Alliance War Matchmaking White Noise

I just want to take a minute to thank the developers for working so hard to create a fair matchmaking system. I also want to encourage everyone to take all of the complaints with a grain of salt, and for those who are complaining about the matchmaking to chill a little. It’s disheartening to lose, but that doesn’t mean the matchmaking is unfair.

People are competitive, they want to win, and they get angry when they don’t. The anger has to go somewhere and it gets directed at the developers because it must be their fault (not the fault of the alliance who lost, of course haha). It’s going to be normal for people to complain and blame and I hope the developers and everyone else here will understand it’s not always legit…often it’s just venting. There are SO many reasons an alliance can lose a war: Players don’t use all of their hits, they don’t maximize the use of their board, they feed all of their heroes so they don’t have a full bench of 30, alliances don’t strategize or coordinate at all, players set their defenses wrong, etc.

Our alliance has been paired up against others with “higher scores” and we’ve won, sometimes handily. We coordinate well, have a deep bench, and help each other set up defenses. You have to understand that the devs can’t match you with an alliance that has an identical score because there would never be any variance in who you’re playing. You would just play the same 3 alliances all the time who have a similar score to you.

In my opinion, the top 30 heroes matchmaking was the best. Those were our closest and hardest-fought wars. I am glad to hear that it’s being refined. I know titan score was temporary, but that one appears to be really lopsided. The developers are getting there…give them some slack.

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I disagree about the titan matching, even more so as you move up the food chain. As your alliance grows your members acquire more 4* and 5* heroes and will use various hero mixes depending on the titan color, same exact thing can be said for AW combat. You will pick your heroes depending on the MT and other stronger heroes of the opponent, usually a 3/2 combo or something similuar and hardly ever a raindow team less you wanna get smashed more times then not. Almost all the problems come from newbie alliances who grow and fall quickly with just one member difference. In the end i think the best matchmaking will be a mix of titan scoring, top 30, top 5 , and best “defensive heroes”.

Thats the one thing i see them not looking at is giving the most weight to the best “defensive heroes” as those are the biggest contributions to a war succeeding or failing. All they need to do is look at raid statistics and that will give them a good look at those type of heroes and give them a defensive number of sorts and go from their, looking at you @Petri!

I’d like to add my experience to this. I posted this in one of the many other topics to AW but believe it to be of value. (This is the internet, of course I think that)

Our first War with the new matching system was a loss. We had lost by a little over 1k and that seemed like a lot. I was salty.
This second match looked worse from the beginning.

But we didn’t give up. We adjusted our strategy, motivated eachother, and went in headfirst.
Our outcome was decided in the last half. Both Alliances had less than 10 hits unused.

Does this mean our strategy and a little more luck helped us win? I think so. Remembering what happened in the first War, it very well could have been lost just because of those 2 factors, and not necessarily a mismatch of alliances. Either way, I’m hoping our future wars are decided within 500 points of eachother.
And to help clear the air on how mismatched I thought we were in the beginning, here are our rankings at the end of the War. Not as far apart as we seemed, and timing of Titans kills plays a huge role in what seemed like a ranking disparity.

Our 3rd fight was another top 100 team Romanian@Family and was a very close fight (300 point difference) despite us losing a member during War Prep. I think it would’ve been a fight within 100 points.

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That’s an incredible visual @2Spookd thanks! People who are looking at the alliance score are psyching themselves out. If they see what they perceive is a disparity and a slight against them, they don’t try as hard and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “See, it’s the developers fault for mismatching us.”

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I agree. Our first battle after the update looked very unfair but we fought well and only lost by 1000. We took the attitude that we’d make our opponent work for their easy victory. This last match up had us as the much stronger alliance and our opponent lost by 3000 points! They pretty much gave up whereas in reality, if they fought harder, it would have been about 1000 point loss.

Normally I hate cross-posting, but I think it’s only fair to also mention it here. Until now, we were very lucky, almost all wars were somehow close. We won one with +1k, we lost another by -1k, but all the others were +/- 500 points. And finally today it seems, that the devs got it really right - 9 pts, the war was decided in the last minute:
e2f2cc76c65f5915ac83f8285cf9381be0ec05a0_1_375x500

For us, the new system worked perfect.

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good that there are some nice storied, but there are also a bad ones.
My alliance was paired with another one which was crazily stronger than us and we have obviously lost.
We might have had similar strength when it comes to 30 heroes, but in our alliance only a few players had a fully maxed 5* heroes and our oponent had at least 2-3 each, so on the end we have used a lot of points on simply trying to go break though their defense.
With this match making it`s better to have a very strong few heroes, to ensure its hard to kill them instead of 30 weaker ones.
It was actually more fair earlier when the MM was based on titan score seen from my perspective :slight_smile:
We have sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never seen such unequality as now.

@Wujek- You do know this last war was based on Titan Score, right? Or were you sharing a story from many wars ago?

At one point in the war, these guys were 9k higher in titan score and 4k higher in trophy score. Whatever method they’re using, seems to be working out better. On paper we should have been crushed by old matchup methods.

As mention by @hookR2 the matching was done based on titan score, so…
I guess there are two issues in AW so far. The matching and the points distribution. @mhalttu seems to be focus on first point, don’t know about second but I’m still concerned by it as we are still not complete.
I would like to understand why if you match a 20 people alliance (A) vs a 30 (B). Why points are assigned like this:
A can do 20 x 6 = 120 attacks. Each team member defeated rewards 2000 / 20 = 100 to B
B can do 30 x 6 = 180 attacks. Each team member defetad rewards 2000 / 30 = 67 to A.
Finally A target will be 120 * 67 when B target is 180 * 100. If team member weight is based on other team number of people then it becomes equilibrated but here… You can elaborate any strategie it won’t work.
And that’s not a matching issue.

Wars that are decided in the second half are indicative of two things:

  1. The winning team had superior roster depth (meaning you can score more points the 2nd half)
  2. The winning team had superior defensive strength (meaning they can score less points the 2nd half)

The pity is that we can’t compare no. 1 because we can’t tell the roster depth of our opponents. However we -can- compare defensive strength. And I’ve kept check the last 2 wars, which we won, and each time our defensive strength was indeed significantly greater. Defensive strength is a huge factor.

Always good to see both sides of the story as forums tend to focus on problems v successes.

Out of interest @NittanyLionRoar where does your alliance lie. Are they a stronger one (say top 100) or middle of the pack?

From what I’ve observed (confirmation bias alert) it seems that those lower down the pecking order are seeing much bigger mismatches than those at the top. And given the methodology used that makes sense. You would expect to see top alliances have deeper benches of levelled heroes compared to alliances in the thousands which are far more likely populated with less experienced players with top heavy rosters that are harder to equate.

I doubt we will ever see enough evidence to swing it one way or the other but would be interested to see at what level your positive experience came from.

For the record we had our second war in a row where our alliance score (yes I know, not overly meaningful in and of itself) had a delta of 20% to our opponent. This time in our favor. Last time we got smashed and this time we had the lopsided win. We are well down the pecking order (4000+ ranking). Down here we have not seen much of a change in closeness of wars but I also am not grinding my teeth. For us it’s a welcome distraction and we don’t live and die by wins/losses being a far more casual bunch in general.

I agree completely with your whole statement. Exactly our experience!

Agree. Every war we’ve had since the mod has been close and we’ve won by the score of one player in round two.

It’s been becoming more and more common for players to hold flags and drop all 6 later in the war. Last 3 opponents we have had a good number of players do that.

Our last opponent all the main players saved their attacks for the final hour. Seemed they were trying to make it look like an easy win for us then steal it at the last minute. fell short however lol.

@Zizzzzy
It’s part of the strategy. But when you are in situation I described above, Team B will win, the gap is too big.

@Bertus, wars that are decided in second half so far have been all our wars because of strategy. Both alliances observe each other, hoping the other will make some fault.

Personally before we start a war I look at the sum of levels and power of both teams:

  • 1049 Levels / 104K Power vs 1067 / 105K (us) → 4257 / 4034. We loose, their midlle blue tank kill us
  • 1054 Levels / 105K Power vs 1077 / 106K → 4182 / 4254
  • 1024 Levels / 95K Power vs 1055 / 103K → 3761 / 3881. The middle blue tank affect us again but we were slighty stronger 8K. Half of us have a blue tank (or any other color) so we can’t apply such strategy so far.
  • 1113 Levels / 108K Power vs 1055 / 103K → 4050 / 4235. They were slighty stronger than us and we manage to win in the last hour.
  • 1091 Levels / 107K Power vs 1126 / 109K (back to 30) → 3947 / 4031
  • 1110 Levels / 106K Power vs 1126 / 109K → 4031 / 3962. We loose due to holy weekend. 6 of us did not enter the war. The most frustrating war at that point. Our best average per attack with 34 points.
  • 1170 Levels / 115K Power vs 1001 / 98K (3 people left after cohesion explode on last war). → 4897 / 3557. I already provide details on another post (10 of us above 3700, 8 of them below, teammate 3340 power rewards them 70 points when a 3813 rewards us 64 points). There was nothing to do.

My conclusion of that is titan score with levels and power is not so bad as well as new system with roster depth (only one reference) meanwhile number of opponents is the same. In such case we have fun. Last war was the first one where forces where totally desequilibrated.

Yes, we’re a top 100 alliance and we’ve typically been paired with alliances higher or lower. Understandably, the mid- and lower-tier alliances will have less continuity, so it makes sense that will have some more variation, higher or lower. The alliances can’t get discouraged though–they will get matched up against someone else they overpower. The stronger they get as an alliance, the better they will feel.

Our alliance seems to have naturally fallen into a strategy that works well for us. Because of our different time zones, our first WAVE of players go in and try to take out most of the weaker teams in order to get their timers started. By the time our sleepy other players wake up, those weaker teams have revived. We are very patient in waiting for those timers!

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We do the same in our alliance as Princess1. It seems to work most of the time. Except this weekend’s war because it was too big a difference in opponents TP. It does make most members work harder leveling up. Which makes the whole alliance stronger in strength and comraderie
.