Simple fix to alliance hoping for AW seasons
TacoScotty
Member Posts: 407 ★★
All you need to do is set war ratings at end of season based on where alliances rank. Yes some thought needs to go into what decay to apply as you move down ratings but this will strip shell alliances of their war rating and probably at the same time, allow higher rated alliances to find matches quicker since more would be in range.
Main issue with this is if an alliance for some reason wants to take season off. However, if they are decently ranked they can do 2 BG wars or 2 wars a week to still place probably in the gold which means they effectively need to use the next season to work themselves back up some and then following season back to competitive
One minor adjustment to this for the scenario I brought up is have a minimum war rating given at start of new season based on prestige - this needs to be low enough that higher prestige alliances aren’t placed back into the top but high enough that you aren’t climbing the full mountain again - maybe t1-2 (in terms of prestige not war rating) Given t4 war rating, t3 prestige to t5 war rating etc. if alliance actual rating is higher there is no adjustment
Main issue with this is if an alliance for some reason wants to take season off. However, if they are decently ranked they can do 2 BG wars or 2 wars a week to still place probably in the gold which means they effectively need to use the next season to work themselves back up some and then following season back to competitive
One minor adjustment to this for the scenario I brought up is have a minimum war rating given at start of new season based on prestige - this needs to be low enough that higher prestige alliances aren’t placed back into the top but high enough that you aren’t climbing the full mountain again - maybe t1-2 (in terms of prestige not war rating) Given t4 war rating, t3 prestige to t5 war rating etc. if alliance actual rating is higher there is no adjustment
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Comments
1) I never spoke of offseason wars - just the rating you would have once season concludes. Therefore you can still work on improving rating in off-season
2) I edited my original post to include a second mechanism to help people still form new alliances as well if they desired and not completely starting over in rating. The assigning a minimum war rating based on prestige tier would allow new alliances to start higher than 0 but still probably cause them to use one season to get rating / ranking high enough to be in desired tier for subsequent season (better than 2+ season though). This I’m fine with as it’s a balance between allowing people to rebuild / start new alliance which is part of reason shells exist today but at same time require a little investment. The min has to be low enough that people can’t effectively do shell alliance strat with it but high enough that you only need to build up over one season.
This addresses the problem of alliance hopping by wreaking havok everywhere else. For example, suppose an alliance takes a season off for some reason. As you mention in your post you address the problem for them in terms of having to work back up in ratings. But you don't address the problem for everyone else in terms of all those lower rated alliances they will have to steamroll over to climb back up.
It also doesn't fully address alliance hopping for ratings. It addresses one extreme corner case of completely empty shells. It doesn't address the alternate exploit of filling shells with filler accounts that are weaker, but strong enough when played by top players to reach reasonable brackets. Suppose a top alliance rolls up secondary accounts that are strong enough to reach the top of Gold 1, say. Such an alliance would end a season with a war rating somewhere around tier 4 or 5 based on your suggestion to reset rating at the end of the season to their final standing. The players could then swap their main accounts into that alliance and fight off season wars to climb as fast as possible from tier 4/5 to tier 3 or maybe possibly tier 2 depending on how long the off season was, and be ready for the next season.
Agree it doesn’t fix an alliance hoping with alt alliance which is also competitive but that is probably one of the harder items to fix.
What solutions do you propose?