How Kabam killed Battlegrounds
Rebark
Member Posts: 443 ★★★
When BG was released, it was my favorite game mode.
Especially from a strategic point of view. Being creative benefited you. Knowing how to execute unique fights benefited you.
If you were someone who intercepted well, you had an advantage over those who played a lot of parries.
And, in my opinion, the most crucial and definitive point: Every defender could be done by any attacker, even by other defenders.
Korg, Fury, FAM, Thing, Photon, Kindred, Hulkling, Sasquatch, Rintrah, Onslaught, Enchantress.
All champions that you can at least try. Even without a suitable champion, you can enter the fight and play without having to pause and in some cases, even win the round.
On the other hand, we have Zola, Bullseye, Serpent, Dark Phoenix.
All champions that you will be punished by. There is no way around this without the four or five champions that can do them (and I'm being very generous). Anyone who plays BG knows that the list is much longer.
And no, none of these champions are impossible to deal, some are not even difficult. But think about it: a mode in which you can have ONLY 30 champions in your deck and have between 27 and 24 champions available and, among them, you can only choose 9, which appear RANDOMLY.
You cannot have champions available in the mode that can only be made by four or five options. Ok, you have 3 bans, just ban the three that you have the least response and you're good.
Every month the node changes radically, every month two new defenders are released, yes, defenders, because practically everyone nowadays is a defender, have you tried facing Gentle? Spiral?
How many different attackers can you rank up to be able to use for a month?
So the right mystic didn't show up to make Serpent? Didn't one of the five counters show up to make Bullseye? Your Dark Phoenix didn't show up and your opponent's did? You're screwed.
What did your opponent do to deserve the win? Was he lucky? How can that be competitive? Where did the strategy go? Sure, there are games where you can be strategic and give up on a round where you clearly have no counter. This makes playing BG extremely frustrating. And to top it all off, you lose and your opponent taunts you with an emote. Why isn't there an option to disable this permanently? Am I forced to mute my opponent in absolutely every game? Why isn't there a button for this like every game has?
So, are you saying that BG is all about luck? No.
I'm saying that there's more luck than there should be.
More luck means that you have to play a lot more games because you're going to lose games against opponents who play worse than you.
I didn't even mention pilots or modders, damn.
And now, with Radiance, we're practically forced to play that.
Especially from a strategic point of view. Being creative benefited you. Knowing how to execute unique fights benefited you.
If you were someone who intercepted well, you had an advantage over those who played a lot of parries.
And, in my opinion, the most crucial and definitive point: Every defender could be done by any attacker, even by other defenders.
Korg, Fury, FAM, Thing, Photon, Kindred, Hulkling, Sasquatch, Rintrah, Onslaught, Enchantress.
All champions that you can at least try. Even without a suitable champion, you can enter the fight and play without having to pause and in some cases, even win the round.
On the other hand, we have Zola, Bullseye, Serpent, Dark Phoenix.
All champions that you will be punished by. There is no way around this without the four or five champions that can do them (and I'm being very generous). Anyone who plays BG knows that the list is much longer.
And no, none of these champions are impossible to deal, some are not even difficult. But think about it: a mode in which you can have ONLY 30 champions in your deck and have between 27 and 24 champions available and, among them, you can only choose 9, which appear RANDOMLY.
You cannot have champions available in the mode that can only be made by four or five options. Ok, you have 3 bans, just ban the three that you have the least response and you're good.
Every month the node changes radically, every month two new defenders are released, yes, defenders, because practically everyone nowadays is a defender, have you tried facing Gentle? Spiral?
How many different attackers can you rank up to be able to use for a month?
So the right mystic didn't show up to make Serpent? Didn't one of the five counters show up to make Bullseye? Your Dark Phoenix didn't show up and your opponent's did? You're screwed.
What did your opponent do to deserve the win? Was he lucky? How can that be competitive? Where did the strategy go? Sure, there are games where you can be strategic and give up on a round where you clearly have no counter. This makes playing BG extremely frustrating. And to top it all off, you lose and your opponent taunts you with an emote. Why isn't there an option to disable this permanently? Am I forced to mute my opponent in absolutely every game? Why isn't there a button for this like every game has?
So, are you saying that BG is all about luck? No.
I'm saying that there's more luck than there should be.
More luck means that you have to play a lot more games because you're going to lose games against opponents who play worse than you.
I didn't even mention pilots or modders, damn.
And now, with Radiance, we're practically forced to play that.
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Comments
Champs like Spiral having small defensive quirks has been a thing since the start, some attackers have a few defensive mechanics to watch out for but that doesn’t make her a defender lmao
Serpent and DP are restrictive so I ban them, and I have one ban left for a strong attacker or another highly ranked defender. I agree champs like this that force just a few shouldn’t have been made but we’re long past Serpent’s balancing period now
I played about 40 matches and only saw people do it with Sinister, Okoye, Guardian and Nick Fury.
I managed to do it with Venom and Dust taking damage.
I might be able to do it well with Iceman. Gentle too.
If you win 1 and lose 1, you are in the same position, might as well play arenas and get some units
Did the NBA kill basketball with the 3-pointers? Did the NFL kill football with the forward pass? No, its just different from how it was.
That moment is made possible because your opponent has completed all the content in the game. They don’t miss anything. They probably play AW and BGs at a competitive level and probably have for a long time. They’ve invested a ton of time to get and rank those champs, and yes, they probably have invested some actual cabbage as well.
If you have reached a point in BG where you are consistently outgunned in champ selection, that’s normal. You’ve hit your current ceiling. You’re facing opponents who have done more to get ready for that moment. All you can do is emulate what they’ve done, which is to play a ton for a long time.
There is definitely a “too bad, you lose” RNG baked into BGs and these defenders. And occasionally my opponent gets treated with the same luck.
I have more patience for it in VT (losses don’t hurt as bad) but since we basically all started in GC….. the spinning your wheels gets frustrating quick.
The nodes can make champs more restrictive but in general bullseye has like 20+ counters, he never specifically said it was this meta
I’ve been doing great this season facing rosters much bigger than mine, I ban DP and Serpent when I see them and then ban whatever annoying r4 they have. Then it’s just a matter of strategizing. I ranked up a ton of generalist attackers so I usually always have a counter to what they draft
The point is that new defenders are increasingly complex and restrictive in terms of what you can use against them.
As a result, when you get to a mode like BG, where every season the nodes change, interactions arise that make some champions practically impossible to beat or that can only be beaten by three or four champions.
And that would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that you have no guarantee that you will catch them, even if they are in your deck.
And when you don't catch them, you simply lose without having the possibility of competing. It doesn't seem healthy to me for a competitive game mode to work this way.
A champion that will deal damage to you without there being a way to avoid it is not healthy for a game mode like battlegrounds, where the amount of HP you lose is decisive for a victory.
Zola will put you to sleep unless you can land a heavy attack on him. Few champions can retaliate against his heavy attack. He has the relic to prevent the first sleep from activating, but he has a lot of resistance and won't die before the second activation.
Bullseye, if you go in without a champion immune to bleed, well, you're screwed.
Serpent doesn't allow you to dodge his specials and even if you always get him to SP2, you still have to deal with the massive power gain from his immortality, which most of the time will trigger SP3.
Dark Phoenix is unbelievable. I don't know who came up with the idea of having her put a passive debuff of nova flame, an effect that only 2 champions in the game are immune to. The other way to avoid it is to put poison. Believe me, the list of champions who are capable of applying poison is very short.
And then there's Yelena coming up.
Again, the guy who plays well and plays all day long eventually gets to the top. It's no coincidence that guys like Beroman are always up there. But the select group of 100 people or maybe even less (because there are a lot of people in the celestial who are piloted) is not the rule but the exception. It is an extremely stressful and frustrating way to play.
The vast majority of people who play from Mysterium onwards must share the same feeling. When you are below 200 points facing opponents who don't know what they are doing, the perception of the game is different. From the moment you face people who have a notion of BG and know what they are doing, you face frustrating situations.
You need to play a lot of games to make up for the ones you will lose due to bad luck. Of course, there will be days when you will be lucky and win a lot too. But the consequence of this is that in order to compete, you need to dedicate a lot of time to your day.
What a terrible example 😭
Those are games of pure skill and coordination and teamwork with no luck involved.
It’s like randomly drafting your players every game from your team and if they get their Ace players and you get nothing, then you’re kind of screwed.
If you watch Celestial streams, you'll see that it's rare when they face a matchup that they have no workable counter for.
Maybe not the ideal counter, but that's what makes the top players great; they can counter the top defenders with champs most people wouldn't be able to use like that.
It really is all skill, experience, deck management, drafting, etc.
It is a very difficult game mode to master but that's what makes it intriguing.
It's more popular this season than it's ever been.
Maybe Kabam has killed the mode for you, which is your feeling and no one can dispute that. Just don't confuse your own feelings with other people's.
It’s about roster size first, then it’s about the RNG of the draft, then it’s about your skill in using optimal or sub-optimal counters.
What we need is faster smooth BG matches, less waiting more fighting, why a round takes like 10 or so minutes? It's crazy
For Zola, literally just counter his heavy with your own or rank up those who can parry non-contacts and he's such a joke.
For Bullseye we now have like 4, that's right 4 direct counters.
For Serpent you got Kushala, Spiral, shahtra and now Tigra.
Dark phoenix is new one so oh well, just ban her.
You want RNG of deck to be removed from BG yeah? I don't see Kabam changing that ever.
You also said there are new nodes in BG every month, I mean, come on now, what is this thinking? You want Vanilla no nodes BG now?
Gentle and spirals are defenders? Literally that's crazy talk right here.
Banning emotes now? Nah man, I like taunting with Loki and spiderHam hammer for that exact reason, to taunt.
Idk how anyone can get triggered by that but hey if it's working then I'll for sure use it.
Anything for the BG win 💯
However, I agree that some recent releases have gone too far regarding this restrictiveness. Many of the latest defenders have major flaws in their design and Kabam's ignorance towards this problem only did further damage as eventually attackers also began to show such flaws. Take a look at Spiral for example, how many meta matchups is she great for? I could count 3-4 at most but everyone knows that there's no reason to draft her over literally any other champion unless your opponent has Serpent. But why was a champion released with such a specific purpose? Why is countering this one single defender such a big deal?
The problem with Serpent is that he is not that difficult actually, skill requirement to fight him is rather low. Korg takes more skill as you need to be proficient at light intercepting and special dexing but Serpent requires none of those, he doesn't test your skill more than an Iron Fist. For %99 of the champions, fight is more about special baiting than trading blows. If that is what makes him difficult then you could claim that Hyperion is even harder to fight. There are many things that make him a dangerous defender but so little counterplay to those at the same time. About 10-15 champions out of 250+ can finish a fight against Serpent in bgs which is a ridiculously low amount if you ask me, not to mention how AI reliant most of them will be. The remaining 240+ probably won't take him down in 2 minutes, some won't even make it out alive. This champion is the prime example of over-restrictiveness and is so overtuned that a separate champion is designed just to answer every single absurd mechanic he has.
Overall, I believe that Serpent has paved the way for an incredibly problematic design philosophy and Kabam's champion release strategy will only make things worse. Adjustments should be made and concerns of the playerbase should be heard. Skill aspect of bgs should always be preserved.
Also, for the curious, here are some abilities that Serpent counters/punishes:
-coldsnap
-bleed
-indestructible
-unblockable
-miss
-evade
-dexterity
-stun on specials
-armor
-nullify
-fateseal
-stagger
-power lock
-special lock
-heal block
-instant damaging effects
-critical penetration
-critical rate
-power drain
-power burn
-perfect block
-block proficiency
-ability accuracy reduction
-buff immunity
-dodging back during a special
-ability power rate reduction against non-mystic
-physical and energy damage
-blocking
-unstoppable
I may have missed some but these are what I could find just by reading his kit.
I never said there were no counters to Bullseye and Serpente, but rather that there were few and that they were very specific. What I'm saying is that this is wrong, having champions who have so few options available to counter them.
Gentle and Spiral defenders? Yes, in this meta, they're. That's the difference between you and me.
I have 20 master titles in alliance war and a few celestials.
I don't need to provoke or do that kind of thing, I find it disrespectful and embarrassing, I couldn't bear to win if it weren't for my own skill, much less bother or stress other people, that's childish, maybe you need to grow up.
If it was bad thing then Kabam wouldn't have added them in first place.
Using emote is disrespectful 💀
Maybe you need to use "mute emotes" feature more.