Battlegrounds: Three changes I would make

At the moment, I love the Battlegrounds game mode. I think it has the potential to be the best addition to the game since - since I don't know when. Opinions vary of course, and not everyone likes the mode, but in my opinion it is engaging, it is casual friendly, it is accessible, and it is open to high levels of competition. But it isn't perfect, and while again, opinions vary, here's three changes I would make to the game mode that I think would improve it: one quality of life change, one resource management change, and one competitive change.

First, the easy one. Everyone wants different timers. Some people think the timers are too long. Some people think the timers are too short. The devs are trying to find the sweet spot there, and of course everyone won't be entirely happy no matter what they are. But one change would make this dramatically better in general: Proceed buttons. On almost every screen where there is an extended timer, it is there to allow players to see or do optional things. For example the fights themselves have a ten second timer to give players enough time to use prefights if they want to. The end of fight screen has more time to allow players to catch their breath and actually look at the scoreboard. That's fine: many people want or need that time. But what if they don't? If there was a button on the screen that said "Ready" or "Continue" we could allow both sides to hit that button and continue the match. Most fights don't' use prefights, but everyone has to wait anyway. Most players don't require ten whole seconds to review the scoreboard, but everyone has to wait anyway. Allow both sides to hit a button to proceed, give the button an obvious name, and let players move on.

This doesn't just speed up the matches for those that want a faster pace. It also allows the devs to be more forgiving with the timers for players that want a slower pace. They can give us generous timers, and still let two fast players keep moving.

Second, slightly more complex one that most people won't argue with, but there's more to. Entrance costs need to be lower. The game mode is an engaging mode for those that like it. Having to pay large entrance costs is not only limiting, it is contrary to most of the game. Most of the game has low or free entrance costs, and higher costs to enhance the experience above the baseline. Battlegrounds currently has a very large (relatively) quest energy costs, which is not only intrinsically high, it has an opportunity cost associated with it. You could be using that energy to get other rewards in other places of the game. For people with a lot of energy to burn this cost is just annoying, but for players who have already worked out their energy budgets and are constrained, this will add an extra additional constraint on already limited quest energy.

But we can't just make energy costs arbitrarily lower, because we don't know how the rewards will work: we haven't been shown that yet. That's where the second, more complex part of this suggestion kicks in. The reward system has to accommodate a wide engagement range of players. The costs have to be low so players can play it to a higher engagement level if they wish, but the rewards cannot be such that playing twice as much generates twice as much rewards. A model to consider is the arena, where there is a baseline level of rewards for grinding, but then there are also rank rewards for those who grind a lot. Analogously but NOT identically, Battlegrounds needs to have some baseline of rewards for those that wish to play it a lot, but it needs a separate reward system that is focused more on the competitive nature of the mode - and not the time spent in the mode.

Basically, if I do twice as many battleground matches as the next guy, I should get twice as much participation rewards. But there should be no amount of grinding that will allow me to overtake the best players in the game. If Lagacy wins 95 of 100 matches, it should be impossible for me to overtake him when it comes to competitive rewards by winning 96 of 1000 matches. I shouldn't even be able to overtake him winning 600 of 1000 matches. There are ways to structure rewards like that, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

This one is weird because it might seem like I'm suggesting a change to a part of Battlegrounds we haven't even seen yet. And I am. Given how the devs have been tinkering with and discussing entrance costs, I think this is actually prudent. I don't normally recommend people complain about things they haven't seen yet, but I'm going to break my own rule here because basic game design principles point to problems in this area, when you extrapolate how things look now. Take that for what it is worth.

Lastly, and possibly most controversially (and least likely to happen): scoring needs to change. Right now the system uses a combined points system that generates a winner based on a cumulative sum across attacker health, defender health (or defeat) and time spent in the fight. This creates lots of interesting opportunities to win by different methods, but in my opinion this comes at the cost of creating degenerate situations that are counter-intuitive to competition.

To be clear: we can make up any rules we want for a competition, depending on what we want to achieve. The people who like the current scoring system aren't wrong for liking it, anymore than I can prove the devs made a mistake with the current scoring system. But I believe that unlike, say, the actual Summoner Showdown competitive events where the *intent* is to create a whole new competition using the MCOC game as a platform to create it, Battlegrounds is a game mode that exists within the game and should be generally consistent with how the game works and how players understand it to work in general.

Combat in MCOC is all about defeating the defender. That's it. We don't have to tell the players that: that's a given in every game mode. And beyond that, the secondary goal is usually to do so with the most health remaining. In some game modes like arena this is not really a concern, but in many it is, because champions often need to be used for more than one fight. Preserving health is often a matter of preserving resources. The less health you lose, the less potions you need. And finally, there's time spent. All other things being equal, going faster is better than going slower, for the simple reason that most people would rather spend less time than more time on a fight - assuming they can win, and do so without spending a ton while doing it.

Battlegrounds isn't scored that way. You could defeat the defender and lose to an opponent who doesn't. You can defeat the defender and end at full health, and lose to someone who throws their health away but ends the fight faster. These are counterintuitive victory conditions relative to how the game generally works. In my opinion, Battlegrounds would be more intuitive and victories less controversial if the scoring was done with victory conditions, not synthetic scoring when possible. In other words:

1. If one player defeats the defender and the other player doesn't, the first player wins, period.
2. If both players defeat the defender, whichever one ends the fight with the most health remaining wins, period.
3. If both players defeat the defender and are tied on remaining health, then time spent in the fight is the tie breaker.
4. If both players fail to defeat the defender, then use the current point system to resolve the tie.

In my opinion, the best thing about Battlegrounds is that it can be appealing to a wide range of players. It can appeal to the highly competitive and it can appeal to the very casual. To preserve and enhance that wide appeal, the game mode needs to be quick paced but not too quick, it needs to have the smallest possible barriers to participation, and it needs to have the least amount of controversy over how winners and losers are selected. We need QoL improvements to keep the mode quick, easy, and simple. We need a cost system and reward structure that encourages participation and rewards competition And we want players to believe the best performance won, and leverage what most players already consider what best performance is throughout the rest of the game.

We also need to beat the cheaters to dust with the ban hammer, but I wasn't going to waste one of my three suggestions on something that obvious.

Comments

Total_Domin01

A question on your second point, the sort of thing you’re proposing is if you win a round, you get points (duh), but if you lose, you lose some? The only game I can of with scoring like this right now is clash Royale

Lezard2191

The point issue has a very simple solution, that already exists in game for AW. Beating your opponent gives you +30k points.

That way, if one players beat the opponent but the other one doesn't, the player who beat their opponent will automatically win since the max possible Hp combinations points (you stayed at 100% while reducing your opponent to 1%) would be 29k.

If both players didn't beat their opponent, result will be decided between damage done and Hp remaining. If both players beat their opponent, result will be decided between remaining Hp and duration of match.

TheBair123

We need QoL improvements to keep the mode quick, easy, and simple.

Quick, somebody get Kabam Zero on the phone ASAP.

In all seriousness, great suggestions. I like how this game mode had not only one but two betas for EVERYBODY. Even seeing the guys in the CCP do it was entertaining. I hope this can be the beginning of a full-scale competitive game mode that we can use to track skill and top players, since we all know how AW is doing

BitterSteel

1. If one player defeats the defender and the other player doesn't, the first player wins, period.
2. If both players defeat the defender, whichever one ends the fight with the most health remaining wins, period.
3. If both players defeat the defender and are tied on remaining health, then time spent in the fight is the tie breaker.
4. If both players fail to defeat the defender, then use the current point system to resolve the tie.

My issue with this system is that there could be a situation like this:

Player A: defeats opponent in 12 seconds, 99.8% health left

Player B: defeats opponent with one second to go, 99.9% health left.

In my view, player A has vastly outperformed player B. The difference in health is minuscule and the difference in time is really sizeable.

That’s the trouble with binary, hierarchical scoring systems. Not to mention that your third point of time taken if both health of attackers is the same will only be a factor in a hugely small number of fights, meaning that fight time barely comes into it. Unless both champions finish on 100% health, fight time will almost be irrelevant.

Now what I may be persuaded from my current view from, is a system that incorporated both the current one and your idea. Where we take your first point, “ If one player defeats the defender and the other player doesn't, the first player wins, period.” and then if both players defeat the opponent, or both players don’t defeat the opponent then we use a scoring system.

Having said that, I think that would also lead to a situation where:

Player C - gets taken down to 1hp, but just about scrapes through and beats the opponent

Player D - remains on 100% HP, and takes the opponent down to 1HP.

I personally think D has performed way better, but your system would award C the victory.

But say we ignore that and move with my promised hybrid system. That way, we can set the objective as “KO the opponent” instead of the current one as “score points”. But if both or neither players KO the enemy, then it falls back to a combination of time taken and health remaining.

I’m also happy for the ratio to be tweaked, I think time taken at the moment is a bit to influential, but I don’t think it should be a rarely used tie breaker.

DNA3000

A question on your second point, the sort of thing you’re proposing is if you win a round, you get points (duh), but if you lose, you lose some? The only game I can of with scoring like this right now is clash Royale

I'm not suggesting something specific, but there are many different potential possibilities, and perhaps many I haven't thought of yet. To give you an idea of how out-of-the-box we can get, lets consider Alliance wars. You cannot out-grind another alliance in alliance wars because for all practical purposes there are only twelve possible wars in a season and most genuine competitors play them all. Because of that, the winner is the alliance that scores the most points out of those twelve wars.

We could do the same thing with battlegrounds, but the problem is that while we more or less have to have these structured, "bulky" wars because they are teamed content and span whole days, we don't need to do that and kinda don't want to do that with Battlegrounds. if a battleground "season" was twelve matches in two months that would be silly. But if we make it something like a hundred matches in two weeks to match the pace of some of the higher activity players, then that would unbalance the competition towards extremely high activity players. It would get closer to arena grinding. What we want is something like alliance war where only a small number of matches counts, but players can theoretically do more than just a handful of matches to help their cause.

One way to do this is to score the player's top X matches during a season. Let's say your top twenty matches in a two week period count towards your score. The rest are thrown out. If there were multipliers for higher tiers like alliance war, players with the highest BG ratings would have a seasonal advantage just like top tier alliances have in alliance war seasons. Anyone that can do twenty BG matches in two weeks would be competitive. But someone that does more could theoretically try for higher scores to replace their lower ones. Doing more would have an advantage, but not an overwhelming advantage. You still have to achieve high rating, and you still have to beat people and score a lot of points in the process.

That's not the only way to do that, its just one way. There might be other creative ways to do this.

DNA3000

The point issue has a very simple solution, that already exists in game for AW. Beating your opponent gives you +30k points.

This would be one way to implement one of the victory conditions I proposed, although not all of them (in particular, not the second one). But in general, yes, there's always a way to implement conditionals with the appropriate point bonuses calculated to the right values.

DNA3000

1. If one player defeats the defender and the other player doesn't, the first player wins, period.
2. If both players defeat the defender, whichever one ends the fight with the most health remaining wins, period.
3. If both players defeat the defender and are tied on remaining health, then time spent in the fight is the tie breaker.
4. If both players fail to defeat the defender, then use the current point system to resolve the tie.

My issue with this system is that there could be a situation like this:

Player A: defeats opponent in 12 seconds, 99.8% health left

Player B: defeats opponent with one second to go, 99.9% health left.

In my view, player A has vastly outperformed player B. The difference in health is minuscule and the difference in time is really sizeable.

There will always be corner cases like this in any system, including the points one. There's no way to eliminate them in the general case, because what's really happening here is that the example is being chosen to make the actual difference in one of the scoring criteria small enough to be qualitatively zero, even though it is quantitatively non-zero. No scoring system can work around that, because for any specific person, values like that can always be chosen such that the scoring system says X wins, but X wins by a point margin that is quantitatively calculated to have one value, but the specific person qualitatively combines them to generate a different one.

To put it another way, this objection would be a point against my scoring system if there existed a scoring system that eliminated the problem. But no calculation formula that combines time remaining and health remaining would generate a consensus for all values. What I'm suggesting is that across all possible scoring possibilities, the scoring I propose generates reasonable results in the widest possible set of circumstances and its degenerate corner cases are more explainable than the synthetic scoring ones are. I don't claim that everyone would always agree with the scoring system's judgment. I do think that when such situations arise, they are easier to explain to the players.

For example, in your example I would explain the result as: player A clearly did a better job, but the game considers higher health remaining to be a better result even in cases where the difference is trivial, because we have to draw the line somewhere and we chose to draw it at "higher at all" because if we instead draw it at some value higher, we'd all be arguing about what that value was. We all agree that 99% health is better than 9% health, we all agree that 99% health is better than 50% health, we probably still all agree that 99% health is better than 75% health, and then we might start arguing if 99% health is better than 90% health, or 95% health, or 98% health, but there's no way to pick a good spot." It is just a grey area that has to be resolved, but at least people would understand why the grey area was being resolved in that way.

Right now, with the synthetic scoring, we have no simple way to explain to players why they lost. They lost because the math says they lost. But how many people can explain what the *point* of the system is, without resorting to stating the point is to optimize the math itself. That detachment from some simple conceptual victory goal is something I think is a weakness of the current scoring system, not a strength.

Lezard2191

I'll also take the opportunity of this thread to reiterate the importance of fixing the black screen bug. As a new player, it's already pretty frustrating trying to find a match that I actually have a fighting chance in, let alone win, only for the game to decide that I actually didn't defeat my opponent and that I died within 1 second with the opponent losing 0 health.

I've had it happen twice already and in both ocassions it was while tapping to skip the winning animation.

Nightkiller7314

tbh, the issue that need to fixed first and is the most important one, is not letting cheaters play and roam free there. you didnt point it at all. rest you mentioned are not very neccessary to apply/change. no for me

Ace2319

tbh, the issue that need to fixed first and is the most important one, is not letting cheaters play and roam free there. you didnt point it at all. rest you mentioned are not very neccessary to apply/change. no for me

It’s the last sentence

Thecurler

One change I’d like to see…

I’ve selected my champ bans and the timer runs out before locking them in… default to the selected champs rather than randomly selecting.

Noobda

@DNA3000 Man you must had be ruling those essay writing competitions as a kid.

K00shMaan

@DNA3000 Great post here. Just going to add my two cents

1st Point: Absolutely. Anything that makes the game mode go faster is fantastic. Especially if it doesn't force the game mode to go any faster. I've brought up this point. Many games have this feature. Getting the timers right is the priority but implementing this makes achieving that easier.

2nd Point: This one is hard to argue. I don't necessarily agree but also see where you're coming from. There are a ton of endgame players who are revive farming with 1,000s of energy every month. There is an opportunity to funnel that somewhere else which is exactly what Battlegrounds can be. That being said, there's also players who do none of that and really need all their energy elsewhere. This one will be difficult to balance. Maybe add an item that can be used as entry and have enough of these get handed out for free for people who are less interested in grinding the game mode and more just doing the standard amount of effort for the rewards. Maybe have a set of rewards that can be accessed by playing the mode Unranked and having that not cost Energy. Other rewards can require you to compete in Ranked which will cost Energy.

3rd Point: I disagree with your scoring suggestion but do agree that it needs tweaking. If Attacker Health Remaining is arbitrarily always more important than time, you cannot use Liquid Edge or Double Edge period. The game is better with different types of decks because it makes matchups more interesting. Even very solid champions like Kingpin, Hercules, etc. aren't able to finish a fight at 100% health reliably with a perfect fight. They might finish at 99.9% but the scoring system you suggested allows someone who clearly showed less mastery of the game to win by just having a character who can in fact finish with full health. Should some lose a fight because they parried successfully one time and the opponent just has a champ who can regen back to 100%? How about if they both parried once but the person who fought much slower happened to get a perfect block? What about if I used a robot so I can't benefit from the Salve Mastery? Is iHulk just not allowed to be an Attacker in this game mode? I think being able to tradeoff points from Attacker HP for Fight Duration is important to keep things interesting.

I think a better addition to the scoring system is if you timeout then you lose half of your health prior to your score being calculated. This is similar to a timeout in every other game mode. You still are encouraged to finish a fight with as much health as possible but not getting the KO actually has a relatively significant consequence. That way the maximum amount of points that you can get with a timeout is >37,500. There is still room for players to lose even when they get a KO and the other player doesn't but it requires a very polarizing display of performance. Below is a not quite perfect scoring situation where that happens.

Player A:
Attacker HP: 100%/2 (get's halved because of rule)
Defender HP: 5%
Duration: Timeout
Score: 7,500 + 28,500 + 0 = 36,000

Player B
Attacker HP: 5%
Defender HP: 0%
Duration: 90s out of 120s
Score: 750 + 30,000 + 3,750 = 34,500

Player A absolutely dominated their fight and it would be considered a tremendous success in any game mode where the time wasn't present or was longer than 2 minutes which is any other game mode in the game. Player B barely scraped by but did in fact get the kill and still took a significant amount of time in doing so. The scores are pretty close so a system like this leaves very little room for a situation where the only person getting a KO can actually lose.

Furthermore, if that's even still too polarizing, you can actually just make it so you get 0 Points for Attacker HP Remaining if you timeout which makes it impossible to lose if you get a KO and the other person doesn't. And more importantly this still doesn't require you to just arbitrarily make Attacker HP Remaining always more important that Fight Duration.

World Eater

Excellent post. I also like that DNA currently has a Rogue profile pic.

1. Love the idea of a proceed or continue option after a fight . I’d like to view mine and the enemy players champs while I’m waiting for the next round.

3. “ You could defeat the defender and lose to an opponent who doesn't.”

This is def something that needs to change IMHO. You win the fight and the enemy doesn’t , you should with that round.

unknown

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RicoShay

My solution to the energy issue is to make matchmake free or very cheap (maybe 5 energy) and to give players competitive mode based energy similar to duel credits/war energy that regenerates daily. You can either choose unranked for 5 questing energy/free or spend mode-energy/credits to play competitively and put your rank on the line. This will also make the mode far more favoured to skill rather than if you have enough units to get refills/recharge champs and reward you for playing the mode daily if you choose to be competitive. Of course, this implies that there should be a season in battlegrounds and ranked players should be ranked in accordance with their overall performance in the season rather than how many refills they were able to use to climb ranks. I also think if this system were to be implemented that champ energy should be removed because some lesser developed rosters can't just freely exchange another suitable option when their champs become depleted.

GoddessIlias

Honestly, I’m perfectly fine with the scoring system as is. It’s only at the lower levels where you’ll see scenarios where the player who takes down the fight loses while the other doesn’t imo. I’ve never had a super close round where I was like “oh I was cheated here stupid scoring”. What I would instead like is something for more of a twist in the draft. What I was thinking is that once per draft, a player could choose to reroll their opponents options during a selection. I think this throwing of the figurative wrench into the opponents draft game plan would be much more interesting than changing the scoring. Also the obvious point about removing modders. I have had a funny scenario where I faced a modder and won, attached below.

Ironman3000

Point 1 - Yes, making it as fast as possible is always better.
Point 2 - 15 energy isn't that big of an issue (~5 entries per energy refill) If you wanted to go to 10 and get 7 per refill I wouldn't complain.
Point 3 - Agreed that the scoring needs to change but don't agree with all your points. KOing the opponent getting 30K points like was suggested sounds like it would go a long way in fixing it.

I've been thinking about this and BGs could be really great for the game or it could be a huge disaster if done the wrong way. I played a fair amount of 7DS a few years ago when Seatin was streaming it but quit cause keeping up with two games was way too much time. Their PVP system was pretty good and I hope MCOC takes a lot from that game.

Some things from 7DS I'd like to see are:
- There are 4 sets of tiers that people play in (normal, Bronze, Silver and Gold) each with 5 divisions. This spreads out players and the rewards that they can get each week. To move up a bracket you need to win 2/3 of challenge matches and once you reach a certain bracket you can't drop any more (to prevent tanking). There is also an Elite tier above Gold for the top 100 players. (It actually looks like they've added 3 more tiers as the players' progress but it's the same basic idea)
- The rewards from their PVP are pretty important so participation is high. If the rewards don't match the time needed to compete, like Incursions, then no one will care. A mix of shards/units/cats and/or glory/loyalty/artifacts.
- They had their own energy system. You got 5 a day but could buy more. I'd use energy refills as the currency to buy more entries.

You can google their system for more info.