While I’m sure plenty of people will remind me that Battle Nights are not the most important part of Forerunner Conflict and why winning should not be the primary factor in Battle Night participation, I still firmly believe that the staple of the community is the Battle Night.
My Perspective:
Every battle night I have participated in over the last several wars has been polluted by multiple blowouts where my team either wins by a huge margin or loses by a huge margin. Either way it isn’t fun.
Problem:
Blowouts aren’t fun for either team. Fix them.
Current Situation:
Currently, some magical force in the FC universe just matches teams up in the Google Doc. Sometimes the matches are fun and competitive (equally skilled). Most times the matches aren’t even close to fair (and usually there is a better alternative elsewhere on the rotation).
Solution:
Stop having battle nights magically arranged in rotations so everybody gets to play every other squad. Other than the fact that this type of structure is extremely easy to setup there are absolutely no benefits.
One of my favorite parts of FC is the squad/battalion/army practices. We play the same people over and over again and it is always fun because the teams are either picked by captains or carefully balanced by the leadership.
Playing every team once doesn’t make battle nights fun, playing good match ups makes battle nights fun even if it is the same team over and over again.
Instead of ranking teams in static tiers or randomly assigning match ups, each team should receive a rating as the night goes on.
Calculating Rating:
All teams start with 0 points so the first round of the battle night will have to be carefully setup to ensure (or at least try to get) optimal match ups. After the first round ratings will be determined by calculating a winning percentage and then adding a significant bonus for teams who won their most recent game.
Rating = Wins / (Wins + Losses) * 100 + Wins * 5 - Losses * 5
If the team won their last game add 75 points.
Easily put into an excel document as:
=ROUND(IF(W+ L> 0,W÷(W+L)× 100 + R× 75 + W× 5 − L× 5, 0),0)
where W = wins, L = losses, and R = 0 or 1 depending on if the team won the most recent match.
(Example Implemented in Google Docs)
Then rank all of the squads by ratings and match them up. If one army has more squads than the other army then select squads to exclude from the rankings until both armies have equal numbers.
The reason I weighted winning the most recent game so highly is to prevent teams from going on long losing streaks. This will effectively create two tiers of squads after each round: squads who won their last match and squads who lost their last match. Obviously the armies will have different amounts of squads in each tier, but the rating system could still be used to matchup squads between tiers since W ratios and win quantities are also factored in. In addition, ratings will reset after each battle night so squads performances in the week before don’t impact different players playing under the same name in the next week. Every battle night every squad will start fresh.
I know this will be a different from the “setup all of the rotations at the beginning of the night” approached we currently use, but setting up matches after “rounds” will also help resolve problems where squads field teams in the middle of battle nights or squads just get off in the middle of battle nights.
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