One way to encourage participation in Battlegrounds (without messing with the competition)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,673 Guardian
I'm sure it is obvious to everyone playing BGs that participation is down, especially for lower progress players. This has made the competition skew higher, making progress more difficult for most players, and especially for lower progress players, even at lower VT tiers. And the more those players decide to opt out, the harder it becomes for those who remain, creating a positive reinforcement loop: the more players opt out, the more difficult and grindy it becomes, the more players are encouraged to opt out.
We need an opposite force pushing in the opposite direction. We need a way to encourage players to participate, and the fewer the number that do, the more incentive there is to return. People have suggested all sorts of changes to BG, most of which (I believe) are unworkable. For example, mandating "fair match ups" where lower progress players never have to face higher ones. We've already done that, we know it is totally broken, we shouldn't try it a second time. Another suggestion is to completely split up BG, give the lower progress players their own mode, and the higher players their own mode, so they never interact at all. This seems equally unworkable, not only because it has all the problems of equal roster match ups, but it adds an additional wrinkle that it punishes lower progress players who are exceptionally good. Where ever you draw the line, there will be players who fall into the lower bracket by virtue of their progression tier or roster strength but *could* compete in the higher bracket due to skill. This would punish such players.
One idea that might work is to use the mechanism that already exists to encourage participation: the objectives and non-competitive events, in particular the solo event. These systems reward players primarily for participation, but they can only give out so many rewards before they become unbalancing and detract from the point of the mode, which is to reward the strongest competitors with the best rewards.
But there actually is a competitive element to the solo event: besides milestone rewards, it also has ranked rewards. And they are pretty good rewards, especially at the top. The problem is that those rewards generally require enormous activity to get higher ranks for, and you're competing against everyone, including highly active very strong players. So what if you were not?
Suppose we split up the solo leaderboard, making rank rewards for each progression tier. Uncollected and lower (because sometimes lower tier players get a pass into BG), Cav, TB, Paragon and higher (because at the moment there aren't all that many Valiants: giving them their own leaderboard doesn't make sense when essentially everyone would place highly). Each progression tier would be competing for those rewards separately. The #1 UC would get the #1 rank rewards for UC, completely independent of the #1 Paragon and higher player getting the #1 reward for that separate leaderboard.
The idea here is that when there are a lot of players in a particular progression tier participating, the incentive for participating is relatively low, because you have a lot of players competing for those rank rewards. But when participation drops, and there are fewer players playing, the incentive to participate increases, because now there are fewer players chasing those rewards. The odds of placing higher grows, and the return on investment for time spent is also higher.
This has the opposite effect that the mode is currently facing where the more players opt out, the more hostile the mode becomes. Here, the more players opt out, the more rewarding the mode becomes for who's left. But only if they participate, because the solo event leaderboard rewards activity. If you're willing to compete, if you're willing to queue up and take your chances, that''s how you get those rewards.
This encourages participation without directly bribing players to play. And it still encourages players to win, because you score more points when you win. The system already exists, and it already exists to do exactly what I'm suggesting it do: it tries to encourage participation, whether you actually advance in VT or not. By making each progression tier independent, that encouragement gets focused on where it needs to go: towards the progression tiers that are being most turned away from the mode.
The biggest objection I can anticipate here is: it is not appropriate to give the #1 (active) UC player those huge rank rewards. Except they already have a shot at them now. We're all in the same leaderboard all shooting for the same rank rewards now. Everyone has a shot at those rewards, and apparently that's fine now. The difference here would be that a) Kabam would be giving out collectively more of them (by virtue of having multiple leaderboards) and b) lower participation equals more rewards concentrated into who's left still playing, which is intentional. I think this is a valid but not fatal objection. We're increasing reward flow into the game, but not by an unmanageable amount.
We need an opposite force pushing in the opposite direction. We need a way to encourage players to participate, and the fewer the number that do, the more incentive there is to return. People have suggested all sorts of changes to BG, most of which (I believe) are unworkable. For example, mandating "fair match ups" where lower progress players never have to face higher ones. We've already done that, we know it is totally broken, we shouldn't try it a second time. Another suggestion is to completely split up BG, give the lower progress players their own mode, and the higher players their own mode, so they never interact at all. This seems equally unworkable, not only because it has all the problems of equal roster match ups, but it adds an additional wrinkle that it punishes lower progress players who are exceptionally good. Where ever you draw the line, there will be players who fall into the lower bracket by virtue of their progression tier or roster strength but *could* compete in the higher bracket due to skill. This would punish such players.
One idea that might work is to use the mechanism that already exists to encourage participation: the objectives and non-competitive events, in particular the solo event. These systems reward players primarily for participation, but they can only give out so many rewards before they become unbalancing and detract from the point of the mode, which is to reward the strongest competitors with the best rewards.
But there actually is a competitive element to the solo event: besides milestone rewards, it also has ranked rewards. And they are pretty good rewards, especially at the top. The problem is that those rewards generally require enormous activity to get higher ranks for, and you're competing against everyone, including highly active very strong players. So what if you were not?
Suppose we split up the solo leaderboard, making rank rewards for each progression tier. Uncollected and lower (because sometimes lower tier players get a pass into BG), Cav, TB, Paragon and higher (because at the moment there aren't all that many Valiants: giving them their own leaderboard doesn't make sense when essentially everyone would place highly). Each progression tier would be competing for those rewards separately. The #1 UC would get the #1 rank rewards for UC, completely independent of the #1 Paragon and higher player getting the #1 reward for that separate leaderboard.
The idea here is that when there are a lot of players in a particular progression tier participating, the incentive for participating is relatively low, because you have a lot of players competing for those rank rewards. But when participation drops, and there are fewer players playing, the incentive to participate increases, because now there are fewer players chasing those rewards. The odds of placing higher grows, and the return on investment for time spent is also higher.
This has the opposite effect that the mode is currently facing where the more players opt out, the more hostile the mode becomes. Here, the more players opt out, the more rewarding the mode becomes for who's left. But only if they participate, because the solo event leaderboard rewards activity. If you're willing to compete, if you're willing to queue up and take your chances, that''s how you get those rewards.
This encourages participation without directly bribing players to play. And it still encourages players to win, because you score more points when you win. The system already exists, and it already exists to do exactly what I'm suggesting it do: it tries to encourage participation, whether you actually advance in VT or not. By making each progression tier independent, that encouragement gets focused on where it needs to go: towards the progression tiers that are being most turned away from the mode.
The biggest objection I can anticipate here is: it is not appropriate to give the #1 (active) UC player those huge rank rewards. Except they already have a shot at them now. We're all in the same leaderboard all shooting for the same rank rewards now. Everyone has a shot at those rewards, and apparently that's fine now. The difference here would be that a) Kabam would be giving out collectively more of them (by virtue of having multiple leaderboards) and b) lower participation equals more rewards concentrated into who's left still playing, which is intentional. I think this is a valid but not fatal objection. We're increasing reward flow into the game, but not by an unmanageable amount.
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Like a cavailer player who is 950th rank in cavailer leaderboard becomes a thronebreaker mid season, what will his new rank will be?
There's another edge case, and that's the case of some simply never progressing, but building up a monster roster in the background. I think this would require making the idea a little more complex, instead of segregating strictly by progression tier, we would need some way of combining progression tier and roster strength, so that if someone became "too beefy" for their actual progression tier, we would bump them up to where they belong.
If we combine these two things, I think we end up somewhere where if a player promotes in the middle of the season that does not change their leaderboard tier, but if they improve their roster by enough to push them into the next higher tier then that would push them to the next higher leaderboard. An imperfect solution, but one that doesn't encourage players to simply not promote to higher progression tiers and just camp out in the lower ones, and also doesn't punish someone who starts the season Cavalier and then becomes Thronebreaker in the middle of the season, but doesn't actually get materially stronger while doing so.
For simplicity sake, I mention progression tier. But in practice, I suspect we would have to create a roster strength metric, something like prestige but calculated over their top 30 or so champs (the size of a deck) and say your BG tier is some combination of progress tier and this roster strength metric.
Which, not coincidentally, is how I think lower tier Victory Track match making actually currently works.
I suggested a new set of 48hr objectives just for GC.. of course completing those would complete the ones we have right now
We definitely need something help make people at all levels engage in the mode again. I think the recent store update only being for Valiant didn’t help at all. If I wasn’t Valiant I would honestly have felt like Kabam didn’t care about my participation in Battlegrounds after that. Store is outdated for them so are the 48 hour objectives even a driver to complete anymore?
Think a store buff for all levels is needed. Solo rewards I think are getting a buff next season? But the rank rewards you suggested I think could help.
The reply to @captain_rogers however, reminded me of wsg twinks in wow. You could play BGs in wow at level 20 as you started to level and they had low level BGs at every ten levels as you went up. In reality, no one did, because the very best players had "twink" accounts, which were the very best level 20, 30, 40 etc accounts, kitted out in the best gear, piloted by the MSDs of the wow game. It was impossible to play those low level BGs because the skill and gear gap, was just insane.
I think what you're suggesting would end up the same. You will have some players who just want to be the best in that bracket, camping it forever.
Personally and while I have no data for this, I think it is the design of the game mode itself and the zero sum game, that you've so brilliantly broken down in the past that is the issue and which really comes to the fore in a dwindling population game. The lose one win one, ad infinitum, ladder, when the player base is becoming an even more concentrated group of the best, results in even more people opting out.
They can't fix that with rewards, without risking the balance in the game, because it would need to be stupendously large rewards, to make me push to gladiators and as a valiant, I really like those 25% tc66.... But not enough to play BGs beyond diamond.
I think they will eventually have to revisit the design of the ladder, entirely.
You would have win 3, 2,1 and play 3 objectives stacked that are completed in 1 pass.
Personally I think the VT itself is part of the problem, as I don’t recall this level of frustration in the beta season where it didn’t exist. But then it’s probably easily exploitable by people who lose with energy to win with EMs… and I can’t reason a way around that.
Moreover, the big victims in point farming are the lower progress players, but if this encourages more of them to participate, then it is more likely they will start finding matches with each other at the lower tiers than is happening now.
So I think the damage possible is low, and it helps lower progress players more than it hurts them.
But this is a bit self-regulating, because in the suggestion I'm making specifically, with the details modifications I mention to captain_rogers, you can't just camp out with a low alt indefinitely: as soon as you attempt to use any of those rewards you will start promoting yourself into higher tiers. And since the currency has a cap, you can't just stock up a billion trophies first, and then spend them after you've had many seasons to earn them.
Also, even if this does happen to at least some degree, there's the separate psychological change that happens. People complain about being completely unmatched when they get matched against someone of vastly stronger roster. They don't complain when they get matched against someone of vastly stronger skill set or knowledgebase, because they simply don't know that happened. When you get destroyed by a PvP player using a twinked account, you know you got twinked. All the gear and resources are extremely visible, just like huge roster is visible in BG. But superior skill is not visible. There's no way to tell you got beat by MSD playing an alt, and you got beat by someone who just got lucky. And even if you suspect your opponent is exhibiting far better skills than normal, short of them being mod-worthy speed, most people seem more willing to write that off as being "fairly" beaten. It is only a perception change and not a competitive one, but even a perceptual change can have benefits for the game mode if it decreases the antagonism towards match ups.
It's a miracle I make it to GC i'm telling you lol.
Something should definitely be done though to increase interest. My alliance currently has decreased each season in participation.
We want the strongest players to come out on top. Strongest. Not strongest among their age group, or strongest among people of their height, and not strongest among all the players who happened to not have completed Act 6 yet. None of those things matter, or should matter. We want the strongest players to move up, and the weakest to move downward.
If you don't want that, there are other parts of the game that don't have that. But Battlegrounds is for the players that do. It is not about excluding players who don't want that, it is about accepting that there are players who do, and the mode is for them. Just like Alliance war is for players who want that sort of thing, and the arena is for players who want that sort of thing. We can try to make Battlegrounds as palatable and admitting as we can, but not at the expense of defying its original purpose. If we make lower progress players happy by handing them easy (yes, easy) matches all the time at the expense of making the higher progress players angry that lower progress players are overtaking them without ever having to face them, that's not an equal trade off. That's a complete failure.
That's what I mean when I say this is an attempt to encourage participation without tampering with the competition. Nothing I'm suggesting disadvantages higher progress players. Noting I'm suggesting is handing lower progress players any special treatment in the Victory Track specifically. What I'm suggesting acknowledges that lower participation makes things arbitrarily harder for everyone, and lower progress players more than anyone, and attacking the participation levels in a competition-neutral way benefits everyone playing the mode without altering the fundamentals of the competitive elements of the mode. Players will still end up where their competitive potential dictates. They might just be more willing to push harder to reach that potential.
To the OP: if the goal is simply to increase participation, why is this any more complicated than improving the solo BG milestone rewards and/or the BG store for lower tiers?
I'm running into some of the smaller accounts, usually wiping thr floor with them, then I get matched with some dude stacked moreso than I am and lose all my progress.
I legit feel bad for these smaller guys because I'm sure as hell not purposely staying where I am, I'm having just as hard of a time getting anywhere as they are!
I been in diamond one for at least a week now and just can't seem to string a win streak together at all, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
I think incentivizing earlier and/or more frequent play is a better lever to pull.
As designed, it’s a problematic game mode. You cannot truly allow everyone to compete against everyone because there are vast gaps in accounts. And you cannot fully segregate by tier because that devalues the effort put in to be at the next tier, and the next tier.
The sad truth is that if you excel, you essentially wind up playing yourself over and over. Is that fun? If it were, I’m guessing there wouldn’t be a BGs offer in store right now and a few empty tiers of GC with a week+ remaining.
Dr. Zola
My only concern, is that I think this is only half the battle. I can’t speak for everyone, but for me personally even if rewards are made to be worth chasing, if I’m not having fun while chasing them, then I won’t. I remember the first time we had a buffed rewards season. I was cavalier so the solo milestones were amazing for me. I joined a bg alliance, and grinded daily until I made it to 400k. I got the rewards I wanted, but I did not enjoy most of it. I told myself I wouldn’t grind that hard for a while due to how burnt out I was, and I know that a lot of the community felt the same way.
Anyways, my point of that whole rant is that better rewards aren’t exactly enough to motivate players to play more. For some it might be, but I don’t know if that % of players is enough to get battlegrounds back on its feet, especially with all its other problems. With that being said, what are the other problems that need to be fixed?
Well what I think still holds bgs down, is matchmaking. I know we’ve all seen the posts asking for fair, roster based matchmaking, and I’m not saying that’s the direction we should take. But, even if the system is fair in rewarding those who have worked hard for their rosters, it’s still a major turn off for anyone who is in the disadvantageous position. When players feel like they have no chance of winning, they give up. And when it happens enough, they give up on the gamemode entirely. Sure you can entice them with rewards and see if they’ll temporarily suffer through the grind, (like I did months ago) but at some point they will lose the motivation and stop altogether.
Most (if not all) of the complaints regarding matchmaking are from uc & cavs in platinum, or tb & paragons in diamond & vibranium. The majority of the problems are in these 3 tiers. Now that I’ve addressed the problem, how does it get fixed?
I unfortunately don’t have an easy clear answer, but I do have a couple suggestions that may at least ease the burden if it doesn’t fix it entirely. (This suggestion could be implemented in addition to yours as well)
First off, change seeding slightly. Right now, everyone who makes it to gladiator circuit will start their next season in plat 1, regardless of where in gc you finished. There’s a big difference between an uru player and a celestial player, and having them all start in plat 1 means the lower tier gc players get stuck and have to wait on the larger account to move out of there, which makes everyone below them have to wait to get into plat 1, and the cycle continues. A better option imo, would be to have everyone in quantum and higher start in vibranium 3, and everyone in arcane and below start in plat 1 as usual.
Secondly, make vibranium 3 or 4 wins instead of 5. Vibranium is the only tier that requires 5 wins to progress through, which makes it the easiest target to become a bottleneck. Reducing the number of needed wins would send some of the players into gc, (which is empty anyway) and consequently remove some of the tension off of vibranium. Especially since a lot of rewards are trapped behind VT completion, this would improve the incentive to push for gc, since it no longer feels like an impossible task.
Lastly, as I’ve seen others suggest, add an incentive to make it to gc as early as possible. It could be trophy tokens, 7* shards, anything really as long as it’s made enticing enough.
I’m sure there’s probably better solutions out there, but I think mine would at least help out. I appreciate the thought you put in to making a post trying to improve the gamemode, and feel free to critique any issues you see with my suggestions.
I charge an hourly rate for my services. When I charge a package price without hourly rates, I drive my value down should a project take twice or three times the projected amount of time. Time = opportunity, opportunity = money. I lose money on package pricing.
Battlegrounds is a package price endeavor. Payment could be for one hour or 10 hours or more of work. "Fairness" means little when the issue is a wildly variable time commitment for invariable rewards, period.
Want me to play bgs? Pay me by the hour. When you figure that system out, I'm all ears.
Would rather see the victory track get removed and have one big gladiator circuit and let everyone face themselves and let it naturally settle in the type of arrangement that would be possible
It could encourage Valiants to grind harder if Kabam got really generous with the ranked rewards but I don't really see that happening tbh.
As to why not just increase rewards. What’s the correct level to raise them to? We know what’s going to happen for any reasonable boost to rewards. Everyone is going to praise them for a couple months, then get used to them and start bemoaning them being outdated and not worth pursuing.
Giving each “progression” its own rank rewards means there is no uniform buff to the rewards. Instead, the less people who play, the bigger the rewards are on average for everyone who does play. If the players get numb to the rewards and start expecting more, the act of dropping out makes the rewards juicier for those left. If a lot of people drop out, the rank rewards will automatically become better incentives for players to jump in.
If more lower tier players are encouraged to jump in, that will also reduce the strength of the average player in every tier, which will encourage higher Paragons and lower Valiants to compete more because they will get less stuck.
So for example, reach Plat1 to claim a specific set of calendar rewards; reach Diamond 1 for higher, then Vib1, then Uru1, Arcane1, Mysterium, and so on....
It would be easy, even as a valiant, to go 20 matches without any reward *in the victory track*; 3 hours of your life gone for only the marginal gain of perhaps having a smidge of extra game knowledge than before. It takes a certain type of person, who's likely in the extreme minority, who would find that appealing compared to other uses of their time.
There's minimal reward structure that can be inserted into that design, that will encourage most people to push.
They may as well have a holding screen with a spinning coin, that freezes the game for 10 minutes a time and you have a 50/50 chance of winning at the end of those 10 minutes.
I ask because currently, one of the flaws in the solo milestones is that they account for 5 progression tiers with an insane gap between the lowest and the highest accounts. There’s no way to balance rewards that are enticing for high end accounts with the fact that they’d be far too rich for lower accounts outside of completely scraping the current systems in favor of trophy tokens for the store, but even that addresses the need for progression segregated milestones as the stores are progression based.
If the proposal is only for rank rewards to change and people have to wait the full season… I doubt things would change as daily participation is more likely to be influenced by the immediate rewards or tiered chase journey along the way to the season end payout.
My idea would be a to add a new solo event, one that only awards tokens. In milestones and rank rewards, same for all. (Maybe some 7* shards too here and there).
You get points for winning a fight, completing a match, winning a match. Extra points if you're doing it in GC.
Of course, the store for Paragons and lower would also need a re-work, otherwise it won't really incentivize those players to play more than they do now.