Battlegrounds matchmaking

Can we discuss how awful battlegrounds matchmaking is for newer paragon players I was placed in diamond one and have been stuck for over a week just do to the absurd matchmaking I’m getting destroyed by huge rosters I’ve been on a 10 and over loss streak and it’s not that I’m awful I can’t keep up I’ve wasted my elders marks just trying to get milestone points it’s not cool kabam please address this somehow

Comments

HSS75

It is how it is, you got stuck so go improve your roster more to get a better chance at progressing
Kabam already addressed it at their 1 year season 12 Battlegrounds thread

Maat1985

can we discuss the fact this is a ranked competition.

and this game is about having skill and a good roster.

need both to climb.
without both you can only expect to get so high.

MRroberts

Ya but if you don’t dump large amounts of money you can’t climb I’m just talkin about the milestones that were designed for ftp players it’s taking me double the time just cause the matchmaking is awful

flapjax

Who said the milestones are made for ftp players?

They have never said that was the intention.

Look at BGs like every other game mode. You don't do Masters War on a mediocre account, the same way you aren't getting the 6 star featured each week from the arena.

You have to grow your roster if you want to progress, otherwise why bother if you just get matched up with easy opponents.

MRroberts

I’m not asking for easy opponents I’m asking for fair opponents There should not be people with six million power accounts fighting people with 2 million power accounts and yes I check after every match and that’s the scale you need to stop defending Javan’s laziness

MRroberts

And for your information my opponents are getting the easy matches

MRroberts

Seriously why are you sticking up for them it’s not like they done anything good for mid players we just get kicked around and forgot about the games gonna be near unplayable after cyber weekend ftp which is sad I’ve been playing this game for years and I really like it but kabam never addresses there issues they really need to look at the marvel snap devs and see what there doing right

Demonzfyre

Because it's a competition. People like you can't understand that.

PT_99

What is this gamblers mind.
You know that you're getting shitted on, then why you keep wasting elder marks? Wait for last 2-3 days in BG, till then every strong accounts have progressed to GC, then start your climb.

The moment you hit your wall, just stop.

MRroberts

You guys aren’t understanding the I’m talking about matchmaking I’m not trying to be the best or get to gladiators circuit I just would like to win a few matches geez and I’m not gambling I started using my marks just to progress in the milestones but it takes me double time because of the matchmaking it started me in diamond this season so I didn’t get to win any matches for the milestones because of the matchmaking I got lucky last season that’s how I got higher i wish I didn’t

Shooter708

BringPopcorn

Why would Kabam want more traffic in BGs? Do they profit with traffic? People at most spend units they farmed for free.

flapjax

The problem is "fair" is so subjective its hard to even start deciding how to match people in a way that is fair.

You can't do it by progression title, because there's 500k Cav players and 2 mil Cav players.

Speaking of account rating, even pairing up a 2 mil account vs another 2 mil account can be difficult because what if one of them has a ton of ranked up 2/3/4 stars inflating that number, while the other only focused on ranking up the 30 champs in their deck, making it a very lop sided match.

So let's go by deck right? But then you get the original problem with battleground; sandbagging.

So what's left? Prestige? Well that's a similar problem to the account rating issue, if someone put all their resources into the top of their deck vs someone else with the same prestige but has a deck full of R4+ it's not going to seem "fair".

So at the end of the day, the only really "fair" match making is where everyone fights everyone in their tier. Eventually you'll hit a tier where your win rate hits 50% and you won't be able to progress without strengthening your roster. Over the course of the season stronger players will move out of the VT and hit GC, leaving more manageable matches for lower players still trying to climb.

People seem against it but the easiest solution is just making match making completely open and remove losing a medal if you lose, making point farming impossible. Eventually everyone will move up if they put in enough effort, but probably not make it far in the GC (which is the real competative mode anyway).

goguvlad616

from the start of the season I played 60+ matches and except for 2 or 3 I always picked first no matter if i had a bigger or smaller roster then the opponent. for the last day I am in vibranium 1, trying to get to GC, i'm matched with account of 4.5-6 mil ( i have 3.6 mil) and i'm still first at picking. i have no big issue facing bigger account, i believe is normal to face them if I want to enter GC, but in 20 matches i played today only 1 i had to draft second.

mbgibson

You really need to finish this thought. Yes battlegrounds is a competitive mode. But you are failing to comprehend as part of this post is that it needs to be a fair competition. When matchmaking is pairing up accounts that are obviously at different levels, that is not a fair match. As a comparison, take any competitive sport or tournament based on skill. This could range from professional level to little league level. You’re not going to pair a minor league baseball team up against a major league team. Yea there is a difference in talent level, but there are also differences in infrastructure and the investment within the team.

When you pair whales that spend and grow their roster rapidly against FTP players who grow at slower paces, generally all you will do is create an environment where that competitive balance grows farther apart.

Kabam would get a lot more activity in battlegrounds if they were able to properly matchmake players at the same level. Most people who don’t play is because it’s a constant beat down of playing against larger accounts.

Fair competitions and fair matches are not always the same. In the case of open matchmaking they are very different. Open matchmaking is a fair competition; everyone gets the same time, plays with the same nodes, and has the same scoring system. Manipulating the matchmaking makes matches fair, but it certainly does not make the competition fair. Think of it like this: manipulated matching is essentially a handicap. Most competitions (especially elite level) do not use handicaps.

Demonzfyre

So you're telling me that if 2 accounts match in platinum 2, they aren't the same level?

ItsClobberinTime

Fairness can have a different meaning depending on how you look at it. From your perspective, matching your account with other accounts your size would be fair. From my perspective that wouldn't be fair cause while I'd be out here fighting whales you would just be ignoring 80% of the actual competition. You see the problem now?

DNA3000

Kabam actually did implement what you call "fair match making" previously, by accident really. When they removed deck based match making they implemented roster based match making. The problem with roster based match making was so obvious that they changed it to the system they have now, where there is some version of roster/progress based match making that starts in Bronze and then phases out in Platinum. The obvious problem was that a player with a low strength roster could simply glide all the way to GC by facing nothing but other low strength roster competition, and get there much faster than strong roster players who got stuck facing vastly stronger competition.

Now, some say that was perfectly fair, that the low strength roster player got to GC "fairly" because they beat their competition while the stronger player did not. That's certainly an opinion. But the problem with that opinion is that it penalizes stronger rosters. A given player, say me, would have a much easier time promoting to GC with a low alt account than my main account. That's the very definition of a roster strength penalty: given the same player with the same skills, having a lower strength roster offers an advantage. This was a wide spread issue, and it was seen as a critical problem because in spite of the people who have this romantic notion of competitions as being 50/50 match up affairs, in this game competitive strength is determined both by player skill and knowledge AND roster strength. The game's foundation is building roster. Progress itself is gated by it. The game's financial survival relies upon it. Players are encouraged to build roster and in exchange they are rewarded for it. Battlegrounds is no different. It is a game mode that must exist within this game and help to support its survival, and actually actively penalizing players for building roster is immensely nonsensical and counterproductive.

Nor is it at all strange. In almost no competition of any seriousness is some tiny slice of "skill" the sole focus of the competition to the extent of nullifying all other sources of advantage. Chess is considered the most extreme example of a game that is strictly about nothing but pure skill, and even in Chess there is a significant advantage to being able to spend money and resources on competition. There's no sport on Earth that I can think of where this romantic notion of being only about "skill" narrowly defined is actually in force or even the goal. It is a pure fiction invented by people who don't like losing (or occasionally don't like winning by wide amounts).

This also is an odd repeat of what happened with Alliance war. In alliance war, Kabam experimented with prestige and rating based match making. It was a disaster, so they eventually removed it. It was a disaster for precisely the same reason it was a disaster in Battlegrounds. It created fair matches at the expense of creating an totally unfair competition. Individual matches were fair, in the sense that they were fights against roughly equal strength opponents. It was an unfair competition in the sense that weaker opponents could leap frog past stronger ones without ever having to face them. And at the end of the day, if a competition allows weaker competitors to pass stronger ones - defined to be competitors they could never win against head to head - without ever having to face any of them, that's considered ludicrous by the majority of competitors. The people you most want to attract to a competition would find your competition not worth their time. And that's counter productive.

As to attracting more players, the VT itself and the milestone rewards are the concession to attracting more players to BG, and it seems to be very successful considering that on the order of a quarter million players or more participate every season. That's more than arena, more than incursions, and possibly more than alliance war itself attracts. Without VT and the associated milestone rewards, BG would only include rewards for ranked performance in GC, which would in fact probably make the mode far less popular. VT and milestones are a huge concession to weaker and more casual players. I'm fine with attracting the players this is good enough for, which is hundreds of thousands, and losing the ones that require more than that, which is already a huge concession (and it is a concession: the original version of BG did not include a Victory track, or milestone rewards: those were compromise additions to the mode to address participation concerns).

DNA3000

And I really feel the need to address this directly, because it keeps coming up over and over. The reason why we don't match little league teams and MLB teams is because they are literally playing different sports. They are playing different games with different rules in different leagues with different requirements. Little league teams have requirements no MLB team can meet, and the MLB has requirements no little league team could meet. While both play some version of baseball, they play in competitive leagues with completely different rules and requirements.
Matching little league teams and MLB teams is not like matching Cav players and Paragon players, it is like matching Cav players and players who play Injustice.

But let's look at how the MLB actually matches teams, since you called out baseball specifically. The MLB does not have a salary cap. That means a team could theoretically spend a thousand dollars on roster or a billion dollars on roster. The Mets spent over $350 million USD on their team in 2023. The Oakland A's spend about $57 million. The top team spends $300 million more than the bottom team. But the A's still have to play the Mets. There is no rule that says if a team completely outspends another team, that is an unfair match up that should be avoided. Everyone knows the rules, the rules say there's no salary cap, and everyone has to deal with it. This is considered a fair competition, in the sense that there are no serious attempts to change it.

Shooter708

The lack of salary cap is a fair point. But would MLB create a matchup where they would schedule MLB teams against minor league teams? No. And that is the level of disparity with the current setup. 2 different player or can be in platinum 2 with very different level accounts. And sometimes they get paired up with each other. I get that this is an open competition. And yes I agree that you reach a level where you can’t get past based on your progression / roster.

The separator really could be the circuits and the problem are the players that are sticking around lower tiers to avoid going to gladiator’s circuit or people throwing matches to stay on certain levels. That’s purely an integrity issue. There isn’t a perfect solution for this.

But I was just pointing out in my original post that you can’t just look at this from one perspective. Maybe the issue is there aren’t enough circuits and maybe the rewards should be adjusted to encourage top level players to advance or reduce rewards for lower level players. You’re always going to have people tying to game the system. The question becomes how to minimize that. I do feel that the matchmaking has gotten better over time. But I also think it will never be perfect.

Generally speaking the more people enjoy Battlegrounds the better it is for the community and Kabaam. Feeling like you can’t progress gets people to stop playing which is not a healthy aspect for the game. Kabaam needs players. Players need to enjoy the game modes.

Demonzfyre

You're still missing the point. BGs isn't minor league vs major league. It's MLB teams vs MLB teams. For example, I am a fan of the Kansas City Royals-

For the current season, we had the 2nd worst record in the entire league. The Texas Rangers are in the World Series right now. We went 1 and 6 against them-

KC does not have a big market and doesn't spend much on roster compared to teams like the Yankees yet in 2015, we won the world series. We had to beat teams that paid more for their rosters and had better talent. That's like a TB/Cav being in Plat or Vibranium and beating paragons with bigger rosters.

Cav players are teams like the Royals. Paragon players with skill are teams that are making the playoffs year after year. They're all in the same league going after the same rewards. Sometimes they'll win, sometimes they won't. Cav players aren't in a different league though.