I did receive an answer from Small Giant’s support staff to the issue about the uneven number of players in the battlefield I opened a ticket about before writing the original post.
I think it could be useful to share it here so that the community is aware and may check if the solution / explanation could fit their case too.
Support staff had carefully checked the logs then verified that at the time of the matchmaking we were 22, not 21. Then, according to their answer, a player left after the preparation phase.
I checked the membership time of all our mates and no one of our allies left then rejoined the alliance from long time.
However, being an open ally, many players repeatedly join then leaves after a few time, maybe looking for titans to defeat in order to complete the valor path (this is our best supposition for that behavior).
So we thought that the incident might have happened due to an unlucky timing: one of those “visitors” joined the alliance then left during or nearby the matchmaking phase.
Now we set the alliance to invite only and won’t accept players when the matchmaking is about to start.
This could be a suggestion to prevent similar issues from happening again if our deduction is correct.
I hope that these informations could be useful to someone else or help finding a better explanation for such behavior.
We used to have it ALL THE TIME. Like every 4th war. We were around 16 members. I think it was because we were on win streaks in the 7+ range. The opponent even had an extra player when we dropped down to 5 players, which was concerning and completely unbalanced (we won though). We’ve had an extra player too, but that was much rarer.
I’m assuming that we’re not the first tab that this has happened to. The mechanics of it seem a bit out though, I understand we’re a reindeer team but how does the flag allocating work? We only have 24 to their 30. I’m assuming that spinneys this all evens out but I can’t seem to see how. Please can someone that has encountered this before and figured it out she’d some light on how this works
It can and does happen.
The matchmaking is based on your roster and strength etc.
So very occasionally that will mean an uneven number of opponents on the battlefield.
However you still have a good chance of a win
Good luck
One possibility is that one player left after matchmaking, either to merc titans, or just because. Did you check the alliance war scores and are they similar?
It’s the only scenario I can think of. He must have been really quick to leave the alliance cause I checked their team seconds after matchmaking.
There should be an ex-member on the battlefield when war starts, right?
In the 2 and a half years I have been playing, I have only experienced this once. Rather recently, in fact… I think it was about a month ago?
It was weird for sure, and I’m not sure why it happened… other than to say that the other team’s members were a lot stronger than ours, so maybe the game’s matchmaking system was experimenting with something (or the person in charge of maintaining the matchmaking system was “experimenting with something”)
If they actually left after matchmaking and return well before the war actually starts, chances are they will be on the field. There is no way of knowing until the war starts.
Joking aside (my previous post was somewhat meant in jest), this situation should be extremely rare, but occasionally necessary.
Say for example your alliance has 13 warring members. Say there are 1001 alliances with exactly 13 warring members. The matchmaking algorithm should assign 500 matches of 13 v. 13, but what to do with the 1001st alliance? They’re either going to have to be matched against an alliance of 12 or 14.
You are going to get hammered - if they have one less member (without having one leave) their teams will be a LOT stronger and even with the 6 extra hits you will have you wont even tickle their strongest teams - happens a lot in alliances with few members
That’s the same thing that happened to us. We had an extra member but they were freaking OP.
IIRC we did win thanks to the extra flags and getting more points per hit, but it wasn’t exactly a blowout victory.
In the end, it wasn’t really a fair war for either one of us. They would have spanked us if they had the extra member. They put up a great fight, but it’s hard to overcome that kind of disparity.
