Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This is a great idea
Been proposed a long long time ago and it’s not perfect due to tanking. There’s a secondary part that addresses tanking but that isn’t included cause I posted it separately on another thread. Lol
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This is a great idea
Been proposed a long long time ago and it’s not perfect due to tanking. There’s a secondary part that addresses tanking but that isn’t included cause I posted it separately on another thread. Lol
Honestly had no idea it’s been suggested before and I’ve never heard of it anywhere before. But I’m sure it has been just like how the opt-in matchmaking system was suggested by multiple people who probably never saw the previous times suggested.
The thing with tanking is that it’s not inherently worse than the system we have now. The only time to tank would be during off-season wars and that could be done the same way. This just eliminates shell jumping as well as some other positive things, like having the feeling of building your own elo on your account. One of the best feelings of many competitive games that use elo is watching it rise over time. With some more narrow multiplayers and tiers, this could play well into the new system.
Honestly had no idea it’s been suggested before and I’ve never heard of it anywhere before. But I’m sure it has been just like how the opt-in matchmaking system was suggested by multiple people who probably never saw the previous times suggested.
The thing with tanking is that it’s not inherently worse than the system we have now. The only time to tank would be during off-season wars and that could be done the same way. This just eliminates shell jumping as well as some other positive things, like having the feeling of building your own elo on your account. One of the best feelings of many competitive games that use elo is watching it rise over time. With some more narrow multiplayers and tiers, this could play well into the new system.
Np. The other part I suggested on top of this system you proposed again is to rework the method of calculating Season points.
Instead of having a fixed multiplier per tier (eg 6.2 for Tier 2 and 5.5 for Tier 3 etc), have the average war ratings between the matched alliance act as the multiplier. For example, if MNG (3534 rating) were to fight against NY718 (3455 rating), the multiplier for the war will be (3534+3455)/2 = 3494.5.
This simple method removes the incentive for tanking as lowering the war rating reduces the multiplier the alliance gets for that particular and subsequent wars.
The % tier system can still be used to determine which map the alliances play on (Expert, Challenger etc), while the multiplier change removes the incentive to tank, and unified matchmaking system removes the opportunity to collude and lowers mismatches. All in all, this 3-pronged approach makes it so that Alliance War maintains its integrity to provide a fair playing ground as one of the competitive aspects of the game.
In addition, in order to keep the “ELO” as recent as possible, I would suggest to use a 6 to 12 war moving average to better indicate the war capabilities of the individual and collectively, an alliance.
Honestly had no idea it’s been suggested before and I’ve never heard of it anywhere before. But I’m sure it has been just like how the opt-in matchmaking system was suggested by multiple people who probably never saw the previous times suggested.
The thing with tanking is that it’s not inherently worse than the system we have now. The only time to tank would be during off-season wars and that could be done the same way. This just eliminates shell jumping as well as some other positive things, like having the feeling of building your own elo on your account. One of the best feelings of many competitive games that use elo is watching it rise over time. With some more narrow multiplayers and tiers, this could play well into the new system.
Np. The other part I suggested on top of this system you proposed again is to rework the method of calculating Season points.
Instead of having a fixed multiplier per tier (eg 6.2 for Tier 2 and 5.5 for Tier 3 etc), have the average war ratings between the matched alliance act as the multiplier. For example, if MNG (3534 rating) were to fight against NY718 (3455 rating), the multiplier for the war will be (3534+3455)/2 = 3494.5.
This simple method removes the incentive for tanking as lowering the war rating reduces the multiplier the alliance gets for that particular and subsequent wars.
The % tier system can still be used to determine which map the alliances play on (Expert, Challenger etc), while the multiplier change removes the incentive to tank, and unified matchmaking system removes the opportunity to collude and lowers mismatches. All in all, this 3-pronged approach makes it so that Alliance War maintains its integrity to provide a fair playing ground as one of the competitive aspects of the game.
In addition, in order to keep the “ELO” as recent as possible, I would suggest to use a 6 to 12 war moving average to better indicate the war capabilities of the individual and collectively, an alliance.
I’m not sure if you mean using x3494 as the multiplier instead of x7 for tier1, or using 3494 to determine where the alliance’s tier would fall, tier 1 in this case. In the first case x3494 would be absurd and in the 2nd case, the new matchmaking system shouldn’t be spitting out many mismatches like before so it really wouldn’t matter.
If you meant using a smaller number like 1/1000 war rating or x3.494 as the multiplier, the problem would come from high war rating alliances scoring so many more points and everyone below would have no chance to catch up. Basically the season leaderboard would just reflect the war rating standings. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since the top war rating alliances should generally be the best, but it would feel a bit dull.
The only problem I’d have with a 6-12 moving average for war rating is it would make progression feel much slower. If an alliance around 3000 kept staying there for a bit then finally caught a small winning streak, it wouldn’t reflect right away and they’d only slightly move up. I don’t know the benefit that would provide.
I can foresee many players giving up on wars or quitting the game from this. It’s not fair for alliances with mixed nationalities.
What Kabam should do (and the same with AQ) is have rotating start times each week.
With war starting at 11:00am PST the first week, the following week they should start at 3:00pm PST. Then the following week 7:00pm PST, etc.
That is the only way both AQ and AW will truly be fair for everybody.
could you please help me. I registered my alliance for AW today. But tonight I have a memberchange. Do I have to re-register AW or does that unimportant until the start phase?
3 pm PST registration time is 4.30 am in India. Is this a healthy time to get registered for war. The old system atleast let us select match making at our own time. Has any thought been put into this limited timing enlistment from the perspective of Asian and players in the regions thereabouts. Why can't we have multiple enlistment times instead?
I’m pumped about the matchmaking changes. I think this will be really good for my alliance! I don’t always agree on Kabam changes, but this one is great! While figuring out a new defense team for season 8 I thought about it, and I know this has been asked before, but I haven’t seen any new news about any update on whether or not war synergies on defense will work? There’s a few champs I want to put on defense like my 6 star sentinel, who could benefit a lot from synergies. I wondered if this was something that could/would possibly find its way into an update? Again I think the matchmaking changes are going to help boost our alliance out of G1 with some more accurate matches! @Kabam Miike@Kabam Zibiit@Kabam Lyra
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
3 pm PST registration time is 4.30 am in India. Is this a healthy time to get registered for war. The old system atleast let us select match making at our own time. Has any thought been put into this limited timing enlistment from the perspective of Asian and players in the regions thereabouts. Why can't we have multiple enlistment times instead?
Enlistment can be done along time before war starts.
I am not a fan at all of the timing chosen for wars however enlistment is along time before matacaking.
enlistment is open now but wars do not start for 2 days.
Normally you can enlist for the next war whilst you are playing one.
Enlistment periods run for a very long time
When it reaches the time noted in this post you can enlist
since there is no war tomorrow, its pointless to enlist...
preseason starts on februar 13th
If u wanna war on the 13th u gotta enlist somepoint between now and then.
enlistment should start at sometime on wednesday ... not at sunday, when there is no war to play
They are making sure you have plenty of time to enlist.
That way noone can say “i missed the enlistment window”
There are many things to complain about. This is not one of them
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts. And when the gap is large with say a 2000 rating account in a 3000 war rating alliance, the 2000 account will gain significantly + more compared to others. Much more complicated to exploit this compared to having ownership of another shell alliance that many top alliances do and just swapping over during off-season. And while this does focus on a specific exploit, so did the "matchmaking rooms" of previous seasons where maybe 7-10 alliances could fit in a room. It even broke apart by last season with less. While there were other issues with the previous matchmaking system, I think the "matchmaking rooms" was the main driving point behind that change.
I doubt we'll see any correction for this alliance swapping behavior this season or any time soon, so we'll just have to see how it goes. When people realize how effective it is (especially in this new search format), expect to see it more and more until Kabam intervenes.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good. Plus if you've ever done recruiting you would know it's a PITA, especially during season. Maybe if someone was already running multiple accounts in the same alliance they could manipulate it, but that always comes with risk and 2-3 accounts won't drag down the rating significantly. Finding people who are willing to jump in and out is a tough thing to do. Alliance swapping currently is much easier to pull off, only the leaders worry about the logistics while members simply leave and join. 'Sister alliances' to swap with like you are describing don't work out as well as you'd think. Plus all the juggled accounts will eventually get weaker due to them having to miss out on rewards. AQ would be a nightmare. I don't think the top manipulators in the game would bother going through that much effort.
You are probably right though in the previous post, the large effort to make such a big system change is likely not worth it to the developers for the problem it will solve. The cases you described however would not be the reason, and I see those worst possible scenarios as much better than the alliance swap system we have now.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
You’re not getting the point. War rating is much easier to manipulate due to tanking done by alts and shell alliance swapping as compared to switching members in and out of an alliance.
Not to mention that you only need to swap members into a lower alliance once at the start of the season and do it again at the start of the next season.
Whereas by having individual members having their individual war ratings and calculating the average as an alliance war rating, it becomes harder to manipulate and you’re forgetting the most important thing, the account that the rewards are going to.
Switching back and forth between alts and main account will screw over their acquisition of rewards and it’s too big a hassle to plan around due to having rewards blackout etc.
In the current state, shell alliances just make it so that the whole alliance shifts in once, and it’s business as usual for the month until the alliance shifts again.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
You’re not getting the point.
I got the point fine. Apparently I need to refute it with fewer words and less supporting detail. Reducing the apparent effort to manipulate the system only works if that reduction is meaningful relative to the benefit. This type of system does no such thing for reasons that are apparently confusing to list.
I don’t see your point tbh. You mentioned that it takes little effort to make an alt and shove it into a shell to maintain low war ratings.
I’m assuming what you’re saying is, subsequently the alt will be transferred into the main alliance where the main account is in to artificially lower war rating.
You’re forgetting the fact that it takes much more than 1-2 alternate accounts to lower the alliance war rating substantially to make it matter. In addition, to maintain this artificially lower war rating, the alts will have to stay in the alliance as the war rating of each member increases as they win. And that’s on the assumption that they can keep winning with 2-3 alts in the alliance.
Lastly, the rewards from winning matter to those whose accounts are getting swapped out to make room for the alts. Not to mention AQ rewards that these accounts will miss.
So in essence, it’ll take a lot more effort to convince the alliance to game the system and it’ll take a lot more effort, coordination and sacrifice to maintain it. As compared to now where the alliance simply swaps to a lower rating alliance one day and it’s business as usual while the alts (even level 18 accounts) just lose to tank the war ratings of the other alliance.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
Your defintion of alliance swapping is different from what I'm referring to. There are not 2 alliances of 60 players total who agree to swap every season. That's the old T4CC swapping method from years ago. I'm referring strictly to swapping into shell alliances, where during the season an alt account just hits war search once every other day to lower the rating to whatever rating they like, then swap into that alliance for the next season and do the same thing with the old alliance. That's a big difference in resource and effort when it comes to hitting the search button 3 times a week vs maintaing 5+ alternate accounts so they're good enough to come join your alliance when you need them.
I'm not sure why you think it takes "zero effort to make a stacked secondary account". Have you even played this game before? I can make an account tomorrow with 0 war rating, great. Doesn't mean that account is ready to join my alliance and contribute to alliance war / alliance quest lol. There is the option of purchasing high-level accounts in black markets and that's probably the biggest risk for manipulation, even then accounts can get expensive.
The point I'm making is that the current system has much more potential for war rating abuse via alliance swapping than the individual war rating idea suggested would have. Neither are perfect but one would do the job better. If it's worth the effort to make that big of a change is another question though.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
Your defintion of alliance swapping is different from what I'm referring to. There are not 2 alliances of 60 players total who agree to swap every season. That's the old T4CC swapping method from years ago. I'm referring strictly to swapping into shell alliances, where during the season an alt account just hits war search once every other day to lower the rating to whatever rating they like, then swap into that alliance for the next season and do the same thing with the old alliance. That's a big difference in resource and effort when it comes to hitting the search button 3 times a week vs maintaing 5+ alternate accounts so they're good enough to come join your alliance when you need them.
That's actually my definition of shell swapping also, so our definition of shell swapping is identical. It is your definition of "big" that seems significantly different from mine.
Throwing this idea out now to hopefully spark Kabam into making changes to the unethical behavior of alliance swapping to lower war rating. We’ve seen they’re open to community ideas in the past.
Instead of making War Rating a value attributed solely to an alliance, make War Rating a value assigned to EVERY summoner (like an ELO). The alliance’s war rating would be the collective average of all players in the alliance. The War Rating stat would be something every player carries around individually, losing and gaining whenever they win/lose an alliance war. Very similar to how every player carries around their own prestige and the alliance’s prestige is an average of all players.
This would stop alliance swapping to match easier opponents dead in tracks, because the swapped alliance would have the same war rating as before. Sure you could try to tank your war rating but you’d be missing out on many rewards and it likely would not end up worth it. There may be a small few with multiple accounts who try to manipulate this more, but a few low war ratings in an alliance won’t be enough to push all 30 members down significantly. If a player hasn’t fought in an alliance war for a while, their war rating would stay the same (or introduce the same ‘war rating decay’ for them).
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
Your defintion of alliance swapping is different from what I'm referring to. There are not 2 alliances of 60 players total who agree to swap every season. That's the old T4CC swapping method from years ago. I'm referring strictly to swapping into shell alliances, where during the season an alt account just hits war search once every other day to lower the rating to whatever rating they like, then swap into that alliance for the next season and do the same thing with the old alliance. That's a big difference in resource and effort when it comes to hitting the search button 3 times a week vs maintaing 5+ alternate accounts so they're good enough to come join your alliance when you need them.
It is your definition of "big" that seems significantly different from mine.
Comments
Sounds familiar lol
However, im unsure how this would affect new matchmaking.
This is a great idea
Been proposed a long long time ago and it’s not perfect due to tanking. There’s a secondary part that addresses tanking but that isn’t included cause I posted it separately on another thread. Lol
Honestly had no idea it’s been suggested before and I’ve never heard of it anywhere before. But I’m sure it has been just like how the opt-in matchmaking system was suggested by multiple people who probably never saw the previous times suggested.
The thing with tanking is that it’s not inherently worse than the system we have now. The only time to tank would be during off-season wars and that could be done the same way. This just eliminates shell jumping as well as some other positive things, like having the feeling of building your own elo on your account. One of the best feelings of many competitive games that use elo is watching it rise over time. With some more narrow multiplayers and tiers, this could play well into the new system.
Np. The other part I suggested on top of this system you proposed again is to rework the method of calculating Season points.
Instead of having a fixed multiplier per tier (eg 6.2 for Tier 2 and 5.5 for Tier 3 etc), have the average war ratings between the matched alliance act as the multiplier. For example, if MNG (3534 rating) were to fight against NY718 (3455 rating), the multiplier for the war will be (3534+3455)/2 = 3494.5.
This simple method removes the incentive for tanking as lowering the war rating reduces the multiplier the alliance gets for that particular and subsequent wars.
The % tier system can still be used to determine which map the alliances play on (Expert, Challenger etc), while the multiplier change removes the incentive to tank, and unified matchmaking system removes the opportunity to collude and lowers mismatches. All in all, this 3-pronged approach makes it so that Alliance War maintains its integrity to provide a fair playing ground as one of the competitive aspects of the game.
In addition, in order to keep the “ELO” as recent as possible, I would suggest to use a 6 to 12 war moving average to better indicate the war capabilities of the individual and collectively, an alliance.
When it reaches the time noted in this post you can enlist
I’m not sure if you mean using x3494 as the multiplier instead of x7 for tier1, or using 3494 to determine where the alliance’s tier would fall, tier 1 in this case. In the first case x3494 would be absurd and in the 2nd case, the new matchmaking system shouldn’t be spitting out many mismatches like before so it really wouldn’t matter.
If you meant using a smaller number like 1/1000 war rating or x3.494 as the multiplier, the problem would come from high war rating alliances scoring so many more points and everyone below would have no chance to catch up. Basically the season leaderboard would just reflect the war rating standings. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since the top war rating alliances should generally be the best, but it would feel a bit dull.
The only problem I’d have with a 6-12 moving average for war rating is it would make progression feel much slower. If an alliance around 3000 kept staying there for a bit then finally caught a small winning streak, it wouldn’t reflect right away and they’d only slightly move up. I don’t know the benefit that would provide.
What Kabam should do (and the same with AQ) is have rotating start times each week.
With war starting at 11:00am PST the first week, the following week they should start at 3:00pm PST. Then the following week 7:00pm PST, etc.
That is the only way both AQ and AW will truly be fair for everybody.
since there is no war tomorrow, its pointless to enlist...
preseason starts on februar 13th
If u wanna war on the 13th u gotta enlist somepoint between now and then.
could you please help me. I registered my alliance for AW today. But tonight I have a memberchange. Do I have to re-register AW or does that unimportant until the start phase?
enlistment should start at sometime on wednesday ... not at sunday, when there is no war to play
This has been suggested before: it focuses too much on one specific kind of exploit at the expense of opening the door to many others. You are in effect allowing alliances to change their rating by substituting players. So now an alliance could arbitrarily lower their rating by adding filler accounts with low or even zero ratings.
Enlistment can be done along time before war starts.
I am not a fan at all of the timing chosen for wars however enlistment is along time before matacaking.
enlistment is open now but wars do not start for 2 days.
Normally you can enlist for the next war whilst you are playing one.
Enlistment periods run for a very long time
They are making sure you have plenty of time to enlist.
That way noone can say “i missed the enlistment window”
There are many things to complain about. This is not one of them
It would be very tough for an alliance to significantly lower their war rating with multiple accounts against 30, without sacrificing a bunch of rewards along the way. It wouldn't be hard to have some outlier detection where a 0 war rating account isn't counted against a bunch of 3000+ accounts. And when the gap is large with say a 2000 rating account in a 3000 war rating alliance, the 2000 account will gain significantly + more compared to others. Much more complicated to exploit this compared to having ownership of another shell alliance that many top alliances do and just swapping over during off-season. And while this does focus on a specific exploit, so did the "matchmaking rooms" of previous seasons where maybe 7-10 alliances could fit in a room. It even broke apart by last season with less. While there were other issues with the previous matchmaking system, I think the "matchmaking rooms" was the main driving point behind that change.
I doubt we'll see any correction for this alliance swapping behavior this season or any time soon, so we'll just have to see how it goes. When people realize how effective it is (especially in this new search format), expect to see it more and more until Kabam intervenes.
People said the same thing about swapping: turns out it is not hard enough. And while it is always possible to counter every corner case problem with an exception, the point is that for every suggestion like this you make, I can come up with yet another exploit that counters them, because as long as you hand me control of rating by any means other than winning and losing, I will break that system. Because that's what giving me control automatically does. And if I can think of a way to do it, there will be alliances that attempt it.
It doesn't have to be zero rating, it could be a rating of one, or one hundred. I could deliberately create an alliance of secondary accounts and deliberately idle-play them into stone 3 so their ratings are valid: takes no time at all compared to other manipulation, then shift them into the main alliance. I could split my main alliance into two connected alliances where our main thirty accounts are split between them, and then secondaries are used as fillers. In fact this system allows a single thirty person alliance to be expanded to a pseudo-alliance of forty people, split into two twenty person alliances, with ten fillers each.
Whatever limits you make, I could do one of two things. I could skate just above them, or I could exploit the fact that the limits are so high that they create other problems. For example, I could keep my multiplier high even after losing by replacing one member with a higher rated filler account that would keep our multiplier high even when losing would otherwise lower rating. I could dodge ratings penalties by swapping players back and forth. You could keep making more and more exceptions, but for these rules to work you have to specify them before they get exploited, not after.
All of those situations revolve around a center theme: having multiple accounts and people willing to constantly swap. You could make 30 alt accounts and swap them in to lower your rating, but guess what you won't be winning wars lol. When the season rolls along, all people want to do is win. Having some stone or lowly accounts in the alliance to slightly lower your rating will be doing more harm than good. Plus if you've ever done recruiting you would know it's a PITA, especially during season. Maybe if someone was already running multiple accounts in the same alliance they could manipulate it, but that always comes with risk and 2-3 accounts won't drag down the rating significantly. Finding people who are willing to jump in and out is a tough thing to do. Alliance swapping currently is much easier to pull off, only the leaders worry about the logistics while members simply leave and join. 'Sister alliances' to swap with like you are describing don't work out as well as you'd think. Plus all the juggled accounts will eventually get weaker due to them having to miss out on rewards. AQ would be a nightmare. I don't think the top manipulators in the game would bother going through that much effort.
You are probably right though in the previous post, the large effort to make such a big system change is likely not worth it to the developers for the problem it will solve. The cases you described however would not be the reason, and I see those worst possible scenarios as much better than the alliance swap system we have now.
If this were actually true, swapping wouldn't be a problem either. Because swapping only works if you swap into a lower rated alliance, and if you don't actually engineer losing you eventually swap yourself back and forth into two high tier alliances. Swapping works because one alliance wins and that's where the rewards are, and one alliance is manipulated into losing just enough to lower rating to the right point to be the proper launchpad for the next season. Shell alliances are not an unlimited resource unless you manage them.
Pilot tablets seemed ridiculous until people started doing it. I don't see this as taking any more resources or effort. And I should point out that it is critical not to conflate the strength of the account with the war rating or bracket they are in. It takes virtually zero effort to make a stacked secondary account with low war rating. Just shove them all into a shell and start match making, then sit back and don't do anything.
Beyond that, I'd rather not lay out the step by step process of manipulating this kind of system with trivial effort and almost zero risk, but it is definitely possible.
You’re not getting the point. War rating is much easier to manipulate due to tanking done by alts and shell alliance swapping as compared to switching members in and out of an alliance.
Not to mention that you only need to swap members into a lower alliance once at the start of the season and do it again at the start of the next season.
Whereas by having individual members having their individual war ratings and calculating the average as an alliance war rating, it becomes harder to manipulate and you’re forgetting the most important thing, the account that the rewards are going to.
Switching back and forth between alts and main account will screw over their acquisition of rewards and it’s too big a hassle to plan around due to having rewards blackout etc.
In the current state, shell alliances just make it so that the whole alliance shifts in once, and it’s business as usual for the month until the alliance shifts again.
I got the point fine. Apparently I need to refute it with fewer words and less supporting detail. Reducing the apparent effort to manipulate the system only works if that reduction is meaningful relative to the benefit. This type of system does no such thing for reasons that are apparently confusing to list.
I’m assuming what you’re saying is, subsequently the alt will be transferred into the main alliance where the main account is in to artificially lower war rating.
You’re forgetting the fact that it takes much more than 1-2 alternate accounts to lower the alliance war rating substantially to make it matter. In addition, to maintain this artificially lower war rating, the alts will have to stay in the alliance as the war rating of each member increases as they win. And that’s on the assumption that they can keep winning with 2-3 alts in the alliance.
Lastly, the rewards from winning matter to those whose accounts are getting swapped out to make room for the alts. Not to mention AQ rewards that these accounts will miss.
So in essence, it’ll take a lot more effort to convince the alliance to game the system and it’ll take a lot more effort, coordination and sacrifice to maintain it. As compared to now where the alliance simply swaps to a lower rating alliance one day and it’s business as usual while the alts (even level 18 accounts) just lose to tank the war ratings of the other alliance.
Your defintion of alliance swapping is different from what I'm referring to. There are not 2 alliances of 60 players total who agree to swap every season. That's the old T4CC swapping method from years ago. I'm referring strictly to swapping into shell alliances, where during the season an alt account just hits war search once every other day to lower the rating to whatever rating they like, then swap into that alliance for the next season and do the same thing with the old alliance. That's a big difference in resource and effort when it comes to hitting the search button 3 times a week vs maintaing 5+ alternate accounts so they're good enough to come join your alliance when you need them.
I'm not sure why you think it takes "zero effort to make a stacked secondary account". Have you even played this game before? I can make an account tomorrow with 0 war rating, great. Doesn't mean that account is ready to join my alliance and contribute to alliance war / alliance quest lol. There is the option of purchasing high-level accounts in black markets and that's probably the biggest risk for manipulation, even then accounts can get expensive.
The point I'm making is that the current system has much more potential for war rating abuse via alliance swapping than the individual war rating idea suggested would have. Neither are perfect but one would do the job better. If it's worth the effort to make that big of a change is another question though.
That's actually my definition of shell swapping also, so our definition of shell swapping is identical. It is your definition of "big" that seems significantly different from mine.
Yep I don't doubt that