Battlegrounds matchmaking
MRroberts
Member Posts: 6 ★
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
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Kabam already addressed it at their 1 year season 12 Battlegrounds thread
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.