I’ve heard often complaints about the trophy-based system used to determine matchmaking in PvP raids and I believe it’s deeply flawed. I checked for proposed solutions to see if there was another great mind like mine but apparently not (or my mind isn’t that great).
My idea is simple, replace the current system with something akin to war matchmaking but for individuals, not alliances.
In other words, to determine a Player Score, the game would rate a player on two simple and well-defined concepts:
- Roster score.
- Raid score.
Roster score, would take an arbitrary number of the best heroes of each player and rate them in some way. I would suggest rate the 10 heroes with the highest power (since power reflects emblems too). Perhaps a better approach would be to expand this number for each tier, something like 5 for Bronze, 10 for Silver, 15 for Gold, 20 for Platinum, and 25 for Diamond since the higher you are, the larger and stronger the roster at your disposal. But let’s keep it a simple 10 for now.
Raid score would simply be a win-loss balance sheet. You get a certain amount of points for a win, and you lose the same amount of points for a loss. I would suggest 100 points here for example.
Arenas would be determined by the overall Player score while ranking could be done either based on Player score (to include the roster score as well, since its a player achievement nonetheless), or based on the Raid score, the person who has more wins than losses compared to the others is by definition the best raider after all.
So to recap, if your 10 strongest heroes are all 4* and through leveling and embleming they average 720 power each, your Roster score is 7200 and since your raid score at this point is zero, your player score is 7200. If you decide to do a PvP raid, the game will match you with another player with a 7200 score (plus minus something tbd later). If you win, your Raid score becomes 100 and next time you will be matched with a 7300 score player. If you lose, your Raid score becomes zero again, and you start all over.
Clearly, the roster score is the determining factor here but skilled players can showcase their talent and take their player score well above their roster score. Which will make rankings even more significant. It’s not just what you have but also how you use it.
As for defenses, my favorite solution is not to score them all. Whether you win or lose on defense, it doesn’t matter, you gain or lose no points at all. While it’s true that creating and positioning a defense is an achievement on its own and should be rewarded, you don’t actually control your defense, the AI does. Not scoring your defensive performance would also end (almost) the much maligned practice of cup-dropping. Not only you won’t lose points by fielding a weak defense, but you will gift points to others and improve their ranking instead. (I said almost because you can still decrease your score by losing raids on purpose, but at least that will come at expense of your own flags, so I’m not sure that’s a wise idea). That said, players would still have a great incentive to field the best defense possible as it would make their attackers lose points and therefore drop in the rankings. And let’s not forget the pleasure and pride of checking on your defense and seeing your defense’s success.
In conclusion, the benefits of this system would be:
A more fair matchmaking.
No cup-dropping.
Focus on offensive heroes instead of defense.
A more fair ranking system
Less stress from incoming attacks (there was a thread about this recently)
A more fair arena placement.
P.S. the only flaw I can see in this proposal, is that older players, or aggressive players will have the advantage of more raids and a better win-loss balance. I’m sure we can find a fix for this. I’m thinking that the Raid score can be limited to the first 12 PvP raid each day only. This way, players who like to flask or buy more flags would gain nothing. Older players would still have the advantage of time but perhaps that’s good since rankings would be considered as a Raiding Hall of fame.
Thank you for your time and patience.