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How I got into the Gladiator Circuit using quantum physics
One of the things I enjoy doing is metagaming. Once upon a time that's what "meta" meant, before it became the lazy way of saying "the state of the game." I enjoy thinking about how the games systems - the random crystals, the economy design, the resource balance, etc - function, and sometimes I try to use that analysis to my advantage. And nowhere has that been more interestingly useful than in Battlegrounds. I don't discuss it much - specifically because we're talking about attempting to get competitive advantages - but I have discussed some of my thoughts privately, and hinted at some of them here. But this is the first time I'm going to articulate a complete line of thought of the game mode and how I chose to test the limits of that analysis on the forums. This is the story of how I got into GC for the first time.
I'm going to be covering subjects that have been controversial on the forums in the past. This is not the place for addressing those controversies. I'm simply going to state the facts as I see them, without much judgment. For the purposes of this discussion, I am just showing how I play the hand I'm dealt, not arguing whether the game is fair or not.
When BG moved away from deck matching they switched to a roster-strength metric of some kind. This meant that players were tending to match against other players of comparable roster strength. This has a net effect of placing significant downward pressure on players of higher strength rosters, relative to the statistically average case. We can simplify the net result of what was happening in an inaccurate but illustrative way. If UC players were matching against UC players, and Cavs with Cavs, and so on, then some percentage of UC players would be promoting upward, and a similar percentage of Cavs, and so on. It would be like there were a bunch of turnstiles, each with players of similar roster strength, and each turnstile was allowing some rate of players through. On the other side of the turnstiles was a roughly equal mix of players of different roster strength.
For reasons unnecessary to debate, Kabam began moving away from that type of matching to matches that were more statistically average within a tier - in other words, players were more likely to match against a random playerr in the tier, and were thus exposed to a random sampling of all players in that tier. They were, in effect, matching against the average player, not the average player of equivalent roster strength. At the moment, it *seems* like this really kicks in around Platinum. At Gold and lower, you are far more likely to match against players of similar roster strength. Above that you are far more likely to match against players of average strength in your tier.
This dichotomy can be seen as a kind of transition line. Below Platinum, the match system is putting downward pressure on higher strength rosters to try to "even out" who gets passed that point. But above that point, everyone starts to match against everyone else. And because of that, the stronger players with stronger rosters are very likely to start winning at higher rates, and accelerate through those tiers. The strongest of them have almost certainly catapulted to the end of VT and exited to GC by now.
Which means we should have a situation where many players with strong rosters are still working their way through the lower tiers, and still stuck below Gold. However, the tiers above Gold are likely to be depleted of strong players - because they have had enough time to reach GC. Which means Platinum through Vibranium are probably "weaker" in terms of competitive strength than you might otherwise think, because many strong roster players you might expect to be there are still fighting it out in lower tiers because of roster matching, and many other strong roster players you might expect to be there have benefited from stochastic (random) matching and have left VT entirely.
*If* you buy this analysis, then now's the perfect time to attempt to get into GC, if you have a reasonably strong roster and at least some minimum amount of skill. It is entirely possible that Platinum through Vibranium is currently *easier* for Paragon players than Gold is at the moment, because of the way the current match and points system treats strong roster players.
So how closely did my analysis match my experience. Well...
This is my final twelve matches on the run up to GC. Three immediate forfeits, two give ups after the first fight, six 2-0 sweeps, and one 2-1 win. Now, clearly some of those guys were significantly lower than my roster. But others were not. The forfeit just before my last victory was a Paragon player with similar prestige and the Zone 25 title, not an underpowered roster. And some of those wins were not against players with weak *roster* but weak *skills*. Players with a scary roster but did not draft well or play well.
What I'm seeing are players with weak roster and strong skill who got there by virtue of the match mechanics, and players with strong roster and weak skill who haven't made it out of VT yet. And if you are a player with A- roster and B+ skills, that's exactly who you want to fight.
I don't know how long this dynamic will last. The population of the upper VT will probably continue to evolve over time. Stronger players with stronger rosters will eventually make it through the Gold/Platinum match maker bottleneck and statistically increase the strength of the average player in those tiers. More stronger players will end up staying in upper VT simply because they don't want to grind out enough matches, but are still formidable when you face them. And two or three of those matches were genuinely tough matches I could have lost, so my win streak does contain some luck.
To make this happen in the first place, I had to push through Bronze through Gold (well, Silver through Gold really) and then through Platinum where the match difficulty leveled off but was still significant. But I think there is a tier of player, like me, with strong roster and decent skills, that probably thinks BG is not worth it because of the roster disadvantage in the higher tiers. But *if* they are willing to push, and *if* they have at least some reasonable level of skill, and *if* they are willing to burn the time and energy, I think it could be worth it to get passed Platinum, where ironically the rewards get higher and the overall *statistical* difficulty might be lower. Random chance still applies.
Take this for whatever it is worth. This is much more of an intuitive analysis than a numbers-crunching one. And actually, I hope most people TL;DR this one, because every player that takes this to heart and gets to GC is probably gonna lower my own GC rewards. Which is why I don't discuss BG strategy too much in general, except where the discussion is necessary to discuss productive improvements to the mode.
Oh yeah, what does quantum physics have to do with any of this? Well, it only took 35 years, but I finally got to use my semiconductor physics education in a productive manner. I realized the Battlegrounds VT contains a depletion zone, and this depletion zone would ballistically accelerate me to GC. Okay, the metaphor doesn't ultimately work very well, but let me have my fun. EE FTW.
I'm going to be covering subjects that have been controversial on the forums in the past. This is not the place for addressing those controversies. I'm simply going to state the facts as I see them, without much judgment. For the purposes of this discussion, I am just showing how I play the hand I'm dealt, not arguing whether the game is fair or not.
When BG moved away from deck matching they switched to a roster-strength metric of some kind. This meant that players were tending to match against other players of comparable roster strength. This has a net effect of placing significant downward pressure on players of higher strength rosters, relative to the statistically average case. We can simplify the net result of what was happening in an inaccurate but illustrative way. If UC players were matching against UC players, and Cavs with Cavs, and so on, then some percentage of UC players would be promoting upward, and a similar percentage of Cavs, and so on. It would be like there were a bunch of turnstiles, each with players of similar roster strength, and each turnstile was allowing some rate of players through. On the other side of the turnstiles was a roughly equal mix of players of different roster strength.
For reasons unnecessary to debate, Kabam began moving away from that type of matching to matches that were more statistically average within a tier - in other words, players were more likely to match against a random playerr in the tier, and were thus exposed to a random sampling of all players in that tier. They were, in effect, matching against the average player, not the average player of equivalent roster strength. At the moment, it *seems* like this really kicks in around Platinum. At Gold and lower, you are far more likely to match against players of similar roster strength. Above that you are far more likely to match against players of average strength in your tier.
This dichotomy can be seen as a kind of transition line. Below Platinum, the match system is putting downward pressure on higher strength rosters to try to "even out" who gets passed that point. But above that point, everyone starts to match against everyone else. And because of that, the stronger players with stronger rosters are very likely to start winning at higher rates, and accelerate through those tiers. The strongest of them have almost certainly catapulted to the end of VT and exited to GC by now.
Which means we should have a situation where many players with strong rosters are still working their way through the lower tiers, and still stuck below Gold. However, the tiers above Gold are likely to be depleted of strong players - because they have had enough time to reach GC. Which means Platinum through Vibranium are probably "weaker" in terms of competitive strength than you might otherwise think, because many strong roster players you might expect to be there are still fighting it out in lower tiers because of roster matching, and many other strong roster players you might expect to be there have benefited from stochastic (random) matching and have left VT entirely.
*If* you buy this analysis, then now's the perfect time to attempt to get into GC, if you have a reasonably strong roster and at least some minimum amount of skill. It is entirely possible that Platinum through Vibranium is currently *easier* for Paragon players than Gold is at the moment, because of the way the current match and points system treats strong roster players.
So how closely did my analysis match my experience. Well...
This is my final twelve matches on the run up to GC. Three immediate forfeits, two give ups after the first fight, six 2-0 sweeps, and one 2-1 win. Now, clearly some of those guys were significantly lower than my roster. But others were not. The forfeit just before my last victory was a Paragon player with similar prestige and the Zone 25 title, not an underpowered roster. And some of those wins were not against players with weak *roster* but weak *skills*. Players with a scary roster but did not draft well or play well.
What I'm seeing are players with weak roster and strong skill who got there by virtue of the match mechanics, and players with strong roster and weak skill who haven't made it out of VT yet. And if you are a player with A- roster and B+ skills, that's exactly who you want to fight.
I don't know how long this dynamic will last. The population of the upper VT will probably continue to evolve over time. Stronger players with stronger rosters will eventually make it through the Gold/Platinum match maker bottleneck and statistically increase the strength of the average player in those tiers. More stronger players will end up staying in upper VT simply because they don't want to grind out enough matches, but are still formidable when you face them. And two or three of those matches were genuinely tough matches I could have lost, so my win streak does contain some luck.
To make this happen in the first place, I had to push through Bronze through Gold (well, Silver through Gold really) and then through Platinum where the match difficulty leveled off but was still significant. But I think there is a tier of player, like me, with strong roster and decent skills, that probably thinks BG is not worth it because of the roster disadvantage in the higher tiers. But *if* they are willing to push, and *if* they have at least some reasonable level of skill, and *if* they are willing to burn the time and energy, I think it could be worth it to get passed Platinum, where ironically the rewards get higher and the overall *statistical* difficulty might be lower. Random chance still applies.
Take this for whatever it is worth. This is much more of an intuitive analysis than a numbers-crunching one. And actually, I hope most people TL;DR this one, because every player that takes this to heart and gets to GC is probably gonna lower my own GC rewards. Which is why I don't discuss BG strategy too much in general, except where the discussion is necessary to discuss productive improvements to the mode.
Oh yeah, what does quantum physics have to do with any of this? Well, it only took 35 years, but I finally got to use my semiconductor physics education in a productive manner. I realized the Battlegrounds VT contains a depletion zone, and this depletion zone would ballistically accelerate me to GC. Okay, the metaphor doesn't ultimately work very well, but let me have my fun. EE FTW.
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Comments
I went on a 31 match win-streak to finish the VT.
This BGs season has the the best for me. I was cruising all the way to Plat 1. I usually match with weaker accounts or at most, those similar to mine.
The moment I hit Plat 1 yesterday, I began matching against strong accounts. Guys with multiple 7*, r5 and r4 max sig running suicides.
So if your ambition is to get to Gold 2 and quit, low roster is an advantage. But if your goal is to get to Diamond or higher, or to actually attempt to reach GC, low roster is not the way to go. You have to be very lucky to get to GC with a low roster. It is not impossible, but it is getting increasingly harder.
Device physics (aka semiconductor physics) was actually the only class I actually tried hard to do well in, and only managed to scrape together an 89 for the final. The professor teaching that class congratulated me on the grade, and explained it had been years since anyone had gotten a 90 and offered me a job in his lab. That led me to take over the IT in that lab until I graduated, and that gave me a huge head start with novel technologies like ethernet and routers and this thing called the internet, and here I am. In a real sense, I owe a big chunk of my career in IT to an engineering professor that in no way shape or form taught anything remotely associated with IT. Thanks HK.
It turns out that it's because I was playing at night. I don't know why but I usually get easier match ups in the morning.
My earliest work was in cryptography, then I segued into machine learning before taking that to the financial world. My favorite class was stochastic processes was actually one of my favorite classes, but an awesome professor pioneering probabilistic machine learning was ultimately who helped me decided what Id research for my master’s thesis and beyond
Now, there's no reason why 9am matches would be easier than 10pm matches. However, random chance will cause some hours to just happen to have easier matches and others to have harder matches. They aren't all going to be even. And because players tend to play consistently, pockets of "easy" matches tend to stick around for a while. This is relative to the player: 9am might be great for one player and bad for another player because they match against different players.
But when you find a "sweet spot" in time of day where matches seem easier, the odds are it has a decent chance of being easier tomorrow, because it will consist of similar players of similar strength. Stronger players will exit that pocket quicker, weaker players will fall behind, but that cluster of players will remain.
This is down to chance: you have to find the sweet spot and you have to exploit it while it persists. But there is a certain logic to why they seem to pop up for many players and persist for longer than random chance would otherwise suggest. I know where my own sweet spot times are, or were when I was in VT, and it was pretty consistent for me.
But it has been like that since BGs started. Variations are few and far between.
The Abyss has rewards. Everyone who wants those rewards has to do the same content, regardless of their own roster strength. There is no Cavalier version of Abyss. You could argue that a Cavalier player with a Cavalier roster has a harder time completing Abyss than a Paragon player. They certainly "put in the work." But regardless, everyone has the same requirement to earn the rewards.
From Bronze to Platinum (approximately), that's not true for BG competitors. Lower roster players are matching against other lower roster players, while higher roster players are matching against other higher roster players most of the time. That means lower roster players are seeing a lower strength of competition. If BG was PvE content, it would be considered unfair for lower roster players to get weaker content to progress up the VT ladder than higher roster players. But that's what the match maker is effectively doing, and this causes a lot of resentment from players who feel that they are being punished for having a stronger roster.
I don't blame the players for this. You played the hand you were dealt, as did everyone else. But the rewards that lower roster players are getting is much higher than they would be if VT didn't exist and BG was just run as a straight up competition as is done in GC. Some of that is deliberate. We want lower progress players and more casual players to get more out of BG than they might otherwise get if BG was nothing but a straight up competition. But up to now this has been happening to the very strong detriment of stronger roster players.
We're in a transition period now where the devs are trying to balance roster matching and more open matching. This is creating very weird situations in the VT ladder. Those weird situations are demonstrable proof of just how much the roster based match system was, in effect, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Players who have never reached GC before are finding that as soon as they push through Gold the game practically throws them into GC like a catapult. Which implies they should have been getting there all along.
The rewards they were not getting all this time were going somewhere. It isn't your fault, it isn't any player's fault. It just is.
Look! That's me! Mom, I'm famous!!