**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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A modest suggestion to make BGs less stressful
LJF
Posts: 172 ★★★
One of the worst parts of the BG season is the very end when everyone jockeys for the best Gladiator Circuit rewards. As a result, players can go on long losing streaks that ruin their position and make the entire BG season turn sour. It's the complete opposite of fun and makes BGs enormously stressful.
So here's my suggestion: give all players in Gladiator's Circuit the highest bracket they reach during the season. So if, for example, I end up on Quantum 1 when the season ends, but I reached Mysterium 2 a week earlier, I'd earn M2 rewards. That way players are incentivized to reach as high as they can for peak rewards, but they won't lose their minds seeing rewards slide away as they slide down the rankings the last few days (either because of legitimate losses or modders, which come out in full force at season end).
This may not work for the top 10 in Celestial I-IV, but an easy solution is to award rankings based on how long each player was at a given rank, with greater weight given to higher ranks for longer times. For example, if a player is Celestial II for 4 days, they'll earn that spot over another who was there for 2 days and slid down to Celestial V, even if the last day the first player slide down a few spots. For 99.99% of players, though, this isn't an issue and wouldn't affect the idea of "peak rewards," so I'm sure this could be adjusted a bit if needed without ruffling too many feathers.
So here's my suggestion: give all players in Gladiator's Circuit the highest bracket they reach during the season. So if, for example, I end up on Quantum 1 when the season ends, but I reached Mysterium 2 a week earlier, I'd earn M2 rewards. That way players are incentivized to reach as high as they can for peak rewards, but they won't lose their minds seeing rewards slide away as they slide down the rankings the last few days (either because of legitimate losses or modders, which come out in full force at season end).
This may not work for the top 10 in Celestial I-IV, but an easy solution is to award rankings based on how long each player was at a given rank, with greater weight given to higher ranks for longer times. For example, if a player is Celestial II for 4 days, they'll earn that spot over another who was there for 2 days and slid down to Celestial V, even if the last day the first player slide down a few spots. For 99.99% of players, though, this isn't an issue and wouldn't affect the idea of "peak rewards," so I'm sure this could be adjusted a bit if needed without ruffling too many feathers.
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Comments
Hell, if you were first in you’d automatically be C1.
Your idea on how long a player is at a rank is a pretty complex idea too to implement and balance properly for not a whole lot of reward in my opinion.
I appreciate why you suggested this idea, as get caught up in the stress too, but it’s part of the competition, and economically, if like 10x the amount of players are getting C5 rewards because they all made it there at some point, then C5 rewards get devalued, and would need to be reduced. There are a lot of knock on effects to what you’ve suggested unfortunately
I don't disagree that the placement mechanism for top 10 would need a little work, but just because I haven't ironed out the details doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented. It would take some tuning to come to a fair system. The current system isn't less fair than "time at a rank," it's just capturing a snapshot of who was lucky at the very end. No system is perfectly fair, it just comes down to how fair and who is helped/hurt.
Rank rewards might need a slight tune down if more people are earning higher sets, I don't disagree. I think that's a fair trade-off for the significantly less stress when playing toward the end.
One other point I didn't mention is that it would make cutoffs more fair. Say I got Q2, 1st place, because I slid in the last 10 minutes of the season. Am I so much worse a player than the person who's in last place in Q1? Those two players should be treated more fairly, and a peak reward system could do that.
Is that really the goal of the game mode? Play the minimum number and that's it?
I spent half the season on celestial 5 and I'm going to finish on celestial 6. In the end, the bigger accounts play for real and rise, it's natural to fall. I can get Celestial 5 if I keep playing but I don't think it's worth the effort, but that's the point. It's not fair that I get rewarded from Celestial 5 if I didn't finish there.
But here's a tip: If you reached Mysterium 2 once, you can reach it again. I lost three days at Quantum. Defeats happen. If you're losing or starting to lose, it's a sign that there's something you need to change in your deck or there's something about the meta that you're not understanding. Sometimes it's masteries, sometimes it's knowing about specific fights. I myself was having difficulties on Korg until I found out that Havok made it very easy. Just knowing about this fight I started winning several matches that I wouldn't have won if I hadn't known and I rose very quickly. Join groups with people who play BG and watch YouTube lives of those who play at a high level, it helps.
It's not a discussion about whether we can reach a level by season end. It's whether we should have to.
I personally made it into Mysterium briefly during the season, but I never considered thats where I would end. And that's not because I couldn't put in the effort to maintain it, but rather because I don't view it as being worth it to maintain that rank.
What you're asking for would effectively devalue the rewards of those higher ranks, cause folks would grind the hell out of GC to get to a high bracket, then completely stop playing once they were satisfied.
In addition to that, you also have the knock on effects where someone reaches GC late in the season, and has to wait 15 minutes to find a match, cause everyone else has stopped playing cause they're locked into their peak rewards.
Ultimately, and I'm not trying to be rude, it's just a bad idea for a variety of reasons.
Before it wasnt as much of a big deal not scoring as high but now each progressive rank gives 1500 extra 7* shards.
Which btw is a hefty amount when you consider the fact that Kabam has yet to buff the solo ranked rewards(top 10k barely gives you only 1k 7* shards which is laughable)
Lessgo.
NFL/NBA teams don't get additional benefit because they were first in their division for one of the months during the season. Everything is cumulative - the wins/losses all play a role in their total record. The last few weeks are the most stressful as teams jockey for positioning; it would be less exciting/meaningful if teams could just rest on their laurels because they had a win streak back in December.
The NBA is instituting a mid-season tournament, so theoretically Kabam could institute something similar where players get a little bonus reward for their rank after Week 2.
So, the model you are proposing would only work as an Addition, not as a Replacement for how GC is currently structured.
What am I not listening to in the chorus of "that's a bad idea" without further explanation? My reaction to these comments is exactly what you accuse me of: prejudging without thinking about the bigger picture in all this. Also there's not much I can listen to when people hit disagree. Me calling out the fact that this community is highly pro-status quo and resistant to change isn't me shutting my ears.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the ranking ladder if you didn't finish where you ended up placing haha
I don't disagree the current system can feel stressful at times. But the proposed solution won't fix it either. The GC tiers, except for Uru III, all have a limited number of openings. Changing those limited positions will reduce the value of the rewards.
If your highest score is what is used, there will still be stress to keep getting a higher score. Losses that lower your score will still be frustrating. Also other competitors will also be able to maintain their highest score, so if you don't continually improve yours, you are at risk of going down in tier. I just don't see how it would actually solve the problem
When we do a match, the points we score are absolute points. They are judged based on a very specific set of objective rules. Much like distance in the long jump or target score in archery, they are judged by criteria, not by comparison. But ELO rating is a comparative system. It is a relative score based on comparing competitors. We all start at zero, and then our rating changes based on wins and losses against our competitors. ELO starts off completely bogus. We all start at zero after all, regardless of how strong we are. But rating improves over time with more and more matches. Mathematically speaking, ELO converges on the true competitive strength of the players over time. ELO, and the placement order it implies, thus gets more accurate the longer the competition goes on. It is in principle the most accurate when the most matches have been played, at the end of the season. The final placement thus overrides any interim one.
Think about archery or the long jump. Competitors compete in order. Whoever goes first automatically gets first place regardless of performance. They drop to second place if the next competitor gets a higher score. But they could linger in the top ten even if they are the worst competitor. That's not really an issue, because interim rankings in the long jump or archery don't count for anything. The final ordering of the competitors is the only thing that matters.
We don't want the order or the timing of the competition to play an important role in the competition, so we only count the placement order of the competitors at the end, when all the matches have been played and our information about who is better than who is as good as it will ever be. If we were to count things like "how long a player is in the top 100" we are now weighing mathematically inaccurate information more than the final ordering, which is improper.
1) a points bump for reaching gladiator circuit. Maybe a one-time 50k or something
2) a check-in at the 2-week or 3-week mark to ease the pain of a terrible week 4.
What makes this worse than war, for example, is that players are constantly being added to the GC pool as they reach it. This creates more openings for a significant drop, whereas war season points are locked in once earned. This is especially true at lower rankings, say sub 200 points.