronger than me, or weaker than me, whose win rates went downward?
Having players match by deck is not a bad idea at all.
It's bad under the wrong circumstances in which you precisely explained, having end game valiant players like yourself with better developed skill sets (knowledge being one of them), match cavalier players with 4* decks.
What if matchmaking in VT worked according to progression?
New players would have a better experience and would actually have a chance to engage with the game mode because they would be constantly competing amoungst their piers.
The only logical way this would work is to have different rewards. If you’re only going to match valiant with valiant and tb with tb and cav with cav, that’s a decision but don’t give a player who fully progresses through cav VT the same rewards as a valiant player that progresses through valiant VT.
Every milestone reward should be progression based and since there has to be a challenge factor in VT, I even proposed the following matchmaking brackets:
Progression based players are already fractionalized, new valiants don't have nearly as much experience or knowledge than an end game valiant. No wonder cavalier players simply don't want to play the mode at all.
It's like if a Silver alliance had to match a Masters alliance, why would they even try to play that war?
One of the following accounts is a Valiant, one is a Paragon and one is a Thronebreaker.
If you don't know where this is going, I'd be putting all my units on betting the TB account would smoke the Valiant account.
The base issue is with an old game like this, you have compilers who can rack up a stacked deck without the aid of progression titles, and you have speed runners who can knock off progression titles in no time, but inherently have just the bare minimum of ranked champs, like in the case of the Valiant above who blitzed with a handful of key champs but can't field more than 15 champs before digging into 6r3s.
There's no perfect formula. Title? Watch the cav with the 200k account complain about the cav with the 2.3 million account, or the 1m TB vs the 5.9m TB account (as seen above). Title plus top 30 champ prestige? Sure, but if you're unwilling to expand the scope, you'll just be fighting the same accounts and anyone and everyone with superior accounts will raise quite a stink about why you'd get the same rewards as those who YaddaYadda. If you're cool with that, there's parity, and you never need to change anything about anything.
I understand your point and I agree, that's what a mean when the playerbase is fractionalized. What I have seen from all comments till this point regarding current matchmaking system is that they are biased from their own progression and knowledge in this game. The vas majority of the player base; players that understand how the game works.
What I am trying to explain is that a change in VT design where matchmaking is progression based may actually help new players engage with the mode. New players that do not have developed knowledge, Skill or strategy; players that can not afford to make BG meta rank ups because all they have are 30-50 champions in roster; players that are experiencing constant defeat, that are frustrated and overwhelmed because they are still in diapers while trying to understand the game.
How can a player that is trying to understand the Game Mode, engage and overcome with no developed skill sets, the fact of matching opponents with huge disproportionate rosters in comparison to theirs? In other words how can they have fun while playing BGs?
This is why roster strength is very important, specially in top tier ranks where players hardly make mistakes.
More generally, what you're saying is roster strength matters when everything else is close to equal. But it is supposed to be for obvious reasons.
When people complain about roster strength, it is usually within the general context of "roster advantage beat skill advantages." That would of course be true, when there are no skill advantages.
I would better define it like this:
Roster strength is a developed game component from competitor strength that can overcome all developed player skill set components within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower developed player skill set opponents. 2. When a player's roster is strongly over developed in comparison to an opponent's roster.
This is a weird set of caveats. You're saying roster strength can can overcome "all" player skill provided both players have similar skill. What does that actually mean? How can you say roster strength can overcome all player skill differences provided those differences are sufficiently small?
Let's flip this:
Skill can overcome all player roster advantages within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower rosters. 2. When a player's skill is strongly overdeveloped in comparison to an opponent's skill.
These are truisms. Roster beats all skill differences, provided you only look at the small ones. Skill also beats all roster differences, provided you only look at the small ones. You can replace that word with anything and these statements will always be true. Any advantage can overcome all other advantages, provided those other advantages are sufficiently small.
The question is not whether these advantages exist. No one argues they don't. The question is not whether there exists match ups where these advantages are decisive. No one argues against that either. The question is whether these advantages are fair to allow to exist. And the argument against roster advantage (or rather, one of them) is that it is impossible to overcome. But you cannot prove roster advantage is impossible to overcome by only looking at situations where no other advantage exists. That doesn't prove anything. It is only impossible to overcome when it cannot be overcome even when one competitor has a sizeable skill advantage over the other competitor. If even in those situations roster advantages are impossible to overcome, then at least the argument has some validity. But if sufficient skill can overcome roster advantages, then the argument that it is insurmountable is invalid on its face.
I'm not saying it is the only such argument. I'm specifically focusing on this one, because it is the one relevant to this line of thought. The other ones include things like players can buy roster advantages, which is a completely different discussion (in effect, this says spenders are cheating, but we let them in some parts of the game but refuse to let them in others, which is contrary to the game's principles which is that spending is fair, what you get from spending should be considered indistinguishable from what you get from game play, once you actually get it).
This flipped example you just brought up is actually false because in fact, skill can not overcome roster strength on certain thresholds even if it's MSD playing the match. Specifically point 2.
1. One rank difference in roster strength is already hard to overcome with knowledge, skill and strategy but it is possible. 2. Two rank difference in roster strength is on the boarder line of impossible unless a player has extremely good knowledge, skill, strategy and the opponent doesn't (MSD). 3. Any threshold equal or above three rank difference in roster strength is *impossible* to overcome simply because Time and HP are scoring factors which are strictly tied to champ's rank stat benefits.
R1 vs R4 • You don't even have enough time to finish the match. • Any blocked hit takes a chunk out of HP
R4 vs R1 • The fight will take no less than 60 sec and I'm being extremely generous. A sensical amount would be around 30 sec if players knows how to tap and activate special attacks. • Even if the attacker gets hit multiple times the damage output will only tickle.
So yes, this is why even MSD skill, knowledge and strategy CAN'T overcome roster strength on certain thresholds. This is what Uncollected and Cavalier players face vs Valiant players.
Um, that is false (may not be false for all seasons). I just lost with my mostly r3 deck to someone who was running 6r4 and 6r5.
Same here. My draft luck was awful where they had a hard counter to all my defenders and I had 0 counters to all of their defenders. It is what it is. I just shrugged it off and kept going.
Actually to make it fair and competitive, 3* only bgs would be great. The problem is you don't get to monetize the game like that and the rewards for players can't have the same value. The community could agree to use 3* only champs by itself, but then there would always be people who would happily take a win using 5* deck. Otherwise you're more or less guaranteed to reach the place where you wouldn't be able to move up
Separate from everything else, there's this myth that if only everyone used the same decks, or were restricted to low rarities, then BG would be more "fair." That's laughable, and not just in theory. We used to do this, or rather we did something close enough that we don't need to guess what will happen, we know what will happen.
When BG used to match by deck, a lot of players (myself included) assembled 4* decks to consistently match against players with similar strength decks. No one could have a stronger deck than me, because I had all the 4* champs and I had them more or less ranked up. So every match was at worse more or less on equal roster terms. And I never had a better win record than in those seasons, because when you factor out deck strength, what's left is deck construction (which champs are best for the meta), the bans, the drafts, and the match selections. Oh yeah, and then actually fighting the fight. Most of the time I won my matches before the fights even started, because while I am not the smartest MCOC player around, the odds of a random player knowing more than me, knowing more mechanics than I do, knowing more champion abilities than I do, knowing more match ups than I do, is very low. In a "fair fight" between me and J. Random Cavalier, I'm going to win about 85% of the time. The other 15% of the time I'm going to be matching against some veteran's alt.
It is just a weird bias that players hate losing to someone with a stronger roster, because they think they had no chance to win in the first place. But the players who were, you know, having to pick one of their last three mystics to fight my Torch say, those players were just as doomed. They had no chance to win at all. They just didn't know that, precisely because they are new and have no idea how the game works.
If it is not obvious how deck matching actually hurt the lower players, look at it from my perspective. I'm not a lower player. Right now, there's a good chance I will match against someone with a lower roster, but also a chance I might match against someone with a higher one. With deck matching, the chance to match against someone with a higher roster becomes zero. All those matches where I would have struggled, well now I am much better off. My win rate is likely to rise, and in fact it did rise when deck matching was a thing. If my win rate is going up, whose win rate is going down? Its a zero sum game. Do you think it was the players stronger than me, or weaker than me, whose win rates went downward?
Having players match by deck is not a bad idea at all.
It's bad under the wrong circumstances in which you precisely explained, having end game valiant players like yourself with better developed skill sets (knowledge being one of them), match cavalier players with 4* decks.
What if matchmaking in VT worked according to progression?
New players would have a better experience and would actually have a chance to engage with the game mode because they would be constantly competing amoungst their piers.
The only logical way this would work is to have different rewards. If you’re only going to match valiant with valiant and tb with tb and cav with cav, that’s a decision but don’t give a player who fully progresses through cav VT the same rewards as a valiant player that progresses through valiant VT.
Every milestone reward should be progression based and since there has to be a challenge factor in VT, I even proposed the following matchmaking brackets:
Progression based players are already fractionalized, new valiants don't have nearly as much experience or knowledge than an end game valiant. No wonder cavalier players simply don't want to play the mode at all.
It's like if a Silver alliance had to match a Masters alliance, why would they even try to play that war?
One of the following accounts is a Valiant, one is a Paragon and one is a Thronebreaker.
If you don't know where this is going, I'd be putting all my units on betting the TB account would smoke the Valiant account.
The base issue is with an old game like this, you have compilers who can rack up a stacked deck without the aid of progression titles, and you have speed runners who can knock off progression titles in no time, but inherently have just the bare minimum of ranked champs, like in the case of the Valiant above who blitzed with a handful of key champs but can't field more than 15 champs before digging into 6r3s.
There's no perfect formula. Title? Watch the cav with the 200k account complain about the cav with the 2.3 million account, or the 1m TB vs the 5.9m TB account (as seen above). Title plus top 30 champ prestige? Sure, but if you're unwilling to expand the scope, you'll just be fighting the same accounts and anyone and everyone with superior accounts will raise quite a stink about why you'd get the same rewards as those who YaddaYadda. If you're cool with that, there's parity, and you never need to change anything about anything.
I understand your point and I agree, that's what a mean when the playerbase is fractionalized. What I have seen from all comments till this point regarding current matchmaking system is that they are biased from their own progression and knowledge in this game. The vas majority of the player base; players that understand how the game works.
What I am trying to explain is that a change in VT design where matchmaking is progression based may actually help new players engage with the mode. New players that do not have developed knowledge, Skill or strategy; players that can not afford to make BG meta rank ups because all they have are 30-50 champions in roster; players that are experiencing constant defeat, that are frustrated and overwhelmed because they are still in diapers while trying to understand the game.
How can a player that is trying to understand the Game Mode, engage and overcome with no developed skill sets, the fact of matching opponents with huge disproportionate rosters in comparison to theirs? In other words how can they have fun while playing BGs?
Why should everyone have fun in every game mode? This whole line of thinking is just ridiculous. If a player is new, inexperienced or just bad, maybe they should focus on other modes.
I’m a decent player with mature valiant roster and a couple dozen r3s. But if I decided tomorrow, “hey, I want to play tier 1 AW”, I would get hammered most of the time and it wouldn’t be any fun. But I’m not on the forum writing thesis papers about it.
You guys don't see what is going here? He wants to be able to throw away matches with energy and make sure he gets a "fun match" with elder marks... Basically making farming "easier".... Leave the chance of getting a sweaty match out of the scope of matchmaking.
This is why roster strength is very important, specially in top tier ranks where players hardly make mistakes.
More generally, what you're saying is roster strength matters when everything else is close to equal. But it is supposed to be for obvious reasons.
When people complain about roster strength, it is usually within the general context of "roster advantage beat skill advantages." That would of course be true, when there are no skill advantages.
I would better define it like this:
Roster strength is a developed game component from competitor strength that can overcome all developed player skill set components within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower developed player skill set opponents. 2. When a player's roster is strongly over developed in comparison to an opponent's roster.
This is a weird set of caveats. You're saying roster strength can can overcome "all" player skill provided both players have similar skill. What does that actually mean? How can you say roster strength can overcome all player skill differences provided those differences are sufficiently small?
Let's flip this:
Skill can overcome all player roster advantages within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower rosters. 2. When a player's skill is strongly overdeveloped in comparison to an opponent's skill.
These are truisms. Roster beats all skill differences, provided you only look at the small ones. Skill also beats all roster differences, provided you only look at the small ones. You can replace that word with anything and these statements will always be true. Any advantage can overcome all other advantages, provided those other advantages are sufficiently small.
The question is not whether these advantages exist. No one argues they don't. The question is not whether there exists match ups where these advantages are decisive. No one argues against that either. The question is whether these advantages are fair to allow to exist. And the argument against roster advantage (or rather, one of them) is that it is impossible to overcome. But you cannot prove roster advantage is impossible to overcome by only looking at situations where no other advantage exists. That doesn't prove anything. It is only impossible to overcome when it cannot be overcome even when one competitor has a sizeable skill advantage over the other competitor. If even in those situations roster advantages are impossible to overcome, then at least the argument has some validity. But if sufficient skill can overcome roster advantages, then the argument that it is insurmountable is invalid on its face.
I'm not saying it is the only such argument. I'm specifically focusing on this one, because it is the one relevant to this line of thought. The other ones include things like players can buy roster advantages, which is a completely different discussion (in effect, this says spenders are cheating, but we let them in some parts of the game but refuse to let them in others, which is contrary to the game's principles which is that spending is fair, what you get from spending should be considered indistinguishable from what you get from game play, once you actually get it).
This flipped example you just brought up is actually false because in fact, skill can not overcome roster strength on certain thresholds even if it's MSD playing the match. Specifically point 2.
1. One rank difference in roster strength is already hard to overcome with knowledge, skill and strategy but it is possible. 2. Two rank difference in roster strength is on the boarder line of impossible unless a player has extremely good knowledge, skill, strategy and the opponent doesn't (MSD). 3. Any threshold equal or above three rank difference in roster strength is *impossible* to overcome simply because Time and HP are scoring factors which are strictly tied to champ's rank stat benefits.
I'm afraid you're wrong. For most matches at most levels where player knowledge and skill are still heterogenous, one rank difference is not a big deal. Match up knowledge is far more important. Two rank difference is now a big deal, you must have either significant skill, knowledge, or draft luck advantages to win, or the other player has to make a mistake (or more mistakes than you), which does happen.
Three rank differences is a very difficult one to overcome. My win rate against those players was practically zero at the start of the season, but rose to about 25% by the end of the season. The reality is most of the players good enough to guarantee you a loss with a strong roster advantage are just not going to be in VT by the end of the season. But I've had matches with Cav and TB rosters that have beaten very strong Valiant players. It isn't easy, but it is not impossible. I've taken 6R2/6R3 against 7R2/7R3 average rosters and won.
In GC, things change because there are a lot of sufficiently strong players simply slumming it in Uru. You're going to have a tough time winning with more than a one rank average difference in roster. Two rank difference is going to be very tough. But impossible? I mean, you're saying things are impossible that I've both seen and done. How much experience do you actually have fighting with intermediate rosters in intermediate BG, where the vast majority of players actually play? I can imagine no top 20 players would survive with a two rank deficit, but again, that's not because such an advantage is insurmountable, rather their competition has just as much skill as they do for the most part so achieving such a skill advantage to compensate is nearly impossible to achieve without time expenditures no one would bother attempting.
You keep saying things are impossible that I know are not because I've done them. I don't know what else to say about that, except they can't be impossible if I've seen them. Heck, I beat MSD in the beta once, which on paper sounds impossible and even I thought was him just joking around, but according to him it was a straight up fight he just didn't play optimally in. No one plays perfectly all the time.
Read your post and I find it helpful for the community. To answer your question, I have my main account which I play in high tiers and I've had a couple alt accounts which I create from time to time to Speedrun content in a day or two with champions I usually don't use just for fun.
I've recently taken the time to experience BGs with one of those accounts that are uncollected which is the required progression title to play BGs. I played during first 3 weeks and it was a tough time, won a few by actually playing the match around same amount by forfeits and lost a lot more. Many of those won matches that I actually played were thanks to knowledge (same as your cav experience) because my roster was basically as small as can be with only speedrunning to reach uncollected and nothing else. Many times I lost because my opponent banned my top 3 champs and I couldn't draft the others. I faced a couple times the experience of not getting hit, finishing close to 100% HP and precisely not being able to KO the opponent and simply lost those matches because my defenders were taken down in less than 30sec although my opponents had lost considerable amounts of HP. After that I basically decided while on ban screen if the match was winnable or not precisely if my opponent's roster had more than 3 rank difference champs in comparison to my top attackers. I intentionally didn't invest in mastery setups so they were as basic as can be. I reached Vibranium 3 and stopped playing. I probably would have been able to reach GC if continued playing during the last week however my overall experience was a very tough one which led me to realize that if it wasn't because of my knowledge and other skill sets, I would have basically not been able to win most of those matches I actually did.
This said, when I try to empathize to how lower progressed players feel about matchmaking, I understand them. If they are new to the game, new to the game mode and are trying their best to succeed and have a fun time, it's more likely they won't engage with the mode at all.
Why is this important?
Because the game design is fractionalizing the playerbase by not allowing certain progressions to engage with the mode which creates the need of having to prioritize other audiences which leads to the mode's stagnation.
Many pain points from Bgs Dev Diary are precisely a problem because there's no awareness around creating Battleground's design structure with a holistic approach. Competitive game modes should encourage competitiveness at all progression levels for all type of players effectively (this does not necessarily mean everyone has to reach GC).
When the best advice people can give lower progressions is don't play until the last few days of every season, somethings wrong. When the excuse towards not making VT progression based is assuming low progressions can still overcome roster strength with skill sets they have yet not developed is incomprehensible. Players complaining about matchmaking means they want to engage with the mode but the game design structure isn't allowing them to.
I'll leave my deck and masteries for reference. I honestly don't believe a new player with non developed skill sets could possibly engage with the mode. Keep in mind this is also two years after your Cav push.
This is definitely not about me, it's not about the vast majority of players either, it's about solving Battlegrounds issues as a whole and matchmaking could actually solve many of those problems. I will leave it here and like I said, if it helps the game fine, if it doesn't I won't loose my sleep. I appreciate the talk.
They don’t need to change the current format as there needs to be an ultra competitive mode that drives revenue and offers end game players an outlet. What would be great is to run a second BGs that is 3*,4*, or 5* only and themed, ie X-Men vs Avengers or Villians only. It would open up the competition and allow for lower tier players to compete.
This is why roster strength is very important, specially in top tier ranks where players hardly make mistakes.
More generally, what you're saying is roster strength matters when everything else is close to equal. But it is supposed to be for obvious reasons.
When people complain about roster strength, it is usually within the general context of "roster advantage beat skill advantages." That would of course be true, when there are no skill advantages.
I would better define it like this:
Roster strength is a developed game component from competitor strength that can overcome all developed player skill set components within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower developed player skill set opponents. 2. When a player's roster is strongly over developed in comparison to an opponent's roster.
This is a weird set of caveats. You're saying roster strength can can overcome "all" player skill provided both players have similar skill. What does that actually mean? How can you say roster strength can overcome all player skill differences provided those differences are sufficiently small?
Let's flip this:
Skill can overcome all player roster advantages within certain circumstances:
1. When players face either close to equal or lower rosters. 2. When a player's skill is strongly overdeveloped in comparison to an opponent's skill.
These are truisms. Roster beats all skill differences, provided you only look at the small ones. Skill also beats all roster differences, provided you only look at the small ones. You can replace that word with anything and these statements will always be true. Any advantage can overcome all other advantages, provided those other advantages are sufficiently small.
The question is not whether these advantages exist. No one argues they don't. The question is not whether there exists match ups where these advantages are decisive. No one argues against that either. The question is whether these advantages are fair to allow to exist. And the argument against roster advantage (or rather, one of them) is that it is impossible to overcome. But you cannot prove roster advantage is impossible to overcome by only looking at situations where no other advantage exists. That doesn't prove anything. It is only impossible to overcome when it cannot be overcome even when one competitor has a sizeable skill advantage over the other competitor. If even in those situations roster advantages are impossible to overcome, then at least the argument has some validity. But if sufficient skill can overcome roster advantages, then the argument that it is insurmountable is invalid on its face.
I'm not saying it is the only such argument. I'm specifically focusing on this one, because it is the one relevant to this line of thought. The other ones include things like players can buy roster advantages, which is a completely different discussion (in effect, this says spenders are cheating, but we let them in some parts of the game but refuse to let them in others, which is contrary to the game's principles which is that spending is fair, what you get from spending should be considered indistinguishable from what you get from game play, once you actually get it).
This flipped example you just brought up is actually false because in fact, skill can not overcome roster strength on certain thresholds even if it's MSD playing the match. Specifically point 2.
1. One rank difference in roster strength is already hard to overcome with knowledge, skill and strategy but it is possible. 2. Two rank difference in roster strength is on the boarder line of impossible unless a player has extremely good knowledge, skill, strategy and the opponent doesn't (MSD). 3. Any threshold equal or above three rank difference in roster strength is *impossible* to overcome simply because Time and HP are scoring factors which are strictly tied to champ's rank stat benefits.
I'm afraid you're wrong. For most matches at most levels where player knowledge and skill are still heterogenous, one rank difference is not a big deal. Match up knowledge is far more important. Two rank difference is now a big deal, you must have either significant skill, knowledge, or draft luck advantages to win, or the other player has to make a mistake (or more mistakes than you), which does happen.
Three rank differences is a very difficult one to overcome. My win rate against those players was practically zero at the start of the season, but rose to about 25% by the end of the season. The reality is most of the players good enough to guarantee you a loss with a strong roster advantage are just not going to be in VT by the end of the season. But I've had matches with Cav and TB rosters that have beaten very strong Valiant players. It isn't easy, but it is not impossible. I've taken 6R2/6R3 against 7R2/7R3 average rosters and won.
In GC, things change because there are a lot of sufficiently strong players simply slumming it in Uru. You're going to have a tough time winning with more than a one rank average difference in roster. Two rank difference is going to be very tough. But impossible? I mean, you're saying things are impossible that I've both seen and done. How much experience do you actually have fighting with intermediate rosters in intermediate BG, where the vast majority of players actually play? I can imagine no top 20 players would survive with a two rank deficit, but again, that's not because such an advantage is insurmountable, rather their competition has just as much skill as they do for the most part so achieving such a skill advantage to compensate is nearly impossible to achieve without time expenditures no one would bother attempting.
You keep saying things are impossible that I know are not because I've done them. I don't know what else to say about that, except they can't be impossible if I've seen them. Heck, I beat MSD in the beta once, which on paper sounds impossible and even I thought was him just joking around, but according to him it was a straight up fight he just didn't play optimally in. No one plays perfectly all the time.
I reached Vibranium 3 and stopped playing.
I'll leave my deck and masteries for reference. I honestly don't believe a new player with non developed skill sets could possibly engage with the mode.
That lets lower players move up, which is adventageous in a rankings / mathematical sense, but it's really bad in terms of things like fun, gameplay, sense of accomplishment, and development as a player. A small account could spend an hour grinding BGs where every match is either (a) a forfeit that lets them move up, or (b) a lopsided match they have no hope of winning. At the end of the hour, they might be higher on the ladder than when they started, but without truly playing a competive match. They won't be better as a player, they won't be having fun, and they're unlikely to stick around long term. It's not about helping them progress on the ladder. Two of the foundations of fun, psychologically speaking, is that a match needs to have an uncertain outcome and the player needs to feel a sense that they can influence that outcome. The present situation is more of an idle game. They cue up, and let nature take its course.
As I posted in my other thread, there needs to be some mechanism that rewards players for playing at their appropriate level, and to get more points for beating higher level opponents and less for winning easy matches. You posted above about different professional racing leagues and teams needing to work together to put the best car and driver on the track... BGs is a bit more like a professional soccer team queuing up into high-school tournaments to pad their stats. If they just need wins, and it doesn't matter who it's against, why play another pro team and risk losing? There's literally only one day of the BG season where it matters what tier you're in or what your GC ranking is. The incentive structure of the scoring system and the 48-hour objectives is to "get wins" regardless of who they are against. It sabatoges the developmental ranks of the game. That's my point.
VT incentives are a completely separate subject from VT match making. The reward structure for VT has been an unstable compromise from the beginning, trying to balance the participation elements of VT from the competitive requirements of VT leading into GC. Much of that tension has been seen through the evolution of VT: look at the changes to (medal) scoring, match making itself, and even the most recent changes to rewards. Many of the pressures placed on Battlegrounds come from conflicting priorities that have to be balanced, because one cannot simply wipe out the other. There's a desire for BG to not become a purely grinding mode like arena. But there's also a desire to encourage significant participation, because match making and VT progression doesn't work unless there are a lot of players playing a lot of matches. Most incentives to participation are going to have some element of also encouraging grinding, which makes these two requirements mutually exclusive to a degree, and balancing between them non-trivial.
We have the same tension between VT and GC. VT is more focused on participation, while GC is more pure competition. VT has rewards for progress, GC has rewards for final rank. But since promoting through VT is the prerequisite for entry to GC, there has to be some transition from participation focus to competitive focus, or it becomes too easy to enter (and then claim rewards from) GC. That too has been tinkered with a lot, so that progress through VT is as smooth as possible for players looking to participate, but still eventually places downward pressure on players so they don't just all enter GC. We see them trying to address that stuff now, with things like more GC ranks (right now there's that ridiculous Uru3 bracket with half the GC players just parked in it), and we've seen that with changes like the S19 changes to tier structure.
Kabam has even hinted at downstream changes designed to address things like lopsided match making early in the season and lack of participation until the end of the season with things like ratings decay (so players play more continuously) and experiments in different ways to seed players. These are all things designed to indirectly affect who gets matched against who by having VT better represent relative player strength in VT tiers. But it doesn't change a fundamental fact that at some point, players MUST run into stronger competition if they wish to rise to higher tiers of BG (VT or GC). And at some point if a player wants to promote but doesn't want to face stronger competition to promote, there's nothing we can do for those players. It can be made smoother, with less abrupt changes in match strength. It can be made less disruptive between seasons. But the one thing it cannot be, no matter how "unfun" it is, is something that protects players from stronger competition. However it happens, it has to happen eventually.
To put it another way, not everyone is supposed to reach GC. Even Kabam has stated this directly. Any system where all the players think all they have to do is XYZ and they'll make it is a broken system by definition. Now, just that, on its face, without even specifying the specifics, is "unfun" to a lot of players. BG is not meant for them.
Is there a particular reason why this can’t be implemented for VT while GC is left to be a free-for-all? The structure of VT relative to GC implies that VT is supposed to be a climbable track for anyone, while GC is where rank-based rewards become a thing and so more open matchmaking is required. Sort of like the difference between a solo event and ranked rewards.
I think that already exists in VT till D2. After that it is normal matchmaking
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If you don't know where this is going, I'd be putting all my units on betting the TB account would smoke the Valiant account.
The base issue is with an old game like this, you have compilers who can rack up a stacked deck without the aid of progression titles, and you have speed runners who can knock off progression titles in no time, but inherently have just the bare minimum of ranked champs, like in the case of the Valiant above who blitzed with a handful of key champs but can't field more than 15 champs before digging into 6r3s.
There's no perfect formula. Title? Watch the cav with the 200k account complain about the cav with the 2.3 million account, or the 1m TB vs the 5.9m TB account (as seen above). Title plus top 30 champ prestige? Sure, but if you're unwilling to expand the scope, you'll just be fighting the same accounts and anyone and everyone with superior accounts will raise quite a stink about why you'd get the same rewards as those who YaddaYadda. If you're cool with that, there's parity, and you never need to change anything about anything.
The problem is not a theoretical exercise of whether it is a good idea or not. It is that they lead to results that are unacceptable to Kabam. Unacceptable is unacceptable. It means they go away.
Here, I am referring both to the question of roster based matching, and the separate idea of phasing match making restrictions out at higher tiers. Both ideas separately have extremely bad side effects.
I'm afraid you're wrong. For most matches at most levels where player knowledge and skill are still heterogenous, one rank difference is not a big deal. Match up knowledge is far more important. Two rank difference is now a big deal, you must have either significant skill, knowledge, or draft luck advantages to win, or the other player has to make a mistake (or more mistakes than you), which does happen.
Three rank differences is a very difficult one to overcome. My win rate against those players was practically zero at the start of the season, but rose to about 25% by the end of the season. The reality is most of the players good enough to guarantee you a loss with a strong roster advantage are just not going to be in VT by the end of the season. But I've had matches with Cav and TB rosters that have beaten very strong Valiant players. It isn't easy, but it is not impossible. I've taken 6R2/6R3 against 7R2/7R3 average rosters and won.
In GC, things change because there are a lot of sufficiently strong players simply slumming it in Uru. You're going to have a tough time winning with more than a one rank average difference in roster. Two rank difference is going to be very tough. But impossible? I mean, you're saying things are impossible that I've both seen and done. How much experience do you actually have fighting with intermediate rosters in intermediate BG, where the vast majority of players actually play? I can imagine no top 20 players would survive with a two rank deficit, but again, that's not because such an advantage is insurmountable, rather their competition has just as much skill as they do for the most part so achieving such a skill advantage to compensate is nearly impossible to achieve without time expenditures no one would bother attempting.
You keep saying things are impossible that I know are not because I've done them. I don't know what else to say about that, except they can't be impossible if I've seen them. Heck, I beat MSD in the beta once, which on paper sounds impossible and even I thought was him just joking around, but according to him it was a straight up fight he just didn't play optimally in. No one plays perfectly all the time.
What I am trying to explain is that a change in VT design where matchmaking is progression based may actually help new players engage with the mode. New players that do not have developed knowledge, Skill or strategy; players that can not afford to make BG meta rank ups because all they have are 30-50 champions in roster; players that are experiencing constant defeat, that are frustrated and overwhelmed because they are still in diapers while trying to understand the game.
How can a player that is trying to understand the Game Mode, engage and overcome with no developed skill sets, the fact of matching opponents with huge disproportionate rosters in comparison to theirs? In other words how can they have fun while playing BGs?
Why should everyone have fun in every game mode? This whole line of thinking is just ridiculous. If a player is new, inexperienced or just bad, maybe they should focus on other modes.
I’m a decent player with mature valiant roster and a couple dozen r3s. But if I decided tomorrow, “hey, I want to play tier 1 AW”, I would get hammered most of the time and it wouldn’t be any fun. But I’m not on the forum writing thesis papers about it.
He wants to be able to throw away matches with energy and make sure he gets a "fun match" with elder marks... Basically making farming "easier".... Leave the chance of getting a sweaty match out of the scope of matchmaking.
I've recently taken the time to experience BGs with one of those accounts that are uncollected which is the required progression title to play BGs. I played during first 3 weeks and it was a tough time, won a few by actually playing the match around same amount by forfeits and lost a lot more. Many of those won matches that I actually played were thanks to knowledge (same as your cav experience) because my roster was basically as small as can be with only speedrunning to reach uncollected and nothing else. Many times I lost because my opponent banned my top 3 champs and I couldn't draft the others. I faced a couple times the experience of not getting hit, finishing close to 100% HP and precisely not being able to KO the opponent and simply lost those matches because my defenders were taken down in less than 30sec although my opponents had lost considerable amounts of HP. After that I basically decided while on ban screen if the match was winnable or not precisely if my opponent's roster had more than 3 rank difference champs in comparison to my top attackers. I intentionally didn't invest in mastery setups so they were as basic as can be. I reached Vibranium 3 and stopped playing. I probably would have been able to reach GC if continued playing during the last week however my overall experience was a very tough one which led me to realize that if it wasn't because of my knowledge and other skill sets, I would have basically not been able to win most of those matches I actually did.
This said, when I try to empathize to how lower progressed players feel about matchmaking, I understand them. If they are new to the game, new to the game mode and are trying their best to succeed and have a fun time, it's more likely they won't engage with the mode at all.
Why is this important?
Because the game design is fractionalizing the playerbase by not allowing certain progressions to engage with the mode which creates the need of having to prioritize other audiences which leads to the mode's stagnation.
Many pain points from Bgs Dev Diary are precisely a problem because there's no awareness around creating Battleground's design structure with a holistic approach. Competitive game modes should encourage competitiveness at all progression levels for all type of players effectively (this does not necessarily mean everyone has to reach GC).
When the best advice people can give lower progressions is don't play until the last few days of every season, somethings wrong. When the excuse towards not making VT progression based is assuming low progressions can still overcome roster strength with skill sets they have yet not developed is incomprehensible. Players complaining about matchmaking means they want to engage with the mode but the game design structure isn't allowing them to.
I'll leave my deck and masteries for reference. I honestly don't believe a new player with non developed skill sets could possibly engage with the mode. Keep in mind this is also two years after your Cav push.
This is definitely not about me, it's not about the vast majority of players either, it's about solving Battlegrounds issues as a whole and matchmaking could actually solve many of those problems. I will leave it here and like I said, if it helps the game fine, if it doesn't I won't loose my sleep. I appreciate the talk.
Just Wow.