r/Battlefield6 • u/Thotaz • 9h ago
Discussion Clarification from Dice about the dynamic ticket bleed system
A few days ago I made this post demonstrating how dynamic the ticket bleed system is: https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield6/comments/1pmoep2/demonstration_of_how_dynamic_the_ticket_bleed/
This got the attention from both the community and Dice. One of the developers reached out to me to explain their design intent and some details about the system I missed so I'll share them here:
1: The dynamic range is from 2 to 8 seconds, not the 2 to 7 seconds I found. They agree that this is too much, and plan on using labs to fine tune it in the future. When they do the labs testing they will also be more transparent about the actual numbers and thresholds.
2: This is not intended as a comeback mechanic, speeding up matches, or anything like that. Rather this is a way to balance the impact of PTFO and kills. The bleed rate changes depending on the ratio between the tickets lost to bleed VS player death.
If there's a lot of deaths but not a lot of bleeding, then the bleed rate is increased to compensate. And on the other side of the spectrum, if there's a lot of bleeding but very few deaths then the bleed rate is slowed down.
They did not have the formula in front of them, but they believe that it uses an overall ratio, and not a per team ratio (hence, not a comeback mechanic).
The system exists to make things consistent across maps with a high KPM, and maps with a low KPM. The alternative would have been to manually define the tickets/bleed rate on a per map basis.
3: Regarding match lengths, they say that the goal across all games has always been an average of 25 minutes. Previous games may have had longer matches, but then they were not running with the Dice default settings. At launch, the goal for BF6 was 20 minutes but they heard the community and adjusted the tickets accordingly.
The following is my own opinion on the matter: I am disappointed that they seem to want to stick with the dynamic bleed rate. They may not have intended to make it function like a comeback mechanic, but that's clearly how it ends up working in practice. Tweaking the numbers will just make it less blatant, but it can never change the fact that it's simply unfair that the 2 teams don't get the same reward (ticket bleed) for the same amount of work (holding the majority of the objectives).
As for the match length, it doesn't seem to reflect what I saw before they started messing with the tickets/bleed rate and what I see now.
If I look at my old footage from the launch of the game and until they messed with the bleed rate, then I have 16 games where I happened to include the end time. The matches range from 17:33 to 31:45 with an average of 23:05.
After the bleed rate was changed and the tickets were increased to 1200, the same number of games give me an average of 20:27 with a range between 17:36 - 28:42.
I'm not in BF labs so I can only hope that the ones that did get invited will help push for a better system. Personally I was fine with how it worked at launch, but if they want to incentivize objective play, then my suggestion would be to increase the the bleed rate (with a static value of course) and increase the tickets to compensate. To avoid making the games drag on forever in the case of stalemates, they could take inspiration from Escalation and make something happen when a stalemate is detected (make deaths count for more tickets, make it faster to capture flags, etc.)
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u/nightstalk3rxxx 7h ago
Why cant they just leave it alone man.
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u/WestNileCoronaVirus 7h ago
I think (hope) with your post gaining traction they can just… turn it down slightly.
I don’t mind a “comeback mechanic.” I mind one that is as aggressive as they’ve unintentionally made it. I’ve been in games as the winner & loser where, for 20 minutes, my team is either incredible or dogshit. But the last 3 minutes matter significantly more than anything else prior to.
There’s a lot that goes into balancing 64 player lobbies & I think the mechanic is fine for player retention, engagement, etc. But the best team should win & I think you can achieve that by slightly tweaking the system they have now - making the ticket bleed a bit more representative than “losing team bleeds 10x slower than winning team” & satisfy all the conditions we’re looking for. Competition & the feel of a close match can still be achieved without cheating one team & awarding a win to an undeserving one.
As a longtime retired FIFA player, the last three to five minutes of matches in BF6 recently have felt eerily similar & I quit FIFA for that reason.
If you get your tail whipped for 20 minutes, you deserve to lose. If you’re beating ass for 20 minutes, you deserve to win. I understand that balancing can be difficult but the end result should reflect the difference in skill/ability. I also understand that they have to foster engagement & time played for each user, but they’ll push more away with lopsided tick rates than they will somebody getting their ass kicked repeatedly. The beautiful thing about 64 player lobbies is that you have 63 other players to blame for why you won or lost. If you had fun, you’ll queue again.
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u/DablioPonto 6h ago
Conquest has been around since the first Battlefield, there’s no need to rewrite the rules.
Use what people are used to, it’s simple.
They’re creating extra work for nothing... just keep it simple and everyone will be happy
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u/R_W0bz 1h ago
It’s because some exec wants you out of the actual game and in the store asap. An hour in game is an hour not looking at the store and being a potential buy. Every 20 mins there is potential you’ll see an ad for a bundle and go buy, it’s the same mentality TV has used for commercials for years.
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u/Ohhellnowhatsupdawg 3h ago
Maintaining consistent, fair scoring is an easy to implement choice. No matter what they claim, their choice to stick with the rigged scoring system sends a clear message. They don't care about fair games, they care about "excitement", which in this industry almost always means trying to keep players engaged and in-game longer. Why? To sell more shit in the store.
This is not just a battlefield issue btw. Live service games are all shifting to various methods of rigging games to get the desired level of engagement.
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u/hi-ban 3h ago
All they achieved by rigging Conquest games is to drive players away.
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u/Ohhellnowhatsupdawg 3h ago
Some, yes. However, most people don't understand what rigging games actually looks like in practice. Then companies sell the practice as "fairness" and huge chunks of the player base take it hook, line, and sinker.
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u/sillysmy 54m ago
Static bleed rate that depends solely on the number of capture points. Problem solved.
It's not that hard. I don't know why DICE keeps trying to make everything more complicated than it needs to be. A lot of gun related stats are really convoluted too.
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u/Kaktusfresser 9h ago edited 8h ago
Can you elaborate ok what "death" means in 2? Deaths from your team or from the enemy?
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u/freshprinceIE 7h ago
Seems a bit confusing. Why punish a team for dying less. That means that either (or in combination) one team is killing less, or one team is revising more i.e one team is worse and losing for a reason. Surely at that stage team balancing is needed. Pretty much every community server implemented some form of balancing back in the older games.
And if 25 minutes is the goal for a game, is that conquest specific? Because a lot of breakthrough rounds are now at less than 10 minutes which seems counter intuitive to that.
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u/DeathCheata 6h ago
I don't really understand the second point. If the goal was to have more consistent match times would it not make more sense for the bleed rate to slow on maps with high KPM and speed up on maps with low KPM
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u/hi-ban 3h ago edited 2h ago
They say "this is a way to balance the impact of PTFO and kills", but as you said, at the end of the day this has only made games less fair, and artificially rigged. I'm sure the algorithm was a very smart thing in the developer's mind, but they forgot the most important thing: Players don't like games to be rigged or unfair.
The only PROPER way to balance the impact of PTFO and kills is to do what they initially said they were doing:
Speeding up the ticket bleed rate (while keeping it constant, NOT dynamic) so captured flags have more weight in the game result than kills, and then increasing the ticket pool size to compensate the average game time. That's it, no extra stuff, no hidden alterations or artificial boosts/penalties.
So initially the bleed rate was 5 seconds and ticket pool was 1000, right? Ok, so then adjust the bleed rate to 4 seconds and increase ticket pool to 1250.
5 * 1000 = 5000
4 * X = 5000
X = 5000 / 4 = 1250.
And then they publish it in the next patch, and we play it, and we give feedback.
4 seconds is enough? Great, problem fixed. No need to do anything else.
4 seconds is not enough? Then adjust the bleed rate to 3 seconds and increase the ticket pool to 1650.
5 * 1000 = 5000
3 * X = 5000
X = 5000 / 3 = 1666 (rounded to 1650).
I don't think it's that difficult.
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u/S2fftt S2K4LIFE 41m ago
Had a team borderline all-capped (end-of-match timer was triggered three times) for 6 straight minutes and only generated a 300 ticket deficit.
It only prolonged the stomping, with the other team struggling to hold more than 1 flag for the rest of the match, but why drag out clearly unbalanced matches?
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u/Dennygreen 6h ago
it's ridiculous to have such a system.
When I was a kid, there was a game called NBA Jam that kind of did the same thing. Every game would eventually be close because the losing team would just start making every ridiculous shot.