Alliance Wars Matchmaking (Discussion & Developer Response) MASTER

One of my alliance mates routinely finishes top for AW scoring and is often top in our alliance for cups. He is level 44. There are seven alliance mates with higher level than him, three well over 50. Level really doesn’t measure the performance of a player at all.

3 Likes

You wrong my friend because at that level you must have a deep bench of hero’s and you can beat someone at level 40 with no worries and no stress. Player’s level says he’s playing the game from longer,have experience,have deep bench of hero’s and you or me at level 40 i cant touch him to much in war otherwise I’m not afraid because in Raid’s you can choose doesn’t matter wich hero you like but in war you have restrictions so in that case you loose in front of him because simply he has more upgrade hero’s and he can choose from his bench alot and me…not really

1 Like

We must agree to disagree then.

1 Like

It’s been covered before, but there has been some question on if it has changed. I’m still collecting data, but I am getting pretty much the same results I did previously. When I have enough data I’ll post an update.

2 Likes

:laughing:

You would think that a higher level (50+) player who has been playing for 18+ months would have a great bench depth and know what they’re doing. Many of them do (most of the regulars on this forum seem to be professionals in the top leaderboards). But you would be surprised to learn how many of these so-called “high level players” are still clueless and incompetent. My alliance usually fights alliances with several members over level 40 and 50. We only have 2 members over level 30 (my girlfriend at 35, and me at level 34), and we win more wars than we lose.

You would think that a level 50+ player would have 6 strong war teams, and wouldn’t have to use 3 flags to take out a level 25’s war defense. Yet I have seen it happen so many times, it’s not even funny.

Well truthfully, since that level 25 is one of my alliance members and the level 50s are our opponents, I actually find it quite funny. :grin: Making it to level 50 just means that you’ve grinded a ton of provinces. It doesn’t guarantee that you have a clue on how to be good at the game.

6 Likes

And as always those who spend can build better teams faster than those who don’t. So a spender at a lower level can easily have a better team than a f2p player. You’d be better off matching by $ spent not level.
Also, alt accounts throw off a level matching system. My main is 54 and my alt 41. My alt was such a better player at level 30 or 35 or 40 than my main was. My hero levelling in my alt has been better and more consistent based on what I know; it’s quite likely my level 41 alt can outplay a level 50+ single account player.
Last as TGW references how you level matters… Auto-farm 8-7 day and night might help you level… But grinding through Atlantis on hard gets you more mats and better experience.
Too many variables for levels to improve matchmaking.

3 Likes

The majority of my province farming is on auto, and I’m usually grinding for recruits and backpacks to pump out more heroes to level up my bench. I don’t have much need for higher level farmable mats as I’ve already accumulated more than I’ll be using anytime soon (as opposed to non-farmable mats, which I never seem to have enough of, but seeing as how there is no way to farm for them, I just cross my fingers and hope for good chest loot).

When I just need recruits and to fill my monster chest, I farm 8-7. When I need backpacks and need to fill my monster chest, I farm 5-4. When I just need backpacks, I farm 5-8. When I have loot tickets, I use them on Atlantis to finish my Atlantis missions (kill X number of Y enemy, complete X number of Y type special stages, etc.) - Atlantis missions usually give you better loot and more recruits, but they have the downside of requiring 6+ world energy flags, so I tend to skip them if I’m trying to be efficient (number of war flags used vs. loot / recruits gained per war flag).

By hanging around in the lower provinces, I level my heroes up faster than my actual player level, which suits me fine. It means that by the time I reach level 50, I’ll have a much more robust bench than most of my similarly leveled peers. Of course as you mentioned, people who spend more money will still probably have better heroes than me (they usually do), but you can have all the great pulls in the world and still not have nearly enough resources to level them up, which kinda defeats the purpose of having those fancy heroes in the first place.

2 Likes

Always nice to see a critique who doesent understand what he is complaining about. :smile:

a)
Find out how pairings for AW work.

b)
Search the forum or think before you use arguments which have been refutet some time ago.

c)
Always wait how the war turns out before you start complaining. There are so many “soft” factors you never no what can happen.

d)
Try to avoid this "we will loose anyway* attitude.
Ever heard of self fullfilling phrophecies ? :wink:

Good luck for your next war.

2 Likes

My team knows how to make war effectively. The previous war before this was good example when we faced similar team in power. But we outsmarted the opponent. Defeating only weaker players at the start and making 2 resets of the board at the end (the opponent made the reset at the start). But back to the last war. When your opponent have almost only strong def teams (4k and the rest 3,6-3,9), how can you make this strategy… I remember that the opponent had much higher war score than my team, sry I dont remeber that numbers. I have already wrote this to SSG support, they told me to write about it here.

I never tell my alliance, “we will lose anyway”. We’ve won so many wars against higher level opponents because they used poor strategy, they had weak bench depth, or didn’t use all flags, etc. I tell them “we might lose this one, but we’re going to try our best anyway”. Even when we do lose, we don’t lose by a lot, and we show the opponent that we are a worthy adversary in spite of the power disparity.

I never understood why some of our opponents reset the board in the beginning of the war. When you defeat a defense team once, they have a 6 hour cooldown before respawning. Second time, 8 hour; third time, 10 hours (which knocks them out of the 24 hour war cycle entirely, unless you reset the board after). Resetting in the beginning does not decrease the cooldown cycle for respawns, so common sense dictates that you shouldn’t reset until the second half.

But then, I probably shouldn’t share that tip with my future war opponents. I prefer it when they make mistakes. :grinning:

By how much did you loose that war ?

I aassume the strong players attack a team only once is in effect in your alliance.

What we think are mismatches can happen in several ways.

The “soft” facts of organisation, participation, skill, luck, and so on can not be taken into account by the pairing algorithm.

In your case the less players you have in war the more luck weights in.

@TGW We too reset opponent the earlyest after 12 hours because of real life timing problems.

But we are more of a casual alliance. :smile:

1 Like

We always re-set their board at the beginning of the war. We have a very international alliance with half our members either working or sleeping when the war starts (Wed war mainly),

We always seems to have enough members available to re-set the board once or, like in this last war, twice before we get additional flags. Then we clear the board again in the second round.

We are a full alliance of 30 members, with occasionally one or two opted out for work or vacation. Our war score is between 78k to 83k depending on our opted out members. We find the match making to be very fair and our wars are usually nail-biters right to the end.

So far we are winning more wars than we are losing. Since we know where everyone lives we are able to determine if and when we can clear a board. We are also blessed with incredible players who can “number crunch” for us to say whether we should try to clear or just wait.

We fight organically and have a lot of fun. We never know for certain what’s going to happen but that just adds to the suspense and excitement.

2 Likes

The casually-oriented alliance I am in has members world-wide. It is next to impossible to co-ordinate attacks so we flip our opponent when the opportunity to do so arises. That may be within the first five hours or not until the second half.

That makes sense if you have the ability to do so and your members are in different time zones. My alliance is small and localized within a few time zones (all Muricans, LOL). With the way the wars are timed, we’re usually able to coordinate attacks in both the mornings and evenings.

For us, it doesn’t make sense to reset early on, since about half of our members are only able to take on lower level opponents, we let those members chew away at the weaker defenses early on and save our larger attacks for the end, that way we can reset and use our smaller war teams to mop up the weaker opponents again. We get more overall points by taking out the smaller teams 4 or 5 times vs. resetting early on and leaving our low level members to try to take out high defense teams.

But of course every alliance is different, my strategy has been working well for us, other larger and stronger alliances might benefit more from resetting early. My alliance only has 11 active war participants ranging in level from 23 to 35 so we have to be very careful about when and how we use our flags to maximize our score.

1 Like

We’ve experienced war mismatching for about a month or two. Really becoming a drag. We coordinate tanks. We do waves. We coach through hits. We use all flags. But we’re up against teams that have 9-13 3900+ teams when we only have 5 strong teams and the rest are 2900 - 3500. Can’t seem to catch a break. Something’s not working. We’re killing it with our performance but are totally fed up losing cause ZYNGA is somehow matching us against MUCH stronger teams every time. What gives!?

1 Like

So one potential issue is how SG dictates power. It used to be worse, they actually lowered the power rankings of 5* but it still has the potential to be an issue.
Who you level and to what degree matters.
An average 4* max = 640 power
An average 5* 3.70 = 660 power
An Average 5* max = 760 power
This is no troops no talents.
So unlikely scenario for a single player but over the course of 30 players × 30 heros could play out:
30 5* at 3.70 = 19,800 power
25 max 4* + 5 max 5* = 19,800 power
BUT
Best d with 5 3.70 gonna be 3300 vs best with 5 maxed 5 will be 3800.
Yet these 2 full 30 graded roughly the same, producing an “equal” match.
Yes they put additional weight on top 5 but we don’t know how much.
Throw in the fact most 4* maxed have better stats than most 5* at 3.70 it sets up for a tough go.
Max your defensive team first especially if using 5*.
Don’t do what I did- I had just enough hero’s to be dangerous when AW first started, long before they used top 30 in matchmaking. I took all my 5* to 2.60 so I could have 6 war teams. So did a bunch of others. When they changed over, it completely jacked our matchups.

From the files of when it works it works there is this:
We lost 2 won 3 lost 1 and ended up here today. All flags used both sides:

1 Like

We were matched last weekend with a top 100 alliance. We range around 160ish. Anyways, our war score changed by 4,000 points during the war. Friday it went up 4k for unknown reason. We were then matched with a top alliance. Then our war score drops by 4k during the war and finally goes back up during the last 12 hours of war. There were no changes in players. No one was even logged in on Sunday morning when we jumped up 4k for the second time. How can the war score go up and down during a war with no changes in players? Is there some other variable or is this a know bug/issue? I noticed it change about every 12 hours. I opened a case and they suggested I post here.

@General_Confusion thoughts? ^^^

2 Likes

Just to add clarification, the alliance we were up against yesterday is currently ranked #19. So to say top 100 doesn’t do it justice. Also, we are 180+. I know these scores change a lot, but there was a horrible difference between us and our opponent. They even acknowledged the mismatch in their banner at the end of the war.

1 Like