Taking A Look At Matchmaking and Tier Progression

fox1342

I'd be cautious of any solution that ends up making the higher tiers even harder to get into though. So if you increase the reward differential, after a while anyone who's not in that tier will be massively dis-favoured when they do enter and will have even less incentive to do so.

Perhaps better coalition ranking points would be an answer that doesn't cause this to happen too much.


Mostly though it's that mastering cards is boring.

losdamianos

rather than crippling lower tiers I think we should expand the reward for platinium to give an incentive to reach highest tier

hawkyh1

I've only been playing for 2 months.
my view is the tier system is inadequate
at representing players. my gideon/nissa
decks wins me many battles. my other
colours I'm not so confident. maybe you
could allow players to choose the tier
their planeswalkers qualify in and then
encourage them to try the upper tiers
for more fun and rewards?
if card mastery could unlock small gameplay
rewards for the cards involved and it's
colour. that could encourage more variation,
discovery and fun?
planeswalker levels and card potency should
go hand in hand.
higher level tiers could have an aditional
score/competition with cascades/landslides/
risk which would separate the true best
players from their piers.

HH

Moomins

Just improve rewards in higher tiers. Both rewards available for leader board success and for getting 10 points, 25 points, etc.

Add a multiplier so that points from a higher tier matter more for coalitions.

Additionally do what someone said and greatly reduce chances to get cards you have mastered.

This way it is better for virtually everyone to move up in tier.

Hemlock

Relatively new player here - but I really like the suggestion that Mastered cards are excluded from new packs.

It gives an incentive to experiment with new cards, and reduces disappointment when new packs are opened and all you get are dupes.

M3f

Basically the rule of "carrot and the stick" in f2p games works much more when applying the carrot rather than the stick. Making any rules more harsh shrinks the player base quickly.

Simple solution that doesn't hurt people and motivates to go higher up in tiers is making the rewards more lucrative in higher tier ranks. No matter in which rank You are You want to get the exclusive (and when the event doesn't have an exclusive it should always have a guaranteed rare or mythic sometimes at highest progression reward like it used to be in PvE events) card so just put it in at 100% progression bronze, 85% silver, 70% gold and 50% platinum (so for an event that ends progression at 150 it would be at 150B/75Plat) and double the other rewards for each rank higher than bronze (so in Platinum all runes would be 8x what You get in Bronze).

Both of those changes implemented will make most of the casual players to advance tiers asap since higher ranks will require You to play less for the exclusive card (if that's Your goal) and benefit You more with each step even if playing against tougher decks.

The last change would be competition reward where brackets would also have to increase a lot for each progression (so a mythic card for 1st person in Bronze only, top 3 in Silver, top 10 Gold and Top 25 Platinum and analogically with lower reward brackets).

There's really no point in beating players with the proverbial stick like many of You propose because no one plays the game to get punished or forced to do something. People will just quit and look for another game if that happens. "The Carrot" is almost every time a better solution.

chillyerrmac

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=55234

Made my own post a while back about this in the Suggestion forum. Please review/comment.

hawkyh1

I was thinking along the lines of fixed rotating awards that would really
only benefit players of that tier.
eg bronze winners can win fixed prizes such as lone rider and planeswalker
koth etc. the roster is then cycled through with each event. if you've won/
accumulated all there is to win on bronze then maybe you should look at
mastering your cards to enter at a higher tier. overpowered players are not
going to want to knowingly win 1st place prize koth for the 2nd time. should
a low level/small deck bronze player be able to win mythics? why not give
more appropriate prizes for each tier? you don't need to force overpowered
players into higher tiers once they realise there is nothing left in the lower
tiers that is of any interest to them.

HH

bk1234

fox1342 wrote:

I'd be cautious of any solution that ends up making the higher tiers even harder to get into though. So if you increase the reward differential, after a while anyone who's not in that tier will be massively dis-favoured when they do enter and will have even less incentive to do so.

Perhaps better coalition ranking points would be an answer that doesn't cause this to happen too much.


Mostly though it's that mastering cards is boring.

Soooooo boring. I almost quit this game when I did my Platinum grind. I think card mastery is the worst feature they have ever introduced.

jogamundo

i think the matchmaking should consider these variables

1) players in the same Tier as you
Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum

2) players of equivalent lifetime point score
opponents who score a similar number of pts in events that you do.
similar to the Lifetime Score that shows up in your Coalition pts. but not tied to Coalitions since some players simply aren't in a coalition or could circumvent this.
This still doesn't guarantee balancing since players i know grind the event until they reach the top goal and then stop.

3) player planeswalkers points
start tracking how many pts each planeswalker gets for a player. If you win every game you play with your Koth deck, then that deck gets ranked higher for matchmaking. But if your Gideon deck is just a pile of rubbish and only rarely gets you any points then it gets paired against equivalent decks.

4) deck contents
come up with an algorithm that evaluates the rarity of each card in a deck.
this would help in special events, some people don't have mythic Werewolves so their deck would rank differently than someone that has 3 common werewolves vs someone with 3 mythic werewolves.

Morphis

I know probably this is not what you want to hear, but my opinion is that the whole mastery system simply fails on many different levels.

It could have been a good way to unlock new deck slots. Cause having to manage those can be a little "complicated" for new players.
For medium players it would have been n incentive to play with different carda(one of the good goals of the system).

As a meter for establishing tiers it fails cause:
- it's easily exploitable
- it's not even a valid meter of a player skill level.


So fixing it to accomplish this purpose requires more work(for worse result) than implementing a valid matchmaking system.
Any logic that is based on player performance and can(even if slowly) result also in getting lower tier will work.

Like I said mastery can be used as future "currency" for deck slots or for foil cards or whatever does not give advantage to players.

Dr_Dobz

Suggestion: Add additional progression rewards for higher mastery tiers in events, and make the progression rewards more important than the leaderboard rewards.

I don't have the actual progression rewards from any event handy, so these aren't based on/derived from any actual event rewards, but consider the following thumbnail sketch based on the 350 possible points from Nodes of Power:

Available to all:
25: 1000 runes
50: BfZ Pack
75: 20 crystals
100: Origins pack
150: Fat Pack, Event specific card
Available to silver and above:
175: 2500 runes
200: Guaranteed Rare
Available to gold and above:
250: 50 crystals
275: Fat Pack
Available to platinum only:
300: 75 crystals
325: Guaranteed mythic

Add to this a change in the leaderboard rewards--since the good rewards are already in the progression payouts, the leaderboard rewards can be something more inconsequential like a bunch of runes and a few crystals, or maybe flair of some sort. Of course, tweak and fine tune the specific payoffs as desired; if the corporate overlords view these as too generous then turn it down a notch, since you gotta pay the bills after all. In any event, the specific form the rewards take is less important than the relative rewards of progression vs leaderboard placement.

Inverting the relative payoffs of leaderboard vs progression might accomplish a few things:
1. Better carrots for progression up the mastery tiers. Gold players can't possibly do as well as platinum players.
2. People quit being pissed off at the tiebreaker system. Believe me, there is a lot of angst over this.
3. Because tiebreakers are way less important, server load should be more evenly spaced out over time.

There are other, less important benefits too, like making coalitions easier to manage by reducing free rider problems, etc. Anyway, just something to think about.

buscemi

Dr_Dobz wrote:

Suggestion: Add additional progression rewards for higher mastery tiers in events, and make the progression rewards more important than the leaderboard rewards.

*snip*

Inverting the relative payoffs of leaderboard vs progression might accomplish a few things:
1. Better carrots for progression up the mastery tiers. Gold players can't possibly do as well as platinum players.
2. People quit being pissed off at the tiebreaker system. Believe me, there is a lot of angst over this.
3. Because tiebreakers are way less important, server load should be more evenly spaced out over time.

There are other, less important benefits too, like making coalitions easier to manage by reducing free rider problems, etc. Anyway, just something to think about.

Ooh, I like this idea. Also, perhaps capping the number of points that players can get by competing at lower tiers, so that people deliberately slumming it in Silver can't actually score the same number of points for their coalition as ones competing in Platinum?

madwren

buscemi wrote:

Dr_Dobz wrote:

Suggestion: Add additional progression rewards for higher mastery tiers in events, and make the progression rewards more important than the leaderboard rewards.

*snip*

Inverting the relative payoffs of leaderboard vs progression might accomplish a few things:
1. Better carrots for progression up the mastery tiers. Gold players can't possibly do as well as platinum players.
2. People quit being pissed off at the tiebreaker system. Believe me, there is a lot of angst over this.
3. Because tiebreakers are way less important, server load should be more evenly spaced out over time.

There are other, less important benefits too, like making coalitions easier to manage by reducing free rider problems, etc. Anyway, just something to think about.

Ooh, I like this idea. Also, perhaps capping the number of points that players can get by competing at lower tiers, so that people deliberately slumming it in Silver can't actually score the same number of points for their coalition as ones competing in Platinum?

I like all of this.

octal9

Dr_Dobz wrote:

words

One of, if not the best idea thus far.

Morphis

While dr_dobz solution is good, I don't like it cause it's based on the principle the system can't be fixed, so it just makes one of the bad aspects less important.

I still believe that a different matchmaking/tier alone can go a long way in handling the ties.

Nowadays how many times you face worthy opponents has a big impact on the chances of losing ribbons.

What if basically ALL match were to be at least potentially hard?
On many matches chances something will go bad increase drastically so ties will be less long.

Btw dr_dobz suggestion is hugely easier to implement and still "deals" with the problem.
I just don't like the fact that it does it by almost deleting the competition aspect.

Ohboy

Morphis wrote:

While dr_dobz solution is good, I don't like it cause it's based on the principle the system can't be fixed, so it just makes one of the bad aspects less important.

I still believe that a different matchmaking/tier alone can go a long way in handling the ties.

Nowadays how many times you face worthy opponents has a big impact on the chances of losing ribbons.

What if basically ALL match were to be at least potentially hard?
On many matches chances something will go bad increase drastically so ties will be less long.

Btw dr_dobz suggestion is hugely easier to implement and still "deals" with the problem.
I just don't like the fact that it does it by almost deleting the competition aspect.

That's the real problem in matchmaking. The AI just isn't good enough to pose a challenge.

Even up against the best deck in rotation, most people have no problems beating it currently unless the AI lucks into the correct combination of cards.

bk1234

buscemi wrote:

Ooh, I like this idea. Also, perhaps capping the number of points that players can get by competing at lower tiers, so that people deliberately slumming it in Silver can't actually score the same number of points for their coalition as ones competing in Platinum?

I don't like this idea at all. It makes the top 10s more elite.

Currently we have a few players in silver who need to be in sliver -- they're still pretty new to the game, but they do well with what they have and they get a lot out of being in a top 10.

In my coalition we encourage tiering up when you're ready, recently 4 of us did the grind to Platinum together -- because we felt we had outlived our time in Gold and were ready for the new challenge and mostly the better rewards.

Shipwreck

I used to have only white leveled to platinum because gold was easier, but it wasn't a huge shift. It was like the difference of a top 5 in gold vs 25 in Platinum. And the increased rewards make up for placing a bracket or 2 lower. I've since leveled all my colors to Platinum because of the rewards. I think the problem is more in the event than the player.

Ohboy wrote:

There's also the problem of AI being inadequate right now to sift really good players from the very good players, resulting in the 60 way tie for first place this event.

This I feel is a very urgent matter. Making events more tedious has not worked. Neither has making non event decks eligible to be picked as opponents.

You're either going to need a much better AI that poses a challenge, actual pvp, or event objectives that are actually challenging, not tedious.

Exactly. The AI does stupid things. Prime examples are Liliana using her ability to make me discard when I have no hand. Or PWs dropping a board wipe right after casting a creature. OB will suicide with his abilities, because the AI always casts abilities as soon as it can, without regard to without regard to if it should. OB his hand mostly full should be saving up to use his 2nd and 3rd ability. I've never seen him cast his 3rd ability, which is by far his best. For a while the AI even casted kill spells to cast them, destroying it sown creatures because I'd have none.

I guess a fix would be having more requirements scripted in, like maybe the AI doesn't cast a board wipe if it has more creatures. The PWs don't use an ability if it doesn't help, such as when described above. You could even track how some of the top finishers in play various combos to see if you could script some of those into the AI. I'm not saying QB and Bronze/silver need a change, but platinum certainly is more monotonous then challenging. I kinda miss the days of Kiora using Drowner of Hope or Hixxus or absolutely challenge a few games. I guess with newer cards it'd be like a deploy the gatewatch, Avacyn, Olivia, and or decimator of the provinces. You see them sometimes, especially Olivia, but with cheap removal spells (all my event decks use inner struggle or grip/ to the slaughter, except Kiora, who plays slighty more for turn to frog or engulf the shoreline), that its just a road bump, not much of a challenge. I know the same coalitions/players tend to get the mythic rewards, but maybe an Oath of the Gatewatch type event where it wasn't a race (as described next), was challenging (Avacyn's Madness can be also), and took less time. It'd be a nice break, on a side note, I started playing during the gatewatch events and the free rares/mythics really got me started. I know the game heavily investided in PVP events, but how many times do I need to beat story mode? PVE has been neglected for a while, SOI didn't even come with a full set of story mode games.

There's a major problem with matchmaking. Platinum isn't a challenge, and now with a lose or 2 your knocked down out of the top 100 sometimes. Kinda a big deal since freezes count as loses, and there still are many bugs, but stability is a separate issue. Nodes and to a lesser extend Terrors/Emerakul shouldn't be a race to see how can play their games first. With over 25 perfect scores in Platinum, that's exactly what it is. That's not a challenge, that's not fun. It's a punishment for living on the West Coast or having a job, school, or other commitment that doesn't let you play within 30 minutes of the last refresh. I'd also like consistency, if if an event has restricted colors, then you shouldn't occasional see restricted color PWs. If it's going to happen, then at least it should be consistent. but some terrors events I see Koth and Saheeli, others no. Of course, changing the colors would be nice also.

[Deleted User]

I recently broke through into Gold Tier and wish I had paid more attention to colour mastery now. I'm getting absolutely pounded in every match I play.

There's a tangible difficulty curve I wasn't expecting and I'm afraid it correlates with decks that have spent a lot of cash.