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Scoring based on difficulty in Battlegrounds

Rebark

Initially, I was making a post about the problems of this Battlegrounds season and the game mode in general, but while I was doing that, I had an idea that might be good.

Well, maybe you'll think it's a bad idea, but at least I'll spare you another thread complaining about this terrible Battlegrounds season.

For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of Battlegrounds is when you have an incredible fight, in a far from appropriate matchup, you manage to have a very good fight and end up losing because your opponent's fight is simply easier.

You can argue that there is a certain subjectivity in what is easy or difficult, after all, there are many variables. Every season the nodes change, some champions receive slight improvements in attributes from one season to another. And I agree. But there is something that is not subjective: Data.

What I believe to be the healthiest thing for Battlegrounds would be a difficulty coefficient that affects the final score of the fights.

For example: Imagine two exactly identical Captain Britania, 7 star rank 4 in defense. In this scenario, there are no nodes, nothing that benefits or interferes with the fight. The first player will fight with Jack O'Lantern, the second with Yondu. In this scenario, it's clear who has the advantage. Unless something disastrous happens, it's almost impossible for the Jack O'Lantern player to lose this round.
This coefficient would recognize which fight is more difficult, and this would be SLIGHTLY taken into consideration at the end of the fight.

But how to do this? There's a question of skill, and there are cases where the difficulty is extremely subjective.

Well, I would run several consecutive seasons of Battlegrounds without any nodes. I would use them to collect as much data as possible.
In these seasons, I would increase the deck size to 40, to have a larger sample of different fights.
I would put in good rewards to encourage people to play, maybe a realm event.

Of course, with so many people playing, there will be many cheaters, and they can slightly affect the collected data. Therefore, it would be necessary to somehow automate or create a filter, perhaps collecting data from accounts or players without a history of punishments.

Benefits:

I believe this could make Battlegrounds more challenging and diverse. Perhaps people will start putting themselves in adverse fights and be motivated to play even when the picks are terrible.

It would also be very good for content creation. We would stop seeing the same fights repeated over and over in live streams.

It would allow space for you to use your favorite champion, even if they are not meta.

I can see some problems that could arise with this, but honestly, none of them would be as absurd as what we saw this season. It's something that would take time, need to be calibrated, and would make it difficult to add additional nodes to Battlegrounds, but I believe that even if it's not exactly the way I envisioned, I definitely believe that Battlegrounds needs a shift in that direction, one that favors diversity and skill instead of counterpicks.

Comments

NARWH4L

So players with a better deck and/or draft should get put at a disadvantage? What if you're both Jack v Britain with one being R3 and the other R4? Does the R3 then also get a boost to even the playing field? This would take a lot of strategy out of deck building and drafting.

Vanitelia

Interesting idea, but I don't think someone should be at a disadvantage for selecting the right counter to a defensive placement.

Maybe the concept of BG's needs to change. It can still be PvP but with a PvE element. 3 defenders are chosen at random. Players would then draft their attackers. Scoring system stays the same and may the best player win. Sort of like the old battlerealm brawl qualification fights we had back in the day.

They could also do a coliseum-type BG where it's the person who gets the most bars. Basically, draw elements we have in the game already and have players go head to head.

There's a lot of things they can do to spice up competitive game modes for sure.

Ayden_noah1

It sounds like you want an arena style BG. Vanilla fights of equal attacker and defender. How are you going to fix the AI, unless the AI behaves the exact same, there will still be advantage and disadavantage. This makes ranking up champs useles and will require zero strategy. How boring are you trying to make BG.

Squidopus

I know that you’ve acknowledged a bit that this would be a difficult undertaking and more than a bit arbitrary at the end of the day, but nevertheless I somehow think you are severely underestimating how true both of those things are.

How are you getting the data for lesser-used or niche champions? Getting lots of data is important for accurate analysis, and there’s no way you’re getting the same quality data for Red Goblin as opposed to Hulkling.

How do you factor in nodes? That changes the expected outcomes of matches a ton. Tigra vs. Galan is extremely easy so I’d expect that to award no points in such a system, but that would not remotely be true in a meta with Force of Will. There’s thousands of cases like these, and there’s no way you’re constructing a system to adequately handle them all.

Are you factoring champion ranks? Sig levels? Maybe even Stat Focuses? That’s gonna add a lot of granularity, and it can matter a lot. Sig ability certainly does at least, you’d be a lot more comfortable taking a non-Poison Immune into Nico is she wasn’t awakened.

I’m not gonna call you an idiot for proposing such a mechanism, but I am gonna say you are maybe a little too naive if you’re earnestly proposing this with ideas that this is a reasonably possible system to implement in a fair and precise manner.