BG crazy suggestion #1093: Allow players to play unranked matches (plus a trophy reward tweak)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,841 Guardian
First, the main suggestion: let players play unranked matches in Battlegrounds. Unranked matches always match against other players of similar roster strength and progression (similar to how match making works in Bronze) but you never gain trophies for wins and you don't lose trophies for losses. However - and you'll have to read to the end - there's also a way for unranked matches to earn trophies, to a point.
Okay, so what? Why bother? Well, that will take a bit of explaining.
First of all, I've been tracking BG numbers for many seasons in a couple ways. For one, every other season or so I take my low alts and deliberately score very low points with them. The reason is to gauge overall player participation. Just a few seasons ago we had many players claim BG was dying, because fewer and fewer players were playing. It turns out that was not true. *Slightly* fewer players were playing, but according to the solo milestone leaderboards, there were still about 200k players playing at least one match in BG. The counter argument could be that of course a player might just play one match, get disgusted, and quit the mode, but that was also not possible because this behavior persisted across multiple seasons. Hundreds of thousands of players could not be playing BG a little and then quitting permanently, because there are not enough players playing MCOC for that to happen season after season. There might be a small number of players doing that, but most players were playing a few matches and then quitting for the season, but then coming back season after season.
What was changing was how many matches those players played. There's a huge difference between 200k players most of whom play dozens of matches, and 200k players most of whom play only a few. That would make the mode look a lot more empty. Moreover, it wasn't simply a matter of players playing a few matches and then stopping for the season either. They were focusing their matches towards the end of the season. We could observe this by looking at GC leaderboards and seeing how many players were entering GC. In earlier seasons we would see many more players entering GC than in later seasons, but if you waited until the last day to observe, you'd see a very large influx of players entering GC in the last few days, and especially in the very last day. There might still be fewer players in GC, but the difference was lower when comparing the last few hours and comparing in the middle of the season. GC in the middle of the season has at times seemed like it wouldn't even fill up all the tiers.
So the data was saying that BG still attracted a lot of players, hundreds of thousands in fact, and players were still willing to play and push to GC, but the difference was that fewer players were seeking matches throughout the season. And it seemed like this affected lower progress players more than higher ones, which affected their match making in lower tiers - they were getting unbalanced matches somewhat more often earlier in the season.
So BG does have a participation problem, but it isn't because players are no longer playing because they are, and it is not because the rewards themselves are dramatically too low because players are still pushing for those rewards, just moreso at the end of seasons than the beginning. To be fair we've seen a significant jump in overall participation in the past few seasons with the enhanced milestones. It isn't a huge reward jump and the effort required to get those higher milestones is very largee, but we still see it have a noticeable effect on participation. But we also know reward boosts do not have lasting impacts on participation: when players get used to them, their effect diminishes. And we still see participation gaps in the mode, where lower players are still seeing unbalanced match ups in very low VT tiers.
There's always going to be players who lose more often than they win. Even with roster-based match ups, that's going to be true, For a given player population, some players will just be better, and some worse. How do we encourage the players who tend to lose that they should participate more? We have BG milestone rewards, but they don't seem to be enough to consistently drive participation. If they were, we wouldn't see participation shift so much towards the end of the season. Participation shifts to the end of the season, because that's when the competition is the most favorable - or used to be - because that's when it is most likely the strongest players will have promoted out of VT. However, when *everyone* waits to the end, that doesn't happen like it used to, for obvious reasons.
So how do we encourage players to play early, and often? Here we go: we create an option for a player to play an unranked match. Unranked matches have two properties. First, you do not gain or lose trophies, whether you win or lose. But these do count for BG milestones. So with unranked matches, you can earn BG milestones without losing trophies.
But since you can't gain trophies for wins, what's the point? Whether you gain and then lose, or just don't gain or lose, aren't you still stuck in the same place? Yes, but we're going to make one other change. The BG objective that requires three wins? We're going to add one BG trophy to that objective. If you win three times and get that objective, you'll get one BG trophy.
There are 28 days in a BG season. There are thus 14 such objectives, and it is possible to earn 14 trophies just from those objectives. But *only* if you play starting from the beginning of the season. You cannot wait to the last day of the season and then snag 14 trophies from BG objectives. You can only get one. So if a player feels they cannot win, they can still play nothing but unranked matches and if they play enough and win at least three matches in two days, even if they lose twenty, they will still gain one trophy they cannot lose so long as they continue to just play unranked matches.
Theoretically speaking, if the player started in P1 (the highest you can start in a season) the maximum possible benefit would be to get to V3. This is not enough to get to GC. And if you lose a lot this still requires a ton of effort to get the 42 wins required to maximize this benefit. And it must be spread out across the entire season.
Because this requires player to play to get the benefit, this encourages participation. Because you can only get the benefit once every two days, it encourages participation across the entire season. And because the benefit is something even lower skill players can achieve, it encourages them to actually play more matches to earn more rewards. And it does so without skewing the competition too much. Players who choose this path will be progressing upwards through VT very slowly.
Admittedly, this does add more trophies into the system, and that might require tweaking the number of trophies required for promotion, because players who play regular matches will also be getting that one extra trophy every few days. How much depends on whether Kabam thinks current promotion rates are fine (in which case more required trophies would need to be added to VT) or could use a slight boost (in which case things might be fine as they are).
To summarize:
1. Let players play unranked matches. Unranked matches do not gain trophies when the player wins, and do not cost trophies when the players lose. Such matches always use the same match algorithm as in Bronze, where players are matched against other players of similar roster and progression title when possible, regardless of what VT tier you are in.
2. Award one VT trophy in the BG objective "win three BG matches." This trophy is awarded to any player that completes that objective, whether they are playing unranked or regular matches.
3. If necessary, tweak the number of trophies required for promotion in higher VT tiers, because now players will be earning a bit more trophies for the same game play.
This does three things that I think would be a positive for Battlegrounds:
1. Lower skill players are encouraged to participate. This means they can earn BG objective rewards, and they can even progress slowly *if* they play early and often. They can't reach GC in this way, but they can promote in VT to a point, even if they can't string enough wins in a row.
2. Players have a way to play "casually" while providing competition for other players. Suppose you are in D1 with three trophies. You have a few minutes and you like playing BG, but you're worried about losing and backsliding. You just want to play a casual match. You flip the unranked switch and you can now play a casual match that counts for BG objectives, but won't cost you any trophies. Maybe you just want to play for fun for a while until later in the season when you think you'll be in a better position to promote, or maybe you just want to wait for a better time to fight "for real." Either way, while you're playing a casual match, other players have another opponent to fight against.
3. This incentivizes playing at the beginning of the season. The mechanics of Victory Track means there's a significant incentive to play at the end of the season. I've covered this effect many times myself, and I'm probably significantly to blame for popularizing the "wait to the end" strategy. This counterbalances that effect, by created a reward incentive to play early in the season, by making the BG objectives - that do not stack up and must be claimed or lost over time - contain rewards worth obtaining by playing early (namely, VT trophies). And interestingly the stronger you are the less incentive this is, because VT trophies aren't worth as much to someone who is going to promote quickly anyway, but weaker players will find this much more valuable, much more willing to pursue, and thus worth jumping in and playing even if they are likely to lose a lot.
Okay, so what? Why bother? Well, that will take a bit of explaining.
First of all, I've been tracking BG numbers for many seasons in a couple ways. For one, every other season or so I take my low alts and deliberately score very low points with them. The reason is to gauge overall player participation. Just a few seasons ago we had many players claim BG was dying, because fewer and fewer players were playing. It turns out that was not true. *Slightly* fewer players were playing, but according to the solo milestone leaderboards, there were still about 200k players playing at least one match in BG. The counter argument could be that of course a player might just play one match, get disgusted, and quit the mode, but that was also not possible because this behavior persisted across multiple seasons. Hundreds of thousands of players could not be playing BG a little and then quitting permanently, because there are not enough players playing MCOC for that to happen season after season. There might be a small number of players doing that, but most players were playing a few matches and then quitting for the season, but then coming back season after season.
What was changing was how many matches those players played. There's a huge difference between 200k players most of whom play dozens of matches, and 200k players most of whom play only a few. That would make the mode look a lot more empty. Moreover, it wasn't simply a matter of players playing a few matches and then stopping for the season either. They were focusing their matches towards the end of the season. We could observe this by looking at GC leaderboards and seeing how many players were entering GC. In earlier seasons we would see many more players entering GC than in later seasons, but if you waited until the last day to observe, you'd see a very large influx of players entering GC in the last few days, and especially in the very last day. There might still be fewer players in GC, but the difference was lower when comparing the last few hours and comparing in the middle of the season. GC in the middle of the season has at times seemed like it wouldn't even fill up all the tiers.
So the data was saying that BG still attracted a lot of players, hundreds of thousands in fact, and players were still willing to play and push to GC, but the difference was that fewer players were seeking matches throughout the season. And it seemed like this affected lower progress players more than higher ones, which affected their match making in lower tiers - they were getting unbalanced matches somewhat more often earlier in the season.
So BG does have a participation problem, but it isn't because players are no longer playing because they are, and it is not because the rewards themselves are dramatically too low because players are still pushing for those rewards, just moreso at the end of seasons than the beginning. To be fair we've seen a significant jump in overall participation in the past few seasons with the enhanced milestones. It isn't a huge reward jump and the effort required to get those higher milestones is very largee, but we still see it have a noticeable effect on participation. But we also know reward boosts do not have lasting impacts on participation: when players get used to them, their effect diminishes. And we still see participation gaps in the mode, where lower players are still seeing unbalanced match ups in very low VT tiers.
There's always going to be players who lose more often than they win. Even with roster-based match ups, that's going to be true, For a given player population, some players will just be better, and some worse. How do we encourage the players who tend to lose that they should participate more? We have BG milestone rewards, but they don't seem to be enough to consistently drive participation. If they were, we wouldn't see participation shift so much towards the end of the season. Participation shifts to the end of the season, because that's when the competition is the most favorable - or used to be - because that's when it is most likely the strongest players will have promoted out of VT. However, when *everyone* waits to the end, that doesn't happen like it used to, for obvious reasons.
So how do we encourage players to play early, and often? Here we go: we create an option for a player to play an unranked match. Unranked matches have two properties. First, you do not gain or lose trophies, whether you win or lose. But these do count for BG milestones. So with unranked matches, you can earn BG milestones without losing trophies.
But since you can't gain trophies for wins, what's the point? Whether you gain and then lose, or just don't gain or lose, aren't you still stuck in the same place? Yes, but we're going to make one other change. The BG objective that requires three wins? We're going to add one BG trophy to that objective. If you win three times and get that objective, you'll get one BG trophy.
There are 28 days in a BG season. There are thus 14 such objectives, and it is possible to earn 14 trophies just from those objectives. But *only* if you play starting from the beginning of the season. You cannot wait to the last day of the season and then snag 14 trophies from BG objectives. You can only get one. So if a player feels they cannot win, they can still play nothing but unranked matches and if they play enough and win at least three matches in two days, even if they lose twenty, they will still gain one trophy they cannot lose so long as they continue to just play unranked matches.
Theoretically speaking, if the player started in P1 (the highest you can start in a season) the maximum possible benefit would be to get to V3. This is not enough to get to GC. And if you lose a lot this still requires a ton of effort to get the 42 wins required to maximize this benefit. And it must be spread out across the entire season.
Because this requires player to play to get the benefit, this encourages participation. Because you can only get the benefit once every two days, it encourages participation across the entire season. And because the benefit is something even lower skill players can achieve, it encourages them to actually play more matches to earn more rewards. And it does so without skewing the competition too much. Players who choose this path will be progressing upwards through VT very slowly.
Admittedly, this does add more trophies into the system, and that might require tweaking the number of trophies required for promotion, because players who play regular matches will also be getting that one extra trophy every few days. How much depends on whether Kabam thinks current promotion rates are fine (in which case more required trophies would need to be added to VT) or could use a slight boost (in which case things might be fine as they are).
To summarize:
1. Let players play unranked matches. Unranked matches do not gain trophies when the player wins, and do not cost trophies when the players lose. Such matches always use the same match algorithm as in Bronze, where players are matched against other players of similar roster and progression title when possible, regardless of what VT tier you are in.
2. Award one VT trophy in the BG objective "win three BG matches." This trophy is awarded to any player that completes that objective, whether they are playing unranked or regular matches.
3. If necessary, tweak the number of trophies required for promotion in higher VT tiers, because now players will be earning a bit more trophies for the same game play.
This does three things that I think would be a positive for Battlegrounds:
1. Lower skill players are encouraged to participate. This means they can earn BG objective rewards, and they can even progress slowly *if* they play early and often. They can't reach GC in this way, but they can promote in VT to a point, even if they can't string enough wins in a row.
2. Players have a way to play "casually" while providing competition for other players. Suppose you are in D1 with three trophies. You have a few minutes and you like playing BG, but you're worried about losing and backsliding. You just want to play a casual match. You flip the unranked switch and you can now play a casual match that counts for BG objectives, but won't cost you any trophies. Maybe you just want to play for fun for a while until later in the season when you think you'll be in a better position to promote, or maybe you just want to wait for a better time to fight "for real." Either way, while you're playing a casual match, other players have another opponent to fight against.
3. This incentivizes playing at the beginning of the season. The mechanics of Victory Track means there's a significant incentive to play at the end of the season. I've covered this effect many times myself, and I'm probably significantly to blame for popularizing the "wait to the end" strategy. This counterbalances that effect, by created a reward incentive to play early in the season, by making the BG objectives - that do not stack up and must be claimed or lost over time - contain rewards worth obtaining by playing early (namely, VT trophies). And interestingly the stronger you are the less incentive this is, because VT trophies aren't worth as much to someone who is going to promote quickly anyway, but weaker players will find this much more valuable, much more willing to pursue, and thus worth jumping in and playing even if they are likely to lose a lot.
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Comments
I generally fit the second category.
I don’t think adding more required wins to each tier would be a great move, because that changes this idea from being “a nice helpful addition” to some sort of forced exchange, where players now have to lose something in order to gain this benefit instead of just being thrown a bone. Yes it would push more players into gc, (which I personally don’t think is a problem since kabam gatekeeps exclusive rewards there anyways) but you are right when saying it’s their decision on whether or not they feel the promotion rate could use a bump or stay as is.
I do have a few questions. Would matchmaking care about the tier you’re in? Or could someone in vibranium 2 match someone in plat 2 just because they have similar prestige. If it is tier based, do players in gc have access to unranked mode? I feel like it would start to be difficult to find a match as you make it further into gc if you had to match someone in your same tier AND with similar prestige.
Would this be a bit too good for uc & cav players? It would now be far easier for them to grind points, meaning they can grab 7500 7* shards every month fairly reliably. That’s really strong for a player at that level, and would place less importance on progressing through story mode since reaching a higher progression will have no effect on their bg solo milestones, which have the best rewards they can access.
Sorry if these questions come across as nitpicking, I just genuinely do like this suggestion and would love to see it implemented. And if it were to be, these things would have to be figured out for it to work.
In fact, I suspect more lower progress players *are* grinding out BG now, in spite of the perception that BG is hostile to lower players, precisely because those milestone rewards are proportionately so much better for them. The incentive for a Valiant to grind those out is low, but the incentive for a Cav to grind those out, win or lose, is big.
Not at all. The point to posting a suggestion is to invite comments (or at least it should be). There are no perfect suggestions, and there is always the possibility I’ve overlooked something big I have forgotten to account for. I’ve been mulling this over for over four months now, in part because I was collecting data, and in part because whenever you change a competitive environment like BG the first thing you have to worry about is how competitors will attempt to exploit any flaw in that change. After all, the people who participate in BG are self-selected to be the ones most likely to try to push the envelope to look for any advantage. The idea has gone through about five iterations in my head over that time, mostly to either make it simpler, or eliminate exploitable flaws.
(1) Makes sense, since part of the appeal is the fact that it awards a medal upon completion of the objectives. Gc doesn’t have that and can’t have that, so it misses out on part of the appeal. I don’t think having an unranked mode in gc would be a bad idea, probably the better way to do it would to have matchmaking be rating based as you suggested, with roster not being a factor. The reason I mentioned it is because I didn’t want players to feel like they lose something when hitting gc. We want players to feel incentivized to push early, and the casual player might not be as excited to hit gc if they lose their casual mode.
(2) Ok so I realized I didn’t actually mention why I think uc & cavs can grind points more easily with this change. Right now they run into the infamous plat 2 wall, where 80-90% of matches become a guaranteed loss just due to roster differences. This means after a pretty short amount of time they reach a point where their winrate becomes 10-20%, making it far harder to grind points. Now add in the fact that they get less marks since they’re roadblocked sooner along the vt and it becomes impossible to grind to 300k, at least without units. Obviously most players at that level won’t want to spend units to lose more or simply won’t have the units on hand, so this serves as an unofficial progression lock on most of the 7* shards.
With an unranked mode implemented this unofficial lock goes out the window, because now those players have an infinite supply of fair matchups. Of course that’s a good thing in many ways and the entire point of this suggestion. But it does give lower level players a lot of new rewards to access. And maybe that’s fine, they still had to work for those rewards after all, so maybe we just leave it be. What I personally think could be an option is capping the amount of milestones those players can get. Maybe cav and under can’t get milestones past 200k? That still offers them a 6* class nexus and 3k 7* shards every month, still pretty good and worth grinding for. This would kill 2 birds with one stone. Debataby overpowered rewards, and those players not having enough marks to reach all the milestones.
(3) Glad there’s no misunderstood intentions. I think we’re both here brainstorming because we care about this game, and trying to improve it in the places it needs help. Bg matchmaking has been a debate for a while, and your original suggestion is probably the one I’ve been the most excited about maybe becoming a reality.
Maybe that's the intent: at some point you stop being able to gain anything except the three match participation objective because you can't win anymore. If so, then this would be problematic. But if there's some wiggle room to improve participation by improving the ability for players to actually reach those milestone rewards, then that might be less of a problem. You could adjust for this by rebalancing the milestone point requirements, but of course that's easier said than done because any change that improves something in one place but reduces the benefit somewhere else tends to not be judged on the net effect but overfocused on the reduction side.
Strictly speaking this is not intended to be a reward buff. This is intended to be a participation incentive. A side effect of any incentive to do anything is that players will get more rewards, but the idea is to increase the rewards as little as possible while still being sufficient to be seen as an incentive worth changing behavior to chase.
I truly do feel for the smaller players, once they hit Plat 2 they're pretty well screwed.
You can make it easier or harder for players to find their own fun, but you can't give players fun.
We also can't ask every single player if they are having fun, and to prove it. We can observe participation, and either we accept that participation is a valid proxy for measuring players having fun, or we don't. And if we don't, then we just surrender to the conclusion that we will never know if players are having fun or not. Because if participation is not a good proxy for what the players think, neither are the complaints of a few hundred or even a few thousand players.
But obviously, people won’t look at it that way. They’ll see it as something being taken from them even tho they wouldn’t have gone for those rewards anyways. Which I do understand, even if the rewards themselves weren’t taken away the opportunity to get them was, no matter how unrealistic reaching those rewards is. But the final decision would be Kabam’s anyways, on whether or not they think capping the milestones would be a good idea.
I am interested, If there are any uc or cav players reading this, how would you feel if your solo milestones were capped at 200k in addition to DNA’s change? You would still be able to get all the 6* shards, the 6* class nexus and 3k 7* shards, but nothing more. Reasons for this cap are listed in my previous post.
But the idea to put together only same BG levels may be interesting.
Maybe Kabam can do a season, why not, next one, this way? And after the results ,take a look and see if it was ok or not?
I was thinking of a beta test, but I presume that only a few summoners are beta testers, so ,impossible to get an actual feedback from this.
👍
Kabam doesn’t consider it a Competitive mode, because they think its okay to lock Story Content to milestone rewards (Deathless pieces; and yes, Deathless is story content).
High competitive players consider it just a speed bump to get to the actual competition where they can compete and get the really good rewards.
Other High Level players consider VT as a point farming ground to reach the highest milestone before casually choosing to proceed to GC. VT is clearly not a competition to them.
Mid levep players see VT as a competition, and also going up a few tiers in GC before plateauing as the competiton.
Other Mid level players see getting to GC as the entire point, as the 10k for entering as well as any Nightcrawler/Deathless piece to be the goal (the goal is not to get the rewards of competitive GC). As such they do consider VT a competition.
Low level players see VT BGs as an unfair competition, as they are unable to progress past a certain point and feel locked out of rewards they deserve/want/desire.
Your proposal seems like it would help with participation, and potentially help the Low Level player group. But it does nothing to address the weird hodgepodge where VT is both a competitive and not a competitive mode to a wide range of interacting players. And portions of VT have fairly matched competiton, and other portions of VT have fairly matched progression.
However, VT whole point is to encourage participation, since if BG was entirely just GC, then participation would be much less (As a personal example, I don’t actually enjoy GC when I do make it). So, your suggestions could work.
But a game mode with only the GC would be very hostile to newer players and lower progress players. And just like this game allows player to play for free and treats free players well, because most of the spenders of the game start as and become attached to the game as free players, most of the players who ultimately will become hard core BG players have to start somewhere. Providing an on-ramp to the more cut-throat competition is in the best interests of everyone. If not enough players play it, the people who love it will be playing a game mode the devs will be less likely to invest time to maintain. And the game mode can spiral downward if not enough players play it, causing it to get harder to find matches, which causes more people to decide it is not worth their time to play.
This is less of an issue for Alliance War, because alliance war operates on a schedule. Whether 50,000 alliances compete or 5,000, there is always a way to match everyone up. But when a turnstile based game mode like BG uses real time match making, there’s a huge difference between 200,000 players playing and 20,000 players playing. Density matters for BG in a way it doesn’t for AW.
The Victory track is not just some arbitrary design mistake: in my opinion it is necessary for the long term health of the game mode. We need to encourage players to play, to get better at it, and to want to invest resources in building roster to improve their performance in it.
The game mode is a competitive game mode. Ultimately, all strong players end up in competitive fights for either progress through the top tiers of VT, or placement in GC. The fact that lower progress and more casual players have an on-ramp to the more competitive tiers of the game mode is perfectly fine. It’s just important to keep in mind the specific decisions that were made to support both the competitive and participatory elements of the mode.
Players get confused all the time, but the devs don’t. They are keenly aware of what elements are there for what reasons, and they seemed to agree with my analysis of the game mode which argued for a Victory track that works similarly to how it works now, with a transition from “easy mode” to “:competitive mode” to balance the need to encourage participation and the requirements of being a legitimate competition.
The albatross you mention is not the Victory Track. It’s the expectations of a player base unused to competitive PvP. This is an unavoidable problem, and one that can only be solved with time. It’s also one I’ve seen before, as a player of first and second generation MMOs that often launched with only PvE and retrofitted PvP after they build player bases whose expectations were fashioned around PvE values. We have to give time for the culture to shift enough to lift that albatross, much as it did for content difficulty in the pre-Cavalier days
Remember when it seemed every other forum post was complaining about the game being too difficult, because the expectations were that the game was supposed to be a casual past time, not a difficult intensive game, because “that’s not what mobile games are supposed to be.” The players with that mindset back then would not be able to recognize the game as it exists today, with Winter of Woe and Necropolis being widely played, progression-significant content. The game today is not made for those kinds of players.
To be blunt, we probably lost a lot of those players, because they had no choice: they had to accept the game was not what they were expecting, or leave. BG players have the same choice, albeit on a smaller scale. They can accept BG as a competitive mode, or they can leave the mode. And some probably did. But with the VT, we have an opportunity to create a third option: convert some of the players that cannot see themselves participating in such a mode into players that learn it and grow into it. I think the VT does that fairly well, but it can do it a lot better. That’s not an albatross: that’s good game design. As I said, the albatross is the player expectations that this mode does not match their expectations of what is “fair” for MCOC content. We can’t fix that, we can only wait for it to fade away.
Also, true story. I got through P1 fairly easy, and then last night I immediately got two trophies in D4. In my third match I was 1-1 and had an easy fight: Deathless Guillotine vs Knull. And my opponent ultimately scored 39813 points in his round: I’ve done that fight a few times already scoring in the mid to high 40s.
And then I somehow picked the wrong attacker and ended up losing. And then I lost the next match, and was down to zero. One slip up, and I went from promoting to D3 to resetting to the floor in D4. And what was going through my mind that caused me to absentmindedly select the wrong attacker in a promotion match? Finalizing some details for this thread.
Yeah, that happens to me more often than I care to admit.
Well Iam not asking to make the competition aspect of BGs redundant.
What im asking here is a non competitive mode with fairer matches.
Some gold for completing few matches in objectives maybe, 200 points in solo score maybe idk.
To have a place where we can do a "rol run" of the BGs with no consequences. To have a place to knock out opponents with similar accounts.
It may engage more player who want to play casually. This idea may have many holes and Im not a developer who can define what it should look like.
A player can escape to a non competitive mode when they are stuck.
Competition will evolve with time and progression.
But it may co-exist with Non competitive mode.
Since you're squarely in the hardcore end-game super-engaged camp, by all means suggest away (cause they want to keep you), but I suspect you can forget about widening the audience, since that's evidently not a big Kabam priority.
Battlegrounds is not a "loss leader." It is a way to expand on one of the foundational parts of the game: champion chase and roster progression.
BG doesn't have to be directly monetizable to be profitable. But besides that, it does have a direct monetization avenue: marks. Last season over 45 thousand players reached or exceeded the 300,000 point solo milestone. The most marks you can earn in a season is 3200. This equates to about 36 matches. If you win them all you could reach 243,000 points but it is highly unlikely we have 45,000 players capable of winning every match. If the average player who reached that milestone averaged a 50% win rate, that would be 189,000 points. To get the remaining 111,000 points would require playing 148 matches using energy at a 50% win rate. Do you believe all 45,000 players either won almost all the time or played at least 184 matches to get there?
Marks earn points nine times faster. I suspect people are buying those, along with Victory shields, in significant numbers. But the impact BG has on incentivizing champion chase and rank ups is probably significantly higher.
This I feel is the main problem with Battlegrounds. VT has a moving target of wins to qualify for the big dance that is GC. You should never lose a trophy in VT. If you win a trophy just like in Track and Field it is yours to keep. If you lose you simply to not move up. So if someone wants to put in the work, they will slowly climb the ladder with effort and qualify for GC. The impossible will now be probable.
A BG match is not a tournament, such that a win in a match is like winning a tournament and should qualify you for some higher thing. A player can do twenty matches, or fifty, or five hundred. If you want a system where you never lose a trophy, you would need to limit the number of matches players can do in a season. And if you miss, you miss, period, and you just get to sit on the sidelines. Fixed number of wins necessary combined with unlimited attempts to get them is not a qualification, it is just a grind.
Kabam does not want to limit the number of matches players are allowed to participate in, so they cannot use fixed numbers of wins to determine who advances and who doesn't. There has to be some proportionate measure of skill that more matches doesn't simply make completely moot.
The problem with all sports and competitive analogies is they can be useful to describe what is happening and to illustrate how certain things work in conjunction with other things, but you cannot simply lift one property from one competition and transplant it into another competition that does not contain the same surrounding mechanics. You need to understand *why* things work that way in one competition and don't work that way in others. Track and field events are generally scored on a points system. That means from event to event a competitor can move up in ranking or move down in ranking depending on their performance relative to other competitors. A player in first place after one event can drop to last place with poor finishes in the next few events. That's how Gladiator Circuit works. But that's not how the Victory track works. The VT is much more forgiving than that, and yet players still find it not forgiving enough, because the structure of the VT is such that all of its benefits are things people think they should just get automatically, and all the deficits that pay for those benefits are things that can just be erased with a wave of a hand.