Alliance Wars Matchmaking (Discussion & Developer Response) MASTER

I’m so disappointed by how they matchmake me against a very strong opponent. I’ve lost 6 wars in a row. Sooooooo unbelievable. My team is trying the best to win but ended up losing badly. ■■■■■■■■!! They should display who i’ll be up against and have the option to not fight against them. Should be like the raid where we can reroll to challenge someone else. I almost had a nervous breakdown and take out someone i don’t know. :triumph: :rage: :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

There’s a lot of discussion on this at this thread. It’s long, but the appropriate place.

@zephyr1 @Rook @Kerridoc @Coppersky @Garanwyn

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If you’ve lost six in a row, there’s probably a strategy thing that’s off. May I ask what strategy you use as an alliance? Or is not one yet in place? That could lead to some help. Some alliances strategize very well. Others not so much. It’s possible you may be in an alliance that doesn’t strategize but you want to. May need to jump ship.

Of course, without specifics, I’m just hypothesizing.

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Merged, thanks! :heart_decoration:

Like what kind of strategies? I tried to beat the opponent Using 2-2-1, rainbow, and 2-3 but i can’t seem to destroy them easily. Give me ideas.

I meant “alliance” strategy. A basic one is using the same tank color - it forces the opponent to use a lot of the same color or go weak against your tank. There are a few others too. How big is your alliance? How strong are your mates? Some work better with more established alliances while other thoughts can help out all alliances.

May i suggest doing a search, like for war strategy? One link is below but there are more. Also, feel free to ask specifics.

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My team power range from 2400k-4000k. What is good against rainbow team?

Sometime back when I was getting into wars I was regularly voicing my criticism of the matchmaking system at the time. This was back before we had individual opt out, and I was in an alliance that had spotty participation etc. And I was getting frustrated with loss streaks that were seemingly out of our hands. And I’m pretty sure it was littleKAF (apologies if not) that said something blunt like “maybe you just aren’t as good at wars as you think you are”.

And I was annoyed. I knew I wasn’t “good”. I didn’t have a full set of war-ready heroes but I was trying my best. I took it personally because I felt like I should be matched against other people that were not good like me. But I thought about it anyway.

A year and a bit later I can affirm that what they said was 100% true. We had sporadic participation, fast and loose rules about using flags, and no real plan other than killing what we could. This is fine if that’s what you want from it, but it wasn’t what I wanted and anyone slightly more organised would obviously trounce us.

So, this.

If war matters to you, and your alliance isn’t on the same page then you should (for your own sanity) move on. Find a group with more participants, that want similar things. You’ll enjoy it more.

And a belated thanks @littleKAF

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Whoa. A bit harsh but glad it helps. Assuming it was me (which is possible), sounds like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Can’t claim to be perfect. :man_facepalming:

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Of course I can’t find it now, so maybe I was harbouring a grudge against you all this time for nothing! :wink:

No, actually it wasn’t actually meant to say “waah bluntness hurt my feelings”. But that I appreciated the reality check, even if I didn’t have the grace to say so at the time.

Also, back when the power ratings of unleveled 5s were wonky, casual alliances had a lot of weirdness in the top 30 hero selection, and I seem to think that troops weren’t factored in the same way either. I think a lot of the war issues that training/mixed casual/non-full alliances had was based on consistency, and were problems that players in more organised alliances just didn’t experience in the same way.

Nowadays though I sometimes raise an eyebrow at the enemy teams, it isn’t quite the same feeling as it was back then. And it feels more like we earned our turn to get wrecked by getting stronger, rather than just getting wrecked a lot of the time :smiley:

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When we face an opponent, they are either:

  • Casual (won’t use all flags, hit as they want)
  • Mixed (may use all flags, may use Mono tank color, may be organized as they hit)
  • Competitive (will use all flags, Mono tanks—and on strongest color for the alliance, timed hits, players organized by strength, may “sandbag”)

Our normal opponents are usually between Mixed and Competitive. A very competitive team will usually beat us. :wink:

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My alliance has never been in a war where our opponents were decisively lower level than ours. They always have a higher average player level and usually a higher average overall defense TP - except for when they set their teams lower on purpose (and it’s very obvious, when a level 40 puts an 1800 defense team in the war and they have a 3700 raid defense… this “strategy” always backfires, especially against my alliance, where our lower leveled members are more than happy to use their 6th war flags to wipe up silly cupdropping defenses) :grin:

Yet in spite of the higher player levels and higher defenses, we usually fare pretty well. Not always… some of our wars are just stupidly unbalanced, they come in and one-shot our entire team over and over again… ugh. But we’re usually able to beat these allegedly “higher” teams when they either (1) don’t use most of their flags, or (2) when it’s obvious that they haven’t put any effort into leveling up their lower war teams.

I’ve seen level 50+ opponents score 0 points on their 6th war flag against us. How have you gotten to player level 50 and you still don’t have 30 leveled heroes? Even leveled 3 stars should be able to do better than 0 points against a low-mid 3k defense team. It boggles the mind. But - everyone plays differently. They obviously put all of their resources into their main teams and neglected everything else on their rosters. Their loss is my team’s gain. :grin:

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My alliance is Casual-Mixed. We may use all flags, or we may not. We may have mono colour tanks, but some aren’t at that level yet and use best they have. We hit when it’s convenient (which for weekday wars for me is all six flags in the evening on Wednesday, usually between 8 and 9pm EST). Yet we still manage to do somewhat better than 50/50.

The opponents we have the biggest problems with are the ones who hoard their flags until the last few hours and then blitz us. They usually have a 3-colour flag with horizontal stripes.

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My alliance does this, but not because we’re trying to be all like

8bc

We’re honestly not trying to troll our opponents or anything. It’s just easier for us if we coordinate all of our attacks at the same time. :wink:

And no we don’t have a color stripey nationalistic flag, nor do we do mono-color tanks or whatever. We’re just a small group of roguish vagabonds who usually do our own thing, but briefly band together on war days to plunder a wee bit of loot from other unsuspecting alliances.

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That’s cool bro’

My alliance is scattered worldwide so coordinating is not in the cards :laughing:
Half of us are asleep while the other half are working.

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Oh I get that, it was the same in my previous alliance. My alliance has real life stuff to do too, which is why we coordinate a time that is best for us. We’re probably comparing apples and oranges, perfect coordination is not possible for every alliance (I’m currently in a small alliance of friends and family)… when you’ve got a larger more scattered alliance, you need a good network of co-leaders. The bigger the alliance, the lower the level of coordination.

My only point was that our flag-hoarding was more a matter of convenience for us, not a matter of “oh let’s let the opponent think they’re going to win, then destroy them at the last minute so we can laugh at them”. We’re not trying to lull anyone into a false sense of security or anything like that. It’s just the strategy we’ve chosen to use that works best for us.

For the record, my alliance only has 11 warring members, as do our opponents. It would be a much different game if we were fighting 30 vs. 30, or 1 vs. 1, etc.

I personally think it’s a great strategy if you can pull it off and would be advocating it myself if we could. But during the week I’m asleep for the last 6-8 hours of the war, so not an option for me anyway.

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Totally understandable. My first alliance wavered between 25-30 members and we never knew who was working, who was sleeping, who might show up later, etc.

The mid-week wars are kind of inconvenient for us because they start early mornings and end early mornings, so they’re difficult to coordinate (stay up late or wake up early?). The last war, I had to go to sleep before it ended, so I wasn’t sure of what the outcome would be. Weekend wars are easier because they start and end in the afternoon in my time zone.

Because I work variable shifts, sometimes I’m able to be awake and online all night, but there have been times when I actually set an alarm so that I could be awake for the war or to use last minute flags on a titan that might escape. That’s a big commitment to make for a game, and I don’t expect my other members to do the same, which is why we plan ahead for a time that is most convenient for all of us. But yeah, that only works when you’re all in more or less the same time zones with similar schedules.

I usually adjust my own schedule to fit the needs of my alliance, but I also realize this isn’t possible for everyone. In the rare cases that I’m not able to be online, I leave instructions and inform my co-leaders on how to proceed when I’m not there. My suggestion, if you’re running a large international alliance, is to have co-leaders in different time zones / different schedules, etc., who you can trust to coordinate things when you’re offline.

I’ll also add that as sound as the strategy is it doesn’t always work. I recall a few wars where the opponent started their blitz in the last few hours but we had already built up a 2000+ point lead. It whittled down pretty fast but then they lost steam and fell short by a couple hundred. Just couldn’t get that last flip. It is successful more than it isn’t, but it’s not guaranteed.

And that’s against us, a somewhat unco-ordinated alliance.

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That was the point I was trying to make in the thread where the OP was suggesting “forcing” people to use their first 3 flags in the first 12 hours. Ultimately it doesn’t matter when you use your flags, what matters is how you use them. A strong alliance will get as many points as they can get, and they shouldn’t fear the possibility of the opponents coming in later. My alliance used all of our flags late Wednesday night / early Thursday morning our time in the last war… we went from being almost 2000 points behind to being 1000 points ahead… after most of my team had used their flags and gone to sleep, our opponents (Germans, assuming it was daytime for them while it was the middle of the night for us) came in and tried to close the gap. They almost made up the difference, but not quite. I really don’t think the overall scores would have been much different if either one of our teams had used flags earlier or later.