Alliance Wars Matchmaking (Discussion & Developer Response) MASTER

We haven’t been able to win a war all summer. We came close two times.

This feature needs clear, userfriendly individual opt outs, so players who are away can be taken out of the matchmaking. Because I strongly believe that this is a major culprit in muddying our matchmaking.

Also the matchmaking needs to change to an ELO like system. Why? Because the current matchmaking is based on theoretical strength, which doesn’t equate to actual strength. Which is also influenced by hero composition and skill. So if you’re winning you’ll keep winning and if you’re losing you’ll keep losing. The result of a purely theoretical matchmaking is that it will systematically either overestimate or underestimate actual alliance strength.

ELO, or matchmaking based on past performance, is entirely based on actual alliance strength. And thus should be the way forward. That will even out into overall a 50/50 win loss of AW’s. Which for the enjoyment of the game is a good thing, even though it’s not the most economic outcome for better than average performing alliances.

A comparison: imagine a group of friends. They play the same game every Friday for a year. Maggie always wins, and sometimes Stephen. Alfie never wins, but comes in second a lot. ■■■■, well, sorry, he always loses. One Friday ■■■■ and Alfie don’t show up. And Maggie and Stephen can’t play their game anymore. A fun game is one that you will win from time to time. That at least gives you the impression you have a fighting chance.

Maybe it’s not to late to add an “equalizer” to the game? A method to weed out consistently underperforming alliances and give them a better matchmaking? It’s probably too late to totally overhaul, right @mhalttu?

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The results of the poll were inconclusive enough that we’ll keep the 24 hour preparation phase for now. However, we are planning to allow you to adjust your defense team also before the preparation phase has started.

Please can we just have a timer showing when the prep starts please.

What is the benefit of knowing when the preparation phase starts? To me it feels a bit too much like “This timer lets you prepare for the preparation timer”. :slight_smile:

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If Prep starts no members can enter.

Some members like to go help others when passing Titans. With the banner “War preperation starts soon”, you dont know when exactly the preperation starts. If there was a timer people will know when they need to be back in the alliance so that matching can be done and preperation phase starts.

Remember the whole world plays this and the Wars never start the same time.

Please it would help a great deal and trust me the alliances will love you for this.

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In short … once preperation phase starts you are matched and if your team is missing players they wont be able to partake in the war. This would be to tell them … Preperation starts is 6hrs 45min, letting them know to be in the alliance before this timer reaches 0 and the war preperation starts.

Make sense?

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I love how that sounds, althought sometimes it’s a little predectible it’s true having an accurate timer would be bliss :heart_eyes:

The matchmaking needs some work still…we’ve been matched against a +26k alliance, I can take having the best 30 heroes in each roster being considered but… PRETTY PLEASE consider their tier and levels as well.

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Yeah, please do throw mercenaries a bone. They’ve been hit enough. Sure they stand to get more ascension items, but in turn they do help other alliances get theirs as well. For the community point of view this is a win win, and it would be appreciated if you at least help them out by allowing them more precise timing of when to return to their home alliance. :+1:

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I have yet to see the biggest factor in determining a win or loss being mentioned, and that is the boards. It’s the same with raids as well. The boards are the single biggest factor in a win or loss for each War attack, and every raid or revenge. I’ve lost with my attacking team being 400 points higher power, and I’ve won with my attacking team being 400 points lower power, all because of the boards being great for me or terrible for me.

The only thing that the Alliance match-ups can truly target that can assist in a win or loss for an Alliance being a fair or fighting chance is the accounting for the roster depth of each member. The strongest team having more weight is futile and irrelevant in the overall war, but 30 heros against 30 heros of the same basic star level/ power/ ascension is what’s really more critical to a balanced match.

Many, many people I know have lost their first battle with their best team because of bad boards, but then won the last attacks with their weakest heros because the boards were great, myself included. That being said, I never agreed with the notion of giving more weight to the best 5 heros of a player’s roster. It’s futile and a waste of the Dev’s time, in my opinion. It applies to their potential defense team, yes. But we all know that it’s the offensive element that’s much more critical. Any defense team can be beaten with a good board.

I also think an ELO system being implemented would help out the less established or newer members in alliances, especially alliances with less than 30 members. If you lose every war because you keep getting matched up with stronger teams, you’ll eventually tire of it and not want to participate in Alliance Wars at all, which we have already seen happen numerous times.

I’m fairly certain that is not the intent of SG, and I’m also certain that they are working to fix it and make it as best as it can possibly be for everyone, and it’s not that simple a feat to pull off.

The countdown timer in place of the 24-hour Prep time would be great, along with a 4-6 hour actual prep time. There has to be a big enough window in there somehow where people can change their teams around, though. Maybe they tried a set-up the previous War that wasn’t that good and they want to switch it back. A 6 hour window isn’t necessarily long enough. A lot of people work 12 hour shifts and if it fell between that time for them, they’d be stuck with whatever they had prior.

If we were able to change our team set-up during the countdown, that issue would be eliminated all together, but I still think a 24 hour window for team set-up is needed, regardless of if the opponent is known. That is trivial, for the most part. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

A 24 hour countdown with a 4-6 hour prep time is kind of the same thing as it is now, just that we wouldn’t know our opponent until the last 1/4 of the prep phase. It doesn’t really matter how long we know who it is because we can’t exactly re-roll for a new opponent. So I don’t think it really matters, honestly.

Apologies for being long-winded, but I get that way about something that’s as important as this. :slightly_smiling_face:

Ok, I get it. One problem is that the matchmaking currently takes about 3 hours. We could show a timer that tells when the matchmaking starts, but the preparation phase starts only when the match is made for the specific alliance. So the timer would be counting down to 0, but it could still take 0-3 hours before the preparation phase starts. Either way, I’ll discuss the idea here.

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Perfect!

You will get a big thumbs up from the community doing this!

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I fully agree!!! That’s a great way to go about it!

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Wow. I can run an hourly dispatch for the entire electric power grid of eastern North America for a whole year in three hours, admittedly with a DC approximation to the AC flows. That problem is perhaps two orders of magnitude harder given the constraint space than sorting alliances into wars. You either need to get more serious silicon or programmers who can optimize code.

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Don’t just blame the boards for that. What doesn’t really help in how we use our best teams, is that we tend to go for the biggest kill we think we can make with it. So yeah, that doesn’t always end well. In contrast: We are much more careful with our weaker teams, resulting in more wins with those.

Also there’s more than meets the eye to the match-3 game. If you’re only playing based on the tiles that -drop- when you make a move, then you’re only playing a third of the board’s potential. You should also be playing based on the tiles that -move- when you make a move, that takes you to two thirds. And you should be playing based on the new tiles that -enter- the board when you make a move, that’s the final third. That’s how you can get out of a bad board, how you can turn a mediocre board into an amazing one, and how you avoid making poor boards. Boards are random, but how we play them does affect their distribution.

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War has been going on one no enough now that you should know prep phase starts early morning Tuesday and mid afternoon Fridays five or take an hour (eastern time zone, USA here), so realiy can’t figure out why you need a timer to tell you the Oreo phase timer is going to start. Should we have a timer to tell you the timer that lets you know the prep phase timer is going to start as well. Hell, let’s just have timers all week long and that will solve all the problems…:roll_eyes::roll_eyes::roll_eyes::roll_eyes:. Imagine if wars actually meant anything in the grand scheme of things how much discussion we would have. Right now war is nothing more then a chance to get a few feathers axes and bear banners twice a week…wooohooo…:joy::joy::joy:

I still think a Lock in of 30 hero’s chosen by the players and maybe a troop lock in feature would be better way to matchmaking, because once people have locked in their hero’s plus a defense would still allow players to make attack teams out of their 30 hero’s, but will cut out a lot of the mismatched wars because you will only be choosing from what is actually fielded so you won’t have stupid situations of average 3000 power teams having to fight 3400 power teams and when you couple the ridiculous aid/heal into the mix it makes it a waste of time

I hate to burst your bubble but the last war we fought I got fine gloves… and we LOST the war :rofl:

The game is crazy random.

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I’m fairly positive matchmaking is abusable.
The fact I’m seeing more and more alliances with a large majority of members leaving thier alliances and rejoining right before war begins. Which is on a predictable schedule. Suggests that the actual computer matching calculated before war locking is announced. This suggests there is a window where the computer is calculating war rankings and when players can rejoin and skew the match results. There is absolutely no legit an alliance that is matched correctly should be cleared 3x by a similar level alliance. Especially when this happened twice with 2 alliances where the majority of thier members joined 1 day before matching occurred.

My suggestion is lock alliance for war and then calculate matching!!!

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What I’m saying is your 3 hour computer matching timer before the prep phase begins and locks alliances into war is being abused.
You need to lock allliances in the prep phase and then start calculating matching.
Or you end up like my last 2 war matching with 1-2 players with 100+ days played and everyone else joining an hour or less before war is announced.

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@mhalttu Would you, please, consider this:

Current war setup and rules can be abused and are sometimes not fair.
Having one set war defense team means that during war the team with deeper benches will win, not the team that had the best strategy or the team that plays the board best. Which is not a competitive arena but e-peen one.
The popular strategy to put one color tank forces the other side to “have” enough strong heroes vs that color. It does not promote arena stule fighting and fun PvP.

Make players lock up to 6 defense teams and if killed - the next defense team comes up.

This alone will make wars immensely fun.

The other thing is the matching phase - as people already pointed out: it’s abusable!

Please, sit on a table and discuss it inhouse.

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