With the greatest respect, I have no clue what you are trying to say. Perhaps you might try to make your point a little more clear? Or, as you say, move on?
If you do wish to clarify, then what, exactly, do you find circular? I’m definitely entertained and certainly confused.
What part of this game is like poker? Please tell me? Is it the passing cards to people sitting around a table? Or putting chips in to make a bet? Is it reading people’s faces? Is it is it looking for your full house? Or bluffing your opponent? No… it’s the randomness of the luck of the draw… so you spent all this time insulting me to basically agree with my original post. You don’t like the way I use the raid system for resources? Great. I do t really care and didn’t need your personal attack. I didn’t personally attack you and my original post wasn’t directed at you. So please…
Go about your day and stop replying to me and I will do the same.
You say the elo system is like chess? Well let’s use an example… say I’m Bobby Fisher or Gary Kasparov. And I come into your local library with a beard and glasses and say I’ve never played before. Let’s say my elo score is 800 and I start playing against your 10 year old. Guess what? I just mated him in 8 moves.
I can drop cups and then hit your 2500 power team with my 4100 power team. And because I’ve drop cups to 800 and you were at 1300, you just lost 50 cups from my win. I’m so happy that you spent a few paragraphs schooling us on how the ranking system works, but that doesn’t mean that I cant take all your cups and resources by letting my 5 year old push the buttons as I win. Good strategy huh?
That is what this game allows and I believe what the original poster was complaining about. I believe a solution to that issue would be to in fact match you against the team power of your attacking team instead of defending team. I don’t want that change, but it would make PvP much more fair.
I’m genuinely sorry you feel personally attacked, but that is nothing to do with me. I have not and am not attacking you: I’m discussing the raiding system. Relax. I like you.
It is the combination of luck and skill in gameplay that makes E&P a bit like poker, not just the ‘randomness of the luck of the draw’. But the latter is not what you said in your original post anyway. Let’s check:
As a true PvP, raids are broken. The game relies too much on getting a good board. I can lose to someone 1000 points lower to me with a bad board and I’ve beat people who were substantially better on paper then my team was at the time. I use raids for resourses and every so often when I don’t need resources I will see how high I can get. While I can get above 2800, by the morning it is inevitable that I will have lost several hundred cups. And this is with a team power of 4120.
(TL/DR: you said ‘raids are broken’ because you lose to players with worse teams than you when you get a bad board. Seems like you don’t like the element of luck in the game, doesn’t it? Certainly doesn’t read like you understand that one of E&P’s most appealing features is that it is absolutely not a game of pure skill.)
Of course you can drop cups to farm resources, if you don’t care about cups. Similarly, Kasparov could tank a few tournaments to hustle International Masters out of side bets, if he wanted. This seems to irk you and you still have not explained why. It lets you do all the farming you want with an artificially depressed rank (again, good luck to you, I don’t care), while those who regard trophies as a measure of game success can focus on winning them. Everyone is happy. What is the problem?
Finally, I note that throughout your posts you keep referring to team power. You genuinely seem to feel like team power is a good representation of a team’s strength. It is not. Don’t be misled by it into thinking you have a better team than you do, or a worse one. The best proxy for actual team strength is, of course, trophy total, because it self-corrects when you get too many or too few. (Unless you’re tanking trophies to farm, in which case, yet again and with my most sincere best wishes, good luck.)
Have some emojis just to make sure you don’t feel like you’re being attacked.
If it is just luck, how come a single player can compete for the 1st place in 3 different categories on the same event?
Or that the same player win advanced 2 times even if there’s so much spenders around?
You fool yourself, i too wanna believe that i don’t win because of “luck” or because i don’t spend enough.
But casuality is only a factor, and the analogy with poker is just perfect.
You need skills to choose your team, your items, how and the timing to use them, see the opportunietes for huge combo and so on, exactly like in poker you have to know your cards, read your opponents and don’t make the opponent read you.
What is weird about that analogy is that you don’t actually do any of those things in poker. Take it up a level and you can say it’s like baseball. You pick your pitcher and hitters based on their line up. There is luck and skill as to when you take a bunt, throw a fastball or slider, or take a pitch. So… basically it has similarities to any kind of competition as there is luck and skill in just about anything. You just focused on poker as an analogy. I can’t pick the ace of spades because you are weak against the ace of spades. I can’t add more food to the pot because I am going on a major gem combo that will destroy the center of your team. So the comparison has limitations.
In regards to the other comments, I hold to my beliefs on the game and you can hold to yours. A system that allows top tier players to match against novice players doesn’t truly represent the way a ranking system in PvP should work. I use it to my advantage, but the person who lost all his food and cups to me after spending a few days building his cup level may not feel that it is fair… and guess what? He’s probably right.
You can compare this game to what you want, just sayin that is more ‘similar’ to poker then chess, cause chess has absolutely no luck factor in it (duh, maybe just to decide who do the first move?)
So Brobb example seems more suited then yours, thats all.
As long as ranking don’t gives advantage at all, even if top player compete with newbie it’s only for some piece of meat and some easy win. You think is fun?
It’s not fun, i assure you. Much more fun to beat Arien or Zero in a raid that a random 2000 cups.
Devs probably are working to change this, so you just have to wait some more.
But once again, for me tanking take as much as gives.
My analogy about chess was a piggy back off of his original elo chess comparison. So… not really my comparison in the first place. I explained it a little better in a separate post. It was the condescending - I know better than you, so let me tell you about your mistakes that I disliked about his comments. My opinion is what I offered. I wasn’t looking for a correction of my statements nor was my original post directed at anyone specifically.
A poker analogy is not that strong. There are elements of many games. This game didn’t really reinvent the wheel here. It’s fun for a time waster and also frustrating at times. Everyone enjoy there day!
I’m looking at all these sports analogies (and chess and poker analogies), and wondering if the ELO System can be compared to something else…maybe hunting. It takes skill to shoot, to know the animals, the terrain etc., but you always can miss, or have a day where the wind is blowing from the South and the animals smell you and are long gone.
I think the wind is always blowing South for me in Raid. 
Any system based on Arpad Elo’s math assumes the opponent actively fights back…
…perhaps if we arm bears? 
You’re right that there are limits to the poker analogy, but it’s a reasonable comp to E&P. In one game I craft a team and make decisions on how to play a board; in the other I make decisions on how to bet based on the cards that are dealt and what I know of the other players. They’re different, of course. No one says otherwise.
I call foul on the suggestion that I drew a chess comparison. I mentioned chess because game players may be familiar with the Elo system used for chess rankings. I have also mentioned tennis, because it also uses an Elo ranking system, and more people are familiar with that sport than chess. I believe I also mentioned that Elo-type ranking systems are in use for baseball, basketball and American Football. I no more suggested E&P was like chess than I suggested it was like American Football.
My point was and remains that these ranking systems are ubiquitous and the E&P version of it works exactly the way one would expect. To argue that it is broken is to argue that Elo systems generally are broken - I’d be happy to read that argument, but so far it has not been made.
As to your worry that a weaker player might resent losing trophies to a stronger player, well I’m afraid that’s just how Elo systems work. You win lots of points when you beat a player with a higher ranking than you. I still have no idea why you think this is unfair.
Condescending? I don’t think so. Have an emoji to make you feel good.
I think all the arguing about comparing between poker and chess is missing the bigger point - luck/randomness in hero pulls creates a huge disparity in raid difficulty. Yes a game like poker has incomplete information in a way that chess does not, but in poker, everyone has more or less the same tools available to them (cards, time playing, study materials, etc) to improve.
My main account had the following as it’s first four and five stars: richard, grimm, boldtusk, chao, melendor, grimm, tibertus, caedmon. Compare that to my alt account which got Boril, boril, kiril, li xiu, lil john x2, rigard, cyprian, gormek, melendor. the first account had a really easy time raiding and raided way beyond it’s own power for a long time. The second account really has to not worry about cups in order to raid in a timely manner.
I think that’s some of the frustration and why the sports/poker comparison doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. If you’re a baseball GM, you don’t randomly get assigned a bunch of players and end up with 12 outfielders and 0 catchers or first basemen. You get to choose who you draft and somewhat choose what free agents you sign (or more specifically you can choose which ones to target; you might not get them). But you don’t get that here, so it makes it harder for some teams to raid successfully without dropping cups. I’m not going to use the word “fair” or “unfair” since that seems to bring up a lot of emotions, but some heroes are designed for raiding, others for defense, (and others like cyprian for the trash bin).
So the ELO system itself works great at doing what it’s supposed to (ranking people over a long period of time with lots of matches), the catch here is that the inputs to each player’s team varies so greatly, yet the ranking system only ranks on one specific aspect of the game (raiding).
This is IMO only really a problem at lower and mid-team power/cup rankings, since once you get up higher, most people will have a large stable of 4-5* heroes (either via spending money, training camps, both, or just plugging along for months).
Really good points. I think there might be some more mileage in your baseball thoughts.
There’s no salary cap in baseball, so some teams wildly outspend others and boast rosters of vastly superior players. Other teams get lucky and produce a prodigy or two through their farm system. This is all inequitable. But within the rules of the sport these vast disparities persist, based on money and luck, for some pretty good economic reasons.
Also true of E&P. Personally, I’m fine with it. Spenders fund the game, so they ought to have an advantage. The huge impact of lucky draws just has the potential to mitigate the power of cash.
(As someone who started mostly with heroes from your first team, I gotta say I really lusted after the heroes in your second team. I would have swapped Boldtusk, Chao, Grimm and Caedmon for just Boril and Kiril, or sweet, sweet Li Xiu by herself. Come to think of it, right now I might swap them all for Li Xiu.)
You used the elo statement and I piggy backed off of it and at the end, I stated it it was nothing like chess. You then wrote condescending statements about how I shouldn’t compare it to chess. In a ranking system that works properly (not broken), a professional athlete of your choice from whatever sport you enjoy watching wouldn’t match against my 5 year old who is just learning the game. That happens in this game. You are incentivized to drop cups and attack these players for loot and mission quests. That was the gist of my argument. Does that sound like a system that works as intended as you stated? Wouldn’t it make more sense to incentivize higher cup rankings?
My other arguement was that the randomness of the match 3 board will never truly allow for even matches. It is an intrinsic part of the gaming system. There is nothing wrong with it and no solution to it. It is just a statement. I wasn’t looking for an explanation of how that makes the game great. It was an observation.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say I ‘used the elo statement’. That’s pretty vague - you might be fudging things a little bit. You’re certainly right when you say that you observed that E&P was nothing like chess, and I pointed out that you shouldn’t compare it to chess. Because, you know, you shouldn’t. It’s a silly comparison.
You claim that a professional athlete ought not to be matched against your 5 year old. This is wrong, of course. Your 5 year old might be quite good. To find out, we must let him/her play. After they’ve faced LeBron then we will know who is better. Until then, you’re just boasting about your kid, or LeBron (whoever you think has more talent), and we would be foolish just to take your word.
You ask whether it wouldn’t make sense to incentivise higher cup rankings. This is a really interesting question, which you are raising for the first time. I think cup rankings are an incentive in themselves, being much more meaningful than, say, bonus chests or gems or new heroes could ever be, but I don’t think it would do much harm to introduce other incentives. Fun thought.
And of course, it’s incorrect to think that the randomness of a match three board does not allow for even matches. The effect of the randomness is - very obviously - random. Sometimes it will make an even match uneven; sometimes it will make an uneven match even; sometimes it won’t affect anything. Randomness is like that.
First off let me first state how condescending I feel this whole paragraph is. We are all uninformed, but thankfully you are here to provide us with your insight.
Secondly, you compare it to an ELO system and reference chess and basketball. Here comes in my reference to matching against Bobby Fisher or Lebron James. In your perfect ranking system, I should only be fighting against those people if I was on par or “punching above my weight” which obviously you know is untrue since you know people drop cups. If all you are saying is that people match against people in similar cup range, then I would guess we are all morons if we couldn’t figure that out. Unfortunately my cup total has no bearing on my actual team composition since you are incentivized to drop cups. Maybe you are unaware of the vast amounts of food necessary to level the final ascension tier of 5* heroes, but it is substantial. Much more so than being ranked 32 when I go to bed and 190 when I wake up.
Third, because of the randomness of match 3 games, and the general skew toward attackers versus defenders since you can swap out your attack team (once you have collected and leveled a stable of heroes) while the defense is static, the ranking system again loses any real meaning other than a screen shot for bragging rights for a moment.
Finally, an NFL, NBA, MLB team will never match against a high school team so please don’t be flippant.
Firstly, I’m sorry that you find one of the paragraphs you quote (I’m not sure which one) condescending. I think that might say more about you than about me.
Secondly, you’re right that I compare the E&P trophy system to an Elo-type system, like in the games and sports I listed. This does not mean that I think it is appropriate to compare E&P to those sports. I think we’ve established that to compare E&P to, say, chess, is quite silly. But you’re absolutely wrong to think that in an Elo system you should only face people of a similar strength to you. The whole point of an Elo-type system is that it facilitates matches between players of different strengths. I mean literally, that’s what these systems are designed to do.
Third, of course the ranking system has no real value except for bragging rights. You say this as if it is a bad thing. You’re playing a mobile game: none of it has any value except for bragging rights. Let me demonstrate: It is the attacker’s advantage, plus the randomness of raid mechanics, combined with the vast number of players who construct their teams poorly, that allow a humble FTP player like myself, with a ‘team strength’ of less than 4000, repeatedly to sit in the top 5, peaking for a millisecond as the #1 ranked player. (See how cool bragging rights are? I’ve even got those cool screen shots, if you want them.)
So I’m your 5 year old, your high school team, and I’m happy regularly to beat the major leaguers. Flippant? I don’t think so.
@Coppersky @Rook would suggest closing this thread.
Devolving into ad hominem attacks and I think this horse is throughly beaten to death.
Many including me finished both events on Advanced with zero 5* without single defeat.