Is This Considered Battlegrounds "Cheating" or Not?

So I've been playing battlegrounds since it came out and reached the Silver 2 bracket yesterday, but since then I haven't won a single match due to people using squads of half 1 Star Champs and half 6 Star r3 champs (Keep in mind I am still Uncollected and have only played people with squads as powerful as my own or a bit better prior). I don't know if what these people are doing is considered cheating, due to their profile saying they are Thronebreaker or Paragon and the fact that they are competing against Uncollected and Cavalier players. After finding this info I just wanted to ask the community on what their thoughts on this were.

Comments

Smeagz23

I’m paragon and currently have 6 r4s and 51 r3s and am in a map8 p1/masters alliance and i’m only currently in silver 2 so consider yourself lucky. Why is matchmaking based off anything but your battle grounds ranking? All the people i match against have greater or equal rosters to mine. The way it is now you’re going to have proven players ranked higher than paragon because they’re only matching other proven players. I have way more skill and have a way better roster but i’m going to rank worse? Did you guys seriously think anything through about this battle grounds ranking and rewards system?

Thiartc

I have one R4 6* and my last 6 matches was all against paragons with 4 or more R4’s. How is that fair?

tusharNair

It's not "cheating," but it's not sportsmanlike behaviour, and we will be making some changes to fix it. We don't know exactly how at this time or how quickly we can move on it, but we do plan to address it.

Funny, using the word "not sportsmanlike" while literally you can spend money and move ahead. People saying its unfair, well whole game is unfair, lolzzz. I dont like this exploit and its good , its getting fixed but saying its unfair is hypocritical.

Magrailothos

It's not "cheating," but it's not sportsmanlike behaviour...

... we will be making some changes to fix it. We don't know exactly how at this time or how quickly we can move on it, but we do plan to address it.

😉👍

13579rebel_

It's a cheap move

K00shMaan

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...

Immediate maybe was the wrong word. I meant something short term that could be implemented instantly. a Long Term solution would be more complex but a Star restriction is likely something that could be implemented almost instantaneously.

Georad

I have one R4 6* and my last 6 matches was all against paragons with 4 or more R4’s. How is that fair?

If you want to play in first ligue don't be surprised to match with the best players.

I think that uncollected/cavalier should be separated from thronebreaker/paragon. Or even make four divisions.

Moosetiptronic

It's not "cheating," but it's not sportsmanlike behaviour...

... we will be making some changes to fix it. We don't know exactly how at this time or how quickly we can move on it, but we do plan to address it.

😉👍

New found surge of bromance for you mags; in my view, one of the greatest films!!

"You mean, you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try and kill each other like civilised people?

......

It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest!"

Magrailothos

It's not "cheating," but it's not sportsmanlike behaviour...

... we will be making some changes to fix it. We don't know exactly how at this time or how quickly we can move on it, but we do plan to address it.

😉👍

New found surge of bromance for you mags; in my view, one of the greatest films!!

"You mean, you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try and kill each other like civilised people?

......

It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest!"

World Eater

A little update for you, Summoners!

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.

Is this in effect ? Since this announcement yesterday , my last 2 matches were vs paragon players with sandbagging rosters, including one right now. In silver II.

Ayden_noah1

I’m paragon and currently have 6 r4s and 51 r3s and am in a map8 p1/masters alliance and i’m only currently in silver 2 so consider yourself lucky. Why is matchmaking based off anything but your battle grounds ranking? All the people i match against have greater or equal rosters to mine. The way it is now you’re going to have proven players ranked higher than paragon because they’re only matching other proven players. I have way more skill and have a way better roster but i’m going to rank worse? Did you guys seriously think anything through about this battle grounds ranking and rewards system?

I agreed that the BG rankings should be implemented based on how many wins you have and what rank you are in the tier list. I don't want uncollected or proven players only playing against each other since this will create an issue with the ranking system where they can move up the leader board without facing the top players. If you want the same reward as the top players that rank up their 6 star champs then you have to play in the same league. It's like saying a single A baseball team just play another single A team and can get the same rewards without playing in the big leagues which makes no sense. My account is not stacked and I don't want to face the stacked Paragon team but if I want the top tier rewards I expected to face the top teams. IAs some people have said, AW was like that before, match making was based on your prestige so lower rank teams were only facing lower prestige teams but getting top tier rewards having but never having faced against the top teams. That makes no sense so I'm glad they change that. The current match up system is flawed so I hope they go back to the beta version were you faced against players that have the same rank. Winning used to matter but now it's doesn't which makes no sense.

SirGamesBond

A little update for you, Summoners!

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.
Is this in effect ? Since this announcement yesterday , my last 2 matches were vs paragon players with sandbagging rosters, including one right now. In silver II.

Sandbagging is not working like before.
If you are in same bracket you'll get matched.
Those who are sandbagging are just hurting themselves.

Matchmaking has been changed a bit.
You would have got same match even if the opponent was not sandbagging.

Morghaxor

A little update for you, Summoners!

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.
Is this in effect ? Since this announcement yesterday , my last 2 matches were vs paragon players with sandbagging rosters, including one right now. In silver II.
Sandbagging is not working like before.
If you are in same bracket you'll get matched.
Those who are sandbagging are just hurting themselves.

Matchmaking has been changed a bit.
You would have got same match even if the opponent was not sandbagging.

I don't think this is true. The sandbagger would be matched with a more equivalent roster had no sandbagging be in place...

SuelGames

I dont get how this helps, I got matched with a guy that was forced to fight with 2* cause of this lol

Since i banned his top champs, his options were pretty limited with those weakass 2* lol

TheBair123

I dont get how this helps, I got matched with a guy that was forced to fight with 2* cause of this lol

Since i banned his top champs, his options were pretty limited with those weakass 2* lol

i think what most people are doing is only putting 5 or so 2*s in their deck, so it essentially eliminates the risk that they would have to be forced to use a 2*

SirGamesBond

A little update for you, Summoners!

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.
Is this in effect ? Since this announcement yesterday , my last 2 matches were vs paragon players with sandbagging rosters, including one right now. In silver II.
Sandbagging is not working like before.
If you are in same bracket you'll get matched.
Those who are sandbagging are just hurting themselves.

Matchmaking has been changed a bit.
You would have got same match even if the opponent was not sandbagging.
I don't think this is true. The sandbagger would be matched with a more equivalent roster had no sandbagging be in place...

I have been matched with many players still sand bagging and I have full r3 deck.

Sandbaggers were present in all tiers, so they are matching with their respective tiers.

EldenLordSalsa

Yeah I’ve came across people that use half 1* and 2* that were tb and higher, it’s kinda demotivating when it happens

NerdNerdNerd1

is it breaking ToS? no

is it cheating colloquially? absolutely, scummy behavior to take advantage of it, just as bad as shelling in war

NerdNerdNerd1

was extremely satisfying to completely and utterly humiliate the two sandbaggers i matched though, thats always nice

Ironman3000

Pretty [neato] how everyone in Silver II is all Paragon with loaded rosters too!!!! Def no other players have made it to the highest level such as Silver II. Awesome game Kabam!!!!

DNA3000

@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?

Kang/Thanos teams actually exist for a different reason. Because the arena looks at the teams we use and then "borrows" them to throw against other players, what happens if the arenas are reset and you happen to be the very first person to enter the arena? There aren't any opponents for you to fight at all, because the arena doesn't find an opponent and pick a random set of champions for you to fight, it picks arena teams that other people uses. So it is possible for the arena to be in a state where there are no opponents for you to fight yet. Kang/Thanos teams are in there to ensure that there are always *something* in there to fight against. If you're literally the first person to start an arena match after the arenas are reset, you can sometimes see Kang teams at any streak level. But as this doesn't happen often, this isn't something most people have seen.

Why they show up after the arenas are primed with opponents is a somewhat more complicated. and mostly uninteresting implementation detail. The short answer is, if I recall correctly, it is a bit of harmless mistake in the match assignment code as the streak ramps up. This technical error causes the arena match system to believe it needs to resort to Kang teams when it doesn't really need to.

As to how the devs could not have realized their streak system would essentially cause infinite streak, the honest answer is that it was obvious to everyone what was happening once the details were carefully examined, but those details are buried deep in the technical implementation of the game. They are not something the average player can see without extremely in-depth testing, and not even something the content developers can see when they are working on the game, unless they dig under the hood. So it would not occur to anyone this was happening because the details that would make this obvious were obscured. And the last line of defense for fixing a bug like this is when the players report it. But the players never reported this as a bug, because why would they? Eventually the behavior lasted long enough that players didn't even refer to it as if it was an anomaly, but a feature of the arena. *Some* of us new either some or all of this due to testing, but no one knew enough to both realize what the precise behavior was and realize this could not possibly be deliberate (or if anyone did put these two together, they didn't think it was worth reporting).

If the devs don't know and the players don't care, that's the kind of bug that can persist for years.

DNA3000

A little update for you, Summoners!

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.

The specific issue was that they were using both prestige and rating to find a match. Another player explained the gist of the problem significantly better than I could at the time (as their explanation convinced me the problem was far more serious than I had first assumed). I'm going to use my version of their explanation which I think is simpler, but captures the same important idea. Imagine you split up all the alliances into groups, separated by prestige. If we always look for war matches between alliances with the closest prestige and closest war rating, then in effect all the alliances that have approximately the same prestige are in effect in their own little war island. They are only matching against each other, because the game will not want to match them against anyone else outside that little slice of the world. *Within* that island, higher rating alliances fight each other, and lower rating alliances fight each other, but the highest rated alliances on that island only have to fight the other highest rated alliances on that island. No matter how many times you win, and no matter how high your rating goes, the game will keep trying to find matches on that tiny island. You never have to face stronger alliances that might have the same rating as you, but just have higher prestige.

Which means, in effect, the strongest alliance on that island could end up reaching tier 1 without ever having to face the majority of, or perhaps even *any* other tier 1 alliances. They can just keep beating up the other alliances on that island. Which did happen. What's more, alliance prestige can be manipulated. You might not want to directly manipulate your own personal prestige, but you could add lower prestige accounts to your alliance to deliberately lower your prestige artificially. You don't need high prestige to have, say, a super strong defense. A war focused alliance could afford a few ringers.

The mathematical description of what was going on was striation. The playerbase was being separated into layers of different prestige, without a lot of mixing between layers. So alliances didn't have to beat comparable strength alliances, because they never had to face them.

Ironman3000

7 matches in Silver 2 tonight. Every single one of them is over 15300 prestige and 5 over 15700. This is just pathetic Kabam.

DNA3000

is it breaking ToS? no

is it cheating colloquially? absolutely, scummy behavior to take advantage of it, just as bad as shelling in war

There are two TOS clauses that Kabam could apply here:

Further, you agree not to (this list is not exhaustive and may be updated from time to time):

...

* Use features of the Services for anything other than their intended purpose, including exploiting glitches for personal gain;

* Intentionally interfere with the operation or fair play of any Services including Services available through any third party platform, or any other user’s enjoyment of such Services;

I'm not specifically advocating for them to do so, but just saying the TOS does technically cover these kinds of situations if Kabam chose to apply it. It is arguably a grey area, but guess who has the sole discretion to interpret the TOS.

Beewee

Also why do boosts work in battlegrounds. They’re not supposed to.

xNig

Matchmaking with anything except BG ratings is ridiculous.

Worknprogress

Matchmaking with anything except BG ratings is ridiculous.

Pretty much this. I do agree that there should be some initial separation of the progression tiers at the start of seasons though. I think it's pointless to start Paragon players so low down the ladder and if would alleviate a lot of the very large early mismatches for lower tier players with much smaller rosters.

Valmez

Also why do boosts work in battlegrounds. They’re not supposed to.

Came here to say the same thing. Am noticing them get used and have seen screenshots of them affected champ PI in battle. Please act on this Kabam.

Worknprogress

Also why do boosts work in battlegrounds. They’re not supposed to.
Came here to say the same thing. Am noticing them get used and have seen screenshots of them affected champ PI in battle. Please act on this Kabam.

They are aware and looking into it according to Zero when he was in Lefty's stream yesterday.

unknown

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