**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
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.