Other Rift matchmaking based on power level is backfiring in upper ranks

I have a lot more to say (I'll be back!) but real quick - DUEL is exactly what you're describing. You fight against the highest level of AI for 0 energy. Go find a Diamond in chat and ask them to set a specific Fighter you want to practice against!

 

This requires that I turn chat on and socialize! *gulp
I imagine that once we get the Guild feature it would be easier to coordinate these things!

 

You can arrange the duels in the Skullgirls Discord and then ask to meet them in a channel. That's what I do sometimes.

 

Similar situations here last week and this week. I kept getting matched with the same couple of Gold 2/D4 players with stronger base than mine. It’s a lot of efforts to beat them to earn 8 points or so. Then I’d lose a bunch of points to Megatron because he’s in high 1900s :/

 

If I had a goal in this conversation, Liam, it is this:

I need you to see that, by restricting matchups using “team strength” you have effectively created a shadow tier system from which it is impossible to break free. This creates the perverse incentive to avoid improving your team strength at all costs in order to stay inside the easier tiers.

I dedicated a large part of my time in SGM to building up my team because I thought team strength would give me an advantage. But we are in a position now where diamond evolution, skill tree expansion, and Prize Fight grinding are just further reducing my ability to compete in Rift Battles.

That, that perverse incentive to not build your team, is what I need you to understand. It has distorted this game beyond my capacity to enjoy it.

 

I don't know if this is a temporary system that buys enough time to actually make a better practice mode or the most optimal practice method the devs can think of but it has many flaws. First, asking diamond to set up a duel in a discord chat is a hassle for many players especially if someone does not have time for setting that up or does not want to socialize with other players. Second, the game does not tells players about this at all and therefore not many knows about that. Third, this method is so cumbersome that even people knew about it, it would not be widely use as intended. Forth, that is basically using diamond players as some staff member who specialize in providing training dummies for others.

Please don't widely tell people to ask with diamonds to set up practice round. Catalyst has already done the damage and saying that nonsense to players will only bring more ridicule and PR nightmare. Just make a practice mode that allows players to set various modifiers and other settings to test out their forces before fighting the actual opponent. That is just the best way to solve this one issue.

 

I'm not going to discuss a troubles of someone in D1 tier, as a bronze 2 player, but I'm really agree with that statement. While i have some weak and mostly useless modifiers of bronze tier, i've matched up against player with the nearly same fighter strength, but much more powerful catalysts. I believe it was a gold water armor and gold armor rating on upper boss node, like, imagine, 25% and 10% chances respectively of getting armor on hit. Man, I swear, it was insane! Like, I wasn't even able to kill at least one of those fighters with my strongest units (gold cold stones and gold bassline) because of that! That player had brain freeze, dead of winter and some another gold water fighter on that node, can't remember now who exactly was the third. I didn't even have a chance, u know, and that was a really depressing matchup. So, yeah, catalysts totally should go hand-in-hand with overall base strength calculations.

 

Uhm I have reached rookie tier simply through decay. Cus I can’t get a match up. Cus I’m my collection is too strong for my rank.
Oh and btw. I used to OCD stealth click every player in chat and duel their diamond 2 updates ago. I don’t feel duel ai is any harder than pf ai. Unless there was a change recently. That nobody knew.

 

Behold thine eyes.
I will reach the fabled 3-digit soon

 

Maybe you don't feel that the duel IA is harder because there isn't the pressure of doing a perfect match? Never tried it, just guessing.

 

There are no modifiers. There is nothing to support or extend the defenders innate capabilities, so there is no real challenge. Rifts can still surprise with catalysts, but I also agree that Rift AI feels sharper than duel AI.

 

Agreed. I tried Duel AI out for about an hour and did not once encounter Rift-level AI.

 

Here's my take on what happened. Pre-update, there was a matchmaking problem: Players were getting matched with other players who had similar rift ratings but different collection strengths. This prompted the most simple solution: Use collection strength as a metric when generating rift matchups. But this created a new matchmaking problem: Now players are getting matched with other players who have similar collection strengths but different rift ratings.

I think this happened because the collection strength metric was used offensively instead of defensively in order to combat the initial problem. Used defensively, if a situation like the initial matchmaking problem were to occur, collection strengths would prevent that from happening, likely resulting in longer wait times for matches for those players. But used offensively, the problem was overcorrected and caused the inverse problem, lowering the significance of the entire rating system.
*Edited for spacing

 

Just going to cross post our Rift Battle notes from this thread here in case they haven't been seen:

We'll have more news about the exact solution(s) going live once we're a bit closer to our 3.3. release, and the update notes are live.

 

This is why I continue to play SGM; you guys are awesome!

 

Am I being called out?
I’m sure eagerly waiting for that update. (1045last week. Three digit sooooon)