BG question to Paragons

I wanted to see how Paragons feel about current matchmaking in Bgs so figured I'd ask this question to all of you.

Quick background, I'm end game player, have 100% all content (spend a little but very far from a whale) and before the "git gud" comments flood in, be advised that I have hundreds of gameplay vids on my channel showing I'm fine on the "git gud" category.

Last few seasons, with minimal effort I was out of victory track and in gladiator circuit within first week of BG season. Ive finished decently high top 1000 players in GC each season (without much effort) of BG.

This season, I've put in similar amount of effort but am still in gold. I know with more effort that will change soon and will change as the season goes on, but I can't help but feel this seems a bit unfair based on recent matchmaking changes.

Im fairly positive I'm not the only paragon or high prestige player in this situation and can't help but get annoyed when I see far weaker players who would get slaughtered against me already in GC because the matchmaking system matches weak players against weak players while strong players have to try and win several in a row against end gamers and massive whales in every tier starting in bronze.

This is the only game mode that I'm aware of that actually rewards players for having weaker accounts, avoiding rankups and avoiding prestige. It really doesn't make sense to me. It makes less sense since Kabam tries to do a very similar thing in AW seasons a couple years ago and it was a massive failure and resulted in far weaker alliances getting same or better rewards than much stronger alliances.

We are all competing for same rewards in BG (yes, stores have different prices but we competing for exact same rewards, to include exact same amount of battleground tokens) so why is it setup this way.

I know the lower players have to love this so I'm sure plenty of troll comments coming, but I'm curious to see how others in similar situations feel.

Personally, I feel like it's counterproductive on Kabams end doing it this way.

Comments

Chatterofforums

BG is not the NFL. It's not an elite club. It's a game mode that includes a large number of Players.

Your the one who was using the NFL analogy and now that it was thrown back at you as your analogy well apart horribly, now your saying this isn't the NFL.

Lmao, if your going to blindly fight something, at least stay true to your own arguments that you introduced.

Ironman3000

BG is not the NFL. It's not an elite club. It's a game mode that includes a large number of Players.
Your the one who was using the NFL analogy and now that it was thrown back at you as your analogy well apart horribly, now your saying this isn't the NFL.

Lmao, if your going to blindly fight something, at least stay true to your own arguments that you introduced.

What's so wrong about only accepting analogies when you think that they prove your point and rejecting them when they prove that your point is garbage?

GroundedWisdom

BG is not the NFL. It's not an elite club. It's a game mode that includes a large number of Players.
Your the one who was using the NFL analogy and now that it was thrown back at you as your analogy well apart horribly, now your saying this isn't the NFL.

Lmao, if your going to blindly fight something, at least stay true to your own arguments that you introduced.

Someone used a sports reference, and I also explained why I don't care for them. In my example, I pointed out that the game is not a professional sport. It's important to read the whole comment when considering a rebuttal.

Chatterofforums

For the record, I have no desire to be facing these weaker players, what I want is fairness. Since we are all fighting for same rewards we should all have the same path to the rewards, if they want to avoid massive lopsided matches, I'm fine with that but be fair about it, and don't reward weaker players with easy path to getting same rewards as far stronger players. Simply do what sports do (using your analogy) and keep the different types of players in different leagues only going against themselves while going for lower rewards.
You've openly disagreed with me the whole time when this quote has been my stance the entire time. I just want a system that acknowledges the fact that my competition maybe more difficult to compete against than someone else, and when that is the case, I'm appropriately better rewarded even if my Wins and Losses suggest that I'm doing worse.

Your assuming I'm disagreeing with you but please show me when I have ever said I want to beat up on UC? I never have, if that's your assumption don't blame me for you having the wrong assumption.

What I've said for months now (even before most recent changes) is that if we are all fighting for same rewards then everyone in that bracket should be fair game. Ihoweber I've said numerous times that if they changed the bracket structure to where there were lower rewards for those facing lower accounts then that is perfectly fine with me, however , we know most lower players won't be okay with getting less rewards.

Pikok

2,5m rating here. Bg matchmaking is random and we have to believe that. It must be truth

. In my opinion bg should be allowed for everybody. And right now accounts under 2mil rating are not playing it. Kabam. Please do something with it. From this season accounts under 2mil are not even playing in bronze 3. I did not saw them once. Bg is a great content but right now only paragons enjoy it. Roght now strugling little bit vs those 3,5 mil accounts but that is ok because only those are playing it and matchmaking is random so…. Please remove such restrictions and allow also smaller account to play in bg

Denslo500

I didn't say the NFL allowed high school teams to play.
They do allow poorer teams to play richer teams.
If the poor teams have enough talent, they have a chance to compete for the Superbowl.

Being Paragon doesn't put us in a different league of talent, just different resources.

GroundedWisdom

There's more than different Resources. The game has built-in mechanics that inhibit your ability to inflict Damage, and increase Damage inflicted, the lower you go.

GroundedWisdom

That makes a huge difference in a piece of content that is timed, and the metrics include Health lost and Damage inflicted.

Chatterofforums

I didn't say the NFL allowed high school teams to play.
They do allow poorer teams to play richer teams.
If the poor teams have enough talent, they have a chance to compete for the Superbowl.

Being Paragon doesn't put us in a different league of talent, just different resources.

Your analogy is terrible and fyi, all NFL teams get same salary cap, so again your analogy makes absolutely no sense.

And again, all NFL teams only play NFL teams during the season. These weaker players are only playing other weaker players all victory track and then advancing to the "playoffs" (GC) without ever beating a strong player or team. I really don't think you watch football and should layoff the football analogies because yours are just bad.

unknown

This content has been removed.

Ironman3000

I didn't say the NFL allowed high school teams to play.
They do allow poorer teams to play richer teams.
If the poor teams have enough talent, they have a chance to compete for the Superbowl.

Being Paragon doesn't put us in a different league of talent, just different resources.

Wrong.

The difference between a top Paragon and a new UC or CAV is huge. Poor teams are still ma up of professional athletes and there is a salary cap so your "point" makes even less sense.

Pikok

It is super scary to do carina chalenges v3 and r5 6star. It is suicide if you care about bg

DNA3000

I think their system works, from a "developing talent" perspective and "growing a base" perspective.

another way to think of it:
Victory track is the regular season.
Gladiator circuit is the post-season.
Being #1 is winning the Super Bowl.

The NFL frequently allows "unworthy" teams into the post-season.
If you win your division, you can get in the post-season (even with a losing record).

The rationale for giving division leaders priority placement into the playoffs for the NFL is that American football as practiced by the NFL is a spectator sport. This isn't done to offer any significant "development advantage" to teams - the draft is designed to do that. But while a subpar team in a subpar division can enter the playoffs, a subpar team in a strong division is simply permanently locked out of the playoffs, because there are too many teams that are better than them in the division and also too many teams better than them overall to capture wild card spots. In no sense does the NFL playoff structure promote "talent development." It is there to try to make sure the maximum percentage of the country is interested in post season play for as long as possible.

If the intent was to encourage players to work harder to win, to "develop talent" as it were, then using a match up system in which players are locked into certain match ups by prestige would be the absolute worst way to go about doing that, because of the way the victory track works. Because it takes multiple wins in a row to progress upward, and because the vast majority of the rewards in the VT come from progressing upward in tiers and not just simple victories, if a player ends up winning, say, 30% of their matches instead of 50%, their ability to advance isn't penalized by that 20%. The odds of them stringing three wins in a row drop dramatically, by orders of magnitude in the long run.

In alliance war, if you lose too many times in a row, signaling to the game you are weaker than your competition, you get matched against similarly weaker foes. You will eventually find similar alliances to yourself, where you will probably start winning about half the time. This doesn't make it easier to simply walk up to the Masters bracket, however, because as you win wars you start matching against stronger competition again. If you're weak, you are allowed to fight similarly weak alliances rather than get constantly curb stomped. But to climb the season brackets, you do eventually have to face those stronger alliances. This is a reasonable balancing act. Weaker alliances can still participate and get something out of it, and *if* they get better, *then* they get matched against better alliances and gain access to better rewards.

In BG, if you're losing a lot, the odds are that you will keep losing. Sure, you can "git gud" but so can everyone else. If you can get 20% more skilled, so can your competition. And what if everyone gits gud, but you git just a little less gud? Then you fall behind, and that skill change isn't reflected in the match ups (at least so far as I've seen). Which means you can get better, and still lose more often. In fact, statistically speaking, half of everyone that gets better should fall behind the other half that got just a little more better.

And how long does it take to git gud? How many losses do we expect the average player to sustain to git gud. Ten? Twenty? Fifty? If anyone wants an idea of what impact win percentage has on the average number of matches it takes to promote, I did the calculations here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/314592/battlegrounds-math-how-hard-is-it-to-progress-through-the-victory-track/p1

There were a couple of calculation errors that I corrected here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2164795/#Comment_2164795

Short version: the difference between 33% win rate, 50% win rate, and 75% win rate in progress speed through VT is the difference between 75 matches to reach GT, 188 matches, and 645 matches. Which means the difference between Alliance War-style matching that tries to find roughly 50/50 match ups and experiencing, say, a 33% win rate instead (which is just the difference between winning 3 out of 6 matches and winning 2 out of 6 matches) is a difference of almost a three times slower progress rate through VT.

One less win, three times slower. Does this encourage players to fight harder? In my opinion, it probably encourages players to do the absolute minimum to snag the easy milestone rewards and then sit it out for two days. How much energy would the average player invest in trying to get better at a game mode with these sorts of progression mechanics? I don't have the data, but I wouldn't guess a lot.

Graves_3

There's more than different Resources. The game has built-in mechanics that inhibit your ability to inflict Damage, and increase Damage inflicted, the lower you go.

Weren’t you for the difficulty increase in the monthly event quest to keep up with the power creep in people’s rosters? And now you are saying the same uncollected people should not face others in the same tiers because their ability to inflict damage and to inhibit inflicted damage are lower? Who would have thought that looking at your posts in the event quest feedback thread.

GroundedWisdom

There's more than different Resources. The game has built-in mechanics that inhibit your ability to inflict Damage, and increase Damage inflicted, the lower you go.
Weren’t you for the difficulty increase in the monthly event quest to keep up with the power creep in people’s rosters? And now you are saying the same uncollected people should not face others in the same tiers because their ability to inflict damage and to inhibit inflicted damage are lower? Who would have thought that looking at your posts in the event quest feedback thread.

You're talking about a different subject entirely, but I also agreed that this month was overshot. What I said was it has to be an increase that's reasonable. I also said here that there has to be reason. There is a limit to where people are at. It's not very useful to discuss both topics in comparison to each other without the full viewpoint, and the context. What you're talking about here isn't a little increase. Otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it.

Pikok

I dont get it how somebody could defend matchmaking system. Imagine Chess tournament. First round. Everybody who get 10 points will progress to round 2. Win is +1. Loss is -1. In round 2 10000 dolars are guaranted. In round 1 500elo players will only play with same rankings. Similar for 1000 and 2000elo. Grandmasters only plays with other grandmasters. In round 2 matchmaking is fair -> random. 500elo players will be slaughtered and will not win a single game. But they are happy bcos 10k prize. Some grandmasters will not advance to round 2 and will get nothing. This is how bgs is working today.

Greekhit

I dont get it how somebody could defend matchmaking system. Imagine Chess tournament. First round. Everybody who get 10 points will progress to round 2. Win is +1. Loss is -1. In round 2 10000 dolars are guaranted. In round 1 500elo players will only play with same rankings. Similar for 1000 and 2000elo. Grandmasters only plays with other grandmasters. In round 2 matchmaking is fair -> random. 500elo players will be slaughtered and will not win a single game. But they are happy bcos 10k prize. Some grandmasters will not advance to round 2 and will get nothing. This is how bgs is working today.

We don’t need to imagine or make any analogue tbh.
We had the best example to compare in game recently:
AW Prestige Matchmaking
This is the exact same situation:
Small accounts overachieving while bigger accounts placing lower than they should be.
People will realize what’s happening right now at BGs sooner or later and Kabam will eventually change matchmaking to random, like it happened at AW and like it should be at the very start.
If someone had checked last season’s rankings, he would have noticed how many UC 200k or less accounts were at URU tiers, while so many Paragon accounts left stuck fighting each other at some VT tier.
How fair is that for these players, that have spend thousands of hours playing the game or thousands of $, see UC accounts of few hours of play, placing higher and getting ranked rewards, while they don’t?
And I will give my own experience again:
My alt 600k Cav account cruised through VT and is already at GC from first week, by matching only similar small, mainly noob accounts, while my main 3,6mil 15,5k prestige account struggles at Gold3 atm.
Same person, same skills, different accounts.
Smaller account has a huge advantage over the bigger.
That shouldn’t be happening.
In fact, in a progression based game the opposite should happen.
A bigger account should be an advantage, not a disadvantage.
This example shows, how broken Prestige matchmaking is.
Kabam should be aware of that 🤔

Chatterofforums

Rather disappointing that this topic has been getting this much attention and had several request to just get confirmation mods are aware of the concern but they just completing ignoring us.

It's more frustrating as this situation was causes bases on their overly coddling responses to the weaker players complaining about pretty much everything in BG matchmaking starting in season 1. This currently broken situation is a result and can't even get acknowledged.

GroundedWisdom

War is not the same as BGs. It's also not equally as broken as Prestige Wars. Two different game modes, with different scoring metrics, and different Reward structures.
No matter what suggestion you come up with, allowing people to grossly overpower others, or allow the system to be manipulated with 2*s, or whatever other alternative you can think of, is not better. If the Rewards are the argument, which to be frank only applies to those going for competitive Ranking, then that needs to be addressed. Not by letting people ruin reasonable progress for the people much earlier on in the game. That's not just "whining". That's a request for the ability to play where they're at and advance appropriately.
The argument has never been Rewards. It's been the stability of the Matches. People don't just want "easy Rewards". They want a system that places them in Matches they can compete with. It isn't even possible to carry over like War, where War Rating balances out to an appropriate spot. Each Season starts at 0. Not the same thing at all.

DNA3000

Rather disappointing that this topic has been getting this much attention and had several request to just get confirmation mods are aware of the concern but they just completing ignoring us.

It's more frustrating as this situation was causes bases on their overly coddling responses to the weaker players complaining about pretty much everything in BG matchmaking starting in season 1. This currently broken situation is a result and can't even get acknowledged.

I believe it was actually a direct response to deck manipulation (although there were other things brewing). To respond to deck manipulation, you basically have two options. Measure decks in a better way than just averaging the contents, or simply don't match on decks at all. They chose the latter. And then they had two choices: match on roster, or match on record. They chose the former, because they like the idea of matching players based on "strength" for some vague idea of strength. It is why they tried matching by alliance prestige in alliance war. They like the idea.

It is a likeable idea. It is also completely broken, which is why no one does it. Even Kabam came to that conclusion for war. It is a nice idea in theory to match alliances against each other based on some notion of "fairness of strength." But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, so they changed it but only after they tried to salvage their nice idea for a couple years.

It is a nice idea in Battlegrounds also. Still horribly broken, but still a nice idea so when given a chance to try it again, they decided to try it again. It is provably broken, but while you can prove this on paper, game developers typically prefer to prove water is wet by drowning in it.

GroundedWisdom

Rather disappointing that this topic has been getting this much attention and had several request to just get confirmation mods are aware of the concern but they just completing ignoring us.

It's more frustrating as this situation was causes bases on their overly coddling responses to the weaker players complaining about pretty much everything in BG matchmaking starting in season 1. This currently broken situation is a result and can't even get acknowledged.
I believe it was actually a direct response to deck manipulation (although there were other things brewing). To respond to deck manipulation, you basically have two options. Measure decks in a better way than just averaging the contents, or simply don't match on decks at all. They chose the latter. And then they had two choices: match on roster, or match on record. They chose the former, because they like the idea of matching players based on "strength" for some vague idea of strength. It is why they tried matching by alliance prestige in alliance war. They like the idea.

It is a likeable idea. It is also completely broken, which is why no one does it. Even Kabam came to that conclusion for war. It is a nice idea in theory to match alliances against each other based on some notion of "fairness of strength." But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, so they changed it but only after they tried to salvage their nice idea for a couple years.

It is a nice idea in Battlegrounds also. Still horribly broken, but still a nice idea so when given a chance to try it again, they decided to try it again. It is provably broken, but while you can prove this on paper, game developers typically prefer to prove water is wet by drowning in it.

What suggestion do you have, given the current way BGs are measured, and the limitations of a square-one monthly Season? That's not a rhetorical question. I'd be interested in hearing if you have a solution that accommodates both issues.

GroundedWisdom

I suggested Brackets, perhaps 3, separated by Titles. One for the first two, one for the second two, and the final for TB and Para. That would somewhat alleviate the issues.

GroundedWisdom

I think any sort of variation on a separation like that, with Rewards adjusted to be appropriate for where Players are, might be less troublesome than having everyone in the same pool at once.

DNA3000

Rather disappointing that this topic has been getting this much attention and had several request to just get confirmation mods are aware of the concern but they just completing ignoring us.

It's more frustrating as this situation was causes bases on their overly coddling responses to the weaker players complaining about pretty much everything in BG matchmaking starting in season 1. This currently broken situation is a result and can't even get acknowledged.
I believe it was actually a direct response to deck manipulation (although there were other things brewing). To respond to deck manipulation, you basically have two options. Measure decks in a better way than just averaging the contents, or simply don't match on decks at all. They chose the latter. And then they had two choices: match on roster, or match on record. They chose the former, because they like the idea of matching players based on "strength" for some vague idea of strength. It is why they tried matching by alliance prestige in alliance war. They like the idea.

It is a likeable idea. It is also completely broken, which is why no one does it. Even Kabam came to that conclusion for war. It is a nice idea in theory to match alliances against each other based on some notion of "fairness of strength." But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, so they changed it but only after they tried to salvage their nice idea for a couple years.

It is a nice idea in Battlegrounds also. Still horribly broken, but still a nice idea so when given a chance to try it again, they decided to try it again. It is provably broken, but while you can prove this on paper, game developers typically prefer to prove water is wet by drowning in it.
What suggestion do you have, given the current way BGs are measured, and the limitations of a square-one monthly Season? That's not a rhetorical question. I'd be interested in hearing if you have a solution that accommodates both issues.

Myself personally I was fine with matching by deck, although not everyone was. The problem was extreme deck manipulation (i.e. 2* champs). I would have matched decks by their highest two rarities. In other words, if you have 6* R3 and 6* R2 and a bunch of 2* champs, the deck would be measured based solely on the R3s and R2s. The math is not important and open to debate. But the idea would be to throw out obvious attempts at averaging down while still allowing progressing players who were building their decks (and would have champs of different tiers in their decks) to not get too over matched. But I understand not everyone considers that to be fair, for their definition of fair.

Alternatively, if deck matching was out, then I would match players by ELO. You know, like how players are actually matched in the Gladiator track. But instead of starting everyone at zero, which would allow super strong players to match against weak ones, everyone's ELO would be seeded with the average ELO of players around their roster strength based on prior seasons' data. So if, say, we decide to use something similar to what they are doing now with some super-prestige system that counts more than top five champs, we calculate everyone's BG-prestige, and if mine was say 13000 then my starting ELO next season would be the average ELO of all 13000 players this season. But from there ELO would be allowed to float with wins and losses.

I should point out that these are starting ideas (and a bit simplified for discussion). Which is to say, I don't know how their match system works in detail. There could be modifications in their system unknown to us that try to account for various priorities of theirs based on the data they have. These would be baseline ideas that themselves would need to be tweaked to account for whatever the devs priorities are, which I'm not a party to, but which I'm assuming can be accounted for using these types of systems as starting points.

Matching by ELO has issues due to the way progress and rewards work. Without getting into the weeds, I know this is not straight forward. And I should also point out that I was the one that proposed the +2/+1/0/-1 points system, which was intended to tackle some of the more oppressive issues with the VT track progress system. But if ELO matching *and* 2/1/0/-1 points were implemented simultaneously, there would probably need to be changes to the reward structure. And there's a completely separate exploitive tactic that becomes viable, which would need additional guardrails. But that gets farther and farther afield of where we are now.

Which is all to say I know things are not as simple as I might appear to be portraying, but I would start with a system I know works first, then modify it to account for the various issues that arise. I wouldn't start with a system known to be broken but that seems to address some of the thorny issues associated with other matching systems. Because in my opinion it doesn't matter if you address those, if the fundamentals don't work.

GroundedWisdom

Thanks for registering. I understand what you're saying.

mgj0630

I would suggest simply going back to last season's match making system, but prevent the sandbagging through rarity filters.

Thronebreaker and Paragon can only have 5* r4 or higher and 6* or higher champs in their deck.

Uncollected and Cav can go down to 4*r5, and 5* and 6* rarities.

Proven and Conquerer can have whatever they want.

From there, match on deck strength just like last season.

Will you still have corner cases where someone is gonna get crushed? Probably, but it will be because that someone has progressed to a VT tier where the only match available was against someone with a "weaker" Paragon type deck.

That prevents the deck manipulation but still keeps the likelihood of everyone fighting everyone else.

At least that works in my head.

Chatterofforums

Now this ridiculous matchmaking system has got these lower entitled players complaining about having to fight decent players in leagues way above where they belong.

Same thing happened last season. It's ridiculous some dude just make a big complaint post complaining to Kabam hea facing paragons in diamond when he only has 3 r3 6 stars.

Meanwhike we have lots of paragons still stuck in gold and platinum and this dude comaimong about matches in diamond tier when he belongs way lower.

Kabam really needs to reevaluate this nonsense system.

Graves_3

Hoping for some mod to chime in and let us know if this is even on their radar to fix at some point.

zuffy

I have an almost 4m account with 13 R4 and only recently reached gold 1. I get matchups with the similar accounts. It really comes down to luck in draft. I am not the most skilled but it really who got lucky with rng.

With a small account around 800k, I have a much easier time moving up and surpassing my main account.

GroundedWisdom

Yes, but you're a person with the experience of a 4M Account, playing with an 800k. It's not the same for people who are genuinely at that point.