Coming Soon! A Sneak Peek at Battlegrounds, the new Solo Competitive Game Mode!

Greetings Summoners!

It’s time to give you all an introduction to the highly anticipated 1v1 Solo Competitive mode coming to The Contest this spring, Battlegrounds!

Carina is on a mission to find the most worthy Summoners in all of The Battlerealm! She has enlisted the help of Ægon and The Champion to run a competition where you and your Champions will compete for the honour of being crowned the best Summoner in The Contest!

Get more early information over on the MCoC Blog!

Comments

AverageDesi

Really "love" that the content creators are already gambling on the game mode in the Beta Servers. I'm sure that's not going to go badly down the road if they allow you to challenge "friends".

Who's gambling?

AverageDesi

So we are still fighting an ai? Not the actual person?
Yes, it will still be the AI.
When will they let us actually battle 1v1 with a live person? That would be so rad!
It would not be rad because of parry. Would just be both players waiting for the other to make a move

Or using quake lol.

Napoleon_zamble

What will be rewards for each round? Some 6 star shards and a profile pic each time!😖

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Wakandas_Finest

My critical view and concerns about that solo mode

Your idea of defender ban will quickly grow over in attacker ban

Because team oicking is rng based u basically have very high chance land in situation where u start 0-1 no matter what u do and thats all because of the rng

If u want to avoid 0-1 for nothing have done wrong u have to pay and reroll picks

Even if u remove reroll completely there is still high chance people start 0-1 for nothing have done wrong at all

I have seen matchuo lagacy vs brian

Torch vs imiw and mysterio vs imiw
There is no way mysterio can beat torch and it is an example of 0-1 fight right from the start no matter ehat one does

To avoid that flawed design people will start banning good attackers instead so nobody can cheese and then baning defenders will loose any sense and it growes over into attacker banning and will reflect the aw scenario

-reduce rng factor in solo mode
-introduce ranking system where it becomes no arena 2.0 where whiever doesnt sleep for a month at all gets rank higher then whoever does less but quality matches
-remove reroll completely
-i hope boosters dont affect solo

I saw the lags v BG and the mysterio vs imiw was more a result of bad deck building than bad RNG. Any experienced player knows all of the tough defenders and should plan accordingly with multiple counters in their deck or ban the defender if you don’t have a counter. It’s called strategy. Banning attackers is a viable strategy if you don’t have good defenders. But whether you ban attackers or defenders it still comes down to your skill more than anything

Death_Wa1ch

Kabam just released a new mastery booster pack in game offer for $$ so what’s the point of this when we haven’t had new mastery’s come into the game for like 4 years now these offers are for beginners not end game players that sit and wait year and year and year for upcoming new mastery’s to come to the contest. Why does kabam (knowing it’s a long drawn out money game and a good one at that-Kuddos to you Kabam for that the game is addicting) make everyone wait for the simplest things to play the game

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KrazyKilroy

When it comes to the community at large, will it be on an invite basis to choose an opponent like incursions? or everything at random? I like the option for both. I would like to be able to test myself against certain people and their champs...

Crys23

1. Separate mastery setup for this game mode
2. Remove energy cost. Champ cooldown is fine and enough. And keep it the same for 5* and 6*, say 7hours.
3. Increase fight timer by 30 seconds, or even a minute, nodes dependent.
4. Increase selection timers by 5-10 seconds.
5. Offer 1 free re-roll. Fine if next one costs units
6. Get the scoring right. Players stalling and not caring about fight duration in favor of willpower healing is not right. At the same time, getting full points for HP remaining when you didnt win the fight is not right.
7. Make the rewards worthwhile.
8. Get better servers that can handle the increased load

Eb0ny-O-M4w

The game mode, as was shown in the beta, has some couple of problems that NEED to be fixed/removed before the official release.

- The whole issue with masteries swap. This will just be a burden to whoever is not willing to pay their way in the game mode. We don't need this to be P2W.
- Remove entry cost. Rather, make it a system similar to incursions, where you only need to play X ammount of times per week/month (don't make it daily). It's fine to play as much as you want, but past the limit will not count points towards the rewards milestones.
- Remove unit usage for recharges, re-rolls or whatever. Again, we don't need to make this P2W.
- Adjust the timers to select(choose champions.
- If you make unique rewards to this mode, don't sell them in the future.

ZEDMAN33

The energy cost needs to go asap. I like the cool-down on the champs though with the units. I watched alot of matches and it became repetitive and boring to watch after awhile using the same champs, voids, HT, Ibom, KP etc.
Having the cool-downs challenges the summoners roster and skills. But that energy cost is just crazy .

Fit_Fun9329

Shouldn’t this be a dialogue between kabam (mods) and us (community)? This is a straight against the wall talk? An open dialogue would be great in context of transparency

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xNig

So much interesting feedback when the game mode hasn’t even been launched yet.

The_Sentry06

It feels like an illusion of a solo mode
It looks more like a p2w and it will fail if u dont make it more solo spirited competition were people can actually impact the outcome with their knowledge and skill

There is some level of rng but you can still impact the situation with your skills and knowledge.

McCloud33

I've watched several of the content creators streams on this now and as well as their critiques of the mode and I'd like to add a few thoughts of my own.

1. As I think everyone has said, the energy cost for this mode needs to be changed. It either needs it's own energy, or just no energy cost at all to enter. If it's own energy, you should be able to play at least 5-10 matches in a row without needing to pay to refresh.

2. Timers within the mode need to be extended, both in selecting champs as well as the fight timer. Not by a lot, but 50-100% longer than current.

3. One thing I don't think I've seen anyone mention is having different brackets based on star level. Depending on your progression, you might be able to have a full deck of ranked up 6*, but someone who has only been playing a month or even a year, won't. And what if I as an endgame player just like the fact that I have every 3* in the game so I can build a better deck than I can with my 6*. This would just need to have different rewards for each level, but seems like it would provide the best experience for everyone.

4. Champ refreshes - I actually like the fact that you can only use a champ a certain number of times before you need to swap them out. The caveat here is that you shouldn't just be able to pay to refresh them. Make is so that you HAVE to play with other champs if you want to keep playing. Everyone ranks up and plays with roughly the same champs. I want a game mode that not only rewards us for the depth of our roster, but helps people learn how to play all of the different champs.

5. Which leads me to my last point, scoring and leaderboard. I understand and agree with the rating system where you gain points for winning and drop points for losing, this helps match people of roughly equal skill level. The leaderboard, however, should reflect total points scored in a match and you should never lose season points for playing a match. Much like alliance war, as long as you keep competing, you'll keep adding to your score, even if you would earn more points from winning. This will result in a leaderboard that both shows not only who has the highest win percentage, but who plays the game mode a lot as well. As it's structured now, if you have a really high rating, you have very little incentive to keep playing as you might lose and drop rating. It also kind of forces you to only use your top champions.

Death_Wa1ch

The story so far meaning the game with so many broken promises, so many bugs, continual weak compensation for parry mastery and other parts of the game broken, no new mastery’s to be released after half a decade since the last one released. No new end game content just in store offers to compensate the time, resources to rank 3 a 6 star comes solely and mainly for the big spenders because proving grounds and arena will never get updates to earn more catalyst to rank 3 a 6 star for free to play players, big spender currently have over 50 at rank 3 for 6 star when free to play may only have 1 or 3. Weak new champions released and champion buffs are horrible lately especially the idea of giving gamers a buff for the 3rd time when the original iron man and original Dr strange need buffs for upcoming new movies being released to prove otherwise.

Hoitado

There is always a catch to these type of things with Kabam

DNA3000

3. One thing I don't think I've seen anyone mention is having different brackets based on star level. Depending on your progression, you might be able to have a full deck of ranked up 6*, but someone who has only been playing a month or even a year, won't. And what if I as an endgame player just like the fact that I have every 3* in the game so I can build a better deck than I can with my 6*. This would just need to have different rewards for each level, but seems like it would provide the best experience for everyone.

I don't think this is a good idea. Although this might seem like it emphasizes skill more, it actually eliminates skill from competition in a very important way. Imagine the set of all players with strong 4* rosters. I'll bet the highest skill player in that group could probably beat the worst player who has a large 5* roster in a head to head match. But if they are segregated, then that strong player with the 4* roster has no way to compete against those lower skill 5* roster players. They'd be stuck in the 4* bracket limited to the 4* bracket rewards until they built up a large enough 5* roster to compete in that bracket. Their skill would be neutralized, because no amount of skill would allow them to move up.

I don't think the idea of setting bracket by deck rather than roster works either, because if you decide, as an endgame player, to make a deck of nothing but 3* champs looking for competition against other players using 3* decks, the rewards in that bracket would have to be scaled to the players who *only* have 3* rosters, not end gamers that just happen to be using 3* champs. No one is going to want to do that, and even if some do, they'd be facing more weaker players with 3* decks than end gamers with 3* decks just by random chance, and destroying them constantly in competition.

The last possibility, segregate players by *both* progression *and* deck composition almost certainly doesn't work because there's not enough players to dice them up that thinly. If the match system has to look for matches among all end game players that happen to be using 4* decks, its going to start taking too long to find a match.

This has shades of the arguments against the match system in alliance war. The complaint is that alliances are matched against "stronger" alliances. But if you segregate alliances by rating or prestige, then lower alliances who only match against lower alliances no matter how often they win cannot get the highest AW season rewards. They would instead have to fight in a lower bracket that has lower rewards. Most of those alliances complaining about matching against higher rated alliances would probably have easier fights in a segregated system but also get significantly lower rewards than they do now. They wouldn't be allowed to fight lower competition but still be in the running for the same rewards in the same reward structure. Being exposed to *everyone* is what allows them to have any shot at all at those rewards.

TL;DR: Asking for segregated competition is asking for the highest skilled players to receive lower rewards than they would otherwise,, unless they happen to also have the strongest rosters (and use them).

K00shMaan

5. Which leads me to my last point, scoring and leaderboard. I understand and agree with the rating system where you gain points for winning and drop points for losing, this helps match people of roughly equal skill level. The leaderboard, however, should reflect total points scored in a match and you should never lose season points for playing a match. Much like alliance war, as long as you keep competing, you'll keep adding to your score, even if you would earn more points from winning. This will result in a leaderboard that both shows not only who has the highest win percentage, but who plays the game mode a lot as well. As it's structured now, if you have a really high rating, you have very little incentive to keep playing as you might lose and drop rating. It also kind of forces you to only use your top champions.

Almost every game that has an online 1v1 type mode uses this system. You have to be able to consistently win more than you lose at whatever tier in order to move up the leaderboard. It is not a deterrent at all really. The actual amount of points that you get for winning and losing can probably be a little less severe, but in fairness, When Lagacy was ranked #1 in the world (whatever that really means in a Beta lol) he still only needed to win 3 out of 4 games to have a net positive towards his rating. That doesn't sound unreasonable at all to me. For most of us, I'm sure if we are winning more than 50% of our matches, we will be seeing positive gains to our rating which is exactly how it will work.
I don't necessarily see an issue with some getting the same amount of positive progress towards their rating for winning 15 out of 20 matches as someone who wins 30 out 50. It's an opportunity for people who may have a slightly weaker skill set or roster to achieve the same level of success through perseverance. For comparison, that is exactly how Arena works so the precedent already exists within this game.

They also can have the option of only using rating for matchmaking and still have a separate scoring system for rewards - exactly like how War works. There also will obviously be an option upon final release to have unranked matches which will not affect your rating. We basically know this because they were referred to as "ranked matches" instead of just matches.
**Edit: also just read a post from Kabam Miike that confirmed a friendly mode will exist at some point down the road.

DNA3000

5. Which leads me to my last point, scoring and leaderboard. I understand and agree with the rating system where you gain points for winning and drop points for losing, this helps match people of roughly equal skill level. The leaderboard, however, should reflect total points scored in a match and you should never lose season points for playing a match. Much like alliance war, as long as you keep competing, you'll keep adding to your score, even if you would earn more points from winning. This will result in a leaderboard that both shows not only who has the highest win percentage, but who plays the game mode a lot as well. As it's structured now, if you have a really high rating, you have very little incentive to keep playing as you might lose and drop rating. It also kind of forces you to only use your top champions.

My understanding is that there will be a way to prevent someone from jumping to a high rating and then just sitting out parked there to win high ranking rewards. Probably some sort of ratings decay over time thing that forces people to match at some minimum rate.

Separate from that, a points system would be problematic, because unlike with alliance war everyone isn't doing the same number of fights. If you win by scoring points, win or lose, someone could just spend their way to the top by spending on recharges over and over, win or lose. The points system in alliance war seasons works in large part because everyone is limited to the same twelve wars (or less). In AWS, points represent both quality of the wars and victory. You cannot do more wars than everyone else to earn more points.

You could limit the number of battleground matches to make a points system work, but then the limit would have to be low enough, because all legitimate competitors would have to fight them all. You miss a few, or even one, and you could knock yourself out of the running. This is much easier to do with alliance war, because wars are two day events. Battleground matches are ten minute affairs, and hard caps on the number of matches to make points-based scoring work would probably straitjacket the mode. Right now the biggest complaint about the mode is probably the quest energy cost, which applies an extremely strong limit on the number of matches someone can practically participate in. A low hard cap would probably not go over very well. A high hard cap would probably also not go over very well.

K00shMaan

To piggyback off the above about ratings decay, if they have any kind of long term reward payout (a season, etc.) it is very simple to either completely reset the ratings after each season if they use that for score or even have a weighted reset so that the people who had more points would still start the next season with more points but would obviously still have to participate the next season or settle for much worse rewards.

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xNig

I think its very simple and im pretty sure someone above me has probably said this
i propose creating a new bar of energy, one specifically for the battlegrounds
Like we have for aq, aw and questing, we should have a 4th one for battleground which will refill in x-amount of time and also wont hinder our questing
Besides that the game mode actually looks very very fun, its the first time that i do not care for the rewards at all and actually look forward to the mode
Idc if they give like 5 gold for winning, it seems very fun with correct strategy, roster plays and appropriate bans
Really a test to our overall skill

Yes it looks fun but at the end of the day, if the rewards aren’t substantial enough, it’ll be hard for the game mode to pick up steam (just look at incursions).

DNA3000

To piggyback off the above about ratings decay, if they have any kind of long term reward payout (a season, etc.) it is very simple to either completely reset the ratings after each season if they use that for score or even have a weighted reset so that the people who had more points would still start the next season with more points but would obviously still have to participate the next season or settle for much worse rewards.

The first option is not a practical option. We can't reset ratings because those are used for matching. If everyone gets reset to zero, then we'd have two problems. First, the strongest players will be getting matched against the weakest, because they'd all be zero, so the weakest players would get killed constantly. And second, a mediocre player could win all their matches and equal the rating of the strongest player in the game who also wins all their matches. There might not be enough matches in the reward period to distinguish them.

So a full ratings reset simultaneously hurts the weakest players by handing them overwhelmingly overpowered opponents, and the strongest players by making it impossible for them to distinguish themselves from the rest of the moderate competition.

DNA3000

I think its very simple and im pretty sure someone above me has probably said this
i propose creating a new bar of energy, one specifically for the battlegrounds
Like we have for aq, aw and questing, we should have a 4th one for battleground which will refill in x-amount of time and also wont hinder our questing
Besides that the game mode actually looks very very fun, its the first time that i do not care for the rewards at all and actually look forward to the mode
Idc if they give like 5 gold for winning, it seems very fun with correct strategy, roster plays and appropriate bans
Really a test to our overall skill
Yes it looks fun but at the end of the day, if the rewards aren’t substantial enough, it’ll be hard for the game mode to pick up steam (just look at incursions).

I think Battlegrounds has one extremely powerful advantage over Incursions. While it is somewhat more complex in terms of deck building, bans, and drafts, it is also an extremely casual friendly game mode in the sense that it is brief. You're in and out in ten minutes. Incursions can last an hour or more. With battlegrounds, even if you have no idea what you are doing, you aren't committing a lot of time. Losing because you're just bewildered is not a big deal if you're done that fast.

And being a competitive mode has another curious advantage for casual players. Incursions is a cooperative mode. If you don't know what you're doing, you're screwing with your partner. You can't disguise the fact that you don't know what you're doing because you have to coordinate with them. If you mess up, you hurt them. This can be a barrier to casual players trying out the mode. They don't want to embarrass themselves in front of their friends, they don't want to expose themselves to the problems of pairing with randoms. But with battlegrounds, there's no problem. It is a competition, so no one cares if you're a noob. If you don't know what you're doing, you just lose. No big deal. No one is going to complain if you're slow. No one is going to complain if you suck. No one is going to complain if you just give up and quit. You aren't hurting anyone if you are an easy mark. So why not jump in and give it a try? All you can do is lose, and no one will be unhappy if you hand them some easy wins.

I went something like two and thirteen against some of the strongest players in the game, and I had a blast doing it, and I received no rewards for any of it. I'm not saying everyone is going to flood a game mode with mediocre rewards and spend all their time at it, but I do think Battlegrounds has *a chance* to succeed much more strongly than Incursions did, because I believe Battlegrounds will be more widely appealing to the casual hit and run player. *IF* the developers address the cost issues and *IF* the developers put in a reasonable reward system (it doesn't have to be fantastic, just reasonable), then I think BGs have a lot of potential to attract a wider player participation chunk than Dungeons/Incursions did, and for that matter become competitive with other game modes such as alliance quest, alliance war, and arena.

Guytennis

Kabam just released a new mastery booster pack in game offer for $$ so what’s the point of this when we haven’t had new mastery’s come into the game for like 4 years now these offers are for beginners not end game players that sit and wait year and year and year for upcoming new mastery’s to come to the contest. Why does kabam (knowing it’s a long drawn out money game and a good one at that-Kuddos to you Kabam for that the game is addicting) make everyone wait for the simplest things to play the game

Haven’t you heard, powerful new masteries are coming shortly.

MaxGaming

So will this be online 1v1 or just a bot?

Death_Wa1ch

Kabam is just so unbelievably stubborn that it just seems
they are refuse to fix or even admit any mistakes starting
with the single worst idea they've ever had and yes I'm
talking about the rebalencing/nerf our champions idea

DNA3000

So will this be online 1v1 or just a bot?

Both. You are competing in real time against another player in terms of matching, bans, and pulls. And you fight simultaneously. However, you will still be fighting your opponent's defender controlled by the game's AI and vice versa. This is always going to be the case. No matter what it looks like, you're always going to be fighting an AI controlled opponent, because the game software is not designed to account for attacker/defender lag. The champion you fight must basically live inside your phone at all times.