Reduced Raid Tournament Loot During Work on Matchmaking [Developer Response in Post 334]

The scoring is completely the issue.

Higher team powers are worth more. Beating a higher team power regardless of relative difficulty in the match to the individual player regardless of level gives more points to help make losses hurt less for those higher teams. Further, it’s a scoring system that creates tiers immediately where those below a certain tier can’t make up points to get to a higher tier because their limited to their tier. Yet we’re all in the same pool playing for the same spots at the top.

It’s a downright stupid scoring system for a tournament. No real competition would sit there and disadvantage a large portion of the player base playing for the same things in the same pool not because “they’re poor players” or “others have more skill”, but simply because they haven’t had the money/random luck to make as good as a team as others yet (not because they couldn’t make the proper choices to build one, but because a random roulette wheel holds them back). So penalize them by holding them back so that they get less in a base win and then can’t make up ground due to losses.

Oh, I know. “I’ve been here a while; players that have been playing longer should be advantaged”. Yeah, cause that’s how it works everywhere else, like when the Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup final as a first year expansion team last year while every goal they scored was worth a fraction of the other teams in the playoffs because they were the new guy. Oh wait. That didn’t happen. The Knights were on an even playing field as everyone else and when they scored points they scored them at the same value as everyone else because that’s what happens in a competition.

Though the more whining about the loot and defense of the system as it is that goes on, the more I’m convinced that some here aren’t interested in competing at all and just want a perceived weekly handout.

But whatever could they do to fix this thing?

Oh, I don’t know. Anything that’s been suggested by dozens of people on the forums. Like:

Make separate individual tournaments for different levels each week and you choose what to enter.

Go to merit based scoring by changing the difficulty score according to things like levels of heroes used, time it takes to win, how many special attacks used, etc.

Go to ELO

Allow flags to recharge and allow more attacks

And so on. And yes, none of these are perfect, but they’d all be a better step in a fairer scoring system if they insist on us all being thrown together in one pool.

But I doubt they have any incentive to change it as long as people want to defend it and they get their money off it.

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“Reduced Raid Tournament Loot” during work on Matchmaking…
When will normalize loot? =S

Because your matched against similar strength teams, I think much of what you say isn’t applicable. My alt is only lvl 28, doesn’t have any fully leveled 4 stars yet (is getting close to having a few) and is in the upper 10% right now.

Clearly not a case of buying to the top, I don’t even have any fast hitters leveled yet, because I only recently got one. I’m doing it mostly with good utility heroes, half of which are TC heroes.

I’d like to better understand what you’re saying here:

“Beating a higher team power regardless of relative difficulty in the match to the individual player regardless of level gives more points to help make losses hurt less for those higher teams.”

  1. Are you saying you think an attacker who beats a 4000 TP defense with a 3500 TP attacking team should get more points than an attackers who beats the same 4000 TP defense with a 4000 TP attacking team? (ETA: I’m not saying I necessarily disagree. It would certainly at least add another interesting element to the attacking strategy.)

  2. How does it “make losses hurt less for those higher teams?”

“Further, it’s a scoring system that creates tiers immediately where those below a certain tier can’t make up points to get to a higher tier because their limited to their tier.”

Where are you getting this from? What do you mean by “tiers?”

“No real competition would sit there and disadvantage a large portion of the player base playing for the same things in the same pool not because “they’re poor players” or “others have more skill”, but simply because they haven’t had the money/random luck to make as good as a team as others yet (not because they couldn’t make the proper choices to build one, but because a random roulette wheel holds them back).”

I dunno about all that. I mean, look at European professional soccer. There’s the whole promotion/relegation thing. Or look at college football, where a team like Boise St. can go undefeated and still not get a spot in the playoffs. Neither of those are perfect comparisons, but neither is your NHL example…

“So penalize them by holding them back so that they get less in a base win and then can’t make up ground due to losses.”

I agree with the first part of this. You can’t possibly hope to end up with the highest score, even if you win all your attacks, when you start out facing a lower TP defense team than the players with the strongest rosters, since inevitably some of those players with the strongest rosters will also win all their attacks, while having started out against higher TP defense teams.

But I don’t understand what you mean by the “can’t make up ground due to losses” part of the comment. If you don’t win all your attacks, then how can you make an argument that you should still be competing for a top spot?

I guess the same thing applies even if you lose a couple of attacks. If you go 18-2, and a player with a stronger roster also goes 18-2, that other player will end up with more points because they started out facing stronger defenses. So it’s a valid point either way. Just trying to make sure I’m understanding your argument.

ETA2: And all of this is only about the attacking scoring. The defense scoring is still totally bizarre to me. (Not to mention the matchmacking system that informs the defense scoring. I’ve been attacked like 30 times already in this tourney, and I know most haven’t even been attacked 10 times, which is just weird.)

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So let’s say my starting TP is 3700 and yours is 4100. You start off against teams that have a higher point value than me. So if we both go 25-0 I cannot catch you (disregarding defense). This is where the disadvantage comes from.

The tiers are similar, if you look at the top 100 right now they are all high profile players or in high profile alliances or have been around a long time. So you have a bracket of teams say 4000+, 3500-3999, 3000-3499, etc down the line. If you are in the 3000-3499 bracket you are at a disadvantage from the start to make top 1%. Can you make it there? Yes. Is the deck stacked against you? Yes. You might go 20-0 but someone in the 4000+ bracket might go 19-1 and outscore you on the attacking side of things due to the teams they are facing being worth more points.

I’m not sure what exactly they are trying to do and I’m not sure how to fix it. I just know that the current structure is pretty broken.

However, when you boil it down to the basics, you will get better loot if you go 20-0 than if you go 14-4. I just don’t like the idea of a player with better heroes than me getting better rewards even though we performed the same because the teams they faced were worth more points.

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I’ve only been playing since December. Spending on VIP, I’ve gotten and leveled a full war set of 3* / 4* before even getting a rainbow of 4* heroes. I’ve spent 5 gloves so far to get
Kunchen 3/58 Chao 4/70 Wilbur 4/70+7 Skittleskull 4/70+7 Kiril 4/70+6
Obviously, I didn’t pick them to be a coordinated defense team, just great heroes or all that I had (only green/yellow 4* and no purple 4* at the time). But leveling these helped bring me up to farming province 22 and working season 2 province 13. I still only have a couple of others level 60, and lots of 3* 3/50. Had to push to 3x TC20 to get a good supply of 4* to level, and have now dropped back to 2x TC20 while leveling for now.

Max rainbow team is 35xx TP, but my typical 3-1-1 attack team will be 32xx. In tournaments I start attacking 32xx and it quickly goes up to 35xx. Usually one loss on the first day. If there’s a color restriction it gets very hard from there.

And then there’s my alt account. It’s total trash. It has 2x 4*, one of them up to 60. It doesn’t even have a good selection of 3* to make teams with. (Where is Belith and others?) But it can make IIRC a 25xx team, and stack teams close to that, just not well coordinated due to the lack of roster depth. It faces 22xx teams, and it rises from there. This poor account gets an easy ride the first day. If there’s a color restriction, opposition defenses often don’t even take that into account. It’s only in the second day that there’s any challenge, and even start seeing some defenses doubling up on the difficult color. But it’s not any harder go than the main account until third day. On top of that, the alt’s defense always scores better!

Added: With a 1000 TP difference in accounts, there’s about a 100 point difference in difficulty bonus. But the bonus you get is proportional to the number of heroes knocked out. Even losing an attack on my main while knocking out 4 heroes costs 112 points, plus call it 78 from the difficulty bonus loss, so that’s 190 lost points, plus another 22+78=100 lost points for each hero I fail to knock out beyond that in a failed attack. So, I’m saying this is too big considering I only get an extra 100 compared to my alt on a win. Plus I’m picking up a strike toward those four strikes, which is a big penalty limiting what I can score.

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This really seems to be the crux of the issue, both for you and for @Wondermoose, who I was replying to earlier. I mean, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that players with stronger rosters would have an advantage, but at the same time I can also understand how it would feel pretty sh!tty for that advantage to be baked right into the matching/scoring system!

And I have to say, the two of you have pretty much convinced me that it is indeed broken, from a fairness perspective. Why isn’t simply having stronger heroes enough of an advantage? Even if we started off with the same matchups, and had the opportunity to score the same amount on our first attacks, my having a stronger roster, in and of itself, would give me the advantage of simply being more likely to have an easy time going 25-0 than someone with a weaker roster.

The only reason I can think of that SG would set it up this way is to keep their vocal whales happy, like you and others have stated and/or implied. And that doesn’t sit well with me. Not much to be done about it other than voice the concerns here though, so…

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I’m starting to come around to your point of view on this stuff. As per the reply to @shmup-o that I just posted, I basically agree that we should all start out facing the same difficulty level of defenses in our attacks. I said in that post that I can’t really come up with a solution, but maybe I’ve got one:

Everyone should start out facing the easiest possible matchups. I don’t know what the lowest TP or XL lvl required to qualify to participate in the tournaments, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you need a defense team no lower than TP 1000. Then everyone’s first attack should be against a random team selected from tournament participants with defense teams TP1000 - TP 1250 (or something like that). For each attack you win, you go up to the next tier, and you get more points for each win accordingly. And for each attack you lose, your next matchup comes from the next tier down.

That would be fair to everyone, attacking-wise, and it would have the added benefit of distributing defense opportunities more evenly too. On the first day, presumably, lots of weak defenses would get smashed lots of times, and those new players with weak rosters would get poor defense team grades accordingly. At the same time, folks with high power defenses wouldn’t get attacked right away, and they would get C grades on Day 1. Then, as the days progress, and successful attackers face harder and harder defenses, the mid-range and strong defense teams would start to get attacked more and more, and their defense grades would start to materialize over the course of the last few days of the tournament.

Maybe the tiers could be something like 1000 - 1500, 1500 - 2000, 2000 - 2500, 2500 - 3000, 3000 - 3500, 3500 - 4000, and 4000+. That way, if you keep winning your attacks, by the end of the second day, you’d be facing the top tier defense teams, so SG would still be able to get people to lose four times relatively early in the tournament (so they can get their precious gem rebuys from whoever wants to do that), while at the same time everyone would actually be on a level playing field.

I’d love to hear seom criticisms of this thought process so it can be fine tuned. I think we may actually be on to something here…!

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The main issue I see is that you’re now giving an advantage to having weaker defense. If my defense is stuck at C for 4 days, I can’t catch up to someone who got an early A. You could spread the attacks so everyday you hit one from each range to address that. Second issue is that you’re making a majority of the raids way too easy… There’s no more actual competition. Anything but the top tier is free wins.

I’m all for seperate brackets of difficulty, but the rewards need to reflect that or there’s no incentive to play the more difficult bracket.

@KingArchur You shouldn’t get to choose the difficulty, the “top 5 highest TP heroes that are eligible” should slot you into the right tournament.

Not really. In this system, there really wouldn’t be any early As. The first five teams everyone would be attacking would be TP 1000 - 3000. Most players would smash those defenses quickly and make it through Day 1 with five attack wins and no losses. So your C for not defending would be better than what most of the early defenders would be getting.

Also not true. For the first day, yes. But by the end of Day 2, you’d be hitting 4000+ TP defenses already.

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I would add the word achievable to that statement.

#1 in challenge events was similarly good. Even #2-#9 (or #2-#99 at one difficulty level)

But with a ~million players competing instead of going to the top 1%, that loot went to the top ~0.0001% to top ~0.01%

That said … Even if the restored loot isn’t THAT good, it is time to restore the loot. Matchmaking isn’t so bad as to invalidate the results anymore.

The only valid justification I can come up with to continue a “temporary” reduction would be yet another spin on matchmaking that is ready to roll out and needs to be tested at reduced loot still.

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“I’d like to better understand what you’re saying here:”

I appreciate the dialogue. Believe me, I’m happy to discuss (though I was busy at work, so sorry for the lack of an immediate reply).

"1. Are you saying you think an attacker who beats a 4000 TP defense with a 3500 TP attacking team should get more points than an attackers who beats the same 4000 TP defense with a 4000 TP attacking team? (ETA: I’m not saying I necessarily disagree. It would certainly at least add another interesting element to the attacking strategy.)
2. How does it “make losses hurt less for those higher teams?”

I think the two posts that followed our posts earlier explained it (we start in different scoring tiers by team power, limiting points per win for lower team powers and advantaging higher team powers because they can get more for wins to start and for a loss combined with the 4 loss limit being much more hurtful to the lower team).

I do think that if team power is representative of the overall difficulty of the match for the player (TP 4000 being a supposed superior team to TP 3500, for example), then if TP 3500 beats TP 4000, they should get more for it. That just seems logical to me…but that also isn’t how this is working either. More on that in a minute.

“Where are you getting this from? What do you mean by “tiers?””

Again, I think Draco and shmup-o have it covered, but I’ll try to add.

It became evident last tournament due to screwing around and connecting some dots that it isn’t our teams that we field that matter, but rather where the system decided to place us. I offer 2 pieces of evidence:

  1. Havok333 in response to my inquiry informed me that he received 598 points for a win over a 3 hero defense team. This was in line with the point totals they had received for defeating other full 5 hero teams.

  2. I played corner Aife with a 1* troop as my defense. I did this on purpose, and I was attacked over 30 times. All losses. Others played similar less full defenses as well on purpose or by accident.

Havok’s response combined with a lack of complaints anywhere about players losing points to less than full defense squads (i.e., “ban this SG because I lost points on an attack because they didn’t field a team”) would point to the player themself being assigned a value on defense at the start of the tournament and it doesn’t matter what defense they set because it changes nothing.

In other words, if I set a 5 hero defense all made out of fully leveled 5*, it has the exact same value to the attacker as if I set one 1* hero with a 1* troop.

But wait, it gets dumber. Ex: I set that one 1* hero/1* troop defense, and the computer decides it’s worth 620 points if it is defeated because it reads my best five as 3700 TP.

Player B at a max 2700 TP, sets the exact same corner one 1* hero/1* troop defense, but the system decides that because the player is TP 2700, it’s only worth 520 points to defeat it.

How can that be? What sense does that make at all? All things being equal, a single 1* hero should be harder to beat at a lower team power, yet they’re worth less because…reasons?

And yes, it’s anecdotal. But this is a forum that, as I pointed out elsewhere, will demand compensation on a 20 second server outage because amazingly every alliance was just about to kill a 12* Titan and that ruined it and it escaped.

A four day tourney with a bunch of teams with less heroes than the full count on defense and crickets on lost points attacking because of less than full defenses. So I think we can start to draw some conclusions there.

'I dunno about all that. I mean, look at European professional soccer. There’s the whole promotion/relegation thing. Or look at college football, where a team like Boise St. can go undefeated and still not get a spot in the playoffs. Neither of those are perfect comparisons, but neither is your NHL example…"

Fair enough (BTW, I tend to think the NCAA is hopelessly corrupt…but that’s going way off topic).

“But I don’t understand what you mean by the , “can’t make up ground due to losses” part of the comment. If you don’t win all your attacks, then how can you make an argument that you should still be competing for a top spot?”

Obviously, if you lose regularly and early, you don’t deserve a top spot. My issue is that in this system, 23-2 could wind up behind 21-4 or 20-4 simply because of scoring despite facing similar difficulty for the level that the players are at.

For example, a player that went 25-0 and started at 500 points for their first win and got 4 additional points for each subsequent win (504, 508, etc.) would finish the tournament on attack with around 13,300 points. If their defense was meh, and they only picked up another 2000 in defense over the 5 days, they finish at a total of 15,300 points as a final score.

The top player on the board just over halfway through day 4 has 15,778 points. And there’s still half of day 4 and all of day 5 left.

So this player in the example needs 25-0 and a good defense to have a prayer, and if they take a single loss or two (likely), there’s almost no way to gain that back. That just seems backwards in about every way one can imagine.

I hope that this helps to clarify where I’m coming from. I have a 3700 team and I’m fine in this tourney (1 percent; a good day tomorrow solidifies it), and I have an arsenal behind it for 3* tourney’s, but I really wish they would balance the scoring. It just feels so out of whack to me (the matching is fine; it appears they’ve fixed that).

In any case, thanks for the conversation.

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This is assuming they also fix defense attack distribution which imo is a huge assumption. This system doesn’t actually address it. The ‘only 1 attack per hour counts’ rule is especially problematic and could easily lead to a weaker defense getting an A on day 1. Maybe it’s not the 2k tp teams, but it could easily be the 2nd strongest bracket who only get a couple attacks on day 1 (including from weak players) and then 0 attacks on the next days from strong players (who should now be facing only maxed teams).

If we go to a true tournament system, then lower TP teams will be attacked more than high TP teams. We just have to accept that. Otherwise to be even in attacks means the current state we are in.

That is inSANE!

Well, yeah, but not in the sense that it’s an invalid observation based on a small sample, like when people say “i never get yellow tiles when i stack mono yellow.”

LOL don’t get me started. You should check out deadspin.com if you’re not already familiar with it.

Fair enough.

Totally. And I think my other replies in this thread should illustrate tgat we’re on the same page. Cheers!

What’s a “true tournament system”? How are currently defenses even in attacks?

Also, why is nobody mentioning that weaker players actually have an advantage in terms of defense in the current system? My defense only gets hit by strong players - theirs gets hit by people who don’t even have a single maxed team and/or no bench to stack properly. Much easier to get a good defense grade that way.

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And it happened in this tournament

1 Delilah defense worth 546 points

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Hey, I’m just an idea man, not a coder. Lol. I mean, you’re clearly right. Except they could do away with the “one attack per hour counts” thing. I don’t really get the purpose of that to begin with, but you should note that it only applies after the first five defenses (iirc).

ETA: I feel like, in addition to figuring out a better way to distribute defenses, the way they’re scored could use a complete overhaul too. I’d lean toward a system that gives points once, at the end of the whole tournament, rather than on a daily basis.

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I doubt they make many changes now, so we have to live with what the hiccups are. War still has hiccups as well but we rarely see threads complaining about war anymore.

This is a loot thread, so I’ll summarize by saying keep ticking up the loot (I don’t think they did this go round like last time).