No changes for next season so I will be taking a break from the game. I personally careless about rewards and more so about an improvement to the game mode itself.
1) Take away all RNG aspects. 2) Eliminate loading times, that should not count as fight time. 3) Remove the decline button. 4) Remove the pause button. 5) Increase actual matchmaking limits, no player should wait for more than 1min to find a match. 6) Add a defense and offense mastery setup like in AW. 7) Throw in a prize champ for top rankings.
Stop being delusional 😤
""Your points are just to break the game ""
How would any of the points break the game? Lol
All 7 - i don't know about your roaster but clearly if u play descent enough , u can get to VT easily
Many just do that in 2hr stream 🤷 that shows u are way to behind or u suck
If I play decent enough I can get to VT? 🤣 We start in VT and move up to GC, do you even know what you're talking about?
You need to start reading before making nonsense comments and I would appreciate if you put in some critical thinking on top if it's not too much to ask.
Clearly u are not smart enough to 1. Figure out that was a typo 2. Your deck & team to just go through VT without any problem . 3. Now who ever reaches GC - they don't even alcare about VT nodes are they went throw it fast .
See... this is exactly what I was talking about. @GroundedWisdom
@Asher1_1 Who is even talking about VT?!?! I am talking about problematics taking place in top 400 ranks in GC, top 10 alliance ranks in BGs.
Good night, I'm done here.
Lol so you are like "" Stuck in Diamond 4"" let me make a post and talk about top 400 rank in GC 🤣🤣
Even whoever have made video about BG reward they are still in Celestial 🤷 it's not like they complain & stopped playing
Sure bro, you're absolutely right I'm stuck in D4 with this deck. They are YouTubers, they need to make content, I don't. 😂
What's funny to me is forum users agreeing that cavalier players shouldn't make inputs or "cry" about end game content because they are designed for end game Valiant players but they do agree on making inputs regarding top rank competitive flaws while being casual players... interesting right?
Yet you are throwing in irrelevant inputs like throwing extras on top ranking rewards, even tho you aren’t even close to those rankings. And inputs about removing decline buttons? How does that make any sense or even effect you in the slightest? And cavalier players crying about endgame specifically for VALIENT players makes 0 sense aswell.
What's funny to me is forum users agreeing that cavalier players shouldn't make inputs or "cry" about end game content because they are designed for end game Valiant players but they do agree on making inputs regarding top rank competitive flaws while being casual players... interesting right?
Yet you are throwing in irrelevant inputs like throwing extras on top ranking rewards, even tho you aren’t even close to those rankings. And inputs about removing decline buttons? How does that make any sense or even effect you in the slightest? And cavalier players crying about endgame specifically for VALIENT players makes 0 sense aswell.
Bruh... What part of I don't have desire to play do you'll not understand? That's the whole point of the thread, there's absolutely nothing worth pushing. Rewards and game mode are laughable specially when a "competitive" game mode is full of RNG.
I sometimes wonder if you guys are unable to read or simply can't understand things, it's really not that hard.
Competitive game modes should be based on skill and not reliant on rng factors.
Draft is rng, shuffles are also rng.
Having to go first or last on champion placements can give you the upper hand in a match and that's also rng.
Defenders holding block for too long or not throwing specials can stall a fight longer than it's meant to be, therefore, if your opponent has a cooperative AI defender and you don't, you can loose the match and that can be seen as rng defender interaction.
Time in this game is one of the winning factors. In a "competitive" game mode, loading times shouldn't count towards actual fight time because that gives players with a better device or faster network an advantage.
I think what everyone is confused about is the massive delta between what this game fundamentally IS and what you think it should be. Your points about BGs are whatever. If I was in celestial and I fell out on the last day because of somebody abusing the decline button, yeah that sucks. (Edge case, but sure it sucks.)
What’s baffling about your whole campaign is the obsession with RNG. How have you come this far in a game that is fundamentally built around RNG?
It’s like you registered for a marathon, did all the training and then on race day you said, “what the hell are we doing with all this running?”
These are not needed in the game mode at all. Players often exploit these 3 things in order to win matches which is absolutely disgusting. Decline has been used several times during last few hours of each season to match fix or secure rank positions. People pause when they know they have no chance to win while out drafted or many times restart the match because they got hit during the first seconds of the match which would have caused them the loss.
There are two important points in this regard. First, do to rankings being occupied by multiple positions with same reward bracket players have the tendency to "park" and Two, players have to wait several min to find a match because of many players parking during the end of the season. No player should have to wait more than 1 min to find a match, if after 2min no one within range is found available to match, range should be increased towards next tier of available players.
There's often a feeling of BGs being a draft dependant game mode, thanks to RNG. Something that could eliminate to some extent this feeling is having the option of strategizing a mastery setup exclusively for your placed defenders and another one for your placed attackers, just like we have that option in AW. Remember, it's an option you can decide.
Battlegrounds is a game mode where many hours have to be invested in order to push for top ranks. Doing this also involves time, units and money. Top skilled players should be rewarded as well as top ranked alliances, give the players something to actually push for.
I think what everyone is confused about is the massive delta between what this game fundamentally IS and what you think it should be. Your points about BGs are whatever. If I was in celestial and I fell out on the last day because of somebody abusing the decline button, yeah that sucks. (Edge case, but sure it sucks.)
What’s baffling about your whole campaign is the obsession with RNG. How have you come this far in a game that is fundamentally built around RNG?
It’s like you registered for a marathon, did all the training and then on race day you said, “what the hell are we doing with all this running?”
Valid point and I thank you for that. AW and AQ are 2 other alliance game modes, I don't see them being involved with RNG. To me, it's that simple.
Why is the closest thing mcoc has as PVP based on RNG?
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
The only reason I did not call that out is because I'm not 100% sure there isn't something not entirely nonsensical in there. We know the current "AI" is much less complex than most think it is (even calling it an AI is being generous) and its behaviors are largely random. However, without getting too much into the weeds here it is possible (I don't know, but I have suspicions) the AI system is a two-tiered state engine that has randomized weights and randomized actions.
For lack of a better way of putting it, it is possible the AI has both a discrete random "I'm going to do this now" part and a "in general I'm less likely to do this for a while" part. Which means it is possible that a defender will be (for example) more or less aggressive randomly in a given fight, and if that's the case then you could argue that both competitors should get the same initial "seed" for its defender AI initialization as part of match start up.
However, that's getting ultra technical, and it is arguably not even necessarily a good idea, as having identical AI tendencies is only "fair" if both players are fighting the same defender. If we're drafted and selected different defenders, both sides getting the exact same AI behaviors could still give one player an advantage, making completely random tendencies just as good as anything else, at least in most metas.
Kabam should probably make sure the clocks work correctly before trying to tackle that one. And actually they are somewhat overdue to address the first draft advantage issue, which I think is way more important than the AI one. They were working on it at one point (I think they even said something publicly about it a while back), and then I don't know what happened there.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
The only reason I did not call that out is because I'm not 100% sure there isn't something not entirely nonsensical in there. We know the current "AI" is much less complex than most think it is (even calling it an AI is being generous) and its behaviors are largely random. However, without getting too much into the weeds here it is possible (I don't know, but I have suspicions) the AI system is a two-tiered state engine that has randomized weights and randomized actions.
For lack of a better way of putting it, it is possible the AI has both a discrete random "I'm going to do this now" part and a "in general I'm less likely to do this for a while" part. Which means it is possible that a defender will be (for example) more or less aggressive randomly in a given fight, and if that's the case then you could argue that both competitors should get the same initial "seed" for its defender AI initialization as part of match start up.
However, that's getting ultra technical, and it is arguably not even necessarily a good idea, as having identical AI tendencies is only "fair" if both players are fighting the same defender. If we're drafted and selected different defenders, both sides getting the exact same AI behaviors could still give one player an advantage, making completely random tendencies just as good as anything else, at least in most metas.
Kabam should probably make sure the clocks work correctly before trying to tackle that one. And actually they are somewhat overdue to address the first draft advantage issue, which I think is way more important than the AI one. They were working on it at one point (I think they even said something publicly about it a while back), and then I don't know what happened there.
Its non sensical because the this is what you call a reaction game. Even changing a combo would affect the defender differently. Doing 2 or 3 intercepts before the 1st bar of power would make a fight different. You can't just blame the AI for a different fight or result.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
1) I am giving you a viable solution to your problem of "accidently switching off from client do to swiping too aggressively". That should end the problem of not being able to clamp down all possible avenues to pause the game while worrying about making it an extremely hostile overall experience. There is absolutely no reason to not remove an exploited feature in this game which is often used in a non sportsmanship way rather than the simple fact that Kabam doesn't want to remove them period because it's not worth their time and money. In other words, they know the feature is a problem however they choose to ignore it. Same goes for the decline button and match restart.
Tell me... how come they are able to address other exploited features in game like revive farming and gifting? Is it because it reduces their profits?
Please don't try to sell me the idea that they are not going to address these issues to make me happy. I know I am not the only player who is against these things and many YouTubers have discussed these problems as well during streams.
2) If servers can't trust the game client into accurately identifying fight times without being compromised by modders, there are serious deficiencies in the games security. Which leads me to question what are the priorities when it comes to reinvesting profit because if security is not one of them while being a fundamental point towards overall game experience than I don't know what is. I'm sure players would rather enjoy not having to face modders than playing with Daredevil.
3) We are locked in current optimized matches, that's why there's often a feeling of playing draft dependant metas. Players for the most part have the same mastery setups and rank the same top tier champions.
There's a flaw in your reasoning which I will explain.
We do the exact same things regardless of RNG, although removing it would not eliminate the repetitive element, it would give players actual control of their decks to strategize willingly through out the match. Needless to say, this possiblity would eliminate the experience of loosing a match do to not having a specific counter and this is a problem originated do to the constant implementation of defenders NEEDING specific counters while few months later releasing actual counters as part of the monetization strategy. So back to the point, for the most part, It would come down to who plays the match more skillfully.
The ban feature would have more relevance while strategizing against specific opponents and players would still be incentivized to learn how to play other champs because opponents strategy would constantly change. Implementing a few other tweaks to improve the game mode would benefit the overall game experience without rng. If you want to have an example of a competitive game that constantly plays with the same "pieces" that have same "abilities" with same rules, with no rng while having a different experience on every match that would be Chess which requires knowledge and skills.
I am not a developer, it's not my job to explain or even try to figure out how this would be possible in mcoc but it can be done IF they want to. So again, please don't come with the brightful idea of saying I am arguing against myself because I am not.
And lastly, this right here is not a problem I am trying to fix...
"Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix".
it's a statement that awknowledeges the fact that spenders have an advantage, that rng can give more advantage and that loading times can also give them even more advantage. Now if you even want to try and consider match restarting and other already explained points (which I'm not saying every does), please enlighten me, what type of actual competitive game mode are we playing?
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I am saying that's not RNG. RNG = random number generator. If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable. 100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG. See you don't even know what RNG means.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I am saying that's not RNG. RNG = random number generator. If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable. 100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG. See you don't even know what RNG means.
RNG in games is a seed which often starts with a set value, if that set value is random it can translate into random behavior. In other words random AI behavior can be seen as RNG AI.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I am saying that's not RNG. RNG = random number generator. If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable. 100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG. See you don't even know what RNG means.
RNG in games is a seed which often starts with a set value, if that set value is random it can translate into random behavior. In other words random AI behavior can be seen as RNG AI.
So if I use a Small sized champ the fight is different from using the XL champ (Not RNG, cause its controllable), and lets say the small champ has Taunt, or infuriate or other abilities its RNG too?... It seems you got a bigger problem with drafts than the fights itself. What do you expect? bG seasons based entirely on mirror matches to keep you happy?
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I am saying that's not RNG. RNG = random number generator. If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable. 100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG. See you don't even know what RNG means.
RNG in games is a seed which often starts with a set value, if that set value is random it can translate into random behavior. In other words random AI behavior can be seen as RNG AI.
So if I use a Small sized champ the fight is different from using the XL champ (Not RNG, cause its controllable), and lets say the small champ has Taunt, or infuriate or other abilities its RNG too?... It seems you got a bigger problem with drafts than the fights itself. What do you expect? bG seasons based entirely on mirror matches to keep you happy?
Drafts are rng, I have a problem with rng being part of a competitive game mode which implies I have a problem with drafts.
Random AI behavior is rng so yes, within the same context it's a problem. It's that simple.
I expect all game mode flaws to be looked at and properly worked on to grant players a good overall experience.
I just don't think OP understands that a lot of the changes he is asking would actually hurt him more than benefit his BG experience.
I don't know how many of those suggestions would actually hurt the OP, but most are either more trouble than they are worth, or just plain not happening no matter how many people threaten to quit over them.
Those points being more trouble than they are worth or devs not changing them doesn't eliminate the fact of their existence. They are problems towards a competitive game mode experience. Yes, they can be strictly tied to a small group of players but those players are usually who invest more time or money, or both on this game mode.
The clearest example was Battlegrounds Brawl. Why didn't players play with their own decks? Why did they give them up to 3 shuffles? Why did they play with the same device? Why did they add sp1 and sp2 biased nodes? Because they wanted to take away as much RNG possible from the game mode and because if they played with their own decks, some would be in a clear disadvantage. On the final match, Pepe had to reroll 3 times while getting no counter, so even then, RNG played a huge factor.
This is the RNG "competitive" draft dependant game mode we play, where players are allowed to match fix, pause and restart, where loading screen times may determine the winner and where pushing for top ranks has little to no value. Yet again, those points are more trouble than they are worth.
Most of your list either has nothing to do with competitive play directly, or I've rarely if ever heard as a complaint about BGs.
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Most of the listed pain points don't have to do with competitive play directly however we're talking about how largely it affects the competitive playerbase.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
Seriously? Honestly, this is going nowhere.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
Don't forget the part of calling the defender interaction as in blocking or turtling an SP throw RNG. I guess the only way to prevent that is to script the fight. (This part of his rant and calling it RNG is mind-blowing)
I am talking about the current problems AI interactions have like bugs, dropped inputs and and such. Not actual fight mechanics.
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
Both players are fighting the same AI, then call it bugs not RNG. You are definitely not as smart as you think you are.
So you're saying that in the games current state, fighting onslaught with an XL or S champ will have his AI act in the same way? There will be no rng affecting fight time if he chooses to dance with you for a min without throwing a special? Lol
I am saying that's not RNG. RNG = random number generator. If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable. 100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG. See you don't even know what RNG means.
RNG in games is a seed which often starts with a set value, if that set value is random it can translate into random behavior. In other words random AI behavior can be seen as RNG AI.
So if I use a Small sized champ the fight is different from using the XL champ (Not RNG, cause its controllable), and lets say the small champ has Taunt, or infuriate or other abilities its RNG too?... It seems you got a bigger problem with drafts than the fights itself. What do you expect? bG seasons based entirely on mirror matches to keep you happy?
Drafts are rng, I have a problem with rng being part of a competitive game mode which implies I have a problem with drafts.
Random AI behavior is rng so yes, within the same context it's a problem. It's that simple.
I expect all game mode flaws to be looked at and properly worked on to grant players a good overall experience.
So you pretty much made this long post and babbled all this BS just to say that BGs should be predetermined decks and all matches should be mirror matches to be a competition without RNG. Lol
Comments
And cavalier players crying about endgame specifically for VALIENT players makes 0 sense aswell.
I sometimes wonder if you guys are unable to read or simply can't understand things, it's really not that hard.
Competitive game modes should be based on skill and not reliant on rng factors.
Draft is rng, shuffles are also rng.
Having to go first or last on champion placements can give you the upper hand in a match and that's also rng.
Defenders holding block for too long or not throwing specials can stall a fight longer than it's meant to be, therefore, if your opponent has a cooperative AI defender and you don't, you can loose the match and that can be seen as rng defender interaction.
Time in this game is one of the winning factors. In a "competitive" game mode, loading times shouldn't count towards actual fight time because that gives players with a better device or faster network an advantage.
What’s baffling about your whole campaign is the obsession with RNG. How have you come this far in a game that is fundamentally built around RNG?
It’s like you registered for a marathon, did all the training and then on race day you said, “what the hell are we doing with all this running?”
These are not needed in the game mode at all. Players often exploit these 3 things in order to win matches which is absolutely disgusting. Decline has been used several times during last few hours of each season to match fix or secure rank positions. People pause when they know they have no chance to win while out drafted or many times restart the match because they got hit during the first seconds of the match which would have caused them the loss.
There are two important points in this regard. First, do to rankings being occupied by multiple positions with same reward bracket players have the tendency to "park" and Two, players have to wait several min to find a match because of many players parking during the end of the season. No player should have to wait more than 1 min to find a match, if after 2min no one within range is found available to match, range should be increased towards next tier of available players.
There's often a feeling of BGs being a draft dependant game mode, thanks to RNG. Something that could eliminate to some extent this feeling is having the option of strategizing a mastery setup exclusively for your placed defenders and another one for your placed attackers, just like we have that option in AW. Remember, it's an option you can decide.
Battlegrounds is a game mode where many hours have to be invested in order to push for top ranks. Doing this also involves time, units and money. Top skilled players should be rewarded as well as top ranked alliances, give the players something to actually push for.
Why is the closest thing mcoc has as PVP based on RNG?
Pure RNG, or skill? Or a mix like MCOC?
Edit: actually nevermind, not interested. Please disregard...
The pause button for example, is extremely difficult to address for the simple reason that it is impossible to prevent a player from pausing the game. All you have to do is switch away from the client, and it is paused. The button is just a convenience. And the suggestions to clamp down on all possible avenues to pause the game run into the problem of being extremely hostile to the overall experience. I've accidentally switched from the client simply by swiping too aggressively: if I started losing matches because the game decided a context switch was illegal pausing, I wouldn't be all that happy about it, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people wouldn't be either. And that doesn't even get into the technical weeds of what happens when there's a delay in starting the match, one of your other complaints. The server has no idea why you're taking so long to start, and it can't trust the game client to tell it (because if you trust the game client, you expose yourself to modders). So excessive lag can combine with aggressive pause policing to start causing players to forfeit laggy matches. You say you want to remove the pause button *and* you don't want to count loading times against the player. I don't see how that's possible without rewriting a lot of the implementation to add significant telemetry for individual matches that I'm pretty sure don't currently exist, and would require substantial back end resources to track.
How about widening match criteria so players don't wait long for matches. Sounds good until you consider what that does to rating. If you match against someone far lower than you, you run into asymmetric ratings deltas. Winning against a much lower rated player means you will earn very small amounts of rating points. But a loss is catastrophic: you will lose a ton of ratings points if you lose to someone far lower rated. Matching against players significantly far away from your rating is very dangerous for the higher rated player. They have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. And before you say well just don't do that, if you muck with the way ratings are calculated just because, you will invalidate the calculations that form the basis of why higher rated players are even considered the winner of everything. ELO and ELO-like ratings systems rely upon a mathematical structure that justifies saying the higher rated competitor is better. Start giving away points against the system just to make higher rated players happy while giving them quicker easier matches, and you can create ratings exploit holes.
As to removing all the RNG in the draft phase, why even have a draft? Actually, that's not a rhetorical question. Pretty much all of the competitive games of similar structure have drafts. Kabam didn't invent the idea, they borrowed it from other games. So why do drafts exist in these competitive games? Before you decide to advocate removing it, it might be a good idea to know why it is even there, and why so many games implement it.
There's at least one good reason why the draft exists, and why there is a random element to it. Without it, competitors would get locked into optimized matches and just do the same things over and over, because there is no benefit to changing optimum strategies. That would quickly get boring. That's why the meta keeps changing. Kabam made it a point to say that changing metas was an integral part of the BG game mode to prevent meta lock-in. In fact, it was this very design statement that I used to advocate for BG mastery profiles before the game mode launched.
Whether randomness is a good thing or not depends on its global effect on the competition. Random chance can influence any one particular match, but good and bad luck should average out over time. No one should overly benefit or get penalized by the random effects in the mode, they should simply shake things up without swamping the overall impact of skill and expertise. If RNG was having an excessive impact on the mode, we'd expect to see random chance put random people into Celestial and knock the strongest competitors out at some frequency. But we don't see that. By in large, the strongest players move up and the weaker ones don't. RND can impact a match, but it doesn't have an observable effect on the overall competition. And that's about the right amount of random chance.
You might say that no amount of RNG is good, that this game is "supposed to be about skill." But this game, and every game mode in it, is embedded in a progressional game. If someone has a better roster, that's an advantage that exists in pretty much every game mode. And Kabam *explicitly stated* that this roster advantage should persist in Battlegrounds as well.
You mentioned the Brawl, and ask why it was structured the way it was. I could ask you the same question, because I'm not sure you actually get the point. You say they did what they did you remove as much RNG as possible. But if that was the goal, why not just remove RNG completely? Why limit rerolls? And would you actually be able to do that in the actual game? Everyone gets exactly the same roster and gets to pick whichever champs they want during the draft? Do you actually think this is something you could get even most of the top competitors to buy into? Much less Kabam, because now you're saying pursuing champs for BG is now irrelevant.
I'm far from someone who thinks BG is a perfect game mode. I've advocated for lots of changes to BG from before it was launched until now. And actually the current mode contains quite a few of them. It is within that context that I say, if you're waiting for your list, you're going to be waiting for a very long time. And if you're waiting for people to have an epiphany and realize that's the best path forward, I think you're going to be waiting even longer. More players keep begging for "fair match ups" than anything else, and they are just as convinced as you are that they have the one true way. And they are never going to get it.
Switching from the client should be seen as illegal pausing and therefore all forms of game pausing should be removed. You say this has happened to you by "swiping too aggressively"... it can simply be stopped by pinning the game app and it can be done on Android, IOS or Ipad.
You're telling me that servers can't trust the game client? That doing so exposes them to modders? What I read under these lines is Kabam not wanting to invest enough profit to improve their game security against modders and therefore can't improve their servers in a way game experience isn't compromised. Is this not a priority? It's common to see modders every season and while there are fewer than before, they still impact player's overall game experience.
Competitors are locked in optimized matches with current rng system. And we keep doing the same things over and over. We rank the hardest meta defenders, their fastest counters and insta draft them every season depending on the meta. It only takes a few hours to understand which are the best defenders every season, which are their fastest counters and from that point on, we play a draft dependant game mode where who ever doesn't get a counter to a specific champ looses. We don't change strategies, there's no point in doing so although you wished rng helped with that. While skill and expertise can help overcome some of these rng factors, difference in roster size only exacerbates them, that's why you don't see random people have a random chance at celestial because ranks are also tied to monetization, otherwise we'd be able to see our top skilled ftp players overcoming rng factors and reaching podiums.
1. No, Kabam is not going to force all of its players to use the accessibility features of their phone when playing MCOC just to make you happy.
2. Yes, I'm telling you the servers can't trust the game client because of course not.
3. No, competitors are not "locked in optimized matches with the current RNG system" because if they were, then your entire complaint about RNG affecting the matches negatively would be completely meaningless. You're saying the game needs to remove RNG, and you're saying players are nevertheless doing the same things repeatedly regardless of RNG.
I have a long standing rule, and it predates even my time around here, and it says when I and the person I'm arguing with are both arguing against them, that would be the end of the discussion by majority rule.
Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix.
For lack of a better way of putting it, it is possible the AI has both a discrete random "I'm going to do this now" part and a "in general I'm less likely to do this for a while" part. Which means it is possible that a defender will be (for example) more or less aggressive randomly in a given fight, and if that's the case then you could argue that both competitors should get the same initial "seed" for its defender AI initialization as part of match start up.
However, that's getting ultra technical, and it is arguably not even necessarily a good idea, as having identical AI tendencies is only "fair" if both players are fighting the same defender. If we're drafted and selected different defenders, both sides getting the exact same AI behaviors could still give one player an advantage, making completely random tendencies just as good as anything else, at least in most metas.
Kabam should probably make sure the clocks work correctly before trying to tackle that one. And actually they are somewhat overdue to address the first draft advantage issue, which I think is way more important than the AI one. They were working on it at one point (I think they even said something publicly about it a while back), and then I don't know what happened there.
should end the problem of not being able to
clamp down all possible avenues to pause the game while worrying about making it an extremely hostile overall experience.
There is absolutely no reason to not remove an exploited feature in this game which is often used in a non sportsmanship way rather than the simple fact that Kabam doesn't want to remove them period because it's not worth their time and money. In other words, they know the feature is a problem however they choose to ignore it. Same goes for the decline button and match restart.
Tell me... how come they are able to address other exploited features in game like revive farming and gifting? Is it because it reduces their profits?
Please don't try to sell me the idea that they are not going to address these issues to make me happy. I know I am not the only player who is against these things and many YouTubers have discussed these problems as well during streams.
2) If servers can't trust the game client into accurately identifying fight times without being compromised by modders, there are serious deficiencies in the games security. Which leads me to question what are the priorities when it comes to reinvesting profit because if security is not one of them while being a fundamental point towards overall game experience than I don't know what is.
I'm sure players would rather enjoy not having to face modders than playing with Daredevil.
3) We are locked in current optimized matches, that's why there's often a feeling of playing draft dependant metas. Players for the most part have the same mastery setups and rank the same top tier champions.
There's a flaw in your reasoning which I will explain.
We do the exact same things regardless of RNG, although removing it would not eliminate the repetitive element, it would give players actual control of their decks to strategize willingly through out the match. Needless to say, this possiblity would eliminate the experience of loosing a match do to not having a specific counter and this is a problem originated do to the constant implementation of defenders NEEDING specific counters while few months later releasing actual counters as part of the monetization strategy. So back to the point, for the most part, It would come down to who plays the match more skillfully.
The ban feature would have more relevance while strategizing against specific opponents and players would still be incentivized to learn how to play other champs because opponents strategy would constantly change. Implementing a few other tweaks to improve the game mode would benefit the overall game experience without rng. If you want to have an example of a competitive game that constantly plays with the same "pieces" that have same "abilities" with same rules, with no rng while having a different experience on every match that would be Chess which requires knowledge and skills.
I am not a developer, it's not my job to explain or even try to figure out how this would be possible in mcoc but it can be done IF they want to. So again, please don't come with the brightful idea of saying I am arguing against myself because I am not.
And lastly, this right here is not a problem I am trying to fix...
"Also, I'm curious how many top tier BG players might have started off on board here, and have now been at least given some pause by your assertion that the top skilled players are not the ones at the top of the leaderboards, only the top spenders are. I'm sure at least some of them will be surprised to hear that's one of the "problems" you're trying to fix".
it's a statement that awknowledeges the fact that spenders have an advantage, that rng can give more advantage and that loading times can also give them even more advantage. Now if you even want to try and consider match restarting and other already explained points (which I'm not saying every does), please enlighten me, what type of actual competitive game mode are we playing?
Its not the first time I say this, I suggest you try to expand the perspective you have of things rather than misspointing and criticizing people with what your understandings of the conversation are.
"I'm waiting till this BG season is over to see if any relevant changes are made otherwise I'm out."
Because no relevant changes were made, or are going to be made.
Because you still care a lot even though you said you were taking a break.
RNG = random number generator.
If you are using an XL or a S and blame the behavior on that is not random is it? Its actually controllable.
100 bucks on a slot machine is 100 bucks wether its 1 100 dollar bill or 5 20s and the Slot machine will have THE SAME RNG.
See you don't even know what RNG means.
Game is a joke right now, I'm taking a break.
It seems you got a bigger problem with drafts than the fights itself. What do you expect? bG seasons based entirely on mirror matches to keep you happy?
Random AI behavior is rng so yes, within the same context it's a problem. It's that simple.
I expect all game mode flaws to be looked at and properly worked on to grant players a good overall experience.
Lol