VT.. it is not difficult to progress, don’t mind the tokens.. but it does take a long time play time. I normally get there about 2.5 weeks into season. A good strategy as the first 5/10 fights in GC are pretty straightforward.
All I want to change is some honesty and transparency. I just cannot see why we cannot have clear rules for match making and understand what the system is.. it would stop 90% of complaints. Yes people might not Like it, but at least understand it.
Now is a constant cycle of ideas, suggestions and theories..
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.
Didn’t you keep repeating earlier that it’s not about the rewards but about player experience? This does improve the experience for both higher and lower progression alike. Why are you now suddenly so concerned about rewards?
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.
Didn’t you keep repeating earlier that it’s not about the rewards but about player experience? This does improve the experience for both higher and lower progression alike. Why are you now suddenly so concerned about rewards?
You're talking about two different conversations. I said my points about lower Players being greatly overpowered in the beginning Tiers of the competition were not about Rewards. I was talking about the unreasonable expectations with the Matches. When you're talking about creating a system that makes it impossible for anyone else to progress, that's equally as broken.
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.
Please stop using sports analogies. This type of accurate and compelling logic completely destroys some others attempts to make their ridiculous statements seem valid.
It is, however, worth noting that there has not been a single suggestion that everyone has unanimously agreed with.
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:
You make some interesting and good points. I hope Kabam view this when considering changing some aspects of Battlegrounds. Of course not to implement it as it it but make adjustments as they see fit. I have some small opinions myself. If this helps with context, I haven’t had any major issues with BG. I have a 15.2k (15.5k with relic) prestige and every season I’m in GC in the first week. Of course, some meta are annoying and they’re could have done better but we play through it. My take on your points:
1. Good scoring system, not bad at all. Alternatively, they can reduce the cost of victory shield reasonably and increase the cap per purchase which will allow players to sacrifice tokens (which could buy shards and rankup resources) for the shield. Assuming Kabam are okay with current system and view victory shield as a way of monetization. They could still keep it but reduce the frustration and pain.
2. I don’t agree with the second point. Reasons: - some players actually enjoy playing through VT, and you’ll take that away from them. They may enjoy figuring best champs, play style and stuff like that. - Also, every new season is a new meta. Nodes are different and best champs may vary. Finishing higher one season doesn’t necessarily mean finishing higher the next season. One’s roster may be idle for season A and may not for season B, which may cause them not to do so well.
3. The last point, I have mix feelings. The “strength of a player” imo is his fighting skills, knowledge of the game and his roster as well. Account strength plays a huge role in advancement or progression in this game. So that should also be a factor in determining matchmaking. If you have this huge account and can’t do anything with it then that’s partly your problem. Also, if we’re playing for the same rewards then everyone should be play everyone and that’s fair, small or large account. I’ve played members of all the top alliances, some I’ve beat and others have beaten me. That’s cool, I’m fighting for the same rewards they’re seeking, the best player wins. I know if I have the account or roster they have I’ll be menace. Something that might help: there are progression levels in the game and even in some contents there are specific requirements, eg Incursion: you need a min hero rating to play certain sectors with varying rewards. So maybe this might be a good way to solve or group matchmaking accompanied by it appropriate rewards. Like Football (soccer) divisions; first division, second division, etc. Just my 2cents.
@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.
AW matches alliances by ELO rating. ELO is just a mathematical framework for creating a rating system where you gain rating when you win and lose rating when you lose (the complex mathy parts have to do with how much rating you should gain or lose depending on how strong your opponent is, for ratings to end up being consistent). Under the Fairness section where I mention ELO based matching and how this is similar to AW matching, this is basically what you're mentioning above.
if they do even one thing it's fix the losing trophy thing. it does nothing for the "competition" they refer to and all it does as I've mentioned is force players into an unforgivable and unnecessary loop. well it IS necessary for spending but most will probably just not bother than spend so.
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
This is one of those things that originally I didn't think was all that important, but others have pointed out that for them this has significant strategic importance.
In my reply to @phillgreen I stated that I wouldn't change anything myself, but I've learned more about the relative importance of some of my compromises. This would be one of them. I was perfectly willing to trade this strategic option away for the counter benefits I was trying to engineer, but there are many players who wouldn't, or would at least feel the pain more than I had originally anticipated.
The loss of strategic options in a competition is always something to mourn, and I should have given this more consideration. I would still choose to lose it in a compromise, and I'm not sure how I would have fit a discussion of this option in my original post, but it is worth noting now that as I've stated, no compromise is perfect, and it is only when you stick your neck out and lay out the details of an idea that the imperfections of your brilliant ideas start to show their cracks. I consider this to be one of those cracks I can't repair at the moment.
As I see it, this change adds nuance to this strategic situation. Do you go for the guaranteed match win by throwing one match and gaining one trophy or shoot for the chance at two trophies by going all out in all three matches. But the counter-position is that this eliminates the strategic option to find the optimal way to win period. I find I personally cannot adopt the latter position, but I know it exists.
Again, I would be willing to implement the compromise, but I fully acknowledge there are entirely fair-minded and thoughtful players that would come to the opposite conclusion. I think my suggestion(s) are a solution but not the solution that makes everyone perfectly happy.
I'm a fan of being proficient with Champs that people don't expect to be a concern as well. There are the obvious Defenders and Attackers, and they're usually the most popular, and banned most often. It's the Champs that people don't expect you to use or be successful with that are sometimes efficient. One of the reasons never adhering to the "God Tier" mentality has served me.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
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.
I don't like many sports analogies because they open the door to very weird tangents about what works and what doesn't work. But I think it is worth noting the fact that all sports competitions have differences in how they conduct competition, and yet they all (to varying degrees) are considered fair. How can March Madness, where the weakest teams face the strongest teams, and yet still be considered fair?
This is because I think a trap many fall into is failing to see the forest for the trees. What this thread and many other threads are complaining about or highlighting is the difference between a match being fair, and the competition as a whole being fair. All other things being equal, we want matches to be fair, and many people claiming that roster matching is fair are relying on this assumption: that fairness means "fairness in matches."
But that's not the only fairness. The competition as a whole is not automatically fair if all individual matches are fair, and March Madness is an example that highlights why. If we care about competition as a whole we can't match the best teams against each other, because this means there's no advantage to having the best record. March Madness is not a thing unto itself. It is the culmination of a season of basketball. The idea that it doesn't matter what your record is during the regular season, because whether you have a good record or a lesser one, so long as you make it into the tournament you will only be matched against teams like you violates the spirit of competition that says every win matters. Allowing #1 to match against #2 and #63 to match against #64 means the "reward" for having the best record and being rated #1 is you're forced to play against the strongest team, out there (other than yourself). That's not a reward, that's a penalty. We'd be saying the regular season not only doesn't matter, it might make things worse. We're ignoring the progress of regular season victories entirely when we match.
That's what's happening in BG now. The game is prioritizing match fairness at the expense of global competitive fairness. It is matching #1 vs #2 because the match is fair, and as a result making a mockery of having higher ratings. If March Madness matched #1 against #2 everyone would deliberately lose games to jockey for 43rd place. Which would be a farce. And that's what some people are saying now. They wish they could delevel their roster for BG (which is impossible, and would also hurt their performance in other game modes) to jockey for easier matches, which is equally ridiculous.
I should also point out it doesn't matter if they are right or not. Some people claim that the people who wish they could play lower rosters aren't strictly speaking correct. But that's missing the point. If this was also not a viable strategy in college basketball but enough teams did it anyway the fact that it didn't work would be irrelevant. It would still imply there was something so broken with the competition that something would have to change. It is the competitors that must believe the competition is fairly competitive. If they don't, it doesn't matter who does.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
That might be well and good for a system that involves Alliances where there are variables that can change. Players can join new Alliances, make changes, etc. That doesn't pan out with a PVP game. Imagine the Arena, starting Players out with a certain amount of Points before they even start to Grind. Essentially that's what we're talking about. It's not the same system. Further to that, War serves the Top. Every change that comes is oriented around making it a better experience for them, from Rewards to the structure. It's a monopoly. You're free to disagree with that, but I'm not feigning success for the overall system, as it is success for the highest, and that's it. You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
That might be well and good for a system that involves Alliances where there are variables that can change. Players can join new Alliances, make changes, etc. That doesn't pan out with a PVP game. Imagine the Arena, starting Players out with a certain amount of Points before they even start to Grind. Essentially that's what we're talking about.
Actually, I've played many PvP games. I don't have to imagine. I know of no PvP game that does things the way BG does.
Is this analogous to starting players off with more points in arena? Let's take this apart carefully.
First, what would the benefits even be if the game decided to start me off with more points? Suppose the game decided that since I can regularly get to at least 12 million points in the featured arena, it would just start me at 12 million. Great. Except, now what? Although some people say "and just hand the players the rewards for free" I don't. So let's say I tell the devs to start *you* at 12 million points in the featured, but skip all the milestone rewards up to 12 million. Happy? How are you going to earn all those milestones from the arena? If you do nothing, sure you will get the automatic rank reward for being maybe 60%, but that's trivial. Unless you have a way to earn the milestones, which are the real source of rewards, I haven't helped you at all. I've actually hurt you.
Now, my suggestion is to then add objectives to BG to allow players to start higher to re-earn those rewards by competing. So in our arena analogy I will give you objectives to win those arena milestones you now can't win because you bypassed them. So all you have to do is grind the arena to get them all again. Guess how much points you will probably have to put up to get them.
Now, we wouldn't do this in the arena for the simple reason that there's no point to doing it. My participation in the arena does not affect anyone else's participation. There would be no obvious benefit. But in BG, we are talking about structural changes where there would be benefits. You say those changes are unfair because starting them higher would be like starting players in the arena higher. I've just demonstrated that there is actually almost no advantage to doing that in the arena. So what precisely would the harm be, given the reward protections I've specified.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
The problem is there is a competition within a competition, with Seasons. I'm not a total contrarian. I just can't rationalize skewing the results of the Season before it even begins. Now, if they removed the Seasonal aspect of it, that could be more feasible in my mind. They could restructure the Rewards, keeping the Brackets, and switch to a Points system. Mitigate the starting Matches like you outlined, and switch to ELO when progress takes over. Just make it a continuous competition. You don't lose Points, but if you're not active, you go down by default because others are active and earning. Without the Seasonal aspect, I would have no qualms with that. Starting a Season where Players begin halfway up is skewed results.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
Just think DNA, if you are gifted 12M in the arena, how is someone who never gets 12M in the arena supposed to compete with you?
The biggest fallacy in GWs 'argument' is that starting the best players higher doesn't change who ends at the top in the end, it just makes those players unhappy. Regardless of where we start players a Cav is not going to be able to compete in the GC.
Just think DNA, if you are gifted 12M in the arena, how is someone who never gets 12M in the arena supposed to compete with you?
The biggest fallacy in GWs 'argument' is that starting the best players higher doesn't change who ends at the top in the end, it just makes those players unhappy. Regardless of where we start players a Cav is not going to be able to compete in the GC.
Actually it does. It shortcuts one Player's journey up, and no one ever catches up because they have more hoops to jump through to get there. Meanwhile the shortcut Player is going up and up.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
I think you have a Seaaon, from start to finish, that measures how you do within the Season. Not how well you did last Season.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
I think you have a Seaaon, from start to finish, that measures how you do within the Season. Not how well you did last Season.
The issue is the season doesn't matter in Victory track. You get NOTHING from the season in Victory Track. Only the last week of GC decides your placement in GC. People who are competing high in GC are competing high every single season. Doesn't matter the nodes, doesn't matter the bugs. These people will always be up there. If these people started in diamond each season, then guess what, there is more opportunity for people to get through victory track and more people will get more rewards because the top players aren't going to be in their way. Everyone wins with this idea.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
I think you have a Seaaon, from start to finish, that measures how you do within the Season. Not how well you did last Season.
The issue is the season doesn't matter in Victory track. You get NOTHING from the season in Victory Track. Only the last week of GC decides your placement in GC. People who are competing high in GC are competing high every single season. Doesn't matter the nodes, doesn't matter the bugs. These people will always be up there. If these people started in diamond each season, then guess what, there is more opportunity for people to get through victory track and more people will get more rewards because the top players aren't going to be in their way. Everyone wins with this idea.
The current structure means the Victory Track is part of the Season. You don't get to the GC without it. I've offered a couple suggestions that I think are reasonable. I don't agree with a free pass every Season. That's a monopoly. Period.
The fact that he continues to refuse to answer my question proves that he doesn't have a leg to stand on. Starting Bero and the newest UC at the same spot every season is just an asinine waste of time. Arguing in favor of it is just as asinine.
You're right. Which is why the Matches need to be mediated in the same spot every Season. That's not going to be justified no matter how you approach it.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
I think you have a Seaaon, from start to finish, that measures how you do within the Season. Not how well you did last Season.
The issue is the season doesn't matter in Victory track. You get NOTHING from the season in Victory Track. Only the last week of GC decides your placement in GC. People who are competing high in GC are competing high every single season. Doesn't matter the nodes, doesn't matter the bugs. These people will always be up there. If these people started in diamond each season, then guess what, there is more opportunity for people to get through victory track and more people will get more rewards because the top players aren't going to be in their way. Everyone wins with this idea.
The current structure means the Victory Track is part of the Season. You don't get to the GC without it. I've offered a couple suggestions that I think are reasonable. I don't agree with a free pass every Season. That's a monopoly. Period.
My issue with your statement is people who are high up in GC are going to get through VT no matter what. DNA has said it a million times now, it isn't a matter of if, it is a matter of how. He isn't saying anyone who gets to GC should have a free pass to GC every season, everyone is going to be reset back to somewhere in VT based on where they ended last season on.
How I would have an implementation of this is anyone who has 200+ points in GC by the end of the season would be reset to Diamond. These are going to be top players they'll get through VT anyways.
As mentioned, these people are going to get through VT anyways. Most of them will probably do so with ease. It isn't a competition for them.
As I have also mentioned before, a headstart to GC isn't going to affect the season end, it just means they get to GC 8 hours sooner than they probably would have anyways. As anyone in GC who actually competes, your placement the first 3 weeks doesn't matter at all, it is purely based on how good can you do the last meta of the season, that is the only meta that matters for the competition.
What I don't think you're comprehending is Victory Track isn't the competition, it is just an nuisance in the way of where the competition actually is.
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.
That's actually one of my original motivators for looking at this in the first place. We've seen this before, so we know where it ultimately ends. It ends with the players and the devs concluding something needs to change, after many many seasons of pain first. That pain is the cost of convincing the minority that their version of fairness is unreasonable to enough players to compel estopping it, and lacks sufficient justification to swing people towards it. Even after years.
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.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
The top players aren't the ones complaining. The top players just steal trophies from any poor soul who decided to start matchmaking the same time they did and get to GC no problem. You probably haven't had to run into that issue of being steamrolled by a top player though since the system currently benefits those who aren't in range to be matched with them.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
What level? You're talking about people arguing that others don't even belong 2 or 3 Brackets up in the VT. It's grossly exaggerated by their own position.
So you think it is perfectly fine for Beroman to start in Bronze and just steal victories all the way to GC ruining the experience for those he faces just so he can get back to the point where he should be competing every single season? Wouldn't it be better if Beroman started much higher because he is going to get back to where he is supposed to be competing anyways, so give the dude a headstart so he can compete where he is supposed to be competing sooner and not spending so long stealing trophies from all in his path.
I think you have a Seaaon, from start to finish, that measures how you do within the Season. Not how well you did last Season.
The issue is the season doesn't matter in Victory track. You get NOTHING from the season in Victory Track. Only the last week of GC decides your placement in GC. People who are competing high in GC are competing high every single season. Doesn't matter the nodes, doesn't matter the bugs. These people will always be up there. If these people started in diamond each season, then guess what, there is more opportunity for people to get through victory track and more people will get more rewards because the top players aren't going to be in their way. Everyone wins with this idea.
The current structure means the Victory Track is part of the Season. You don't get to the GC without it. I've offered a couple suggestions that I think are reasonable. I don't agree with a free pass every Season. That's a monopoly. Period.
My issue with your statement is people who are high up in GC are going to get through VT no matter what. DNA has said it a million times now, it isn't a matter of if, it is a matter of how. He isn't saying anyone who gets to GC should have a free pass to GC every season, everyone is going to be reset back to somewhere in VT based on where they ended last season on.
How I would have an implementation of this is anyone who has 200+ points in GC by the end of the season would be reset to Diamond. These are going to be top players they'll get through VT anyways.
As mentioned, these people are going to get through VT anyways. Most of them will probably do so with ease. It isn't a competition for them.
As I have also mentioned before, a headstart to GC isn't going to affect the season end, it just means they get to GC 8 hours sooner than they probably would have anyways. As anyone in GC who actually competes, your placement the first 3 weeks doesn't matter at all, it is purely based on how good can you do the last meta of the season, that is the only meta that matters for the competition.
What I don't think you're comprehending is Victory Track isn't the competition, it is just an nuisance in the way of where the competition actually is.
Yes. They will. However they earn it NO MATTER WHAT. They don't just get it given no matter what. There's no circumnavigating Losses with any system.
Just think DNA, if you are gifted 12M in the arena, how is someone who never gets 12M in the arena supposed to compete with you?
The biggest fallacy in GWs 'argument' is that starting the best players higher doesn't change who ends at the top in the end, it just makes those players unhappy. Regardless of where we start players a Cav is not going to be able to compete in the GC.
Actually it does. It shortcuts one Player's journey up, and no one ever catches up because they have more hoops to jump through to get there. Meanwhile the shortcut Player is going up and up.
Ok, answer my question I've asked a few times.
Should Tiger Woods have to re-qualify for every PGA tournament or should he be able to join whichever PGA tournament he wants to because of his past performances?
I suspect Tiger Woods is busy with his settlement. How does that relate to the game? It doesn't.
Avoiding the question just makes you look bad GW. It's a simple 'yes' or 'no'. It isn't hard.
I'm talking about this game. Sports analogies might be comparative examples, but they're not directly related to what we're talking about. Ask me if a Player should have to qualify every Season, my answer is yes. As long as there's a Season, everyone should jump through the same hoops.
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
This is one of those things that originally I didn't think was all that important, but others have pointed out that for them this has significant strategic importance.
In my reply to @phillgreen I stated that I wouldn't change anything myself, but I've learned more about the relative importance of some of my compromises. This would be one of them. I was perfectly willing to trade this strategic option away for the counter benefits I was trying to engineer, but there are many players who wouldn't, or would at least feel the pain more than I had originally anticipated.
The loss of strategic options in a competition is always something to mourn, and I should have given this more consideration. I would still choose to lose it in a compromise, and I'm not sure how I would have fit a discussion of this option in my original post, but it is worth noting now that as I've stated, no compromise is perfect, and it is only when you stick your neck out and lay out the details of an idea that the imperfections of your brilliant ideas start to show their cracks. I consider this to be one of those cracks I can't repair at the moment.
As I see it, this change adds nuance to this strategic situation. Do you go for the guaranteed match win by throwing one match and gaining one trophy or shoot for the chance at two trophies by going all out in all three matches. But the counter-position is that this eliminates the strategic option to find the optimal way to win period. I find I personally cannot adopt the latter position, but I know it exists.
Again, I would be willing to implement the compromise, but I fully acknowledge there are entirely fair-minded and thoughtful players that would come to the opposite conclusion. I think my suggestion(s) are a solution but not the solution that makes everyone perfectly happy.
Oh I understand the trade off and I wouldn't be wholly against the proposed change personally bc as you said, there is still an element of strategic choice.
I was mostly just stating that it's probably far less rare than you were originally suggesting that some and possibly even lots of high win rate players do in fact win 2-1 and actually do so purposely.
Comments
VT.. it is not difficult to progress, don’t mind the tokens.. but it does take a long time play time. I normally get there about 2.5 weeks into season. A good strategy as the first 5/10 fights in GC are pretty straightforward.
All I want to change is some honesty and transparency. I just cannot see why we cannot have clear rules for match making and understand what the system is.. it would stop 90% of complaints. Yes people might not
Like it, but at least understand it.
Now is a constant cycle of ideas, suggestions and theories..
When you're talking about creating a system that makes it impossible for anyone else to progress, that's equally as broken.
1. Good scoring system, not bad at all. Alternatively, they can reduce the cost of victory shield reasonably and increase the cap per purchase which will allow players to sacrifice tokens (which could buy shards and rankup resources) for the shield. Assuming Kabam are okay with current system and view victory shield as a way of monetization. They could still keep it but reduce the frustration and pain.
2. I don’t agree with the second point. Reasons:
- some players actually enjoy playing through VT, and you’ll take that away from them. They may enjoy figuring best champs, play style and stuff like that.
- Also, every new season is a new meta. Nodes are different and best champs may vary. Finishing higher one season doesn’t necessarily mean finishing higher the next season. One’s roster may be idle for season A and may not for season B, which may cause them not to do so well.
3. The last point, I have mix feelings. The “strength of a player” imo is his fighting skills, knowledge of the game and his roster as well. Account strength plays a huge role in advancement or progression in this game. So that should also be a factor in determining matchmaking. If you have this huge account and can’t do anything with it then that’s partly your problem.
Also, if we’re playing for the same rewards then everyone should be play everyone and that’s fair, small or large account. I’ve played members of all the top alliances, some I’ve beat and others have beaten me. That’s cool, I’m fighting for the same rewards they’re seeking, the best player wins. I know if I have the account or roster they have I’ll be menace.
Something that might help: there are progression levels in the game and even in some contents there are specific requirements, eg Incursion: you need a min hero rating to play certain sectors with varying rewards. So maybe this might be a good way to solve or group matchmaking accompanied by it appropriate rewards. Like Football (soccer) divisions; first division, second division, etc.
Just my 2cents.
In my reply to @phillgreen I stated that I wouldn't change anything myself, but I've learned more about the relative importance of some of my compromises. This would be one of them. I was perfectly willing to trade this strategic option away for the counter benefits I was trying to engineer, but there are many players who wouldn't, or would at least feel the pain more than I had originally anticipated.
The loss of strategic options in a competition is always something to mourn, and I should have given this more consideration. I would still choose to lose it in a compromise, and I'm not sure how I would have fit a discussion of this option in my original post, but it is worth noting now that as I've stated, no compromise is perfect, and it is only when you stick your neck out and lay out the details of an idea that the imperfections of your brilliant ideas start to show their cracks. I consider this to be one of those cracks I can't repair at the moment.
As I see it, this change adds nuance to this strategic situation. Do you go for the guaranteed match win by throwing one match and gaining one trophy or shoot for the chance at two trophies by going all out in all three matches. But the counter-position is that this eliminates the strategic option to find the optimal way to win period. I find I personally cannot adopt the latter position, but I know it exists.
Again, I would be willing to implement the compromise, but I fully acknowledge there are entirely fair-minded and thoughtful players that would come to the opposite conclusion. I think my suggestion(s) are a solution but not the solution that makes everyone perfectly happy.
It is the very nature of a competition that causes the same people to tend to be in the same brackets, because ultimately the stronger players go higher. That's a truism of competitions you cannot avoid, so even complaining about it is misleading: it implies this is a unique problem of the proposed changes when the current system and all conceivable alternatives would have the same problem.
Because it isn't even a "problem." The very definition of competitions is to sort players by competitive strength. A competition that fails to do this is broken. The same players should rise to the higher levels because if they were strong enough to do it last time, they are probably strong enough to do it this time. The question is not *whether* they will get there, but rather *how* they will get there.
The way they are getting there now is, I believe, ultimately unacceptable to a very high percentage of the players who care at all, and it is contrary to how competitions should work. Allowing this type of thing to happen in the very early going is a reasonable compromise to lower competition pressures to encourage participation, but it cannot be allowed to continue beyond a certain point.
Again, I don't believe the current system is sustainable in its current form. It will become a poison that will steadily weaken the mode, just as it was for Alliance War. So there's no debate about whether to keep it or not, only how to change it. We *won't* be matching the way we are now indefinitely (if Kabam was willing to die on this hill, we'd still be doing it for AW), and we *won't* be progressing the way we are indefinitely (because any change anywhere will necessitate reviewing the way progress in the system works), but the stronger players will be consistently rising higher (or the mode will become a mockery). "How" is the question. "If" is something I think most people understand is not a question.
This is because I think a trap many fall into is failing to see the forest for the trees. What this thread and many other threads are complaining about or highlighting is the difference between a match being fair, and the competition as a whole being fair. All other things being equal, we want matches to be fair, and many people claiming that roster matching is fair are relying on this assumption: that fairness means "fairness in matches."
But that's not the only fairness. The competition as a whole is not automatically fair if all individual matches are fair, and March Madness is an example that highlights why. If we care about competition as a whole we can't match the best teams against each other, because this means there's no advantage to having the best record. March Madness is not a thing unto itself. It is the culmination of a season of basketball. The idea that it doesn't matter what your record is during the regular season, because whether you have a good record or a lesser one, so long as you make it into the tournament you will only be matched against teams like you violates the spirit of competition that says every win matters. Allowing #1 to match against #2 and #63 to match against #64 means the "reward" for having the best record and being rated #1 is you're forced to play against the strongest team, out there (other than yourself). That's not a reward, that's a penalty. We'd be saying the regular season not only doesn't matter, it might make things worse. We're ignoring the progress of regular season victories entirely when we match.
That's what's happening in BG now. The game is prioritizing match fairness at the expense of global competitive fairness. It is matching #1 vs #2 because the match is fair, and as a result making a mockery of having higher ratings. If March Madness matched #1 against #2 everyone would deliberately lose games to jockey for 43rd place. Which would be a farce. And that's what some people are saying now. They wish they could delevel their roster for BG (which is impossible, and would also hurt their performance in other game modes) to jockey for easier matches, which is equally ridiculous.
I should also point out it doesn't matter if they are right or not. Some people claim that the people who wish they could play lower rosters aren't strictly speaking correct. But that's missing the point. If this was also not a viable strategy in college basketball but enough teams did it anyway the fact that it didn't work would be irrelevant. It would still imply there was something so broken with the competition that something would have to change. It is the competitors that must believe the competition is fairly competitive. If they don't, it doesn't matter who does.
You can't apply the exact same structure to a PVP mode. It's just not feasible without making it grossly detrimental to anyone who isn't the highest. You can't stay progress of Players to make the Top happy and expect it to continue.
Is this analogous to starting players off with more points in arena? Let's take this apart carefully.
First, what would the benefits even be if the game decided to start me off with more points? Suppose the game decided that since I can regularly get to at least 12 million points in the featured arena, it would just start me at 12 million. Great. Except, now what? Although some people say "and just hand the players the rewards for free" I don't. So let's say I tell the devs to start *you* at 12 million points in the featured, but skip all the milestone rewards up to 12 million. Happy? How are you going to earn all those milestones from the arena? If you do nothing, sure you will get the automatic rank reward for being maybe 60%, but that's trivial. Unless you have a way to earn the milestones, which are the real source of rewards, I haven't helped you at all. I've actually hurt you.
Now, my suggestion is to then add objectives to BG to allow players to start higher to re-earn those rewards by competing. So in our arena analogy I will give you objectives to win those arena milestones you now can't win because you bypassed them. So all you have to do is grind the arena to get them all again. Guess how much points you will probably have to put up to get them.
Now, we wouldn't do this in the arena for the simple reason that there's no point to doing it. My participation in the arena does not affect anyone else's participation. There would be no obvious benefit. But in BG, we are talking about structural changes where there would be benefits. You say those changes are unfair because starting them higher would be like starting players in the arena higher. I've just demonstrated that there is actually almost no advantage to doing that in the arena. So what precisely would the harm be, given the reward protections I've specified.
Also, isn't the point of BGs to benefit those who have taken the time to become strong to be able to crush those who aren't on their level? Afterall, they have probably dedicated more time and money to the game, so why shouldn't they have an advantage?
If Kabam wanted to make a truly fair PVP mode, then they'd copy Clash royale where there is a gamemode where everyone is put on the same level and have access to the same cards. This is truly what you're asking for is a mode where everyone is on the same playing field. You want a mode where everyone has the same deck options, and the same mastery options. This would be the only way to have "fair" competition, because then it is truly the most skilled summoner that will win.
Now, if they removed the Seasonal aspect of it, that could be more feasible in my mind.
They could restructure the Rewards, keeping the Brackets, and switch to a Points system. Mitigate the starting Matches like you outlined, and switch to ELO when progress takes over. Just make it a continuous competition. You don't lose Points, but if you're not active, you go down by default because others are active and earning.
Without the Seasonal aspect, I would have no qualms with that. Starting a Season where Players begin halfway up is skewed results.
The biggest fallacy in GWs 'argument' is that starting the best players higher doesn't change who ends at the top in the end, it just makes those players unhappy. Regardless of where we start players a Cav is not going to be able to compete in the GC.
Meanwhile the shortcut Player is going up and up.
How I would have an implementation of this is anyone who has 200+ points in GC by the end of the season would be reset to Diamond. These are going to be top players they'll get through VT anyways.
As mentioned, these people are going to get through VT anyways. Most of them will probably do so with ease. It isn't a competition for them.
As I have also mentioned before, a headstart to GC isn't going to affect the season end, it just means they get to GC 8 hours sooner than they probably would have anyways. As anyone in GC who actually competes, your placement the first 3 weeks doesn't matter at all, it is purely based on how good can you do the last meta of the season, that is the only meta that matters for the competition.
What I don't think you're comprehending is Victory Track isn't the competition, it is just an nuisance in the way of where the competition actually is.
I was mostly just stating that it's probably far less rare than you were originally suggesting that some and possibly even lots of high win rate players do in fact win 2-1 and actually do so purposely.