Other than restrictions on heroes/troops and Special Rules, the Raids themselves in Weekly Raid Tournaments work the same way as regular Raids.
Each day, you’ll be able to attack up to 5 teams.
The flags used for Raid Tournaments are separate from regular Raid flags.
NOTE: Kills in Raid Tournaments count toward your Wanted: Heroes Raid Chest, so Raid Tournaments also effectively give you extra flags to potentially help fill your chest.
One notable difference to Regular Raids — you can’t reroll.
For the whole of the Tournament, you have 4 “Lives.” Each time you lose a Raid, you lose one life.
The lives do not reset across days of the Tournament. Once you’d lost 4 times at any point during the Tournament, you are out.
If you choose, you can pay some gems to reset your lives after 4 losses — but your score and ranking would still be lowered because of the losses. Paying to reset your lives does NOT give you an advantage from the Raids you’ve already fought. It simply allows you to continue using your normal 5 flags per day and not be “out” of the Tournament.
There is no way to buy additional flags. So everyone ultimately had the same number of maximum flags to use for attacks during the Tournament. The only thing gems allow you to do is continue playing if you’ve used up all of your lives.
CAVEAT: How this worked in beta changed SEVERAL times during testing. It’s very possible we’ll see how all of this works evolve over time, much like Alliance Wars have changed many times since initial release.
Matchmaking
This is an area of the Raid Tournaments that’s obviously had significant problems, and continual revision.
The developers are continuing to work to refine and improve how matchmaking works, so we don’t know exactly what to expect yet, but they’ve set up a Raid Tournament Change Log, which you can monitor for updates.
Matchmaking for Attacks
Click for details on Matchmaking for Attacks
As of the Third Raid Tournament, initial matchmaking was based on your Top 5 strongest heroes that qualified for the Tournament’s rarity and elemental restrictions:
This was slightly amended as of the Fourth Raid Tournament:
The difficulty of the opponents reduced slightly in the beginning of tournaments.
Matchmaking for Defense
Click for details on Matchmaking for Defense
As of the Sixth Raid Tournament, matchmaking for Defense teams was changed again:
Further improvements to the distribution of attacks, especially for the top players.
Keep in mind that if you’re in the top, your defense team will receive more attacks. This is due to the fact that there is a small number of top defense teams that are good matches for a large number of top attackers. We try to prioritize choosing a good opponent over choosing a too easy or too difficult opponent that hasn’t been attacked as much. We have also implemented a limit on how attacks count towards your Defense Grade. After the first five attacks of the day, only one attack per hour counts towards the grade.
Changes to the starting difficulty of opponents your defense team faces.
It is no longer based on the defense team you pick, but your best heroes that match the tournament requirements. We’ve brought this rule back because we want to encourage players to choose the best defense team they can, and thus provide a better challenge to their opponents. Due to the way the Team Power is calculated it was possible, for example, to pick a defense team of two fully leveled, fully ascended heroes that were on paper equal in Team Power with a full team of lower rarity heroes, but in practice that full team would be defeated in most cases.
Scoring
Click for details on Scoring
NOTE: Hat tip to @DracoLovesRi for pointing out that there haven’t seemed to be “extra points” for a victorious attack:
New as of the Second Raid Tournament:
Defense Team Grade
Click for How Defense Team Grade Works
I found this was actually very clear and useful — and I think provides some insights into regular Raid Defense Teams too.
The grades are assigned based on a percentage of wins by your Defense Team:
The Defense Grade is determined based on the win percentage of your Defense Team. At the end of each Battle Day, you receive points based on your grade.
Percent Won
Grade
Points
60%
A
900
50%
B
650
40%
C
500
30%
D
400
0%
E
200
My Personal Take on This:
The top grade in this approach was awarded to a Defense Team that won 60% of the time. To me, that’s a good confirmation of what many of us have long accepted: Raids are unfair, but not for the reasons you think — that is, they heavily favor the attacker, and even a top-notch Defense Team will lose much of the time.
Restrictions
Each Week can have restrictions on:
Hero and troop rarity — e.g. only allowing 3* heroes and 2* troops or below
Elements — e.g. no red/fire heroes allowed
Special Rules
Click for details on Special Rules
Each week has ONE Special Rule in effect.
(At least in beta; it’s possible live Tournaments may sometimes have multiple Special Rules at once. If that ever happens, I would be surprised if we see that before core elements like matchmaking are working properly, so I anticipate a single Special Rule for the foreseeable future.)
The possible Special Rules are:
Whichever Special Rule is in effect for a given Tournament remains in effect for the entirety of that Tournament.
The Special Rule affects both Defense and Offense teams.
Some Clarifications/Expansions
Rush Attack makes all hero specials of any speed Very Fast — it doesn’t require Very Fast heroes, it turns all heroes into Very Fast heroes. Heroes that are normally Slow or Average can become quite powerful in this setting.
Bloody Battle makes any healing effects do nothing. It doesn’t prohibit healers, it just prevents the healing portion of their special skill from having any effect.
Buff Booster adds a stackable 20% attack buff to each hero for each active buff on that hero. Using heroes with special skills that grant buffs or multiple buffs can lead to very high attack boosts. These buffs stack with each other and normal attack buffs.
Rewards
The initial loot for Raid Tournaments was quite excellent in the top tiers, but that loot was only available during the very first Raid Tournament.
Click for Archive of First Tournament's Loot, before reduction
Acronyms in this table:
AM: Ascension Materials
EHT: Epic Hero Token
ETT: Epic Troop Token
Any of the tiers starting at top 75% have a chance for ascension mats.
Here’s the current breakdown for ascension mats, tokens, and Emblems (for simplicity, I didn’t include the Flasks, Atlantis Coins, Battle Items, and Crafting Materials that are in loot in addition to these):
Tier
AM Chance
EHT/ETT Chance
Emblems Chance
75-100%
0
0
1 Draw: 100% x1
50-75%
1 Draw: 5% 3*
1 Draw: 5% EHT, 15% ETT
1 Draw: 20% x3, 30% x2, 50% x1
25-50%
1 Draw: 18% 3*, 2% 4*
1 Draw: 15% EHT, 25% ETT
1 Draw: 40% x5, 60% x3
10-25%
1 Draw: 22% 3*, 3% 4*
2 Draws: 20% EHT, 40% ETT
1 Draw: 40% x5, 35% x10, 25% x20
5-10%
2 Draws: 45% 3*, 5% 4*
2 Draws: 25% EHT, 45% ETT
1 Draw: 10% x50, 20% x30, 30% x20, 40% x10
1-5%
2 Draws: 95% 3*, 5% 4*
2 Draws: 40% EHT, 60% ETT
1 Draw: 5% x100, 30% x50, 30% x30, 35% x20
Top 1%
2 Draws: 90% 3*, 10% 4*
3 Draws: 50% EHT, 50% ETT
1 Draw: 25% x100, 50% x35, 30% x40
As of the Second Raid Tournament, loot was reduced due to problems with the Raid Tournaments. This was initially indicated as being temporary while issues were fixed:
The loot as of the Seventh Raid Tournament was very slightly tweaked. For discussion about this, please see this thread: The New, NEW Raid Tournament Loot
Click for details on Slightly Modified Loot as of Seventh Raid Tournament
As of the 13th Raid Tournament, it was announced that further updates to the loot were not planned:
It has been observed that approximately 1.5 million players sign up for these tournaments as of May 2020. Using this approximation, some key break points for rewards are:
Tier
Low Rank
Top 1%
15,000
1-5%
75,000
5-10%
150,000
10-25%
375,000
25-50%
750,000
50-75%
1,125,000
75-100%
Just Sign Up
Remember that these are approximations assuming 1.5 million players sign up. The actual rank needed for a certain tier could be higher or lower on any given tournament. The required score will also vary depending on the players’ performance and the Tournament rules.
Bug Reporting
Please see these threads for existing bug reports before creating a new report
O yes , no chance for new players , 6 times 5 star tournament , 5 times 4 star tournament , 3 star tournament you can delete is useless, do not give any chance to new players
So what does controll who will get big targets with best points on them?
Cause it’s not fair that some people are starting to have 600+ points and others start with shaving teams with 400 or less!
This gives a big advantage to some people over others.
Especially on 3* fights.
I for my self wont ever be able to compete with 5* dudes. But why my 3* all +13 are not getting me higher targets to start with…I would love to be in top100 for change!
Have you seen the main threads? We’ve been tracking data for each tourney. No one in this tourney should be starting at or coming anywhere near 600 points per attack this tourney (2578 is the top score at the moment…which jives with data). BTW, starting position is determined by best 5 heroes and best 5 troops that can be used for the tourney; some start with better scoring values, but you can catch up. Here is what I posted in the tourney 18 thread.
Post 1 last night:
(my max is 2380 TP for this tourney).
Therefore, if prior tourney data holds, we should expect (for us) the following:
Start at 460 or 461 (based on best 5 TP)
In general, an increase of the next opponent’s score value by 7 for a win; decrease the next opponent’s score value by 13 for a loss (day 1)
If at least four of the five attacks are wins, then one of the defenders (usually the 4th or 5th faced) will have their score jump by 8 instead of 7
By my math, assuming that I am not off, the maximum team power value that a maxxed 3* hero team with maxxed 2* troops and full 20 emblems on each hero could possibly have is 2925. They would start at 515 with their attacks in all likelihood
In the past, the scoring wall for a 3* tourney has been about 525 (the highest I’ve seen reported is 523, but I think that defenses lose value somehow from losing [dev’s notes somewhere], so I’ll allow that there are higher defenses than 523…maybe even as high as 530)
This has meant that the scoring patterns get weird after around 511 (typically) and really start bouncing up and down after 515 in no set range.
Post 2 today:
Day 1: 5-0, scoring acting as predicted last night (four +7 and one +8). 2373, top 5 percent (expected). 20736 rank. So day 2 should see me start roughly at 496 and start advancing by 5 if I win and decrease by 9 in a loss. We’ll see what happens.
So there is a rhyme and reason to it (we’ve been at it for a while now), and if you are curious, refer to the tourney 15-17 threads for how we (myself and a lot of help from others) went through the process of figuring it out. There’s a lot there.
There is a very comprehensive study by @Wondermoose and other users colaborating on how points are awarded
I strongly recommend you to read that, but I’ll try to summarize it.
Your best 5 heroes according to the tournament restrictions define your best TP for that tournament and sets you a “starting score”. Better teams start better. Every time you win, new opponents will have a better score. If you lose, it’ll be worse. Score will continue raise if you keep winning until a point which is called “the wall”, that is the max score you can get from a win in a particular tournament.
So a player who has better 5 heroes than other, will have a higher starting point and a higher wall.
After reading this I’m still confused on how matchmaking works for attack. My daughter highest team is 3550 (triton 7 grimm 11 magni 12/4 cyprian and rigard). On first day the 5 teams she fight were between 3457 and 3818. On day 2 team power increased gradually from 3857 to 4075. and so on on days 3 /4 with now oponents at 4200/4316. On day 4 she got 3 defeats.
I can’t hardly understand how trtion grimm magni cyprian and rigard can be matched with magni kunchen aegir dalila persee (4176) or higher team
@Guvnor I added in a column for previous times a format has occurred in the Full Log, and the recent pattern is certainly clear — but also appears to have been an abrupt start.
It seems like the first 6 Tournaments were perhaps not part of the repeating cycle.
It’s also interesting that the maintenance break without a Raid Tournament skipped a combo, rather than just delaying it by a week.
So if that’s the 32-week rotation, the distribution across Special Rules and Rarity are pretty consistent — but Element Restrictions and the combos of Element/Rarity, Element/Special, and Rarity/Special are kind of wonky.
Personally I’m not a fan of the “pattern” or “set rotation” in the game…
It’s not found anywhere in the game outside of scheduling & the rare stuff (rare titans follow a colour cycle, rare quests follow a cycle, monthly quest follows a cycle)
I personally would prefer that the rule, star rating and elemental restrictions be governed by RNG (as is the case with war rules, token drops, other quest appearances etc…)
My RNG solution:
My suggestion would be
Hero Resrriction*
40% chance for 5*
35% chance for 4*
25% chance for 3*
Rule
Even split across all rules (current and future)
Thus 33.33% chance for each rule
(Buff booster, rush attack, bloody battle)
Elemental restrictions
Even chance for all restrictions, including no restriction.
Thus 16.667% chance for each colour restriction (no red, blue, green, purple, yellow, none)
Additional proposal - class restrictions
I’d also like to add in a proposal for class restrictions.
No class restrictions = 30%
7% chance for restriction on any of the 10 classes
I like, but I’d modify it slightly— 50/50 chance of tournament type, excluding whatever this week’s was (so no 2 rush attacks in a row).
And same for element restrictions. If class restrictions are added, then that too.
If it comes up no restrictions, reroll.
Note that class restrictions give a bit of an advantage to costumes, which is probably a plus in SG’s book. I’d be fine with it except that costumed heroes in a tournament lock them that way for a week. This is just dumb UX.
I think this is perfect, every tournament should have a 1 color forbidden (even two would be fun!)
Also think 5* tournaments should be more rare, after all we use the 5* everywhere else.
Maybe reversing to 40% 3 star, 35% 4* and 25% five star, but even the uniform distribution is fine
Log of Raid Tournament Special Rules and Restrictions
Overview of Weekly Raid Tournaments
Tournament
Attacking
Matchmaking
Scoring
Defense Team Grade
Restrictions
Special Rules
Rewards
Bug Reporting
Related Links
makes it more of a challenge & more fun 