An immediate fix would be to just restrict the content to 5* and 6*. No one who is a Paragon, Thronebreaker, Cavalier is going into this content with 4*s. An Uncollected might but we're looking for a quick fix here before a better one. Obviously that still leaves room for sandbagging but it does help mitigate the impact it would have on Deck Rating.
So you fix is leaving UC and lower out?.. wel solution could be quicker if they only allow Paragon and TB too...
They have commented that it wasn't an intended aspect, and they even explored options to make it not essential, but we were so used to it that we asked for it back, and they reverted.
They reverted? They changed the AI so that it would no longer go through the all or nothing phase, which removed the need to sandbag. When was the infinite streak ever removed such that reverting would be necessary? Pretty sure that never happened.
They brought back the Infinite.
When was it gone? I've never played an arena in which I didn't get an infinite streak other than when my account was too small to do it, which was the beginning of 2016. Evidence?
When they unified the arenas, i believe it started on Shang Chi arena, they took out the easy fights and people wanted to torch kabam headquarters... So upset about losing streaks it was actually quite funny
They have commented that it wasn't an intended aspect, and they even explored options to make it not essential, but we were so used to it that we asked for it back, and they reverted.
They reverted? They changed the AI so that it would no longer go through the all or nothing phase, which removed the need to sandbag. When was the infinite streak ever removed such that reverting would be necessary? Pretty sure that never happened.
They brought back the Infinite.
When was it gone? I've never played an arena in which I didn't get an infinite streak other than when my account was too small to do it, which was the beginning of 2016. Evidence?
When they unified the arenas, i believe it started on Shang Chi arena, they took out the easy fights and people wanted to torch kabam headquarters... So upset about losing streaks it was actually quite funny
Thanks. @GroundedWisdom I guess I'm wrong. Not sure how I missed this lol.
While this tactic, as discussed here, exists in a bit of a grey area in terms of taking advantage of the system, it does seem like something the game team has under a microscope. It wouldn't surprise me if we see changes in the near future to the way matchmaking weighs different elements.
While this tactic, as discussed here, exists in a bit of a grey area in terms of taking advantage of the system, it does seem like something the game team has under a microscope. It wouldn't surprise me if we see changes in the near future to the way matchmaking weighs different elements.
The root cause of this is simply the confused way in which BG has been implemented. If this were, as initially implied, a PvP mode where players compete for high rank, the solution would be simple: throw everyone into a ranked system like AW and let them fight it out. There'll be terrible mismatches for 3 days and then everything will be fine. Or do like the beta and have those with stronger rosters start at a higher rank.
Instead, we have this ridiculous Victory Track where everyone starts in the same tier, but is not matched with each other. The result is that a player with a 3 star roster has the same opportunity to make it the Gladiator Circuit to fight for rankings and more rewards as a player with a 6 star roster.
To make matters worse, rewards are given for winning 5 matches every 2 days, so of course there's a large group of players who want to win easy matches for rewards.
Forget tinkering at the edges or introducing more rules, the BG ranking system needs an overhaul.
Mind as well test some other scoring/matchmaking ideas on this season. Its not stable, it's the mess that it is. At least take the opportunity to use it as a beta before commiting the mass changes for the next season
It's pretty much what people have been doing in arena for years.
The difference being that in arenas you are only beating a computer ai with no negative effects to another player. In BG’s doing this beats and discourages an actual person.
Sandbagging is sandbagging whether it's a real component to the game mode or not. The infinite streak is not an intentional part of arenas. You're sandbagging your arena matches to get easier matches to score higher in the rankings, which is against real people.
Arena is meant to get harder as you go along which is why you get the "death matches" the long your streak is. People sandbag to get around those matches. There isn't any rule against this in arena and there isn't any rule against adding 2*'s to you deck in BG's. People found a way to get easier matchups in BG's and there's nothing in the rules that says it can't be done.
I am not in any way condoning what people are doing in BG's but lets not pretend there hasn't been 1000's of posts in the forums asking how to achieve the infinite streak in arena. So until Kabam can figure out a way to remove that element from BG's, any they very much should, it's not cheating and it's not against the rules.
This is nonsense. If the infinite streak were not part of the area, why is Kang/Thanos team only through fight 14, after which you get manageable fights forever? And equating the two is even more absurd. It is not "unsportsmanlike" to sandbag an arena fight. You can play area however you want. Sandbagging a few fights to get to 15 is nothing like sandbagging matchmaking so that you can continually destroy weaker players. People competing for top spots in arena were not being displaced by sandbagging. Most arena players are only going for milestones anyway. Your argument is just wrong on so many levels. The only point of analogy is the idea of sandbagging itself.
If the infinite streak was a intended part of arena, it would have been announced and Miike has said in the past that it wasn't part of it. He said it when 6*'s began creeping into arena more and more, causing the threshold needed to keep the infinite streak going by maintaining the proper PI.
That doesn't negate the main point, but regardless, I just don't buy it. Why do Kang/Thanos teams stop after fight 14 in every arena, exactly at fight 14, and why do matches stop getting progressively harder at fight 15 whether or not you fought Kang/Thanos? The specifics of how infinite streaks used to be done back in the all or nothing AI days from fights 9-14 may not have been intended, specific PI thresholds, etc., but clearly the option to eventually get easier matches indefinitely is built into the arena design.
Actually, this is *not* explicitly built into the arena. It is a strange consequence of two different arena properties that combine in an unexpected way. First, the more rounds you win, the harder the match criteria gets. In other words, the arena wants to find matches that are twice as strong as you, then three times stronger, then four times stronger. However, there's a problem. What if there is no such match? You would think the arena would just find the hardest possible match, but it is not that simple, because the match system itself is a complicated beast. It is doing things to track how other players play, because it uses other players' arena teams against you (that's why you sometimes see sandbag teams - the game isn't programmed to make them, it is observing other players using them and copies them to throw at you). So when the game asks the match system for a match that is four times stronger than you, the match system might just say "there's no such thing." What happens then?
The game reverts to a failsafe. It tells the match maker "okay, just give me a roughly even match, surely there must be one of those." And that's where infinite streak is born. If you do enough rounds, eventually you break the matcher: the game can't find a team strong enough to meet the difficulty requirements. And this is also how infinite streak fails. If you use a team that is too low, the matcher suddenly wakes up and say "hey, I can find a 4x difficulty team for that weak arena team" and you suddenly get a death match. That's what a death match is. It is when you use a team that is so low, the match maker can now find a team that is as difficult as it should be.
And this is why when new ranks enter the game, infinite streak "changes." Nothing changes about the arena. What happens is players start using stronger arena teams. The arena match system sees these and can now use them. Which means the lowest team that is safe to use also gets higher, because now there are teams that are high enough to match against some of those previously safe teams. The arena mode itself has no idea any of this is happening. It is just watching what we use, and using those teams to throw against other players. As we get stronger, the teams we use get stronger, and the teams we have to use to avoid pulling a death match also get stronger (higher).
This was all very carefully analyzed back when the new arenas came out, and questions resurfaced about precisely how the arenas work.
Incidentally, match 15 is important because it is where the difficulty scaler levels off. But the stretch from 15 to 20 is sometimes considered a grey area that is not perfectly safe, because of another quirk of the arena system: it uses the unawakened PI of champions without masteries for the purposes of matching. In other words, the teams you think are stronger and weaker are not necessarily stronger and weaker according to the match maker. So there is a brief window when you might think you are safe, but the next team you use is much lower than you think it is relative to the previous one and you drop below death match level unexpectedly. Because this is affected by who you rank and who you sig up, different people see slightly different behaviors around match 15. That's why there is some disagreement on what the precise safe match is, and for that matter what the lowest safe team is. We're looking at awakened PI with masteries. The arena isn't, and so there's a slight difference from player to play over what the lowest safe team is.
Now, why is this completely different from deck manipulation in BG? Because sangbagging in the arena is not entirely avoidable. Yes, using two strong and one dirt low champ in an arena team is an obvious tactic, but in the general case the idea of combining stronger and weaker champs in an arena team to try to keep streak alive is not something the game can really prevent, or want to prevent. Furthermore, there's the extra mitigating factor that sandbagging in the arena has no direct consequences for any other player. We aren't causing the opponent to lose in the arena with sandbagging: its just the computer. But in BG, deck manipulation is not a generalization of a naturally reasonable strategy: there is no reason to load your deck with ineffective champions. So that behavior is more focused on exploitive behavior. Furthermore, unlike in the arena, the direct consequences of sandbagging are that it causes another player to lose under bad circumstances. The effects of this behavior harm other players directly. It is the combination of these two factors - the behavior cannot be rationalized in any way other than anticompetitive, and it directly harms other players - makes deck manipulation completely different from arena sandbagging.
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
This doesn't work. You either have (for example) 4* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate only, or you have "uncapped" 6* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate.
If you have a subset of matching based on roster strength, then we'll end up with wars all over again; a 4k prestige account will eventually get into the top 100 or even top 10, without having to fight any of the top 50,000 accounts by prestige.
They have commented that it wasn't an intended aspect, and they even explored options to make it not essential, but we were so used to it that we asked for it back, and they reverted.
To clarify, the developers were not trying to remove infinite streak. They were exploring ways to eliminate death matches. They tried to do this by looking at death matches, which were generally 4x higher than the player, and saying well, if that's too high, let's just set the max difficulty lower, like say 2x. Now it will be impossible to get a death match.
The unintended side effect was that infinite streak became almost impossible to maintain. Because infinite streak is really the arena match system being broken because it cannot find a suitable match, when the maximum difficulty was lowered to 2x, the match system now *could* find suitable matches for much higher player teams. So instead of players seeing easy, easy, easy, medium, medium, medium, whoops broken, easy, easy, easy, easy... when the match maker broke, which we all called "infinite streak" players were now seeing easy, easy, easy, 1.5x, 1.7x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x ... forever, because now the match maker was happily sending us 2x fights forever, because it could find 2x where before it couldn't find 4x. So now instead of infinite streak plus death match, we now actually had 2x fights forever (this is a bit oversimplified here for discussion purposes).
In other words, death matches and infinite streak were actually two sides of the same coin. Infinite streak was what we got when we used a team strong enough that the game couldn't find an appropriate match. A death match was what we got when we used a team low enough that the game could find an appropriate match. And ironically, the worse that death matches are, the easier it is to reach infinite streak. So the weaker the devs made death matches, the harder it was to maintain an infinite streak.
Players don't want death matches, but they really didn't like having to face 2x opponents indefinitely in the arena. So this was reverted.
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
This doesn't work. You either have (for example) 4* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate only, or you have "uncapped" 6* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate.
If you have a subset of matching based on roster strength, then we'll end up with wars all over again; a 4k prestige account will eventually get into the top 100 or even top 10, without having to fight any of the top 50,000 accounts by prestige.
That's not sustainable.
i think i'm not understanding your analogy completely. when you say "we'll end up with wars all over again," what is that trying to reference. if an alliance wants to get higher and higher in the aw ranks, they have to win matchups against other alliances who have a similar war rating. that doesn't take alliance prestige or anything like into account to my knowledge. someone with a small account simply wouldn't be able to build up to higher ranks in battlegrounds simply because they would eventually reach the point where they're facing stacked rosters that they have no chance of regardless of skill levels.
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
A simple solution would be make it like it was in the beta and put the bulk of the rewards in placement and not in participating. Then there won’t be an incentive to sandbag or tank rating and we’ll get skill based matchmaking
i do agree with that. i think in a game where it's called "competitive," you should get a lot more rewards for winning than you do right now. if everyone with the best skill was at the top of the rankings, that's perfect. but there are always going to be people who play way more matches or spend their money on victory shields or what have you
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
Not in Bronze and Silver.
i think the majority of very skilled players i would expect to not be in bronze and silver for too long. even if you expect to face lower skilled players in bronze and silver, what happens when you go to gold and higher? if you can't defeat players of a similar skill level, you won't progress very well in the game mode
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
This doesn't work. You either have (for example) 4* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate only, or you have "uncapped" 6* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate.
If you have a subset of matching based on roster strength, then we'll end up with wars all over again; a 4k prestige account will eventually get into the top 100 or even top 10, without having to fight any of the top 50,000 accounts by prestige.
That's not sustainable.
i think i'm not understanding your analogy completely. when you say "we'll end up with wars all over again," what is that trying to reference. if an alliance wants to get higher and higher in the aw ranks, they have to win matchups against other alliances who have a similar war rating. that doesn't take alliance prestige or anything like into account to my knowledge. someone with a small account simply wouldn't be able to build up to higher ranks in battlegrounds simply because they would eventually reach the point where they're facing stacked rosters that they have no chance of regardless of skill levels.
Not if Kabam only matches people vs others with similar rosters.
@DNA3000 that makes sense, and I do remember the 2x thing now, but I never understood the way the streak/death matches were created. Interesting. So essentially the system throws out Kang/Thanos when it can't find a hard enough match but only up through fight 14? If that's the case, surely the devs must have realized that if Kang/Thanos teams existed for that reason, then anyone who could get to the Kang/Thanos fights would eventually be able to maintain an infinite streak. What other outcome could there have been?
They have commented that it wasn't an intended aspect, and they even explored options to make it not essential, but we were so used to it that we asked for it back, and they reverted.
They reverted? They changed the AI so that it would no longer go through the all or nothing phase, which removed the need to sandbag. When was the infinite streak ever removed such that reverting would be necessary? Pretty sure that never happened.
They brought back the Infinite.
When was it gone? I've never played an arena in which I didn't get an infinite streak other than when my account was too small to do it, which was the beginning of 2016. Evidence?
When they unified the arenas, i believe it started on Shang Chi arena, they took out the easy fights and people wanted to torch kabam headquarters... So upset about losing streaks it was actually quite funny
Thanks. @GroundedWisdom I guess I'm wrong. Not sure how I missed this lol.
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
do you have any sort of numbers or specific information about it? would love to have some insight into what exactly the system that was/is now put in place is
Wouldn't that just be doing the "questionnable" Players' work for them?
nope, it wouldn't. the issue was with the fact that the matchmaking system was flawed, not the fact that players knew what the system was. if we knew what the system was, feedback would be able to be given and changes would be able to made without having this conundrum and having 3 days of people being able to exploit it.
As a player in an AQ focused top alliance if the matchmaking will only match against other top players such as top war players. There will be no ability to move up as such why play, this is dead on delivery game mode. This plus the sure amount of grinding is turning off players.
if you're at the top of the game, do you not expect to be playing against other top players?
I get what he’s saying he enjoys playing casually and has huge pi so he’s automatically matched with accounts as big as his, but are maybe all way above skill level wise because this isn’t skill based matchmaking
If you have a big account and less skill than others with similar accounts, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that "there will be no ability to move up." If you want to move up, you have to win matches against players who have similar rosters as you, it's simple as that
This doesn't work. You either have (for example) 4* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate only, or you have "uncapped" 6* battlegrounds matched on skill/win rate.
If you have a subset of matching based on roster strength, then we'll end up with wars all over again; a 4k prestige account will eventually get into the top 100 or even top 10, without having to fight any of the top 50,000 accounts by prestige.
That's not sustainable.
i think i'm not understanding your analogy completely. when you say "we'll end up with wars all over again," what is that trying to reference. if an alliance wants to get higher and higher in the aw ranks, they have to win matchups against other alliances who have a similar war rating. that doesn't take alliance prestige or anything like into account to my knowledge. someone with a small account simply wouldn't be able to build up to higher ranks in battlegrounds simply because they would eventually reach the point where they're facing stacked rosters that they have no chance of regardless of skill levels.
There was a time when Kabam did take prestige into account for AW matches in order to prevent people from using shell alliances to manipulate war rating. The result was that you could be in Gold 3 and if your alliance had high prestige you would be stuck there trying to move up while playing Plat/Master groups constantly. Conversely, you could be a skilled lower alliance and get to Plat/Master by only facing other lower alliances. It was a disaster. If they did something similar in Battle Grounds you'd get the same result. Skilled players playing alt accounts would rise very high playing less skilled players with similar accounts, and it would be very hard to move up if you have a stacked account and aren't already ranked in the upper tiers.
They have commented that it wasn't an intended aspect, and they even explored options to make it not essential, but we were so used to it that we asked for it back, and they reverted.
To clarify, the developers were not trying to remove infinite streak. They were exploring ways to eliminate death matches. They tried to do this by looking at death matches, which were generally 4x higher than the player, and saying well, if that's too high, let's just set the max difficulty lower, like say 2x. Now it will be impossible to get a death match.
The unintended side effect was that infinite streak became almost impossible to maintain. Because infinite streak is really the arena match system being broken because it cannot find a suitable match, when the maximum difficulty was lowered to 2x, the match system now *could* find suitable matches for much higher player teams. So instead of players seeing easy, easy, easy, medium, medium, medium, whoops broken, easy, easy, easy, easy... when the match maker broke, which we all called "infinite streak" players were now seeing easy, easy, easy, 1.5x, 1.7x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x ... forever, because now the match maker was happily sending us 2x fights forever, because it could find 2x where before it couldn't find 4x. So now instead of infinite streak plus death match, we now actually had 2x fights forever (this is a bit oversimplified here for discussion purposes).
In other words, death matches and infinite streak were actually two sides of the same coin. Infinite streak was what we got when we used a team strong enough that the game couldn't find an appropriate match. A death match was what we got when we used a team low enough that the game could find an appropriate match. And ironically, the worse that death matches are, the easier it is to reach infinite streak. So the weaker the devs made death matches, the harder it was to maintain an infinite streak.
Players don't want death matches, but they really didn't like having to face 2x opponents indefinitely in the arena. So this was reverted.
Thank you for the clarification. My memory is a bit skewed because I remember the Infinite being an issue for me. I remember making the point that long Grinds are particularly dependent on a moderate level of difficulty.
@TheBair123 until a few seasons ago, they matched wars on alliance prestige, not war rating. So you had a bunch of 11k+ prestige alliances stuck in silver 2 only facing 11k+ prestige alliances no matter how many they lost and a number of 6k prestige alliances in master, because they were only facing other 6k alliances.
They did not face a single "top" alliance, or alliance over 6/7k prestige for many seasons in a row.
This was stopped because the people actually paying to support the game, with huge accounts, were being squeezed out.
The same will happen in battlegrounds if they continue this.
The matchmaking should be Random within the tier you are in. Why even use PI, prestige or any other kind of way to "fix" a fair match. Once you climb the tiers the matching will be more fair and rank will be decided by both skill and roster. As mention a couple of times in the thread. The system right now give an advantage to uncollected/cavalier players to get rewards that would otherwise require a lot of work, skill and luck to obtain. The matchmaking system is destorying the game.
Wouldn't a system where only your top champions count toward your rank work?
So if you bring in a 6*, only your 6 and 5*s count, but not your 4-1*s.
If you bring in a 5* as your highest, only your 5 and 4*s count but not any below that.
That way, you wouldn't really be able to tank your own score beyond maybe bringing in some slightly lower-level champions, which I don't think is unsportsmanlike as such.
I can't remember ever using more than two * levels of champions so I don't think it should exclude anyone. If you're mainly using 4 and 5*s but have a single 6*, you might want to exclude that one anyway in order to not inflate your rank needlessly.
@Ercarret as soon as they do this, at the very top, you'll have some whales create accounts designed to exploit the matchmaking, so that they can squeeze out competitors.
Let's say you'll pay what ever the cost is to try and get top 10. A way to help achieve that, is to use an alt account that has an easier ride to the top; maybe 10k prestige, but some nightmare defenders and attackers. Where with your superior game knowledge, you know you can roflstomp anyone else in the 10k prestige bracket and therefore climb all the way to the top 100 or top 10 even, without ever having to play a 12k+ let alone 15k+ account.
You'll never play against that account with your main, but you will prevent some try hards outside the top 30 from breaking into the elite.
Your 10k account will get bumper rewards, that you won't use, but you'll prevent someone else from catching you in the prestige race.
And think this won't happen? Whale alt accounts made the top 20 in gifting to their mains. If people were willing to do that, they'd game matchmaking on battlegrounds.
In short, a game mode that matches on prestige only and not battleground rating, will be gamed.
And tanking off season is easy to stop as well, so that's not an excuse. The only reason for prestige matching, is to milk the player base of cash.
To clear something up: I wasn't talking about Prestige in any way.
What I meant was a system where you can only bring in champions of two different star ratings. If you bring in 6*s as your highest champions, you can bring in 5*s as well but can't bring in, let's say, 2*s to artificially lower your rating.
If you have mainly 5*s, you can supplement your deck with either 4 or 6*s but not both and certrainly not 1*s.
Maybe this wouldn't work for whatever reason. I have no experience designing these systems, so it's possible that it's a bad idea. But I just wanted to clarify.
It's not a bad idea. I'd assume that the meta game would move to people fielding all 3* champs, if you only matched against people with 3* champs, for example.
I know I would. I have every champion at 3* pretty much, most max sig and could build a deck to compete against anyone.
If I could climb the rankings using just that, I would and simply avoid ever having to fight in the over 14k prestige bracket.
But again, you'd have the whales creating alt 3* accounts to do the same, just to squeeze people out at the top, where their mains would now sit, almost unchallenged.
The is no reason why the algorithm should weigh roster strength in any major way or at all. Folks say putting some 2 stars on your roster is cheating but why should accounts with vastly lesser investment and strength be able to be in the same rank as those with super accounts? If you do not want them to fight battles that heavily favor the stronger account then do not base matchups on roster strength at all, wait a bit of time until accounts migrate to their correct placement based on a combo of account strength and skill at which point you won't fight that superior account anymore. You can throw in some events where the match ups are equalized (all players will be reverted to max rank for their champs regardless of actual ranking) for fun and side rewards to players who do not have the firepower but have the skill. Just some thoughts.
Everyone started equal. That's not great / previously we had paragon get off to a "head start" and TB a bit less of a "head start", so it made UC/Cav work hard to "catch up to them".
Depending on your point of view... both options have pros/cons... and both options, eventually things will "normalize". Hopefully next month Kabam will fix this. The question is... would a Cav want to have to win 10 or 20 matches to "catch up", but have them against "peers"... or get matched against people they will eventually get matched with anyways. If the "head start is given"... and TB/Paragons start in say Silver/Gold... then they should get the rewards the "skip over", and not "waste their time" grinding the bronze ranks.
That said... I admit I tried it after seeing others do it to not get messed over by not doing it. I put in 4 x 2 stars for a few matches. Twice on my "pick 1 of 3", 2 of my champs to pick from were 2 stars, and there is certainly a chance of all 3 to have been... so there was risk associated with it. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing more than 4 due to the risk, and my opponents' PI weren't "that much lower" than mine for their top champs... it was actually champs 12-25 that I noticed a difference.
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Instead, we have this ridiculous Victory Track where everyone starts in the same tier, but is not matched with each other. The result is that a player with a 3 star roster has the same opportunity to make it the Gladiator Circuit to fight for rankings and more rewards as a player with a 6 star roster.
To make matters worse, rewards are given for winning 5 matches every 2 days, so of course there's a large group of players who want to win easy matches for rewards.
Forget tinkering at the edges or introducing more rules, the BG ranking system needs an overhaul.
The game reverts to a failsafe. It tells the match maker "okay, just give me a roughly even match, surely there must be one of those." And that's where infinite streak is born. If you do enough rounds, eventually you break the matcher: the game can't find a team strong enough to meet the difficulty requirements. And this is also how infinite streak fails. If you use a team that is too low, the matcher suddenly wakes up and say "hey, I can find a 4x difficulty team for that weak arena team" and you suddenly get a death match. That's what a death match is. It is when you use a team that is so low, the match maker can now find a team that is as difficult as it should be.
And this is why when new ranks enter the game, infinite streak "changes." Nothing changes about the arena. What happens is players start using stronger arena teams. The arena match system sees these and can now use them. Which means the lowest team that is safe to use also gets higher, because now there are teams that are high enough to match against some of those previously safe teams. The arena mode itself has no idea any of this is happening. It is just watching what we use, and using those teams to throw against other players. As we get stronger, the teams we use get stronger, and the teams we have to use to avoid pulling a death match also get stronger (higher).
This was all very carefully analyzed back when the new arenas came out, and questions resurfaced about precisely how the arenas work.
Incidentally, match 15 is important because it is where the difficulty scaler levels off. But the stretch from 15 to 20 is sometimes considered a grey area that is not perfectly safe, because of another quirk of the arena system: it uses the unawakened PI of champions without masteries for the purposes of matching. In other words, the teams you think are stronger and weaker are not necessarily stronger and weaker according to the match maker. So there is a brief window when you might think you are safe, but the next team you use is much lower than you think it is relative to the previous one and you drop below death match level unexpectedly. Because this is affected by who you rank and who you sig up, different people see slightly different behaviors around match 15. That's why there is some disagreement on what the precise safe match is, and for that matter what the lowest safe team is. We're looking at awakened PI with masteries. The arena isn't, and so there's a slight difference from player to play over what the lowest safe team is.
Now, why is this completely different from deck manipulation in BG? Because sangbagging in the arena is not entirely avoidable. Yes, using two strong and one dirt low champ in an arena team is an obvious tactic, but in the general case the idea of combining stronger and weaker champs in an arena team to try to keep streak alive is not something the game can really prevent, or want to prevent. Furthermore, there's the extra mitigating factor that sandbagging in the arena has no direct consequences for any other player. We aren't causing the opponent to lose in the arena with sandbagging: its just the computer. But in BG, deck manipulation is not a generalization of a naturally reasonable strategy: there is no reason to load your deck with ineffective champions. So that behavior is more focused on exploitive behavior. Furthermore, unlike in the arena, the direct consequences of sandbagging are that it causes another player to lose under bad circumstances. The effects of this behavior harm other players directly. It is the combination of these two factors - the behavior cannot be rationalized in any way other than anticompetitive, and it directly harms other players - makes deck manipulation completely different from arena sandbagging.
If you have a subset of matching based on roster strength, then we'll end up with wars all over again; a 4k prestige account will eventually get into the top 100 or even top 10, without having to fight any of the top 50,000 accounts by prestige.
That's not sustainable.
The unintended side effect was that infinite streak became almost impossible to maintain. Because infinite streak is really the arena match system being broken because it cannot find a suitable match, when the maximum difficulty was lowered to 2x, the match system now *could* find suitable matches for much higher player teams. So instead of players seeing easy, easy, easy, medium, medium, medium, whoops broken, easy, easy, easy, easy... when the match maker broke, which we all called "infinite streak" players were now seeing easy, easy, easy, 1.5x, 1.7x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x, 2.0x ... forever, because now the match maker was happily sending us 2x fights forever, because it could find 2x where before it couldn't find 4x. So now instead of infinite streak plus death match, we now actually had 2x fights forever (this is a bit oversimplified here for discussion purposes).
In other words, death matches and infinite streak were actually two sides of the same coin. Infinite streak was what we got when we used a team strong enough that the game couldn't find an appropriate match. A death match was what we got when we used a team low enough that the game could find an appropriate match. And ironically, the worse that death matches are, the easier it is to reach infinite streak. So the weaker the devs made death matches, the harder it was to maintain an infinite streak.
Players don't want death matches, but they really didn't like having to face 2x opponents indefinitely in the arena. So this was reverted.
@TheBair123 until a few seasons ago, they matched wars on alliance prestige, not war rating. So you had a bunch of 11k+ prestige alliances stuck in silver 2 only facing 11k+ prestige alliances no matter how many they lost and a number of 6k prestige alliances in master, because they were only facing other 6k alliances.
They did not face a single "top" alliance, or alliance over 6/7k prestige for many seasons in a row.
This was stopped because the people actually paying to support the game, with huge accounts, were being squeezed out.
The same will happen in battlegrounds if they continue this.
So if you bring in a 6*, only your 6 and 5*s count, but not your 4-1*s.
If you bring in a 5* as your highest, only your 5 and 4*s count but not any below that.
That way, you wouldn't really be able to tank your own score beyond maybe bringing in some slightly lower-level champions, which I don't think is unsportsmanlike as such.
I can't remember ever using more than two * levels of champions so I don't think it should exclude anyone. If you're mainly using 4 and 5*s but have a single 6*, you might want to exclude that one anyway in order to not inflate your rank needlessly.
Let's say you'll pay what ever the cost is to try and get top 10. A way to help achieve that, is to use an alt account that has an easier ride to the top; maybe 10k prestige, but some nightmare defenders and attackers. Where with your superior game knowledge, you know you can roflstomp anyone else in the 10k prestige bracket and therefore climb all the way to the top 100 or top 10 even, without ever having to play a 12k+ let alone 15k+ account.
You'll never play against that account with your main, but you will prevent some try hards outside the top 30 from breaking into the elite.
Your 10k account will get bumper rewards, that you won't use, but you'll prevent someone else from catching you in the prestige race.
And think this won't happen? Whale alt accounts made the top 20 in gifting to their mains. If people were willing to do that, they'd game matchmaking on battlegrounds.
In short, a game mode that matches on prestige only and not battleground rating, will be gamed.
And tanking off season is easy to stop as well, so that's not an excuse. The only reason for prestige matching, is to milk the player base of cash.
What I meant was a system where you can only bring in champions of two different star ratings. If you bring in 6*s as your highest champions, you can bring in 5*s as well but can't bring in, let's say, 2*s to artificially lower your rating.
If you have mainly 5*s, you can supplement your deck with either 4 or 6*s but not both and certrainly not 1*s.
Maybe this wouldn't work for whatever reason. I have no experience designing these systems, so it's possible that it's a bad idea. But I just wanted to clarify.
I know I would. I have every champion at 3* pretty much, most max sig and could build a deck to compete against anyone.
If I could climb the rankings using just that, I would and simply avoid ever having to fight in the over 14k prestige bracket.
But again, you'd have the whales creating alt 3* accounts to do the same, just to squeeze people out at the top, where their mains would now sit, almost unchallenged.
Depending on your point of view... both options have pros/cons... and both options, eventually things will "normalize". Hopefully next month Kabam will fix this. The question is... would a Cav want to have to win 10 or 20 matches to "catch up", but have them against "peers"... or get matched against people they will eventually get matched with anyways. If the "head start is given"... and TB/Paragons start in say Silver/Gold... then they should get the rewards the "skip over", and not "waste their time" grinding the bronze ranks.
That said... I admit I tried it after seeing others do it to not get messed over by not doing it. I put in 4 x 2 stars for a few matches. Twice on my "pick 1 of 3", 2 of my champs to pick from were 2 stars, and there is certainly a chance of all 3 to have been... so there was risk associated with it. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing more than 4 due to the risk, and my opponents' PI weren't "that much lower" than mine for their top champs... it was actually champs 12-25 that I noticed a difference.