Ideas to Resolve Battlegrounds Burnout
Battlegrounds has become very repetitive, and I think that the large majority of the community wants it to change in different ways and for various reasons. This post is a list of ideas which could hopefully improve the current situation of bgs for everyone in the community, whales, elders, and lower tier players. This is targeted specifically towards GC improvements, and does not address the current issues with the victory track.
My first point is the most important, so if you have the time please read through that at least. Each following point is ordered by level of importance, which diminishes each time.
- Gladiator’s Circuit Brackets
This is a change targeted towards improving the bgs experience for mid and lower tier players, or high tier players that are annoyed with the mode. I’ve seen an incredible amount of frustration and refusal to play bgs from all kinds of players.
I suggest that when someone enters the Gladiator’s Circuit, they are presented with 3 brackets to choose from.
1. Hard-Celestial/Mysterium
2. Medium-Quantum/Arcane
3. Easy-Gamma/Uru
Your choice would determine which bracket you choose to play in for the entire season. The purpose of this is to separate matchmaking from players aiming to be in Celestial, and players who would only be able to reach Gamma or Uru. Once you make a choice, you would be unable to switch brackets for the remainder of the season.
Rewards:
I suggest making 3 steps in the reward process with this bracket system to make it run smoothly. Going forward, I will refer to each bracket as E for easy, M for medium, and H for hard.
Step 1: For choosing each bracket, players would receive a small amount of radiance immediately. 5k (H), 10k (M), and 15k (E). The reason the hard bracket would receive less radiance is to incentivize players to only choose that bracket if they believe they can compete within it.
Step 2: Players must qualify for a bracket’s rank rewards once they choose it. This is done as an extra measure to prevent players from choosing a bracket they are unprepared to compete in. In order to qualify for each bracket’s ranked rewards, players would need to win 2 matches (E), 5 (M), and 8 (H). Consider these qualifying matches the same as climbing up the ladder in our current GC.
Each bracket receives a certain amount of extra radiance once they qualify for ranking within it. I suggest these rewards consist of 5k (E), 20k (M), and 45k (H), bringing the totals for each after Steps 1 and 2 to 20k (E), 30k (M), and 50k (H). These rewards are tuned to be less than that of each bracket’s minimum rank, but also to provide guaranteed reward value if players get unlucky/play poorly and are pushed out of the bottom ranks in Uru, Arcane, and Mysterium.
Step 3: The ranked rewards as they are currently. (Gamma/Uru rewards would need to be tuned up slightly to accommodate these changes.)
- Omega Pools
I think every player can agree that this was an interesting addition to last year’s Brawl, and something that could potentially benefit the main GC. Like with rank and sig level currently, champs in the Omega Pool are clearly marked with a new icon. To keep it simple, I suggest that each class has 3 OP champs, and each GC bracket allows a different number of them.
Easy-10 Omega Pool options
Medium-8
Hard-6
The reason Easy would receive more options is because most of the accounts entering these brackets are smaller than that of higher brackets. Therefore, it’s likely that the majority of their champs are from the Omega Pool. In contrast, accounts that are in Hard will likely have many options outside of the Omega Pool. There would only be a total of 18 champs in this pool (3 per class), rather than 30, just in case a smaller account is skilled enough to make it into Hard or Medium. This would be my suggestion for the Omega Pool:
Cosmic
Serpent, Deathless Thanos, Dark Phoenix
Tech
Future Ant-Man, Solvarch, Spider-Man (SE)
Mutant
Jean Grey, Onslaught, Captain Britain
Skill
Nick Fury, Yelena, Okoye
Science
Spider-Woman, Photon, Human Torch
Mystic
Nico Minoru, Pavitr, Kushala
This list is made up of non-ascendable top tier champs for BG’s. This list could also change with each season or as needed. Omega Pools, if structured this way, would provide a lot of a balance to the meta.
- Celestial Tournament
This would be a feature to prevent parking at the very top, increase competition for Celestial players, and give players something exciting to check in on every season. I’m assuming that streaming this tournament would be difficult every season, so the structure I’ll discuss builds around the idea that this tournament can’t be steamed.
At the end of Week 3 in each season, the top 8 is locked in. The rest of the Hard bracket can still compete as normal, but the highest achievable position after this point will be #9 in C4.
The top 8 are put into a bracket resembling the Battlerealm Brawl, with matches from #1/8, and #4/5 on the left, and #2/7 and #3/6 on the right. Each round of the tournament lasts 2 days, this time frame is achievable for anyone entering the tournament, because placing in #1-8 requires a significant time investment anyways.
Players can invite their opponent like with a friendly match, and once accepted, both are entered into that tournament round. The tournament round would consist of multiple matches, which occur back-to-back until one player comes out on top.
Round 1-Best of 3
Round 2-Best of 5
Round 3-Best of 7
If Player 1 invites P2, but P2 does not accept or invite P1 themselves within the 2 day time window, then P2 forfeits that round. If both players invite each other at one point or another, but are unable to make a match happen, they split the difference between the rewards for whatever placement they end up in. The same happens if neither player sends an invite to the other during the 2 day time window.
If a match in round 1 is skipped for any reason and neither participant moves forward, their would-be opponent in round 2 automatically advances to round 3. If this happens in round 2, their would-be opponent automatically wins the tournament.
The tournament could also be shown to all players including current positions and match/round results, similar to the current GC leaderboard.
- Scoring Options
After picking bans, players could be prompted with an additional option to choose between the normal scoring meta and other alternatives, such as our current season’s meta that discounts attacker health. If both players select a certain scoring meta, then their match will have that scoring. If they disagree or do not select anything, the normal scoring would always become the default. While most players have disliked the new scoring, adding it as an option alongside other scoring metas could provide more matchup variety.
- Alternative Ban and Deck Metas
The 40 champ deck/5 bans season was an interesting change to try out. There could be more experiments done with some seasons, to further change up the meta from time to time. Some ideas I had for other alternatives are listed below:
1. Instead of 3 bans, players can ban an entire class from their opponent’s deck, but doing so does not ban that class from their own deck.
2. Only non-ascendable champs can be banned. If the opponent has less than 3 non-ascendable champs, then they can ban ascendable champs as well.
3. 10 bans per match, or 20 champ deck size with 0-2 bans.
Thanks to anyone who took the time to read through this post. I really hope this does either provide a few good options for BG’s/GC changes, or at least becomes a building block for better ideas on the matter.
