Matchmaking Problems!

I just thought of a third way to “play” the scoring system:

  1. The big hitter(s) opt out, giving their junior mates an easier war and fill the war chest more quickly. Suppose, for example, I started a training alliance for 7D, so it was me (with half of my war heroes 5*, the other full 4*) and 29 newish players using a mix of 3* and 4*. My high team will skew us to face alliances with the same average team but a higher median. That is, most of the matches will be badly skewed: I can one-shot 6 targets, but all the other wins will be a struggle. If I opt out of the war and spend the day coaching my mates, then they’ll be paired against similar teams and have a fairer fight. This strategy isn’t abusive at all – I’m earning fewer rare mats in this example.
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That would actually be a really nice thing to do. But knowing you not a problem at all as you have always given knowledge willingly
As for all the we have been badly matched we will be slaughtered comment from everyone. I would echo other comments go into any conflict thinking you will lose and you will. Give each AW match the same chance and you may even realise you are way better than you think. Alliance score means nothing but the hard work you put in lvling your bench will prevail and lead to victory.
Remeber all AW’s are a team effort not for personal score

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Just a thought, I think the current consideration of war history is a nice way of favoring those alliances that have been getting the short end of the stick mostly or exclusively, in the time before this change. They deserve a couple wins… and then things should even out as the war histories change. I can’t see all the variables and there are all alliances to consider obviously, but to me this feels more good than bad.

And full disclosure, in my alliances we’ve gotten some good matches (or at least ones we managed to win, sometimes even when it looked like we wouldn’t), but mostly ones that looked either a little or a lot stacked against us. Mostly because we have a fairly large difference between the top end and bottom end I think (and no doubt many unleveled/partially leveled 4*/5* among all of us). This war, I breathe a sigh of relief because our opponent has a lot more targets that our alliance’s weaker members can decently attack and beat on their own, which before this tended to be slim to none at all. Honestly I admire their grit and fighting spirit all this time.

So definitely for us, the new matching method promises to be a nice improvement based on this early first impression (we still have to actually fight the war of course!).

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Ours looks better as well - more teams that our weaker teams will be able to tackle. We will see how it goes.

I have a very different opinion. :slight_smile: I think using the war history is cheating. It would be possible (for competent developers) to develop good matching that takes into account only the heroes and troops. Adding war history removes the skill/strategy alliances might have been employing. Now the message is: if you’re good – we’ll make you lose (unless you’re #1 alliance); if you’re bad – well then we’ll find someone you can win against.

No, the message is, “If you’re good, we’ll match you with other good alliances. If you’re not, we’ll match you with other struggling alliances.”
Personally, I would rather have a good match against another alliance that is around our ability, one that is close and goes down to the wire. Blowouts aren’t much fun, no matter which side you’re on.

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I agree with them on this the system matching making sucks, the last 3 wars we have been overpowered the other team has all heavy hitters, lvls in the 28+ their teams power is 3000+ most of my alliance isn’t no where near that. Also it’s not just war, the raid match ups are just as bad lately. Surely u programmers can fix this, so fix it. Yes I’m a little upset but being over the age of 50 affords me that itty bitty right.

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Nah, you’re confused.

…and if you still win, we’ll match you against alliances you can’t possibly win.

…and if you still lose, we’ll match you against ever weaker alliances until you win.

So what do you actually want? If you want even matches against roughly equal opponents, this will do it. If you want to steamroll every alliance you face, sorry about your luck.

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Roughly equal opponents?? LOL My alliance is getting screwed with this upcoming war also. Their alliance has 1 diamond level player, ours none, theirs has 8 platinum level players to our 3. Their alliance has 12 gold level players to our 6. Their alliance has 5 silver to our 16. WTF we don’t stand a chance in hell if their players use only half their flags.

Their trophy score is 41223 vs our 30654.

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I guess I don’t want anything specific from the wars or from this game.

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You make a fair point, I get what you’re saying.

Though I’m not sure I’d agree that it necessarily fully removed the skill/strategy/effort and whatnot, I would say most alliances would still fight to the best of their ability. But if based purely on history, then you’re right that you could phone it in as an alliance, and you would land in a place where you would win some, and lose some - just like an alliance that gives it everything. This is much like how raids work; but raids do give better rewards the higher you climb that ladder. Perhaps something similar could be done with wars.

Besides that, I think the difficulty with matching purely on measurable metrics, or it certainly has been anyway, is to be accurate enough for truly fair matches across the board, or very close to it most of the time at least. There are just so much variables that go into it, not just the sum of the power of the top X, or the troops, but also the distribution of power among the heroes and the players, and much beyond the power the actual skills of the heroes, how many healers and so on… even whether an alliance has enough same color tanks to pull off a color coordinated strategy and so on. Accurately gauging the defense team strength is also not trivial - simply giving more weight to the top 5 like has been done is some attempt at that, but I think nobody would say that is 100% accurate. And activity level is probably a hard one also, some alliances are simply more casual by choice than others, and I would say they deserve good matches also.

Would the latest changes be accurate enough without considering history? Perhaps, I can’t answer that for sure… the individual opt-out will help obviously with cases where players simply don’t want to take part at all, but not with cases where a player only will hit once or twice and no more, which does happen also (and yes it would be valid to say that if you fight like that, you deserve to lose… but… some of the time people don’t use all their flags because there is really no enemy they can make any reasonable dent in). The power re-balancing probably made a pretty nice improvement also. I’m not sure overall it’d be quite good enough to come close to fair matches across the board… in my humble estimation there was never enough accounting for power distribution curves of heroes of one player (weighing the top 5 extra does this somewhat in a rudimentary way), and power distribution of players within an alliance, both of which I think are important.

So what we have now, is a hybrid solution that considers both a number of measurable metrics, and some war history. We’ll have to experience how that works out over the next wars, but that actually sounds like a pretty good compromise to me. What do you think?

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It might work out well. Including the history won’t necessarily make for always close matches, but that might be even better than having always nail-biting war endings.

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Second war in a row we have a much stronger opponent with no chance. Now their average level is 38 vice ours 31. that,s noncence, dear devs. Last war was the same, we lost it of course, and now got even stronger one:rofl::rofl:. Surely we’ll loose this war again, I just wonder about the next opponent. Please do smth, this is really very demotivating moment.

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@mhalttu:

I have been telling mates and anyone who worries about the disparity in actual player levels that this doesn’t matter as much as hero levels, but the truth is…

Player level actually IS indicative of some important “softer” degrees of impact.

They have more experience, more troop strength and diversity (not a lot of new players can select for mana-generating troops, or critical or anything really), and more resources for leveling a bench during wars (higher world energy to collect recruits, more food to level heroes, more TC bank spaces to hold them).

Is it possible that this really is another x which is messing up the matching?

I hesitate to ask because I understand that adding more variables to the algorithm = more confounders for which to control, and it may cause match pools to become more restrictive.
Cheers!

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They’re showing 29/29 full teams. 16 of those range 1000 to 1700 strength over me. All of them are stronger than me, their lowest being about 100 stronger.

I’m not the lowest player in my alliance.

Yeah, seems fair. :roll_eyes:

Same here!!

I want to understand this match-up system better because I just do not get it. This just does not make sense to me. Here is the general info about us and about them.


If you look at the numbers (see the chart that lists their defense TP for raids taken during prep while the other side in green on the left shows their battlefield defense at the start of war). We do this for every war to be strategic in our approach.

Here is the current outcome of the war (and we have 4 hours to go):

Here are the attack history details thus far in war – I am providing becaue I think you can see by their numbers on attack just how much stronger their 30 hero rosters must be because many are killing off our top teams with flags 1 thru 4/5 (and they are not “clean up” hits).

I think these attachments clearly dispute the “fairness” of the matching system that is in place for AW. Perhaps the new system is not applied fully just yet and only the historical information is applied? I mention this because from the last 15 or so wars, we have won the majority and done well but I can say with confidence that it was never because we were stronger and our opponent had been unfairly matched, but that they just did not many that used all or even any of their flags. For the most part, I have the history of all of these past wars because we track each one (the only exception was last mid-week war because I was flying across the country and unable to participate and capture).

I would love some feedback to understand this better because right now I have a lot of very unhappy members. And it is so tiring having to rethink and readjust constantly and want to know how we can be better prepared or whether we should even bother with it all.

Thanks!

I do not know exactly how heavily recent war history is going into the equation, but a hint from @mhalttu saying it may be revised down could be suggesting it does have fairly significant weight at the moment.

So I’m thinking your recent record of mostly war wins has a lot to do with the stronger enemy you’re facing right now, and I think also this will level off the next couple wars. So I would say not a reason for too much gloom and doom on your members’ part, and I would suggest to see how the next couple wars develop before drawing any conclusions. Just my thoughts.

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Very good suggestion/thoughts.

I, too, got that same impression by the staff about the war history and really do not understand the reason behind them including it as a part of the match-making.

Do you know if they have addressed why they felt it was important to be factored into the process? If they are “looking for historical” overviews, and believe they are important, then why not other historical components? Like the cups & titan points could be factored into it to, too. Along with the top 30 heroes and war history.

It (cups/titan points) could be based on a historical date points of the last 30 days from the point of matching by backdating and then for next war the historical data points are adjusted accordingly. This, at least in theory, should give you a well-rounded overview of the alliance strength and wellness and, hopefully, balance of closer matching for AW.

Unfortunately sometimes we just need to “live in the moment” and vent, which is what a lot of our members are doing right now (it is just hard to keep cheering them on when it is feels so very unfair). We lost the previous war before this one (although I was not around, I trust the word of my members when they conveyed we had been grossly outmatched then, but that this match-up was far worse) – so back to back hits and with the recent changes to other “fixes and glitches” has just created a lot of frustration.

At this point our opponents continues to hit us and it looks like all 28 of their players may use every single one of their flags (even though there is no way for a comeback by us to make it even close on narrowing the gap). Perhaps from their perspective that is how they play, which makes me question how many losses they have experienced if SG deemed them as “the underdog” historically.

Overall, I think that’s a bit classless on their part, if you ask me, but that has nothing to do with the matching questions for SG, just a very different approach on how to win graciously.

I can only hope we hear something soon about the outcome of the newest adjustment in war match-ups.