I’m optimistic we will see some of these changes implemented. It doesn’t really take that much—but I do believe it’s vitally important to keep BGs viable, and I don’t think the current system does that.
I’m optimistic we will see some of these changes implemented. It doesn’t really take that much—but I do believe it’s vitally important to keep BGs viable, and I don’t think the current system does that.
Dr. Zola
Jax calling me out on the twitch stream was basically an acknowledgement they've read the thread. Kabam John's reaction is how I picture Kabam devs always reacting to my suggestions. With a mix of amusement, anxiety, and horror.
As I said, I know they are thinking this through, and while I'm hopeful they come up with something sooner than later, I recognize they have full plates of stuff to do.
Yes, I'm hopeful that something can be instituted that addresses as many of the concerns as possible. Which is the best we can all aim for, really. Something for everyone.
I love this @DNA3000 and yes I usually win when I play in the morning time, that is when its the ghostly hours in USA and canada. By win what I mean is I get fairly good match making. So losing some of them also doesnt hurt that much mentally as I lose a fair game due to the other persons skilled choice of champs and gameplay.
Thanks for this well thought out post. Appreciate it.
@DNA3000 what do you think about VT matchmaking where player have rating like AW (No idea about how GC matchmaking works), so everyone is matched according to their performance, playing good yields better rewards, faster progress and strong opponents. I didn't brainstormed about it yet. I got few insights from your suggestion will try to come up with some additional idea.
Very good suggestions. Will make battlegrounds infintely better.
Just a couple of points: 1. Your scoring system needs to take into account withdrawals. I assume if someone disconnects or withdraws from the match, the opponent gets 1 trophy instead of 2?
2. The one tier drop might not be enough. The nodes vary like crazy and therefore people tend to rank up faster based on roster. For example, i had the best counters to last seasons' meta so it was by best performance. I would therefore have overperformed in that meta and now that the meta is not as roster dependent, i may underperform compared to my tier in this meta. We may need to have a bigger swing drop from season to season. May be have everyone who placed from bronze to gold should drop to bronze 3, rest of VT drops to gold 3 and GC drops to platinum 3. Or some version of that. It can be easily determined with 4 seasons of data as to where people typically place and their stary
@DNA3000 what do you think about VT matchmaking where player have rating like AW (No idea about how GC matchmaking works), so everyone is matched according to their performance, playing good yields better rewards, faster progress and strong opponents. I didn't brainstormed about it yet. I got few insights from your suggestion will try to come up with some additional idea.
I think that might require a wholesale move to a points based system for milestones. Where (to stop sandbagging) if you lose a lot you get lower points for a win, slowing your progression to milestones.
You could have points boosters for number of consecutive wins in a row. The downside is that progressing players might reach a ceiling quite quickly with available points for a win throttled and much slower milestone progression. A bigger adaptation from todays mode.
@DNA3000 what do you think about VT matchmaking where player have rating like AW (No idea about how GC matchmaking works), so everyone is matched according to their performance, playing good yields better rewards, faster progress and strong opponents. I didn't brainstormed about it yet. I got few insights from your suggestion will try to come up with some additional idea.
I think that might require a wholesale move to a points based system for milestones. Where (to stop sandbagging) if you lose a lot you get lower points for a win, slowing your progression to milestones.
You could have points boosters for number of consecutive wins in a row. The downside is that progressing players might reach a ceiling quite quickly with available points for a win throttled and much slower milestone progression. A bigger adaptation from todays mode.
That's the whole idea but currently i am suggesting it just for matchmaking part. No change needed in current milestone system.
@DNA3000 what do you think about VT matchmaking where player have rating like AW (No idea about how GC matchmaking works), so everyone is matched according to their performance, playing good yields better rewards, faster progress and strong opponents. I didn't brainstormed about it yet. I got few insights from your suggestion will try to come up with some additional idea.
I think that might require a wholesale move to a points based system for milestones. Where (to stop sandbagging) if you lose a lot you get lower points for a win, slowing your progression to milestones.
You could have points boosters for number of consecutive wins in a row. The downside is that progressing players might reach a ceiling quite quickly with available points for a win throttled and much slower milestone progression. A bigger adaptation from todays mode.
That's the whole idea but currently i am suggesting it just for matchmaking part. No change needed in current milestone system.
I think that if you change the matchmaking but not anything else people would just tank their rating at each level - silver, gold etc till they got easier matches and progress that way. Like alliances used to do in war.
For me, I don't understand why a BG rating isn't applied to a player as a matchmaking exercise then use DNA's suggestion for the win/loss tokens. You can lose 25 in a row deliberately but all that means is you are 25 wins behind where you should be and you'll have to climb over those who didn't sandbag. Yeah, some noobs will suffer but they will only fight them once on their climb.
People playing for objectives will still get them.
People who want to be in GC asap will still get there.
Low level accounts can still sweep up objectives and grab some tier rewards but they probably won't get as far as they have this season, everyone is equal and deserves a ribbon has to stop.
My TB alt, with 10 champs above 10k and the rest unlevelled (turns out you need to play to earn gold) is in silver (something, I dont look, 1 maybe?) with one loss since I started the other day. People with better accounts than mine do inexplicable things, I have no idea how these people have progressed through story mode to get their title and managed to climb the BG ranks with some of their attacker/defender decisions but given how hard my main has fought since bronze3, the current system is terrible.
I like the change to the tokens - I think that will definitely help with the frustration people are expressing.
Personally I don’t like the suggestion to start higher in the VT, my reason for that is I actually enjoy the process of moving through the victory track. However if that would be what’s best for everyone I could live with it fine.
Appreciate the time and thought you put into this @DNA3000. Emotion taken out of the suggestions.
Then perhaps I'm misunderstanding your suggestion about the Trophies. I read it as, if you win 2 Trophies to your opponent's 0, you win 2 more. Perhaps you could elaborate. I saw the 1/2 as a Win, with no Trophies added.
These numbers refer to fights, not matches. A BG match is a best out of three. At the moment two wins gains a trophy in the match and two losses costs you a trophy. The proposed system adds two possibilities: you can win by skunking your opponent two to zero, or you can win with a split result winning two while your opponent wins one. The stronger win earns you two trophies instead of one. Meanwhile two losses and no wins still costs a trophy, but one win and two losses - meaning you won at least one of the first two fights - will allow you to retain your trophies and not lose any. So you slide backwards only when you get creamed. If you at least put up a decent fight, you can at least stay where you are and avoid losing trophies.
Winning the match either earns you one trophy or two. Losing either costs you a trophy or allows you to stay even. No player would be worse off under this scoring system under any circumstances, at least in a per fight sense.
The one type of person that might not benefit would be if someone out there is always winning but always winning 2-1. Such a person is currently advancing as fast as possible but under the proposed system they would not gain any of the benefits of winning 2-0 but would have to progress through a longer trophy track. This is not impossible, but I think such people would be very rare.
It's less rare than you'd think honestly. I win A LOT of matches 2-1 by throwing the first round to remove their hardest defender or best attacker bc I know I have much higher odds to more easily win rounds 2 and 3. I probably COULD win a decent amount of those by going all out the first two rounds but in a lot of situations it's a much smarter play to concede a round to basically guarantee an overall win
To add more, if a player makes GC they are guaranteed to start the next season at or near the top of VT?
Does this force/punish players who excelled in one seasons VT to playing at the top of the next season until they reach GC? Does this not deny them the choice of largely opting out of GC (the actual competition)?
Wouldn’t this also decrease player engagement by forcing them to play at a higher level constantly based on performance under the entirely different challenges of last season?
The nodes change and being able to even play can largely depend on roster. Wouldn’t this doom players without the roster to treading water or even just outright drown them?
I think Kabam needs to explicitly state the purpose of VT and GC matchmaking so that players can better understand their purpose and goals. That alone would go a long way towards the complaints about the perceived disparities of VT and GC matchmaking.
This is why I suggested a tiered start based not just on where you finish but how quickly you get to that point. A player that hits GC the first week every season and a player that gets to GC towards the end of the final week are still VASTLY different player types.
My 11yr old, who is TB, swears by that technique by baiting out an excited opponent who placed their best defender then uses their best attacker in rd 1 since his account isn't great.
All good suggestions and really well thought out. If the developers are taking notice, hopefully some changes come soon. Without that, it’s just get objectives every 2 days for me.
It is, however, worth noting that there has not been a single suggestion that everyone has unanimously agreed with.
Challenge accepted.
In my opinion, the Battlegrounds game mode has three primary issues that I believe represent the majority of objections for the design of BG. Things like modding and other cheating are excluded from this, as this is a matter of managing the mode, not designing the mode. I call these three issues the three Fs (most people just call them one F): Frustration, Frivolousness, and Fairness. I'm going to tackle all three in one overarching set of suggestions. To keep things reasonably readable, I'm not going to overly justify every single suggestion, but I will say that I have discussed all three to at least some length elsewhere on the forums.
There is a TL;DR at the end, but I still think it is worth reviewing the why and the details of each suggestion in the TL;DR. Details matter.
Frustration
I think there are a lot of players who experience some degree of frustration due to a particular design decision: you can lose tropies. There are reasons why this decision exists, but the simplified version is: the intent was for players in VT to experience something similar to players who are competing in GC experience: eventually you rise to your level of competition and start winning at a 50% rate. The "win one lose one" trophy scoring system is intended to, in a sense, create a situation where a player will eventually stop climbing. This isn't strictly true but the *intent* was for players to climb quickly, winning and not losing trophies, when they were stronger than the competition, and then stop (or at least radically slow) progressing when they reach equal competition.
However, in practice this doesn't happen as gracefully. For one thing, BG seasons do not last long enough for competitors to "sort" themselves out. Most players don't reach this "equal competition" point. And players do not just alternate wins and losses. Sometimes they win a few, sometimes they lose a few. But regardless, there's a psychological impact to the way this works that goes beyond the math. Even when this is working as intended, it is psychologically crushing.
No one wants to play a game mode where they win one and lose one, when what they see is they gain a trophy then lose a trophy. Losing progress is awful for most players. Now, if you are one of the top 5% of players, you're going to lose one only every so often. It sucks, but it is not hard to shake it off and move on. When you're winning and losing back and forth often, you will be losing almost as many trophies as you are gaining. You are constantly backsliding, constantly losing progress. There is nothing more disheartening than finally winning two trophies after dozens of matches, only to lose two in a row and be back to square one.
Nothing can completely eliminate this, in fact in a competition you don't ever want to eliminate the pain of losing entirely. However, I believe there's a way to greatly soften the blow. We change how we award trophies. Right now we get one for a win, and we lose one for a loss. My recommendation:
If you win a match two wins to zero, you gain two trophies If you win a match two wins to one loss, you gain one trophy If you lose a match one win to two losses, you stay even If you lose a match zero wins to two losses, you lose one trophy
What does this do? Well, it does four separate things simultaneously:
1. Very strong players will advance faster than less strong players. This rewards competitively stronger players in VT.
2. By virtue of #1 above, this accelerates the sorting of players in VT. When the stronger players promote faster, the less strong players don't have to compete against them in the lower levels. There's fewer losses whose sole reason for happening is to allow the stronger players to climb over the rest to get to GC (or higher VT).
3. This reduces the pain of backsliding. Players who lose will backslide less, because 50% of their losses will not result in loss of trophies.
4. This decreases the sense of futility in matches that appear to be lost. Sometimes random chance will put you up against a player that just seems to have your number, or the draft will hand you a disadvantageous situation. It can be easy to just throw up your hands and give up, and blame the game for screwing you. But with this type of scoring, even in bad situations there's still something to play for. Instead of trying against hope to win the match and avoid losing a trophy, you could at least try to steal one win. Get one win, and at least you don't go backwards. Not only does this give you something to fight for, it also reduces the opportunity to psychologically blame all losses on the match system or random chance. It would be more likely that you had at least some chance to get one win and save the match, putting your fate at least nominally in your hands.
Because this scoring system also increases the speed of advance through VT, VT tiers will almost certainly require more trophies to advance. My tentative recommendation here is to increase Bronze from two to three, Silver and Gold from three to four, Platinum and Diamond from three to five, Diamond 1 from four to six, and Vibranium from five to seven. However, these numbers may need to be adjusted for player advancement rates.
Frivolousness
Many players believe that it doesn't make sense that a player spends time climbing all the way up to GC, then starts again at Bronze 3 the following season and has to do it all over again. The counter-argument is that just because they climbed that high, doesn't mean they should automatically bypass that requirement next season. But in fact, this requirement doesn't just impact the higher tier players. It also hurts everyone else, as the only way for those players to climb back to GC is to step all over the weaker players. Every time they win, another weaker player has to lose, and potentially lose trophies. Top tier players are not winning trophies, they are taking trophies away from lesser players. So the notion that allowing them to start higher is just handing them an advantage is false. It is not just letting them get to GC sooner, it is also letting everyone else keep more trophies in the process.
But if we allow players to start higher than Bronze 3, we are actually taking rewards away from them. A big chunk of rewards comes from the advancement through VT itself. If a player were to start at GC directly, for example, they'd be out a ton of rewards (something like 135900 tokens for one). They would need a way to earn those rewards.
I say earn. Some have suggested just handing them those rewards. That won't work for three reasons: first, if they are just handed those rewards, they wouldn't even need to play BG to get them. We'd be rewarding players over and over for something they did a while ago. Second, this would be exploitable. There would be ways for players to participate minimally and still get tons of rewards. And third, VT rewards only exist to promote participation. Kabam will not give participation rewards to players who don't participate, because that's just dumb.
The way we can allow players to start at higher tiers while still earning those rewards is to use the same objective system that is currently used to give VT players access to other participation rewards. We make one objective for each VT track, and if a player starts higher than that track they gain access to those objectives. So if a player starts at Silver 3, they get objectives for Bronze 2 and Bronze 1 (consecutively) that they can fulfill by actually playing BG. These objectives expire at the end of the season, so they can only earn them in the season they start higher.
Where should a player start? In my opinion, we can't start them where they left off. There should be some decay in the system. Otherwise once a player fights their way into GC, they get all the VT rewards forever without even needing to win a match in GC. That's too exploitable, and too tempting for players to try to game the system. A safer option is to start players one full tier lower. So if they end in Bronze or Silver, they start at the beginning again. If they end anywhere in Gold, they start at Silver 3 (the beginning of Silver). If they end in Platinum they start at Gold 3 (the beginning of Gold). Etc. Even GC players will have to start at Vibranium and fight their way back into GC. Also, this decay is per season. If you end at Vibranium you will start the next season in Diamond. But even if you don't play any matches, you will start the following season in Gold (because you "started" the last season in Platinum whether you played any matches or not). Idle players will eventually decay back to the start.
The net result is top tier players don't have to grind all the way through VT again, which not only helps them but it also helps everyone else who no longer has to lose to them (losing trophies in the process). And weaker players will not have to face stronger players, even in the VT, to the same degree they do now, particularly at the start of the season when everyone "resets."
Fairness
The big banana. Probably the most controversial issue in BG. Right now, observations strongly imply that when the devs eliminated deck-based matching they implement some form of roster strength matching instead. In other words, the game "measures" your roster strength and uses that to find "equal" matches. It is like prestige matching, but probably not actually prestige (it is probably something like prestige but calculated over your top 30 champs rather than top 5, but no one knows with absolute certainty). In any event, roster strength matching has basically all the same issues that prestige matching has. But to explain what those are, it is important to take a moment to explain how ELO matching works, and why it is used. In particular, it is used in Alliance War matching, and even in the GC of Battlegrounds itself.
ELO matching calculates a rating score for every competitor that is based on their wins and losses. Specifically, whenever you win or lose to another opponent, the game increases your rating if you win and decreases your rating if you lose (same for your opponent). Moreover, the stronger your opponent the larger the change. If you beat an opponent with higher rating your own rating goes up more than if you beat someone with lower rating. The math is complicated but explicitly designed to push all competitors to a "natural" rating which represents how strong they actually are, based on how well they do against everyone else. If two competitors have 1700 rating, they should win against each other about half the time. If one has 1800 and the other has 1700, you'd expect the 1800 to win more often (the percentage advantage is actually calculable).
The implicit assumption built into ELO matching is that all things being equal, players should have to face equally strong players. And ELO defines how strong they are. Roster strength does not define how strong a player is. A player with a large roster can be weaker than a player with a much smaller roster in actual gameplay. We don't match rosters, we match players. And ELO is self-correcting. We have no idea how strong a player is until we watch him play. But even if we assign a totally random rating to that player, their rating will move towards the correct one. If we give him a rating that is lower than his actual strength he will win more often (because he will be matching against players equal to his rating, which is lower than his actual strength), and his rating will go up. If we give him a rating that is higher than his actual strength he will lose more often and his rating will go down.
The mechanics of ELO mean that over time everyone will match closer to their actual playing strength, because their rating keeps changing to reflect their strength. Any other metric that is independent of win/loss record fails in this. If we match with any other criteria, be it prestige or roster strength or the height of the player, those metrics cannot possibly accurately measure the player's true battlegrounds strength. They will be "wrong." But for every player whose matching metric is wrong, it will basically be permanently wrong. If they are being matched against players weaker than they are, they will always match against the same weaker players, getting a free ride to GC. If they are being matched against stronger players, they will always match against those same stronger players and get screwed. And there's nothing they can do about it.
The discussion surrounding this problem has morphed into a discussion of whether it is fair for Paragons to face Uncollected players or if it is fair for Cavalier players to only fight other Cav players. But this actually misses the real problem. The real problem is not that the current roster strength system makes it easier for Cavs and harder for Paragons. Not all Paragons are hurt by the current system. Not all Uncollecteds are helped. Rather, the problem is for every roster strength from UC to Paragon, there are players who are matching against incorrect competition because we are using a metric that doesn't represent their true strength. And the game is currently ignoring everyone's win/loss record that is telling the game who is stronger and who is weaker.
Weaker players are getting matched against stronger players. Not just Paragons, not just Uncollecteds, but everyone across the entire game. Some players are getting an unfair advantage and some are getting an unfair disadvantage, and the system never self-corrects this. In Alliance War, even new alliances that start with zero rating quickly climb to higher ratings because they win. Because they win, their rating improves, until they are fighting the right competition. In Battlegrounds GC, the same thing happens. Winners climb the rating ladder and are forced to face other winners who are also climbing the rating ladder. Losers fall, but they then face other loses and have a chance to climb back up again.
(Almost) Everyone wants fair competition in general. Everyone says fair competition is where people face "equal" competition. But the problem is everyone defines "equal" differently. I believe the correct definition is: equal competition is when equally strong competitors face each other. Not when equal rosters face each other. Not when equal decks face each other. When equal competitors face each other.
This is probably the most controversial issue across all Battleground issues. I don't really expect to gain perfect consensus here. But I think even this most radioactive of disputes has at least some general consensus. The problem is that some people don't actually want perfectly fair competition, because there's another factor to consider: participation. Competitions are meant for competitors but not all players are equally interested and driven to compete. But the BG game mode needs participants. It needs to fill its turnstile. It needs players to match each other, in real time. Without that density of participants, the mode will fail.
The devs recognized this as well, which is why BG even has a VT and GC. The GC is the pure competition for the top competitors. The VT is intended to be a more balanced participation-driven and competition-driven mode. We want people to participate in VT, but we don't want to wreck the competitive elements completely. Some people feel that roster-matching is more appropriate to encourage participation. And I agree, to a point.
We already have two match systems: roster strength and ELO. They already exist. And I think most people would agree or at least accept that in the very early stages of VT, roster matching is not altogether wrong. In fact I would argue it makes perfect sense. ELO requires actual matches to "refine" its numbers. Until a player has played enough matches, won and lost enough fights against enough players, their ELO score is simply a guess. That guess gets better the more matches they play. So it is fair to say that there is at least some window of time where ELO is not actually as good as it nominally is. So if we know two things about a player, their roster strength and their ELO, but their ELO is shaky, there's no reason why we couldn't match on roster strength until we had enough confidence in ELO to start using ELO.
Ideally we would want a match system that started off looking like Roster matching and ended up looking like ELO matching. So what if instead of inventing a new match system we created a sliding scale of matching. We create a new metric, a "confidence metric" that tells us how much to "trust" ELO. This starts at zero. Every time the player enlists, we randomly pick Roster Match or ELO Match. The confidence score tells us how often to use ELO. When it is at zero, the player will always match Roster. But as confidence rises, the probability they will match according to their ELO also rises. When the confidence score is 50, the game will match them by Roster 50% of the time and ELO 50% of the time. Over time, the player will get "exposed" to more and more ELO-driven matches. If they were getting all weak matches and they were winning most of the time, their match ups will get stronger. Conversely if they were getting all strong matches and they were losing most of the time, their match ups will get weaker over time to a more appropriate level. And when confidence reaches 100, the player will be matching ELO all the time, and leave Roster matching behind.
We could simply set confidence to the number of matches played times ten. So after ten matches players were pure ELO. Or we could do this by tier: all Bronze tier players have confidence zero, all Silver players have confidence 25, and so on. My preference is for players to have confidence zero for their first five matches, then have confidence increase by 10 for every match lost and 15 for every match won.
Also, anyone who starts higher than Bronze due to #2 retains their ELO and confidence rating.
By the way, we have to TELL the players what's going on. The players will never trust a match system they don't understand and have no idea what's happening, and that's especially true of this one. If they are getting a Roster match or an ELO match, the game has to signal that. Otherwise the player will just be mystified why they are sometimes getting strong matches and sometimes weak ones, seemingly randomly (because it is). Players have to understand why the game is doing what it is doing so at least they can comprehend why the game is behaving the way it is. They might not agree, but it is much worse when they think the game is being randomly capricious.
Okay, so here's the TL;DR:
1. Change scoring from win = +1 trophy loss = -1 trophy to:
Win 2/0 = +2 trophies Win 2/1 = +1 trophy Loss 1/2 = even Loss 0/2 = -1 trophy
Increase number of tokens required to promote to compensate.
2. Start everyone one full tier lower than they ended the previous season. If the player ended in GC, start in Vibranium. Add solo objectives to allow players starting higher in VT to earn the missed VT progress rewards.
3. Start everyone matching by Roster strength, use a confidence parameter to slowly shift to ELO matching.
Yeah, I don't actually think I'm going to get universal agreement to all of this, or even any of this. But I believe this represents something most players would accept as reasonably fair for the most part, and acceptable enough where it isn't, at least compared to the current system. But, time to find out. Kabam thinks we don't all agree how to move BG forward, and they are right: we don't all agree. But can we is the real question.
Also, I did try to keep this as short as possible. I really, really tried:
This is the best and most beautifully drafted forum post ever
I’ve tossed this idea to @DNA3000 (response: he didn’t think devs would like it), but I wonder whether it would help or hurt to have at least one change in VT nodes per season.
My thinking, which is admittedly still forming, is that it would enable players who don’t have optimal rosters for one VT meta to adjust with a *potentially* better chance in another. It would also reduce the staleness of VT for players.
One of the main counterpoints is that VT node changes might favor players with broader rosters, but if silos continue to be a thing with matchmaking, that’s really just a progressionally relative concern. Broader rosters likely always have an advantage in BGs.
Again, I haven’t fully thought through the idea, which is why I throw it out. Quite possible it has disastrous consequences I haven’t considered.
I’ve tossed this idea to @DNA3000 (response: he didn’t think devs would like it), but I wonder whether it would help or hurt to have at least one change in VT nodes per season.
My thinking, which is admittedly still forming, is that it would enable players who don’t have optimal rosters for one VT meta to adjust with a *potentially* better chance in another. It would also reduce the staleness of VT for players.
One of the main counterpoints is that VT node changes might favor players with broader rosters, but if silos continue to be a thing with matchmaking, that’s really just a progressionally relative concern. Broader rosters likely always have an advantage in BGs.
Again, I haven’t fully thought through the idea, which is why I throw it out. Quite possible it has disastrous consequences I haven’t considered.
Dr. Zola
The opposite would be true too: if people have a better time with the first VT node, but the second VT node sucks they’re going to have a miserable time.
I’m not suggesting there should be a nuke meta for VT, but there should be a fairly generic set of nodes that doesn’t restrict as it has in the past.
I’ve tossed this idea to @DNA3000 (response: he didn’t think devs would like it), but I wonder whether it would help or hurt to have at least one change in VT nodes per season.
My thinking, which is admittedly still forming, is that it would enable players who don’t have optimal rosters for one VT meta to adjust with a *potentially* better chance in another. It would also reduce the staleness of VT for players.
One of the main counterpoints is that VT node changes might favor players with broader rosters, but if silos continue to be a thing with matchmaking, that’s really just a progressionally relative concern. Broader rosters likely always have an advantage in BGs.
Again, I haven’t fully thought through the idea, which is why I throw it out. Quite possible it has disastrous consequences I haven’t considered.
Dr. Zola
The opposite would be true too: if people have a better time with the first VT node, but the second VT node sucks they’re going to have a miserable time.
I’m not suggesting there should be a nuke meta for VT, but there should be a fairly generic set of nodes that doesn’t restrict as it has in the past.
Right—if there are two node regimes in VT, neither should be restrictive in the sense most of us would think. But there are hundreds of potential nodes. I’d like to think the team can put a couple together almost as easily as they can come up with a single node for the entire season.
IMO, the 'best' solution is the one that is easiest to implement so the 2,1,0,-1 format won't work even if it's the 'best'. I'd say that either going with no token loss or a 2 for win -1 for loss is much more likely as it's just changing a single number in their code (2 instead of 1 for win or 0 instead of 1 for loss). I don't really care which they go with.
They obviously don't want to go w/ fair matchmaking because it would punish low accounts but they have to do something to make up for it for the bigger accounts.
That's my hang up. You're essentially starting a new Season with standings already built-in. That's not a competition. That's a carry-over system. I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on that front.
It's actually common place in many tournaments, particularly professional sports that players/teams pre-qualify based on past performance. Those that don't pre-qualify have to go through qualifying matches or rounds. You don't hear about this being unfair because: a) you don't want top performers running through participants just trying to qualify b) top performers don't want to waste their energy on matchups they're 99% likely to win
The suggestion by @DNA3000 is actually fairer because the pre-qualification is tiered... it's not automatic entry to GC.
That's my hang up. You're essentially starting a new Season with standings already built-in. That's not a competition. That's a carry-over system. I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on that front.
It's actually common place in many tournaments, particularly professional sports that players/teams pre-qualify based on past performance. Those that don't pre-qualify have to go through qualifying matches or rounds. You don't hear about this being unfair because: a) you don't want top performers running through participants just trying to qualify b) top performers don't want to waste their energy on matchups they're 99% likely to win
The suggestion by @DNA3000 is actually fairer because the pre-qualification is tiered... it's not automatic entry to GC.
We already go through that with War, and people fight month after month, in a locked system. They might go up a Bracket now and then, given circumstances, but everyone pretty much Ranks the same every Season. It's a closed system, and the only people who are progressing significantly from it are the top. That's not something I want to see in BGs. A Season should be measured based on that Season. Not carryover progress. Not unless it's limited, as I suggested with the Top Rankings earning limited skips. There's too much of a monopoly on the system the other way. Results are skewed before the Season starts, and no one progresses very far at all, really. Same people getting the same thing Season after Season. That's not a competition.
Then perhaps I'm misunderstanding your suggestion about the Trophies. I read it as, if you win 2 Trophies to your opponent's 0, you win 2 more. Perhaps you could elaborate. I saw the 1/2 as a Win, with no Trophies added.
These numbers refer to fights, not matches. A BG match is a best out of three. At the moment two wins gains a trophy in the match and two losses costs you a trophy. The proposed system adds two possibilities: you can win by skunking your opponent two to zero, or you can win with a split result winning two while your opponent wins one. The stronger win earns you two trophies instead of one. Meanwhile two losses and no wins still costs a trophy, but one win and two losses - meaning you won at least one of the first two fights - will allow you to retain your trophies and not lose any. So you slide backwards only when you get creamed. If you at least put up a decent fight, you can at least stay where you are and avoid losing trophies.
Winning the match either earns you one trophy or two. Losing either costs you a trophy or allows you to stay even. No player would be worse off under this scoring system under any circumstances, at least in a per fight sense.
The one type of person that might not benefit would be if someone out there is always winning but always winning 2-1. Such a person is currently advancing as fast as possible but under the proposed system they would not gain any of the benefits of winning 2-0 but would have to progress through a longer trophy track. This is not impossible, but I think such people would be very rare.
Ah, so I misunderstood. That sounds like an interesting concept. I don't really have any arguments that I can see with that.
@GroundedWisdom Starting out at some level based on previous season does NOT mean it is so locked in like AW is, where AW Tiers heavily dictate how many points you get (Tier Multiplier) compared to others, which yes is purely based on War Rating (and so in a sense, prior seasons play).
Everyone who was in GC in previous season would *ALL* start out at a relative 0 compared to each other. None of them start in GC (and definitely not higher than any others who also finished in GC too), they still have to all start out in the bracket below GC, and fight their way back into GC. Where they also do not have an advantage versus others based on previous year's GC rank.
They have to re-earn their GC Rank from scratch every season.
This I can't get behind no matter how you put it on paper. You're starting the Season with skewed results before it even begins. I've seen the result of that system before, and progress is minimal if any. People always end where they began and become entitled to keep that Ranking. That's not a competition. That's a combination of AQ and AW. It's a monopoly on Brackets. Sorry, but I disagree with that model.
I find it odd that you can be so against this stance. The people who are getting to the high tiers are the ones who are statistically most likely to have the highest win rates in the lower tiers. So the people that you are fast tracking in the competition, are the ones most likely to just stomp whoever they face in the early brackets anyway. Only a 1 Tier drop as suggested in the post is a little generous imo but the principle of it is absolutely fine. It's also a fantastic way to get people to continue to participate in the game mode because the work they put in this season can also help next season. Think of it this way, what if some of the rewards for coming GC were Victory Shields. The fundamental outcome of that wouldn't be any differentv than what this suggests. A proposal like this just removes grind, time sink, and frustration from everyone who participates in the game mode regardless if you are good or not. Plus you've been incredibly vocal that the competition doesn't start until GC anyway.
Then perhaps I'm misunderstanding your suggestion about the Trophies. I read it as, if you win 2 Trophies to your opponent's 0, you win 2 more. Perhaps you could elaborate. I saw the 1/2 as a Win, with no Trophies added.
These numbers refer to fights, not matches. A BG match is a best out of three. At the moment two wins gains a trophy in the match and two losses costs you a trophy. The proposed system adds two possibilities: you can win by skunking your opponent two to zero, or you can win with a split result winning two while your opponent wins one. The stronger win earns you two trophies instead of one. Meanwhile two losses and no wins still costs a trophy, but one win and two losses - meaning you won at least one of the first two fights - will allow you to retain your trophies and not lose any. So you slide backwards only when you get creamed. If you at least put up a decent fight, you can at least stay where you are and avoid losing trophies.
Winning the match either earns you one trophy or two. Losing either costs you a trophy or allows you to stay even. No player would be worse off under this scoring system under any circumstances, at least in a per fight sense.
The one type of person that might not benefit would be if someone out there is always winning but always winning 2-1. Such a person is currently advancing as fast as possible but under the proposed system they would not gain any of the benefits of winning 2-0 but would have to progress through a longer trophy track. This is not impossible, but I think such people would be very rare.
Ah, so I misunderstood. That sounds like an interesting concept. I don't really have any arguments that I can see with that.
@GroundedWisdom Starting out at some level based on previous season does NOT mean it is so locked in like AW is, where AW Tiers heavily dictate how many points you get (Tier Multiplier) compared to others, which yes is purely based on War Rating (and so in a sense, prior seasons play).
Everyone who was in GC in previous season would *ALL* start out at a relative 0 compared to each other. None of them start in GC (and definitely not higher than any others who also finished in GC too), they still have to all start out in the bracket below GC, and fight their way back into GC. Where they also do not have an advantage versus others based on previous year's GC rank.
They have to re-earn their GC Rank from scratch every season.
This I can't get behind no matter how you put it on paper. You're starting the Season with skewed results before it even begins. I've seen the result of that system before, and progress is minimal if any. People always end where they began and become entitled to keep that Ranking. That's not a competition. That's a combination of AQ and AW. It's a monopoly on Brackets. Sorry, but I disagree with that model.
I find it odd that you can be so against this stance. The people who are getting to the high tiers are the ones who are statistically most likely to have the highest win rates in the lower tiers. So the people that you are fast tracking in the competition, are the ones most likely to just stomp whoever they face in the early brackets anyway. Only a 1 Tier drop as suggested in the post is a little generous imo but the principle of it is absolutely fine. It's also a fantastic way to get people to continue to participate in the game mode because the work they put in this season can also help next season. Think of it this way, what if some of the rewards for coming GC were Victory Shields. The fundamental outcome of that wouldn't be any differentv than what this suggests. A proposal like this just removes grind, time sink, and frustration from everyone who participates in the game mode regardless if you are good or not. Plus you've been incredibly vocal that the competition doesn't start until GC anyway.
I'm against it because we've seen the results of that. First of all, it's a measurement of progress within the Season. Not progress from where you left off, minus one. Secondly, that locks (at the very least stunts) people from going past a certain point. Season after Season, the same people will occupy the top Brackets, progressing from that, gaining a leg up because of where they begin the next Season, and using the Rewards to maintain that spot. I'm all for people earning what they earn. I'm not supporting a repeat of a system that stunts growth on an individual Account level. Not by way of appeasing Players.
The entitlement of wanting everyone to start at 0 AND silo people into bands based on roster strength is just appalling. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I've been doing the win 2 lose 2 win 2 lose 2 dance for a week and I can tell you it's definitely affecting my mental health and love for this game mode....
The OP's post was SPOT ON... hopefully Kabam can use this as a great base on how to make this game mode better. The current format is still in tune with how BGs was built on initial release where you get rewarded for simply playing it A LOT... So the whole premise of knowing that most players will typically win 50% of their matches, and requiring a 66.7% win rate to advance to new levels you build a system where players will keep circling the same progression levels for the majority of the time and thus playing more often to try to progress. This is very much a Casino model of "The House Always Wins", where the house in this case is Kabam hoping to rake in units from elders marks, energy refills, and victory shields purchases from us to keep playing and try to protect our promotion matches to next levels.
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Dr. Zola
As I said, I know they are thinking this through, and while I'm hopeful they come up with something sooner than later, I recognize they have full plates of stuff to do.
Thanks for this well thought out post. Appreciate it.
Just a couple of points:
1. Your scoring system needs to take into account withdrawals. I assume if someone disconnects or withdraws from the match, the opponent gets 1 trophy instead of 2?
2. The one tier drop might not be enough. The nodes vary like crazy and therefore people tend to rank up faster based on roster. For example, i had the best counters to last seasons' meta so it was by best performance. I would therefore have overperformed in that meta and now that the meta is not as roster dependent, i may underperform compared to my tier in this meta. We may need to have a bigger swing drop from season to season. May be have everyone who placed from bronze to gold should drop to bronze 3, rest of VT drops to gold 3 and GC drops to platinum 3. Or some version of that. It can be easily determined with 4 seasons of data as to where people typically place and their stary
You could have points boosters for number of consecutive wins in a row. The downside is that progressing players might reach a ceiling quite quickly with available points for a win throttled and much slower milestone progression. A bigger adaptation from todays mode.
For me, I don't understand why a BG rating isn't applied to a player as a matchmaking exercise then use DNA's suggestion for the win/loss tokens. You can lose 25 in a row deliberately but all that means is you are 25 wins behind where you should be and you'll have to climb over those who didn't sandbag. Yeah, some noobs will suffer but they will only fight them once on their climb.
People playing for objectives will still get them.
People who want to be in GC asap will still get there.
Low level accounts can still sweep up objectives and grab some tier rewards but they probably won't get as far as they have this season, everyone is equal and deserves a ribbon has to stop.
My TB alt, with 10 champs above 10k and the rest unlevelled (turns out you need to play to earn gold) is in silver (something, I dont look, 1 maybe?) with one loss since I started the other day. People with better accounts than mine do inexplicable things, I have no idea how these people have progressed through story mode to get their title and managed to climb the BG ranks with some of their attacker/defender decisions but given how hard my main has fought since bronze3, the current system is terrible.
Personally I don’t like the suggestion to start higher in the VT, my reason for that is I actually enjoy the process of moving through the victory track. However if that would be what’s best for everyone I could live with it fine.
Appreciate the time and thought you put into this @DNA3000. Emotion taken out of the suggestions.
My thinking, which is admittedly still forming, is that it would enable players who don’t have optimal rosters for one VT meta to adjust with a *potentially* better chance in another. It would also reduce the staleness of VT for players.
One of the main counterpoints is that VT node changes might favor players with broader rosters, but if silos continue to be a thing with matchmaking, that’s really just a progressionally relative concern. Broader rosters likely always have an advantage in BGs.
Again, I haven’t fully thought through the idea, which is why I throw it out. Quite possible it has disastrous consequences I haven’t considered.
Dr. Zola
I’m not suggesting there should be a nuke meta for VT, but there should be a fairly generic set of nodes that doesn’t restrict as it has in the past.
Dr. Zola
They obviously don't want to go w/ fair matchmaking because it would punish low accounts but they have to do something to make up for it for the bigger accounts.
a) you don't want top performers running through participants just trying to qualify
b) top performers don't want to waste their energy on matchups they're 99% likely to win
The suggestion by @DNA3000 is actually fairer because the pre-qualification is tiered... it's not automatic entry to GC.
That's not something I want to see in BGs. A Season should be measured based on that Season. Not carryover progress. Not unless it's limited, as I suggested with the Top Rankings earning limited skips. There's too much of a monopoly on the system the other way. Results are skewed before the Season starts, and no one progresses very far at all, really. Same people getting the same thing Season after Season. That's not a competition.
Secondly, that locks (at the very least stunts) people from going past a certain point. Season after Season, the same people will occupy the top Brackets, progressing from that, gaining a leg up because of where they begin the next Season, and using the Rewards to maintain that spot. I'm all for people earning what they earn. I'm not supporting a repeat of a system that stunts growth on an individual Account level. Not by way of appeasing Players.
The OP's post was SPOT ON... hopefully Kabam can use this as a great base on how to make this game mode better. The current format is still in tune with how BGs was built on initial release where you get rewarded for simply playing it A LOT... So the whole premise of knowing that most players will typically win 50% of their matches, and requiring a 66.7% win rate to advance to new levels you build a system where players will keep circling the same progression levels for the majority of the time and thus playing more often to try to progress. This is very much a Casino model of "The House Always Wins", where the house in this case is Kabam hoping to rake in units from elders marks, energy refills, and victory shields purchases from us to keep playing and try to protect our promotion matches to next levels.