Unfair Matches in Alliance Wars

That only makes it more likely you’ll lose

You cant see defense teams during prep phase

Totally agree that is not playing fare in my
book :wilted_flower::v::sunglasses:

I knew I was going to have to explain that… you can look up the alliance and look at the defense teams they have set for “Raids”. We looked up their teams after the match was set, and noticed unusually weak Raid teams. Then at the start of the war, they had significantly stronger teams set up. This is what I am referring to, it was as though an aggregation of the Raid team powers were used to set the match ups.

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Can you elaborate on this? We have been wondering why some of our opponents have a 1* troop on 4k teams

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so sad to see this is spreading. Please don’t fall for this.

Read how scoring is really done from the dev themselves.

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Yeah, raid defense teams don’t tell you much, even if it is their top defense, still doesn’t show their bench

Win or lose in alliance wars you still get loot. Winning loot hasn’t been such a difference maker so not sure why it matters much. Just fight and get whatever loot is given to you. I’ve won twice and been the one with the most points twice and no good loot so I don’t see the big deal.

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Something I noted during this last AW Battle. We won our match by about 1100 points. The Team we were up against matched us blow for blow at first, but we have more than a few “collectors” in our alliance and those who are not have been encouraged to save 1 of each hero 3 star and up no matter what from the time they joined. Most of our Alliance is not 30 Heroes deep, but I think deeper than most. Our opponent ran out of gas and was obviously throwing untrained 2 stars against the wall by the halfway mark. We had players with their Strongest team still available with 1 flag left.

That being said, it is going to be very difficult to determine match ups that are fair and equal at first. People need to catch up with their inventory before that’s even possible. Some very lopsided scores are going to be seen and it will be due to the shortage of Heroes available not the difference in strength between Alliances.

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I had to stop reading.

Do you all listen to yourself? To say it is not cheating after going on and on about community building…sad.

Everyone who says AW is meant to bring us together with a new form in the game has to accept that you are talking about friends and neighbors, if you will.

Ain’t cheating…ain’t right

Nuff said

This is why alliance score fundamentally fails: it doesn’t take into account the primary determining factor of AW performance which is roster depth.

We had the same issue with Aggressive yesterday: they matched us (actually were ahead because of rounding or some other scoring idiosyncrasy) through the first round of kills although they used more flags to do it… and after the respawn we just started pulling away to a rather substantial victory which was significantly more than 1100 points.

Actually from all the alliance wars that I’m aware of when we’re talking the 100% bonus ones, 1100 is one of the better matchups among the top 100 (which I think you play in but my apologies I forget which alliance you are in).

I’ve posted an idea that has been reposted a bunch of places regarding measuring the roster depth of the alliance and use that for matching purposes, but even matching on titan score (and addressing the variable membership via mercing) is better as it reduces the variability of cup dropping. My alt’s alliance, which I’m pretty sure had members out mercing and members such as yours truly’s alt who was at least 1k cups underneath what I can easily maintain on that account, had not quite as large margin of victory as my main’s (alt’s alliance won by 2675ish points for reference) but we didn’t have to even fight the second half at all frankly and we still would have exceeded their point total.

Also our top defenses were virtually untouched, except for our resident Line celebrity who did get whacked by a player who’s seen on the event leaderboards with regularity.

Ultimately AW is a work in progress; I’m a little disappointed that we clearly articulated some of these issues in beta and were apparently ignored, but I have hope that we’ll see improvement over time.

It’s not lost on me that the closest alliance we have that would match up evenly against us, is sitting over 10k lower than us because they’re down two players and have several people with artificially low cups: they were at #4 earlier today and could reach that point virtually any time they wished… but the current matchmaking appears to be such we’re never going to match them.

If they did it on roster depth, I strongly suspect we’d be matched the very first time as I think we’re probably the top 2 alliances on that front and judging from respective victories.

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I think the first definition of cheat is an accurate definition of the action described by the OP. Cheating does not require breaking of the rules,.

Being dishonest, in whatever way you employ, to get a significantly weaker opponent is by definition cheating.

cheat

CHēt/

verb

gerund or present participle: cheating

act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination.

“she always cheats at cards”

avoid (something undesirable) by luck or skill.

“she cheated death in a spectacular crash”

synonyms:avoid, escape, evade, elude;

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World is cruel my friend.
Do you want a cookie?

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So you are saying that players who drop cups so that they can raid significantly weaker opponents are, by definition, cheating.

What utter nonsense.

We have no idea what the “intent” of the developers was, somits a little presumptuous to say that doing this or that is against the design intent.

(Side note: there are two very different approaches to laws. England and the US use “common law”, em where what is prohibited is subject to interpretation by courts based on precedent and legislative intent. France use a strict statutory approach: anything not prohibited explicitly is allowed. @Dante2377 is taking a common law POV, whilst @Brobb is using a statutory method.)

That said, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, it does NOT make for interesting matchups if the two teams that are matched are not the same teams that battle. We narrowly lost to Ribelli because a player left our alliance at the last moment, leaving us a player short. (We lost by about 40 points.) probably can’t help that, but it certainly is a problem in the other direction, when players were missing from a team at matchup time but battle in the war.

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In my part of the world (I spend £s) the saying goes:

‘In England, everything that is not forbidden is allowed. In Germany, everything that is not allowed is forbidden.’

There is a strong common law tradition behind this lightweight aphorism. (Check out Lord Denning’s judgement in Miller v Jackson, if you’ve missed out on that piece of art.) I’m in no position to assess seriously the approach Napoleonic jurisprudence might take to such issues - I’m unqualified - but my argument proceeds from an Anglo-American legal heritage that basically says: There had better be a law to stop me doing something, because if there ain’t then I shall keep doing it until sundown.

This aside, close battles are better than lop-sided affairs, I agree.

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I thought about Dropping cups for Raids while I was posting the definition.

The definition allows dishonesty to gain an advantage to be construed as cheating, whether one thinks so or not depends on one’s own moral compass.

I think that in the instance of alliance wars it certainly is as such. Raids are, however, different because the player chooses to fight the opponent, not must fight the opponent. Also, you can already re-roll enough to get a weaker opponent, based on your own criteria, to fight.

The shear advantage and poor real time interaction that happens from the mismatched pairing in Alliance Wars elevates this above the raid example. The enjoyment of you opponent is a not an integral part of raids as they are not actively involved in the battle. This distinction makes it a little more difficult to assign the term.

In most rules for events/games in the real world there is a blanket statement that cheating in anyway is not tolerated. Meaning any dishonest act to acquire an advantage, in the judges opinion, could count as cheating. The reason for this is that they simple can’t think of every possible way to cheat and have a rule to cover it.

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Most rules for events/games do not include a blanket statement that “cheating in anyway [sic] is not tolerated”. (If they did, they would choose a tidier definition of cheating than the one you proposed, but we’ll get to that.)

Here are the laws of football:

Here are the laws of rugby:

Here are the laws of cricket:

You see what is missing in each codification? Any suggestion that dishonest acts to gain advantage (in the judges’ opinion, for unspecified reasons) are not tolerated. Such silliness does not even appear in the preamble to the Laws of Cricket, the sport that resulted in the phrase, ‘That’s not cricket!’, which is appropriate for precisely the sort of complaint you are making. (Viz: Grace, Jardine, Chappell.)

These sports have rules. Breaking those rules is what we call ‘cheating’.

You struggled terribly in an attempt to somehow disqualify cup dropping from your definition of cheating. I’m not convinced you did a very good job.

The distinction you seemed to draw was that in raids, if you face an opponent who has been dropping cups to get easier kills, you don’t have to fight them, you choose to fight them. You say that “you can already re-roll”. That’s simply wrong.

You can choose not to fight on attack; on defence you have no way of avoiding taking a beating from the cup-dropper who has tanked in order to steal all your food and iron while filling their raid chest. If one was of a mind to be judgmental about this sort of thing, stealing food and iron from lower level players would surely be a far greater sin than tilting an alliance war to your advantage, given the relative importance of food to lower level players.

There’s no question that this behaviour falls within your subjectively crafted definition of cheating. But we all recognise that it’s not cheating - it’s a widely used strategy.

So how can we really take your proposed definition seriously, if it can’t even cope with something a sizeable minority of players have indulged in for the life of the game?

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I drop cups from time to time and i also like to hit my cup wall when i get a few new heroes to see how much i have improved and try diffetent setups.

Each their own, when im sitting at platinum and put in my level ones for all to grab free ez cups and hams/iron(lemme remind you i have a level 18 tower) you think they are complaining? Think it bothers me in the least when i hit rock bottom and gave 1800+ cups and hams/iron away to go through my revenge list and smash the new folks back? :joy: Not in the least.

Go play some WoW on a PvP server for a bit if you want something to complain about getting smashed into the dirt while you level up. Been on the receiving and giving end of both and no %!&$! given. :wink:

Please don’t misinterpret my comments: I have no complaint whatsoever about players fiddling their lineup to get matched against weaker opposition in raids. My point is that the practice is ethically and morally indistinguishable from alliances fiddling heir lineup to get matched against weaker opposition in wars. If you approve of one you must approve of the other, or your position is hypocritical.

My own view is that (obviously) neither practice is cheating, both are smart, and neither is good for the game.

I’m happy to see the end of alliances being able to swap players in and out to match against weaker opposition. I would also be happy to see the end of alliances being able to drop cups to match against weaker opposition, and players being able to drop cups to match against weaker opposition.

In the meantime, though, these behaviours are just sensible.