I think anything that changes the dynamic of +1/-1 in a tier is worth looking at.
At a visceral level, I dislike the sense that the structure *feels* like and excuse to sell Shields for struggling accounts.
But I like the idea of 3 consecutive or X total as a concept. Also like the idea of valuing 2-1 and 2-0 matches differently.
But I especially like the idea of the team rolling up sleeves and figuring out why this season has been as buggy as it has. And coming on here to discuss it with players who obviously relish this game.
Dr. Zola
My two cents...I feel like they should stop taking away tokens for a loss. They can add more wins that are needed to advance (instead of 3 maybe 4 or 5 for higher tiers) thats fine!..That would take away the need for shields. Plus, there won't be that roller coaster feeling of playing for an hour or so and not getting anywhere...at least, your wins could start adding up to something.
It can still be competitive without the need to take away tokens and require winning 3 or 4 IN A ROW. It doesn't take much for one or two little things to go wrong before you're back at square 0 in your tier.
Everything else can basically stay the same....I think.
Except for the bugs...they definitely need to go. 🐛 🐛 🐛 🐛🪲🐞🪲🐞
The store could be adjusted. Some prices in the store don't make sense.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
I think he’s making a different point here. He’s addressing the idea of having no loss penalties through Gold tiers as a way to alleviate both smaller accounts and larger accounts progressing in their silos. I didn’t take it as impugning anyone.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
If you have a 10k prestige account and you consistently facing 10k accounts throughout VT, while you should be facing 10k, 13k, 15k, 17k prestige accounts (literally everyone who is at your tier), then facing only the lower part of the competition can be called a “free ride”, since obviously your “ride” would be very wild otherwise 😉
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
If you have a 10k prestige account and you consistently facing 10k accounts throughout VT, while you should be facing 10k, 13k, 15k, 17k prestige accounts (literally everyone who is at your tier), then facing only the lower part of the competition can be called a “free ride”, since obviously your “ride” would be very wild otherwise 😉
You're not facing 10K constantly. My own Account is a testament to that. You're facing a range, within fairly close proximity to your own. If you're 10k Prestige and you're facing 17k Prestige in the first 3 Brackets, there's a problem. It's not a free ride. People are earning their way up. If you're a 15k Prestige Account and you don't want to face 17k Prestige Accounts, so you blame the 10k who aren't, you're not taking responsibility for your own failures.
I'm in the 12k range. I've faced anything from around mine to 15k, maybe more? This idea that people are being coddled is not accurate. They're facing a range. They're just not facing ALL Players. Which is for a reason. It's ridiculous actually. People can't string their own Wins together so they expect people with much less fire power to take the hit.
I'm not saying start people the following season in the GC but I don't see the harm in starting the people that finish VT in a week or two at the bottom of Platinum and giving those rewards personally.
I think you'll find if you talk to people who's job it is to design a game economy, you'll discover that they will see the harm. Its their job to see the harm in all reward flow changes.
But more to the point, those rewards only exist at all because of a specific reason: to promote participation. If you say we're not going to promote participation with those rewards anymore, it doesn't matter if it "does no harm" to give them away, you've knocked out the reason for them to even exist. Either your argument fails and they do nothing, or your argument succeeds and the rewards disappear. There's no version of "let's give the rewards away for doing nothing" that ends up winning anything.
The law of unintended consequences is not to be trifled with.
If it's truly this crazy idea of just giving out the previous milestones in that case (which I find ridiculous), then just make win objectives with those rewards for those players and have them take enough wins for them to possibly be out of VT again.
That's what I said. But that's also non-trivial, because making those objectives is not about making the objectives. You've now proposed a solution that requires the game economy people to sign off on, among other people.
And while you find the idea of not giving rewards out for free ridiculous, as I said I think the game economy designers would (off the record) look you dead in the eye and say "it is equally ridiculous to give out participation rewards for not doing anything. And also absurd." And to be frank, they would have the stronger position here.
I don't think they would have the stronger position personally. Just bc someone does something for a living doesn't mean they're particularly good at it. Now I'm certainly not saying I'm definitively right here as I obviously don't know, but I've dealt with enough completely clueless individuals in my own profession to know that just bc someone is employed in a field does not mean they automatically know what they are talking about either. Going off the absolute mess we have currently, I think it's a pretty safe bet that at least someone with some decision making power in fact is not particularly good at their job.
I think they have the stronger position in this case because of the nature of design intent. When you design something, you're supposed to design with intent. This thing does that thing for these reasons. It is a sign of bad design when something is designed supposedly for a specific reason but then doesn't satisfy that reason, and the sign of a bad designer when they don't even care if their design satisfies their original design intent.
So when a game element is designed with and implemented to satisfy a design intent, you can't' just say well, so what. If the designer caves to that, they don't deserve that job. Nor will they likely have it long.
It is a rare day when I suggest directly to the devs that they should just hand the players something for free (except in jest). It does happen, but only under extremely narrow and defensible situations. Because as a professional designer myself and someone actually aware of the design constraints involved, I would consider that to be insulting.
Sure, there are a lot of things that could be better with the game, and some things I think are just straight up wrong. The BG system as a whole is one of those things in particular I've been critical of. But Kabam is a game studio composed of a number of different individual developers. They are not a hive mind. Regardless of whether you think something has gone wrong in the game, you can't tell an individual game designer that since the game has flaws in one area, they shouldn't bother to try to do their job properly in their area. The economy designers are not just going to burn their spreadsheets just because the Battlegrounds game mode isn't working right. Their job is to hold the line on the game economy until the system designers fix their stuff.
That can sometimes make it seem like the game is schizophrenic, the game doesn't work right here, and they aren't willing to just bend over backwards over there to compensate and just continues on as if nothing's wrong. But that's just how it goes.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
Peewee teams fight with all their might against other peewee teams. Maybe even harder than many of today's NFL players. So no one says they didn't play their butts off, they just don't deserve to get to the nfl playoffs (gc) playing peewee football.
If you want to play peewee football with all your heart and effort fine, just expect your prizes to be 4 and 5* shards....even more than a reduced store.
I think anything that changes the dynamic of +1/-1 in a tier is worth looking at.
At a visceral level, I dislike the sense that the structure *feels* like and excuse to sell Shields for struggling accounts.
But I like the idea of 3 consecutive or X total as a concept. Also like the idea of valuing 2-1 and 2-0 matches differently.
But I especially like the idea of the team rolling up sleeves and figuring out why this season has been as buggy as it has. And coming on here to discuss it with players who obviously relish this game.
Dr. Zola
My two cents...I feel like they should stop taking away tokens for a loss. They can add more wins that are needed to advance (instead of 3 maybe 4 or 5 for higher tiers) thats fine!..That would take away the need for shields. Plus, there won't be that roller coaster feeling of playing for an hour or so and not getting anywhere...at least, your wins could start adding up to something.
It can still be competitive without the need to take away tokens and require winning 3 or 4 IN A ROW. It doesn't take much for one or two little things to go wrong before you're back at square 0 in your tier.
Everything else can basically stay the same....I think.
Except for the bugs...they definitely need to go. 🐛 🐛 🐛 🐛🪲🐞🪲🐞
The store could be adjusted. Some prices in the store don't make sense.
But that's it 😁
..for now
Good suggestion, but still think most will not be happy unless they make it to the GC.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
Not sure why my reply didn't post, but I agree that people are fighting their heart's out. But pee wee teams playing just pee wee teams to make it to the playoffs (GC) doesn't make sense.
the problem is losing tokens after losses. what exactly is the difference in stringing 3 victories in a row vs simply getting 3 victories? why is it imperative that they're forcing you to string consecutive victories in a row? of course it's for resource draining etc. but why? are there already enough resource draining avenues in this game?
i don't care if more people get into Gladiator's Circuit .. isn't that the goal? for more people to actually enjoy playing the game and not having to share various levels of frustration?
i've never felt it was necessary to have to have consecutive victories in a row to advance. the losses will still be the losses and the wins are still the wins if it's just having to come up with however many victories in however many matches it takes. you could still lose 10 in a row etc but when you remove tokens for losses you just send someone in a very ridiculous and unnecessary loop.
CHANGE THAT. it's just not good design, cool story bro moments or whatever the design team thought it would be. simply getting the necessary amount of victories should suffice without having to get the consecutively.
Nope, thats doesn't make sense at all. I don't remember exactly how many tokens you need in total to get to GC, but the actual system insures that in the end you have to get more wins than losses overall. If you win 30 matches but lose 250, then you don't deserve to be in GC.
I have no idea how Kabam would ever please such an overly whiny player base. Interesting BG meta: “It’s too restrictive!” Normal nuke meta: “It’s too difficult! A competitive game mode should be exactly that: Competitive. If I want to relax after a long day of work, I sit down and play arena.
Yep. Battlegrounds is designed for the Best of the Best. If someone is outskilled, then I'm sorry to say, get better. Thats the harsh truth.
If they still want Shields to matter how about: Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss. Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
Bronze to Gold is still too much to have “free rides”. That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking. Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2. Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them. They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match. Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token. Also their price is very high. 90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
What free rides? I understand that people scoff at the Matches lower than their own progression, but people are acting as if they're not fighting to earn what they earn. That's quite frankly, an ignorant perspective.
Not sure why my reply didn't post, but I agree that people are fighting their heart's out. But pee wee teams playing just pee wee teams to make it to the playoffs (GC) doesn't make sense.
I believe the suggestion was for the first 3 Brackets. Up to Diamond 3. That's what I was responding to as a "free ride". Which, I don't see the complaint with either way, considering it's all-out in the GC. So anyone who isn't able enough won't go far. I've been pretty vocal about the fact that I could personally care less if it was up to the GC because that's where the actual Ranking starts. I digress. The first 3 Brackets wouldn't be a free ride. That judgment keeps being thrown out, but people refuse to respect the fact that anyone advancing is playing the competition and winning their Matches. They're earning their way. They're not being given anything for free just because they're not being mopped by the highest Accounts in there.
I'm not sure, but I have a suspicion that won't be acceptable to the devs for a specific reason that would take a bit to explain. As there is no short way, I might as well do it the long way (actually, this is in fact the most abbreviated version of this I can come up with).
For all the problems that alliance war has, it has one property that is different from BG that makes it much easier to manage as a competitive mode. Everyone fights the same number of wars. You can't try to jump ahead by fighting thirteen wars or twenty three wars. Everyone has twelve wars to get as far as they can get. In BG, that's not true: everyone can fight a different number of matches.
Now, in GC, this has limited benefits due to ELO matching. At some point you're going to be matching against people roughly as strong as you. So you would expect to win about half your matches. But if you're winning 50/50, you can't really expect to rise any higher, because you'll tend to stabilize where you are. Now, you could push, and you could get lucky, and in fact since a 50/50 win rate means you're going to be randomly moving up and down, if you play *enough* matches you could still rise higher even at a 50/50 win rate. You could also drop substantially, so you would have to decide how hard to push. But once you reach 50/50, it would take an *enormous* amount of matches to push significantly beyond that point (cf: random walk statistics).
The idea in VT was to create a similar situation but without ELO matching. Instead the idea was to use trophies as a way to emulate the idea of "when you get to 50/50 you stabilize." At first glance, if you win one and lose one, you're back to where you started. But in fact, that's not exactly what happens because you can only lose so much. Once you drop to the bottom of your current tier you can't backslide below it. So in fact, your win/loss pattern skews upward. Even 50/50 drifts upward slowly. This was deliberate on the part of the devs: they wanted players to have some way to progress upward, they wanted to encourage participation by making it so that even when you reached the highest tier you would likely reach there was no harm in continuing to try (you couldn't drop below the highest track you achieved) but there was still a substantial benefit to playing stronger - having a higher win percentage.
The system thus implements implicitly in the math a non-proportional benefit curve to win percentage. As I calculated in another thread small changes in win percentage have a dramatic impact on how fast you advance up VT. I don't think the precise details of this were explicitly chosen, but I think the idea itself was something the devs actually wanted to have (and I know for a fact that they were aware of these numbers, having arrived at them internally by other means).
A low win percentage will still (in theory) allow a player to advance in the lower tracks but as the number of trophies rise, it gets harder and harder disproportionately. Their progress is soft capped based on their level of effort and their win percentage.
Now, judged in this context, I believe any attempt to remove trophy loss completely without accounting for this will likely fail, as it will open the door to proportional progress. Meaning, a much weaker player can still advance just as far as a much stronger player by simply doing proportionately more matches. Consider that in practice someone with a 75% win rate is *enormously* stronger than a player with a 37.5% win rate, but is still only winning twice as many matches. This means a very weak player could simply do twice as much matches as a very strong player and still advance just as far. Or, equally problematic, a very weak player could *overtake* a very strong player by just buying more energy or marks. This is always possible, even in the current system, but in the current system a weaker player has to do many times more matches than a strong one (at the moment a 33% player must do, on average, 8.6 times more matches than a 75% player to reach GC).
Although we want to remove some of the biases built into the match system and we want to try to remove some of the more blatant frustration points while we are at it, we have to remember that the game mode is still intended to be a competitive mode, and even in the VT there's intended to be a balance between participation encouragement and competitive achievement. The current system tries to implement a significant enough penalty for losing that actually having to win is still important, and stronger players still benefit more than weaker players, even if we are talking about players that are not GC-quality players. Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players. We can try to soften that, but we can't completely eliminate that, or the mode becomes too much like an overly complicated arena.
In fact, I recall a developer explicitly stating that back when BG was still in closed alpha/beta. Battlegrounds is not intended to be another arena. Essentially, you play it, you might play it a lot, but you don't mindlessly grind it until you get what you want. If you attempt to do that, you'll be grinding for an excessively long time, deliberately so.
This thread has really turned into a slice of heaven for all of those who love to debate on the forums
That is the primary stated purpose of the forums: to provide a venue to encourage discussion of the game between players.
Although to be honest I would have been happier if this discussion was completely unnecessary. However, history says this is unavoidable because a) the devs need to see how much players are currently dissatisfied (and more importantly why), and b) because just as with Alliance War we won't have peace in our time unless all of this is hashed out publicly, so the people in the minority can't resort to thinking they represent the silent majority.
Just as with Alliance war, this is being portrayed either directly or indirectly as an elitist objection: the top suppressing the bottom. Or as an entitlement problem, with the bottom feeders just looking for a handout. But just as with Alliance War, if it was just the top 1% trying to bully the bottom 99% they would fail. This is not about Paragons trying to bully Uncollecteds, because the players impacted negatively exist across all progress tiers. And it isn't about reward handouts either. The longer the situation persists, the longer it is discussed and argued, and the more players become informed about the issues (the forums are a very tiny subset of the playerbase, and discussions here can take a very long time to diffuse out to the larger player population) the more likely that just as with Alliance War this will be seen as a universal problem by a majority of the players. All of the players negatively affected, plus enough of the players unaffected that share the same notion of what a fair competition is.
The purpose of discussing the problem isn't to convince everyone else who's right and who's wrong. It isn't to "win." It is to keep mindshare of the problem. I believe the more people who think about it, and the more time they devote to thinking about it, the more likely a majority of them will come to the same conclusions. I trust that will happen, because a) I'm convinced most people believe at least the same core general things when it comes to fairness and b) its already happened once before in exactly the same way.
To put it another way, I don't believe I need to convince anyone they are wrong. I just need to convince enough players to get off the sidelines.
There are two arguments for why BG suck (not including bots and connection) but the first feeds into the second argument. the first argument is the "same rewards" issue - A 3mil 16K prestige account is fighting through VT to get to GC. Every tier gets battleground chips. if you make it to CG you are guaranteed 10K chips. - A <1mil <12K account is also fighting to get the tiered rewards and the guaranteed 10K chips.
so the SAME rewards that alot of ppl are annoyed about is the 10K chips for getting to the GC.
The second issue lies with prestige and account size a 8K account and a 10K account is going to be very similar roster diversity. this really makes the matchmaking even and the lower accounts can progress with the "best man wins" narrative. Conversely, a 1.6mil 14k account is matching with a 4mil 16K account (that same 2k difference) and roster diversity is going to be VERY different. the 1.6mil account may have 5 R4s while the 4mil account may have +20 R4s, +50 R3s and so on. Not only does the 4mil account have overall strength, but they have the champions in their deck to support the monthly node.
for me, I have 5 R5s and a 1.6mil rating (2 maxed sig, 2 mid sig and 1 undupped). I now match with everyone else that has 5 x R5s no matter if they have 5 or 30 in their deck because prestige only accounts for your top 5 champions. until a few weeks ago, the highest rated accounts didn't have any R5s so that means i could literally be matched with the giant pool of players that far outmatched my account.
because of the VAST difference in account diversity vs prestige, the 12-15K prestige players are getting unfair matches that do not support "best player wins" which is why there is so much animosity to the matchmaking process.
@DNA3000 “Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players” Does this even happening with the current matchmaking? Because currently many weaker VT players are succeeding over many stronger VT players. It maybe be happening within each Prestige silo separately, but when you consider the whole picture of all, the opposite is happening at very high percentages.
I'm not sure, but I have a suspicion that won't be acceptable to the devs for a specific reason that would take a bit to explain. As there is no short way, I might as well do it the long way (actually, this is in fact the most abbreviated version of this I can come up with).
For all the problems that alliance war has, it has one property that is different from BG that makes it much easier to manage as a competitive mode. Everyone fights the same number of wars. You can't try to jump ahead by fighting thirteen wars or twenty three wars. Everyone has twelve wars to get as far as they can get. In BG, that's not true: everyone can fight a different number of matches.
Now, in GC, this has limited benefits due to ELO matching. At some point you're going to be matching against people roughly as strong as you. So you would expect to win about half your matches. But if you're winning 50/50, you can't really expect to rise any higher, because you'll tend to stabilize where you are. Now, you could push, and you could get lucky, and in fact since a 50/50 win rate means you're going to be randomly moving up and down, if you play *enough* matches you could still rise higher even at a 50/50 win rate. You could also drop substantially, so you would have to decide how hard to push. But once you reach 50/50, it would take an *enormous* amount of matches to push significantly beyond that point (cf: random walk statistics).
The idea in VT was to create a similar situation but without ELO matching. Instead the idea was to use trophies as a way to emulate the idea of "when you get to 50/50 you stabilize." At first glance, if you win one and lose one, you're back to where you started. But in fact, that's not exactly what happens because you can only lose so much. Once you drop to the bottom of your current tier you can't backslide below it. So in fact, your win/loss pattern skews upward. Even 50/50 drifts upward slowly. This was deliberate on the part of the devs: they wanted players to have some way to progress upward, they wanted to encourage participation by making it so that even when you reached the highest tier you would likely reach there was no harm in continuing to try (you couldn't drop below the highest track you achieved) but there was still a substantial benefit to playing stronger - having a higher win percentage.
The system thus implements implicitly in the math a non-proportional benefit curve to win percentage. As I calculated in another thread small changes in win percentage have a dramatic impact on how fast you advance up VT. I don't think the precise details of this were explicitly chosen, but I think the idea itself was something the devs actually wanted to have (and I know for a fact that they were aware of these numbers, having arrived at them internally by other means).
A low win percentage will still (in theory) allow a player to advance in the lower tracks but as the number of trophies rise, it gets harder and harder disproportionately. Their progress is soft capped based on their level of effort and their win percentage.
Now, judged in this context, I believe any attempt to remove trophy loss completely without accounting for this will likely fail, as it will open the door to proportional progress. Meaning, a much weaker player can still advance just as far as a much stronger player by simply doing proportionately more matches. Consider that in practice someone with a 75% win rate is *enormously* stronger than a player with a 37.5% win rate, but is still only winning twice as many matches. This means a very weak player could simply do twice as much matches as a very strong player and still advance just as far. Or, equally problematic, a very weak player could *overtake* a very strong player by just buying more energy or marks. This is always possible, even in the current system, but in the current system a weaker player has to do many times more matches than a strong one (at the moment a 33% player must do, on average, 8.6 times more matches than a 75% player to reach GC).
Although we want to remove some of the biases built into the match system and we want to try to remove some of the more blatant frustration points while we are at it, we have to remember that the game mode is still intended to be a competitive mode, and even in the VT there's intended to be a balance between participation encouragement and competitive achievement. The current system tries to implement a significant enough penalty for losing that actually having to win is still important, and stronger players still benefit more than weaker players, even if we are talking about players that are not GC-quality players. Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players. We can try to soften that, but we can't completely eliminate that, or the mode becomes too much like an overly complicated arena.
In fact, I recall a developer explicitly stating that back when BG was still in closed alpha/beta. Battlegrounds is not intended to be another arena. Essentially, you play it, you might play it a lot, but you don't mindlessly grind it until you get what you want. If you attempt to do that, you'll be grinding for an excessively long time, deliberately so.
I think regardless of their design intent you're missing something fundamental - They have to pay players to participate. That payment is big too, easiest way to get 6 star shards for Paragons by a mile. Without the completion objectives then number of players will tail off dramatically and complaints about match making will be how long it takes. The entire design is supported by it and can't stand up without it. Definition of a flawed design if you ask me.
@DNA3000 “Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players” Does this even happening with the current matchmaking? Because currently many weaker VT players are succeeding over many stronger VT players. It maybe be happening within each Prestige silo separately, but when you consider the whole picture of all, the opposite is happening at very high percentages.
Stronger is a relative term, really. That's where we're at. There are more skilled Players than me with lower Ratings and Titles. They're just coming up. Consequently, there are less skilled Accounts with larger Rosters. Not that I'm the best by any means. Just that skill is a term that is being attached to the size of the Account in this instance. Which isn't an absolute. Skill in BGs is about winning the Matches. Using the Nodes to the best of our ability to gain an advantage, and earn more Points than the opponent. You have 3 sources for Points. Health taken, Health retained, time remaining. No matter how close or how long the Fight takes, those metrics are the same for all Players. UC to Paragon. What people are complaining about is that lower Accounts than their own are succeeding to the GC, and they're not. That's the real issue for some. They're offended that Players with less Rating and Titles are doing better than them. Only, BGs doesn't score on Titles. It doesn't score on how much larger your Rating is than others in the same Brackets. Not until the GC at least, then it becomes a free-for-all. Even then, the scoring is the same. BGs is a game mode that scores based on the same metrics. No matter how tough or weak the Champs are you come up against, you score the same. The idea that Players are weaker because their opponents are weaker is blind to the fact that they're winning proportionately difficult Matches to what they have, the same as others are losing proportionately difficult Matches to what they're bringing. They're not weaker. Their Accounts have weaker Champs. Evidently they're not weaker at BGs because they have enough skill to advance. Give them stronger Champs, they'd likely win the same.
@DNA3000 “Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players” Does this even happening with the current matchmaking? Because currently many weaker VT players are succeeding over many stronger VT players. It maybe be happening within each Prestige silo separately, but when you consider the whole picture of all, the opposite is happening at very high percentages.
Stronger is a relative term, really. That's where we're at. There are more skilled Players than me with lower Ratings and Titles. They're just coming up. Consequently, there are less skilled Accounts with larger Rosters. Not that I'm the best by any means. Just that skill is a term that is being attached to the size of the Account in this instance. Which isn't an absolute. Skill in BGs is about winning the Matches. Using the Nodes to the best of our ability to gain an advantage, and earn more Points than the opponent. You have 3 sources for Points. Health taken, Health retained, time remaining. No matter how close or how long the Fight takes, those metrics are the same for all Players. UC to Paragon. What people are complaining about is that lower Accounts than their own are succeeding to the GC, and they're not. That's the real issue for some. They're offended that Players with less Rating and Titles are doing better than them. Only, BGs doesn't score on Titles. It doesn't score on how much larger your Rating is than others in the same Brackets. Not until the GC at least, then it becomes a free-for-all. Even then, the scoring is the same. BGs is a game mode that scores based on the same metrics. No matter how tough or weak the Champs are you come up against, you score the same. The idea that Players are weaker because their opponents are weaker is blind to the fact that they're winning proportionately difficult Matches to what they have, the same as others are losing proportionately difficult Matches to what they're bringing. They're not weaker. Their Accounts have weaker Champs. Evidently they're not weaker at BGs because they have enough skill to advance. Give them stronger Champs, they'd likely win the same.
You really believe that lower accounts have even close the skills larger accounts have on average? You believe that if an UC player was given the same deck as a Paragon player (or vice versa), the UC player would win? That’s a really hot take 🤔 These lower players have enough skills to advance over other inexperienced lower players. They are weaker from higher accounts, not only roster wise but also game knowledge (champions/nodes interaction), and on average skill wise. Yet they can place higher 😂😂😂
@DNA3000 “Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players” Does this even happening with the current matchmaking? Because currently many weaker VT players are succeeding over many stronger VT players. It maybe be happening within each Prestige silo separately, but when you consider the whole picture of all, the opposite is happening at very high percentages.
Stronger is a relative term, really. That's where we're at. There are more skilled Players than me with lower Ratings and Titles. They're just coming up. Consequently, there are less skilled Accounts with larger Rosters. Not that I'm the best by any means. Just that skill is a term that is being attached to the size of the Account in this instance. Which isn't an absolute. Skill in BGs is about winning the Matches. Using the Nodes to the best of our ability to gain an advantage, and earn more Points than the opponent. You have 3 sources for Points. Health taken, Health retained, time remaining. No matter how close or how long the Fight takes, those metrics are the same for all Players. UC to Paragon. What people are complaining about is that lower Accounts than their own are succeeding to the GC, and they're not. That's the real issue for some. They're offended that Players with less Rating and Titles are doing better than them. Only, BGs doesn't score on Titles. It doesn't score on how much larger your Rating is than others in the same Brackets. Not until the GC at least, then it becomes a free-for-all. Even then, the scoring is the same. BGs is a game mode that scores based on the same metrics. No matter how tough or weak the Champs are you come up against, you score the same. The idea that Players are weaker because their opponents are weaker is blind to the fact that they're winning proportionately difficult Matches to what they have, the same as others are losing proportionately difficult Matches to what they're bringing. They're not weaker. Their Accounts have weaker Champs. Evidently they're not weaker at BGs because they have enough skill to advance. Give them stronger Champs, they'd likely win the same.
You really believe that lower accounts have even close the skills larger accounts have on average? You believe that if an UC player was given the same deck as a Paragon player (or vice versa), the UC player would win? That’s a really hot take 🤔 These lower players have enough skills to advance over other inexperienced lower players. They are weaker from higher accounts, not only roster wise but also game knowledge (champions/nodes interaction), and on average skill wise. Yet they can place higher 😂😂😂
All of them? No. Do I believe there are some Players with lower Accounts with better skills? Sure. There's a whole assumption that people have lower Accounts because they're less skilled at the game. That's not entirely true. Some are skilled. They're still developing their Accounts. The VT is pretty self-explanatory. You have the same Nodes all month long. Pick a Defense, pick an Attack, score more Points than your opponent.
Which is why not ALL lower Accounts are advancing to the GC. For that matter, some are not legit. Let's be honest here. We're discussing the fact that they're advancing while some Paragons aren't ON PRINCIPLE.
Which is why not ALL lower Accounts are advancing to the GC. For that matter, some are not legit. Let's be honest here. We're discussing the fact that they're advancing while some Paragons aren't ON PRINCIPLE.
You’re not a paragon, not a cav or uc either. You don’t have any experience. So your opinion is wildly invalid.
You're right about one thing. I'm not a Paragon, or a Cav, or UC. I'm TB. Regardless of the Title, I've been here for 7 years. You're free to think what you like, though.
The bugs are out of hand right now. Played a few matches this morning and lost 2 mostly to control issues. Was fighting Apoc with Warlock and when dashing backwards my character strongly dashed forward like reverse controls into a Sp2, instant KO. I have had multiple instances recently with my character dashing forward when dashing back OR randomly dashing backwards when I’m performing a combo, either one usually gets you clipped pretty badly.
Then fighting Kitty with Warlock I launched an SP2 interception and the AI somehow kept swiping at my character during the SP2 and took a large portion of my health during the Special attack!? Never have experienced anything like that before. Then I went to launch a Special and as soon as I hit the Special button the AI threw it’s special somehow before me and annihilated me.
These issues are annoying and make progressing in VT harder. I’ve been at 2 medals 3 times now but don’t want to buy victory shields and then loose a fight or two and have to keep grinding to progress one tier. Paragon and still in Gold track.
@DNA3000 “Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players” Does this even happening with the current matchmaking?
I'm not sure, but I have a suspicion that won't be acceptable to the devs for a specific reason that would take a bit to explain. As there is no short way, I might as well do it the long way (actually, this is in fact the most abbreviated version of this I can come up with).
For all the problems that alliance war has, it has one property that is different from BG that makes it much easier to manage as a competitive mode. Everyone fights the same number of wars. You can't try to jump ahead by fighting thirteen wars or twenty three wars. Everyone has twelve wars to get as far as they can get. In BG, that's not true: everyone can fight a different number of matches.
Now, in GC, this has limited benefits due to ELO matching. At some point you're going to be matching against people roughly as strong as you. So you would expect to win about half your matches. But if you're winning 50/50, you can't really expect to rise any higher, because you'll tend to stabilize where you are. Now, you could push, and you could get lucky, and in fact since a 50/50 win rate means you're going to be randomly moving up and down, if you play *enough* matches you could still rise higher even at a 50/50 win rate. You could also drop substantially, so you would have to decide how hard to push. But once you reach 50/50, it would take an *enormous* amount of matches to push significantly beyond that point (cf: random walk statistics).
The idea in VT was to create a similar situation but without ELO matching. Instead the idea was to use trophies as a way to emulate the idea of "when you get to 50/50 you stabilize." At first glance, if you win one and lose one, you're back to where you started. But in fact, that's not exactly what happens because you can only lose so much. Once you drop to the bottom of your current tier you can't backslide below it. So in fact, your win/loss pattern skews upward. Even 50/50 drifts upward slowly. This was deliberate on the part of the devs: they wanted players to have some way to progress upward, they wanted to encourage participation by making it so that even when you reached the highest tier you would likely reach there was no harm in continuing to try (you couldn't drop below the highest track you achieved) but there was still a substantial benefit to playing stronger - having a higher win percentage.
The system thus implements implicitly in the math a non-proportional benefit curve to win percentage. As I calculated in another thread small changes in win percentage have a dramatic impact on how fast you advance up VT. I don't think the precise details of this were explicitly chosen, but I think the idea itself was something the devs actually wanted to have (and I know for a fact that they were aware of these numbers, having arrived at them internally by other means).
A low win percentage will still (in theory) allow a player to advance in the lower tracks but as the number of trophies rise, it gets harder and harder disproportionately. Their progress is soft capped based on their level of effort and their win percentage.
Now, judged in this context, I believe any attempt to remove trophy loss completely without accounting for this will likely fail, as it will open the door to proportional progress. Meaning, a much weaker player can still advance just as far as a much stronger player by simply doing proportionately more matches. Consider that in practice someone with a 75% win rate is *enormously* stronger than a player with a 37.5% win rate, but is still only winning twice as many matches. This means a very weak player could simply do twice as much matches as a very strong player and still advance just as far. Or, equally problematic, a very weak player could *overtake* a very strong player by just buying more energy or marks. This is always possible, even in the current system, but in the current system a weaker player has to do many times more matches than a strong one (at the moment a 33% player must do, on average, 8.6 times more matches than a 75% player to reach GC).
Although we want to remove some of the biases built into the match system and we want to try to remove some of the more blatant frustration points while we are at it, we have to remember that the game mode is still intended to be a competitive mode, and even in the VT there's intended to be a balance between participation encouragement and competitive achievement. The current system tries to implement a significant enough penalty for losing that actually having to win is still important, and stronger players still benefit more than weaker players, even if we are talking about players that are not GC-quality players. Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players. We can try to soften that, but we can't completely eliminate that, or the mode becomes too much like an overly complicated arena.
In fact, I recall a developer explicitly stating that back when BG was still in closed alpha/beta. Battlegrounds is not intended to be another arena. Essentially, you play it, you might play it a lot, but you don't mindlessly grind it until you get what you want. If you attempt to do that, you'll be grinding for an excessively long time, deliberately so.
I think regardless of their design intent you're missing something fundamental - They have to pay players to participate. That payment is big too, easiest way to get 6 star shards for Paragons by a mile. Without the completion objectives then number of players will tail off dramatically and complaints about match making will be how long it takes. The entire design is supported by it and can't stand up without it. Definition of a flawed design if you ask me.
This isn't something I've overlooked. In fact, this is something I've advocated for. Battlegrounds is not a game. Battlegrounds is a game mode. It is an optional part of the game as a whole that must compete with all the other parts of the game for limited player time. But while most game modes function independent of engagement, Battleground being a turnstile PvP mode is highly dependent on player engagement. It must therefore overcome the opportunity costs of playing it, in other words, it must offer sufficient rewards relative to all other opportunities to be worth devoting sufficient time to. If insufficient numbers of players believe it isn't worth it, the game mode will literally die. The arenas don't care how many players play it. AQ doesn't care. Even AW is only moderately sensitive to how many players are engaged. But BG must maintain a minimum player engagement density or the turnstiles will fail to find matches and that would lead very quickly to death spirals.
Saying that BG is flawed because it has to give out a lot of rewards is like saying AQ is flawed or EoP is flawed or Act 8 is flawed for the same reasons. A purist might say that if the game mode was actually good enough it wouldn't need to offer rewards. But that's an invalid stance, because of the type of game MCOC is. MCOC is a progressional game at its core. All games "reward" players for playing them in some fashion, and MCOC does so by offering paths to roster and content progression. Those game rewards are not so much "necessary" as they are foundational. They are in effect the way players keep score. Getting more 6* crystals is like getting half a million points in Space Invaders. It might seem like one of those is "bribing" players to play while the other one isn't, but that's completely false. In game design terms, both are rewarding the players in the same fundamental way.
In real terms, arena is still more rewarding. You can't get units from BG. When I calculated the opportunity cost of the time I was spending in BG compared to what that time would have been worth in the arena (as I shifted my time from arena to BG this was a real time trade) BG was costing me thousands of units a month. It was enough to cause me to completely reevaluate my time split between the two modes.
Also, BG is only a great source of rewards if you win. The developers designed the rewards based on a calculation of the average amount of rewards players who participated would get. For every player getting tons of rewards, there are lots of others getting only a few. In a competitive game mode like BG, this is something you're going to tend to see. The mode is an awesome mode for rewards. For the winners. But you aren't averaging across the thousands of players stuck in Bronze, or the thousands of players that spent all season to get to Silver 2. For them the rewards relative to time spent is not all that fantastic.
It is still *decent* though which is the point. There are no winners if there aren't also losers. The wins have to come from somewhere.
Comments
It can still be competitive without the need to take away tokens and require winning 3 or 4 IN A ROW. It doesn't take much for one or two little things to go wrong before you're back at square 0 in your tier.
Everything else can basically stay the same....I think.
Except for the bugs...they definitely need to go. 🐛 🐛 🐛 🐛🪲🐞🪲🐞
The store could be adjusted. Some prices in the store don't make sense.
But that's it 😁
..for now
Bronze-Gold: Prestige matchmaking and no token loss.
Platnum-Vibranium: Random matchmaking and token loss.
That'll give the small accounts three whole levels basically guaranteed every season and if they want to earn more they need to progress. It will also allow the top accounts to properly move to the appropriate tiers. Kabam still can sell shields as most people don't use them in the lower levers anyway. Win/win/win.
That’s 9 tiers, meaning over than half VT tiers with a favouring matchmaking.
Maximum should be 5-6 tiers, or Silver1-2.
Also, if Kabam wants to sell Victory Shields they need to change them.
They should burn only when you lose, not when you win the match.
Meaning they should persist between VT matches until you lose, and burn to protect from losing the token.
Also their price is very high.
90 units (or ~3.5$) for a chance to protect from a token loss, is a lot.
Dr. Zola
It's not a free ride. People are earning their way up.
If you're a 15k Prestige Account and you don't want to face 17k Prestige Accounts, so you blame the 10k who aren't, you're not taking responsibility for your own failures.
So when a game element is designed with and implemented to satisfy a design intent, you can't' just say well, so what. If the designer caves to that, they don't deserve that job. Nor will they likely have it long.
It is a rare day when I suggest directly to the devs that they should just hand the players something for free (except in jest). It does happen, but only under extremely narrow and defensible situations. Because as a professional designer myself and someone actually aware of the design constraints involved, I would consider that to be insulting.
Sure, there are a lot of things that could be better with the game, and some things I think are just straight up wrong. The BG system as a whole is one of those things in particular I've been critical of. But Kabam is a game studio composed of a number of different individual developers. They are not a hive mind. Regardless of whether you think something has gone wrong in the game, you can't tell an individual game designer that since the game has flaws in one area, they shouldn't bother to try to do their job properly in their area. The economy designers are not just going to burn their spreadsheets just because the Battlegrounds game mode isn't working right. Their job is to hold the line on the game economy until the system designers fix their stuff.
That can sometimes make it seem like the game is schizophrenic, the game doesn't work right here, and they aren't willing to just bend over backwards over there to compensate and just continues on as if nothing's wrong. But that's just how it goes.
If you want to play peewee football with all your heart and effort fine, just expect your prizes to be 4 and 5* shards....even more than a reduced store.
The first 3 Brackets wouldn't be a free ride. That judgment keeps being thrown out, but people refuse to respect the fact that anyone advancing is playing the competition and winning their Matches. They're earning their way. They're not being given anything for free just because they're not being mopped by the highest Accounts in there.
For all the problems that alliance war has, it has one property that is different from BG that makes it much easier to manage as a competitive mode. Everyone fights the same number of wars. You can't try to jump ahead by fighting thirteen wars or twenty three wars. Everyone has twelve wars to get as far as they can get. In BG, that's not true: everyone can fight a different number of matches.
Now, in GC, this has limited benefits due to ELO matching. At some point you're going to be matching against people roughly as strong as you. So you would expect to win about half your matches. But if you're winning 50/50, you can't really expect to rise any higher, because you'll tend to stabilize where you are. Now, you could push, and you could get lucky, and in fact since a 50/50 win rate means you're going to be randomly moving up and down, if you play *enough* matches you could still rise higher even at a 50/50 win rate. You could also drop substantially, so you would have to decide how hard to push. But once you reach 50/50, it would take an *enormous* amount of matches to push significantly beyond that point (cf: random walk statistics).
The idea in VT was to create a similar situation but without ELO matching. Instead the idea was to use trophies as a way to emulate the idea of "when you get to 50/50 you stabilize." At first glance, if you win one and lose one, you're back to where you started. But in fact, that's not exactly what happens because you can only lose so much. Once you drop to the bottom of your current tier you can't backslide below it. So in fact, your win/loss pattern skews upward. Even 50/50 drifts upward slowly. This was deliberate on the part of the devs: they wanted players to have some way to progress upward, they wanted to encourage participation by making it so that even when you reached the highest tier you would likely reach there was no harm in continuing to try (you couldn't drop below the highest track you achieved) but there was still a substantial benefit to playing stronger - having a higher win percentage.
The system thus implements implicitly in the math a non-proportional benefit curve to win percentage. As I calculated in another thread small changes in win percentage have a dramatic impact on how fast you advance up VT. I don't think the precise details of this were explicitly chosen, but I think the idea itself was something the devs actually wanted to have (and I know for a fact that they were aware of these numbers, having arrived at them internally by other means).
A low win percentage will still (in theory) allow a player to advance in the lower tracks but as the number of trophies rise, it gets harder and harder disproportionately. Their progress is soft capped based on their level of effort and their win percentage.
Now, judged in this context, I believe any attempt to remove trophy loss completely without accounting for this will likely fail, as it will open the door to proportional progress. Meaning, a much weaker player can still advance just as far as a much stronger player by simply doing proportionately more matches. Consider that in practice someone with a 75% win rate is *enormously* stronger than a player with a 37.5% win rate, but is still only winning twice as many matches. This means a very weak player could simply do twice as much matches as a very strong player and still advance just as far. Or, equally problematic, a very weak player could *overtake* a very strong player by just buying more energy or marks. This is always possible, even in the current system, but in the current system a weaker player has to do many times more matches than a strong one (at the moment a 33% player must do, on average, 8.6 times more matches than a 75% player to reach GC).
Although we want to remove some of the biases built into the match system and we want to try to remove some of the more blatant frustration points while we are at it, we have to remember that the game mode is still intended to be a competitive mode, and even in the VT there's intended to be a balance between participation encouragement and competitive achievement. The current system tries to implement a significant enough penalty for losing that actually having to win is still important, and stronger players still benefit more than weaker players, even if we are talking about players that are not GC-quality players. Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players. We can try to soften that, but we can't completely eliminate that, or the mode becomes too much like an overly complicated arena.
In fact, I recall a developer explicitly stating that back when BG was still in closed alpha/beta. Battlegrounds is not intended to be another arena. Essentially, you play it, you might play it a lot, but you don't mindlessly grind it until you get what you want. If you attempt to do that, you'll be grinding for an excessively long time, deliberately so.
Although to be honest I would have been happier if this discussion was completely unnecessary. However, history says this is unavoidable because a) the devs need to see how much players are currently dissatisfied (and more importantly why), and b) because just as with Alliance War we won't have peace in our time unless all of this is hashed out publicly, so the people in the minority can't resort to thinking they represent the silent majority.
Just as with Alliance war, this is being portrayed either directly or indirectly as an elitist objection: the top suppressing the bottom. Or as an entitlement problem, with the bottom feeders just looking for a handout. But just as with Alliance War, if it was just the top 1% trying to bully the bottom 99% they would fail. This is not about Paragons trying to bully Uncollecteds, because the players impacted negatively exist across all progress tiers. And it isn't about reward handouts either. The longer the situation persists, the longer it is discussed and argued, and the more players become informed about the issues (the forums are a very tiny subset of the playerbase, and discussions here can take a very long time to diffuse out to the larger player population) the more likely that just as with Alliance War this will be seen as a universal problem by a majority of the players. All of the players negatively affected, plus enough of the players unaffected that share the same notion of what a fair competition is.
The purpose of discussing the problem isn't to convince everyone else who's right and who's wrong. It isn't to "win." It is to keep mindshare of the problem. I believe the more people who think about it, and the more time they devote to thinking about it, the more likely a majority of them will come to the same conclusions. I trust that will happen, because a) I'm convinced most people believe at least the same core general things when it comes to fairness and b) its already happened once before in exactly the same way.
To put it another way, I don't believe I need to convince anyone they are wrong. I just need to convince enough players to get off the sidelines.
- A 3mil 16K prestige account is fighting through VT to get to GC. Every tier gets battleground chips. if you make it to CG you are guaranteed 10K chips.
- A <1mil <12K account is also fighting to get the tiered rewards and the guaranteed 10K chips.
so the SAME rewards that alot of ppl are annoyed about is the 10K chips for getting to the GC.
The second issue lies with prestige and account size
a 8K account and a 10K account is going to be very similar roster diversity. this really makes the matchmaking even and the lower accounts can progress with the "best man wins" narrative. Conversely, a 1.6mil 14k account is matching with a 4mil 16K account (that same 2k difference) and roster diversity is going to be VERY different. the 1.6mil account may have 5 R4s while the 4mil account may have +20 R4s, +50 R3s and so on. Not only does the 4mil account have overall strength, but they have the champions in their deck to support the monthly node.
for me, I have 5 R5s and a 1.6mil rating (2 maxed sig, 2 mid sig and 1 undupped). I now match with everyone else that has 5 x R5s no matter if they have 5 or 30 in their deck because prestige only accounts for your top 5 champions. until a few weeks ago, the highest rated accounts didn't have any R5s so that means i could literally be matched with the giant pool of players that far outmatched my account.
because of the VAST difference in account diversity vs prestige, the 12-15K prestige players are getting unfair matches that do not support "best player wins" which is why there is so much animosity to the matchmaking process.
“Even among the VT, there is still the need for the stronger VT players to succeed over the weaker VT players”
Does this even happening with the current matchmaking?
Because currently many weaker VT players are succeeding over many stronger VT players.
It maybe be happening within each Prestige silo separately, but when you consider the whole picture of all, the opposite is happening at very high percentages.
Without the completion objectives then number of players will tail off dramatically and complaints about match making will be how long it takes.
The entire design is supported by it and can't stand up without it. Definition of a flawed design if you ask me.
What people are complaining about is that lower Accounts than their own are succeeding to the GC, and they're not. That's the real issue for some. They're offended that Players with less Rating and Titles are doing better than them. Only, BGs doesn't score on Titles. It doesn't score on how much larger your Rating is than others in the same Brackets. Not until the GC at least, then it becomes a free-for-all. Even then, the scoring is the same.
BGs is a game mode that scores based on the same metrics. No matter how tough or weak the Champs are you come up against, you score the same.
The idea that Players are weaker because their opponents are weaker is blind to the fact that they're winning proportionately difficult Matches to what they have, the same as others are losing proportionately difficult Matches to what they're bringing. They're not weaker. Their Accounts have weaker Champs. Evidently they're not weaker at BGs because they have enough skill to advance. Give them stronger Champs, they'd likely win the same.
You believe that if an UC player was given the same deck as a Paragon player (or vice versa), the UC player would win?
That’s a really hot take 🤔
These lower players have enough skills to advance over other inexperienced lower players.
They are weaker from higher accounts, not only roster wise but also game knowledge (champions/nodes interaction), and on average skill wise.
Yet they can place higher 😂😂😂
There's a whole assumption that people have lower Accounts because they're less skilled at the game. That's not entirely true. Some are skilled. They're still developing their Accounts. The VT is pretty self-explanatory. You have the same Nodes all month long. Pick a Defense, pick an Attack, score more Points than your opponent.
Then fighting Kitty with Warlock I launched an SP2 interception and the AI somehow kept swiping at my character during the SP2 and took a large portion of my health during the Special attack!? Never have experienced anything like that before. Then I went to launch a Special and as soon as I hit the Special button the AI threw it’s special somehow before me and annihilated me.
These issues are annoying and make progressing in VT harder. I’ve been at 2 medals 3 times now but don’t want to buy victory shields and then loose a fight or two and have to keep grinding to progress one tier. Paragon and still in Gold track.
Saying that BG is flawed because it has to give out a lot of rewards is like saying AQ is flawed or EoP is flawed or Act 8 is flawed for the same reasons. A purist might say that if the game mode was actually good enough it wouldn't need to offer rewards. But that's an invalid stance, because of the type of game MCOC is. MCOC is a progressional game at its core. All games "reward" players for playing them in some fashion, and MCOC does so by offering paths to roster and content progression. Those game rewards are not so much "necessary" as they are foundational. They are in effect the way players keep score. Getting more 6* crystals is like getting half a million points in Space Invaders. It might seem like one of those is "bribing" players to play while the other one isn't, but that's completely false. In game design terms, both are rewarding the players in the same fundamental way.
In real terms, arena is still more rewarding. You can't get units from BG. When I calculated the opportunity cost of the time I was spending in BG compared to what that time would have been worth in the arena (as I shifted my time from arena to BG this was a real time trade) BG was costing me thousands of units a month. It was enough to cause me to completely reevaluate my time split between the two modes.
Also, BG is only a great source of rewards if you win. The developers designed the rewards based on a calculation of the average amount of rewards players who participated would get. For every player getting tons of rewards, there are lots of others getting only a few. In a competitive game mode like BG, this is something you're going to tend to see. The mode is an awesome mode for rewards. For the winners. But you aren't averaging across the thousands of players stuck in Bronze, or the thousands of players that spent all season to get to Silver 2. For them the rewards relative to time spent is not all that fantastic.
It is still *decent* though which is the point. There are no winners if there aren't also losers. The wins have to come from somewhere.