Battlegrounds Matchmaking is A JOKE
ababa
Member Posts: 11 ★
Dear Kabam team,
My main question is "why?"
Why is matchmaking this unfair?
Why am I playing against opponents which are stronger than me 10 times? Basically I'm wasting my time and energy because when opponent's deck appears, I instantly embrace the lose. Because I know that I'm fighting against an impossible player, I will lose by time or by a roster anyways. If my opponent doesn't leave or yields, it's a lose 100%. The worst part is that doesn't rely on my skill, it is just technically impossible to win!
I'm a thronebreaker who has 2x7 stars, one R3 6 star and almost 20x Maxed 5*/R2 6 Stars, meanwhile my opponents are paragon plus full stack of MINIMUM R3 6 stars, and mostly R4 6 stars or R2 7 stars
Why did you add a competitive game mode, which is not competitive at all? What is the reason of a ranking system if it doesn't work?
Why it is not possible to make a matchmaking regarding of a champion rankings?
I'd rather see a longer matchmaking, but more fair. I'm having a genuine frustration while playing BG's
I'm 1000% sure that majority of players which are not in GC would agree with me, Not everyone has to be in the GC, not eveyone has to be the BEST. Majority wants to play a competitive mode, which is COMPETITIVE and FAIR. If it is so, I assume people will support this post.
Hope to see a response from Kabam
Cheers!
My main question is "why?"
Why is matchmaking this unfair?
Why am I playing against opponents which are stronger than me 10 times? Basically I'm wasting my time and energy because when opponent's deck appears, I instantly embrace the lose. Because I know that I'm fighting against an impossible player, I will lose by time or by a roster anyways. If my opponent doesn't leave or yields, it's a lose 100%. The worst part is that doesn't rely on my skill, it is just technically impossible to win!
I'm a thronebreaker who has 2x7 stars, one R3 6 star and almost 20x Maxed 5*/R2 6 Stars, meanwhile my opponents are paragon plus full stack of MINIMUM R3 6 stars, and mostly R4 6 stars or R2 7 stars
Why did you add a competitive game mode, which is not competitive at all? What is the reason of a ranking system if it doesn't work?
Why it is not possible to make a matchmaking regarding of a champion rankings?
I'd rather see a longer matchmaking, but more fair. I'm having a genuine frustration while playing BG's
I'm 1000% sure that majority of players which are not in GC would agree with me, Not everyone has to be in the GC, not eveyone has to be the BEST. Majority wants to play a competitive mode, which is COMPETITIVE and FAIR. If it is so, I assume people will support this post.
Hope to see a response from Kabam
Cheers!
2
Comments
You answered your own question, matching people with a chance to win constantly would make the competition unfair.
And what is the main key of the problem, is that it's happening 95% of the time.
I guess it is normal that smaller accounts fight against each other, and bigger accounts fight against each other.
That is the meaning of a ranking system, let it be a total hero rating, or a prestige, but not like as it is rn
I think ya'll agree that 600K Thronebreaker is not a fair opponent to a 3Mil+ rating Valiant or Paragon. It's not fair both ways.
doing this will mean that some small little accounts climb to the top fighting only small little accounts whilst some bigger accounts are stuck at the bottom fighting only bigger accounts.
how is it fair for some small account to get to the top past all these other accounts they could not beat?
this is a progression game. if you wanna climb you gotta grow your account also.
its just how rpgs work.
back in the day we had to work for it.
our rosters were well and truly over and above before we got there.
so just being able to get to TB and having such a tiny account puts you well below.
i understand that that is maybe where the current power creep has put the game but of course you will struggle in a competitive mode.
I am valiant and have a 5.5 mil account and my roster still struggles to compete with other valiants.
i have 4 x r3 7*'s whilst i can come up against accounts where half the deck is r3's.
should i also be capped at the accounts i can face?
my account is huge size wise as it was grown up over a long time with every single 3* in the game maxed and every single 4* at 4/40. but the top of my account where it counts fall short of others that are supposedly at the same level.
bullseye, serpent? who are champs like this my roster has not seen them.
how do you determine the exact metric of what accounts are the same as each other? and why they should only fight other similar accounts?
my account is total 5.5mil but my bg deck pales in comparison to some i know with only 3mil account strength. total account size is not indicative of bg deck strength. that's for certain.
Again if it is relatively stronger, it is alright, I'm talking about 10x Stronger accounts, where the loose is guaranteed! No matter how hard you fight, the timer is going to be on the opponent's side anyways.
If you fight against the equal and you win, that means you're a good player in your "weight division"
Same is in sport, heavy middle and light weight brackets are made on purpose,
Imagine if in UFC or Boxing, heavy-weight will fight a light-weight. That makes no sense
you only have 10 usable champs as you put it.
therefore you are not ready to compete in BGs.
BGs is designed to reward those who have developed roster depth.
this game has progression based rewards.
if you wanna pool matchmaking you would need to seperate and tier rewards.
so small accounts fight it out for small rewards.
you use a boxing reference. the difference is the different divisions fight for different rankings, and different prize pools.
they are not fighting for the same ranking chart and the same pool of rewards.
here there is one ranking chart and one pool of rewards
if you want the big rewards you gotta put in the time and grow big to fight it out for the big rewards.
we all have the same struggles.
its not "fair" either that my account with 4 x r3 7* matches against accounts with 15-20 either.
but hey,
thats what competition is about.
This has been litigated repeatedly, and to be honest there's no short simple answer to your question, but here's the best I can do.
Let's start with the simplest possible version of Battlegrounds that would be fair, and that's actually the GC. The GC works more or less like Alliance war. If you win you go up in rating, if you lose you go down in rating. You match against other players with similar rating, which means you match against players who win at similar rates as you. This is how many if not most competitive environments similar to BG work. Everything from chess tournaments to online open esports tournaments work similar to this. So let's do that.
The problem is in such a system the newer players would basically get killed. They would always end up at the very bottom, because they realistically have no way to climb very far. I'm not saying an Uncollected player can't beat a Thronebreaker or Paragon, the problem is they are unlikely to beat them consistently. And in GC, consistency matters. If you win you go up, but if you lose you go down. So no matter how good you are, a bad streak of losses can push you all the way back down to zero. And that happens in GC. In fact, you can go down even if you don't play, because other players who do play can overtake you while you're standing still.
However, this is all completely fair.
But if you're not a hypercompetitive player, this can be very cut throat. So the devs added a Victory track to GC. The Victory track is like a preliminary participation-focused progression track. VT is designed to address a couple issues with the GC that mind you are completely fair but can be very intimidating to newer players and more casual players.
1. In the VT, you can only promote upward, you cannot slide downward. This means all your hard work trying to advance can't be erased by one bad day. You also cannot be "overtaken" by other players if you stop playing. IF you reach a certain height in VT, you are guaranteed those rewards. They can't be taken away from you.
2. In the VT, your wins count more than your losses. In the GC if you win one and then lose one, you're more or less back to where you started. If you think about it, if you always got "fair matches" then you should be winning and losing about the same number of times. Which in the GC means you would be stuck where you are. In the VT, even if you are facing equal strength competition and winning and losing at about an equal rate, you still move upward, albeit slower. You are less likely to get stuck, and feel like all your effort is for nothing, assuming you are at least reasonably competitive with your peers.
In general, the VT is designed to offer a much better experience than just throwing everyone into a GC-like BG. That doesn't mean, however, that just hands out wins to players. And that's because when we decide to give players those two things above: you can't slide downward and you gain more for winning than losing, we create a potentially very anticompetitive situation where all a player has to do is grind enough matches and they can go as high as they want, no matter how good or bad they are. Battlegrounds is still a competitive game mode: it is intended to reward players who are stronger. And that means both skill and roster. If we add one more feature to BG - which is something Kabam experimented with in the past - we throw the whole thing into a flaming dumpster.
If we allow players to *only match against players with the same roster strength* then we end up with degenerate effects. Weaker players now have a much easier time promoting than stronger players, because weak players only have to beat other weak players. They never have to face stronger players, so they can just keep promoting upward. This actually happened during the periods when Kabam experimented with such match making (it also happened in alliance war, which brings up the question of why they thought it would be any different in BG, but that's another story).
We can't let Uncollected players rise higher, faster, and with less effort than Valiant players of comparable skill, because that would be perverse. And that's not just me saying that, that's also Kabam saying the same thing.
So what is a lower strength player to do? Just get killed? Well, actually yes, sort of. The one thing that most players who complain about unequal matches do not understand or realize is that VT is an evolving ladder of competition. Every day, strong players win and promote upward. Eventually they promote completely out of VT into GC. That means every day Bronze gets easier, because most strong players have promoted out of it. You will get the occasional laggard that starts late in Bronze, but *most* of the stronger players will promote to Silver, then Gold, then Platinum. That means the players remaining are the lower and weaker players, which means lower players have a better chance of winning in those tiers. Victory track "sorts" the players into weaker and stronger over time, and as that happens weaker players are supposed to rise to their strength.
Early in the season, weaker players will have difficulty promoting very high, because there are still many strong players in lower tiers of VT. But later in the season the lower tiers have mostly weaker players and the higher tiers have mostly stronger players, and for every player there is a tier they can comfortably promote to.
All of this is intentional. Weaker players promote lower, stronger players promote higher, and the strongest get into GC where the real competition actually kicks off. The VT is a sorting hat where roster strength, skill, and some determination determine how high you go.
And that's why match making works the way it does. Basically, because all other ways are broken, have been tried in the past, and create silly situations that make a mockery of the game mode being a competition. If you are running into competition you can't beat, it means that at that moment in time, the VT sorting hat has put vastly stronger players than you into that tier. You need to get stronger, or you need to pace yourself better so that you do not run into stronger players too soon in the season.
And as I said, this has all been hashed out many times already. You're not saying anything Kabam hasn't heard before, and what they are doing now isn't because they are unaware of complaints like the ones you are making, it is in spite of them, because there are worse things. Lower strength players simply have to learn how the VT works, and they have to accept that for a particular roster strength and set of skills, there may be only so high they can expect to reach before improving themselves.
And believe it or not, this is the short version.
This is matching is so unfair
Kabam really doesn't care about FTP players