The potential down sides I see for everyone having access to the same heroes.
Sorry for breaking this up into two posts, my last response got buggy and I couldn’t scroll down to finish.
I not surre on the technical side of things … I am not a programmer or developer but I can say it needs to be fixed some how … last war alliance points were close but they only had 4 active members and one left the alliance in mid war
See screen shot of war … how is this fair ?? Please some one fix the match up issues or give us a place to as and report to BEFORE war starts for a better match up
(Copied from another thread, because this is where I should have posted.)
There must be a full moon or something, because I find myself compelled to proclaim your proposal the best idea I have seen so far.
It’s not without issues, mind you.
You’d still be collecting relatively few data points to base an individual rating on, so it would be very noisy.
While it would facilitate fairer matching between alliances, you would still need some sort of War Ladder ranking or Win Bonus system to fully incentivise wars. (This is the case for every matching mechanism - it’s not a problem unique to your proposal.) With matching depending on summed individual scores and alliance composition being dynamic, I wonder whether a War Ladder could work at all under this paradigm.
It would be opaque, or at least very complicated, and in each war round 50% of alliances would still lose. Losing players would still complain that they were being mismatched. The difference would be that they would not be able to explain why. (So they’d invent crazy theories based on victimisation.)
It would require a lot of development resources even to beat together a beta, and I presume there would be more than a few teething problems to iron out before it was workable.
Here’s where I land: I think your idea would improve on the current matching system in that it would create closer matches while still keeping the incentive for players to level their second tier heroes (assuming higher war rankings were rewarded). But there would be some challenges involved (as I’ve noted above), it would take a big investment of time and resources, and even when it was fully implemented and working properly I don’t think players would stop complaining.
So you’ve sold me that your idea is better than the status quo - it’s the best idea I’ve seen - but not so much better that it would justify the time, resources and trauma of changing.
I’m open to being convinced, if you can be bothered.
Edit: @Revelate expressed some smart criticism in his response to you. I think you addressed his concerns well, so that I am less concerned about point 2 above… but am left even more concerned that point 1 above might undermine the entire endeavour. And point 4 - that the development time and effort could be both brutal and unrewarding - is still a big worry.
It occurs to me that having said I’d ponder on @Mezbot9754’s OP, I never responded properly. So here we go.
I think there is validity to all the points made. I am particularly on board with the idea that summing each player’s top 30 heroes would disincentivise levelling heroes 15-30, and so is a bad idea. I disagree with some of the ratings applied (I’d give Titan score 7/10, I think membership size/activity is only a minor issue, I’d give top 5 hero score only 7/10 because I think the disadvantages identified are more serious than @Mezbot9754 does, and we agree on the uselessness of summing player profile levels), but that just reflects slightly differing perspectives.
[Edit: I haven’t explained why I think there are more serious disadvantages to ‘Sum of Top 5’ than Mezbot does. It’s primarily because hero power is such a poor measure of effectiveness. Bad teams can have very high power. Here are two things that I think measure effectiveness better: Titan killing and raid trophies (a.k.a. Alliance Score).]
The bottom line is that I think summing the top 5 heroes would be an appealingly simple matchmaking metric. But I don’t think it would result in closer matches (which is the big criticism of the current system), and it would depart from the current model, which is of alliances that are similarly ranked being pitted against each other to see who is better in a war.
For these reasons I would favour the status quo over changing to a ‘Top 5 Heroes’ system.
If we were to decide that we must abandon the current system then I think @Little_Infinity’s ‘Summed Individual Elo’ system would be more theoretically appealing, but the simplicity and transparency of a ‘Top 5 Heroes’ system would be difficult to argue with. I’d have to see these two systems battle in a steel cage before making up my mind.
Regarding summing up hero power would disincentive people to level additional heroes, I don’t think that would be the case.
I still don’t understand top 5, but again my goal is to get compelling matchups which is not what we have today across probably even the majority of the wars.
Ranking them in order for me:
I’m not sure where Elo either by alliance or by personal rating fits… frankly the second one I think would be incredibly cumbersome from a development perspective when there’s a very good mechanism that’s far easier to implement and works for the overwhelming majority of cases. I don’t really see much that a personal ELO system would solve that top 30 does not when it comes to providing competitive matchups.
Departed may have standards for admission, and I’m sure some other alliances also have standards for admission; for the vast majority of alliances the sole standard of admission is a cup minimum, if even that. Whenever we have an opening we take whoever comes along first. If we find someone who seems cool, we’ll even drop our cup minimum. (It’s only 1400 anyway, and and we’re Top 100.)
Alliance entry standards are not a real thing in most of the game.
That’s sort of the point: the optimal war strategy will be not to level your mid-level heroes - even to eat them , if they’re already levelled and have little use in other parts of the game. This will be the best way to win, and we’ve already seen some of the steps alliances will take to win.
Personal ELO (if all the bugs were ironed out, after a lengthy development process) would provide significantly more competitive matchups than top 30 because it would account not just for hero power (a poor metric), but also for skill in creating a defence, in combining your heroes into smart attack teams, and in working together as an alliance. But in my opinion this would be a secondary benefit.
The main benefit would be that it would continue to incentivise players to level their lower tier heroes, or at least not discourage it. Top 30 would have the opposite effect.
Nobody feeds away useful heroes, it costs too damn much time or money to do so and I don’t even know how that idea is remotely rational.
I’m not talking alliance victories, I’m talking how they perform in the war on the scoreboard compared to alliance mates. Maybe I didn’t explain myself clearly previously… so few people are truly alliance first in this game.
Alliance standards will change with time, guaranteed. You may state it’s only cups now, this game is comparatively new.
This is my last post on this topic, if SG wants to do something about it they will… maybe they can come up with that pie in the sky solution of personal ELO but I really doubt it and I suggest the people who are thinking of it don’t understand what kind of impact that would be from the infrastructure side compared to what they have right now which is almost assuredly a comparatively small infrastructure cost.
On further reflection, I don’t understand why anyone is on this forum if they don’t want this game to succeed… and if we don’t get competitive matchups, this game will ultimately fail like so many others before it.
Again, you’ve hit the point. As Alliance Wars currently function, it has suddenly become useful to me to level Kiril and Boril and Okaban and Horghall, who I have only had lying around because I’m a hoarder. Under a Top 30 approach, they’re no longer useful to me - in fact, they’re a burden that will harm my war performance. They’re immediately food, or I’ll have to figure out a way to burn them.
Again, we’ve seen what people will do to win wars over the last few weeks. I respect your belief in selfishness but I don’t think you appreciate how perceptive players can be. Under Top 30, collectively dumping mid-level heroes will generate immediate wins and won’t affect relative performance.
I think this is wrong. As the game has grown we have seen alliance capacity vastly exceed new player arrivals. Players are at a premium, not alliance places. I might be wrong about this, but I think something fundamental would have to change to affect that dynamic.
Agreed. This is why I think the status quo is the best solution for now.
I want the game to succeed and I think the current system is working pretty well. In particular, it has transformed player behaviour overnight: since AW arrived, players have diverted their time and resources to levelling and ascending previously neglected heroes that suddenly have value. That’s a huge win for SG.
And yes, some matches are not competitive. This will be the case under any system, and under any system alliances that get stomped will think life is unfair and will complain. Alliance score is working okay - better than easily available alternatives would, at any rate.
Something is absolutely screwed in matchmaking.
We are now matched to a team that at prep time start had 10k lower alliance score than us.
We are #29 they are not even at the leaderboard and the teams showned don’t look like cupdroppers.
Even though war not started yet, I’m pretty sure the war will not be that fun for either our opponents or us.
What we like about aw is the challenge of a even fight, not destroying a weaker alliance.
Same thing happened on our last war, we full killed the opponent twice and win was 4800/3000.
I like the idea of matching top 30 heroes to make fair, fun and challenging wars for both teams.
Check titan score. It appears they changed matchmaking to that
I did, the difference was 3k. But yes that could explain it.
Yup. Early returns also suggest they might have increased the food and iron reward differentials between tiers. Might be wrong about this - I’d like to hear from others.
Never let it be said that SG do not respond to feedback.
And never let it be said there aren’t folks to complain at every turn about it 
(obviously not directed at you but the fact all the unfairness threads are now very active)
Some players complain that alliance scores are a bad way of matching for wars, mostly because cup-dropping is widespread.
SG responds by eliminating cup scores from the matching process and using only Titan scores instead (an alternative suggested by players in the forum on multiple occasions).
Chaos ensues in the forum as multiple horrified players complain bitterly.
I pretend to be surprised.
Wow. I’m really surprised.
I used to love coming onto the forums and reading them…now it has turned from love to that car crash that you drive by on the highway that you don’t want to look at but can’t help but not to…
I’ve played numerous games that have some type of alliance matching and no one has solved the problem yet because people will always figure out how to defeat it. I think the best answer is to widen the focus. Instead of trying to match teams to within 10,000 points of the alliance score, widen the range to 50,000 and just accept that there will be mismatches sometimes. When it is overly focused you end up fighting the same alliances over and over anyway.
Another idea is to use all your ideas but let the server randomly pick which stat is important that iteration. We can’t defeat the system if we don’t know which stat to tank for the next war.
I love your attitude and your suggestions. I don’t think they would make people happy, however.
This wars match up for me …
They have 8 members only 3 qualify for war… I have 23 … all but 3 qualify… how is this even fair ?? My only complaint on the wars is I would love to have a match that is either equal or a challenge for myself and my alliance
Lol, that’s some extreme cup dropping right there! Are those 0 cup players even active?
He’s saying they are not even level 12
