**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
And use English Premiere League style of moving ‘xx’ amount of alliances Up/Down based on standings between one season and the next.
I am not complaining about it, for what I am looking for Gold 1 is fine, just don't think the system functions as a fair representation of which alliances are the best. I think a lot of this has to do with the locked war rating in the off season. In the past you could continue to push so that come next season you were at a higher multiplier. Now, you are locked and you can go nearly perfect an entire season without climbing up a map difficulty.
anyway season is over and we will see what comes next
I guess I should add that we are a 10K prestige alliance sitting at the bottom of gold 1
Such as the bottom 3 or 4 ally’s in one season's 13 ally tournament in the “ultimate top” bracket would be forced to move down a bracket, even if their War Rating would have otherwise dictated that they should have stayed in that top bracket.
If an ally's new War Rating would let them move up or down even further (MANY Tournament Brackets worth) for the next season, then they would still do so (just that at a minimum there would be xx amount that would at least move up/down 1 bracket regardless of WR, just on previous tournament/season results alone).
And the 6000+ prestige gap in Gold 1 is plain ridiculous. An alliance fielding all R4 4* for attack and defense is better at war than all the 9k+ alliances sitting in Gold 1 and 2?
You can change the primary criteria back to war rating with possibly a 2000 prestige gap limiter. You will also need to change the +/- to a straight up number like 50 for alliances above 2000 war rating. Because all the lower prestige alliances will be start fighting higher alliances and having +90/-2 result is going to take a long time to lower their war rating. Yes some of these alliances are going to start losing a lot of wars but they've been on the collecting higher tier war rewards for awhile.
The moment you say well, this alliance or that alliance don't "belong" in a particular bracket or war tier, you're just contributing to the problem. Maybe you don't realize this, and maybe I'm incapable of convincing you of that fact, but I'm pretty sure there's lots of other people who remember when matches were done based solely on war rating, and tons of people complained about being matched against alliances with much higher rating, and demanding changes because that was unfair.
Alliance rating doesn't matter. Prestige doesn't matter. The war system should look at war rating, and only war rating, and so should the players. But as long as people keep talking about alliance rating or prestige, Kabam is going to keep fiddling with the system in ways mathematically provably broken. If they used math.
I only put a prestige limiter on match making because that's what Kabam uses now. I Kabam changed it back to strictly war rating. All those 6k prestige alliances in plat are going to only get matches against 9k+ alliances. Then again that's way it should be since their war ratings are probably pretty close.
Another player correctly identified the problem when the new system was put into place: he referred to it as a "siloing" problem where the system has an increasingly hard time finding matches for alliances far away from the average alliance rating for any given war rating (unfortunately, I can't find the posts).
When you say a 12 million alliance as no chance of beating a 30 million alliance, you're echoing the statement that was originally used to justify to claim that such matches are unfair. If it is literally impossible for the lower alliance to overcome that discrepancy, then it is in fact an unfair match. But if war ratings were used for matches and alliance rating was ignored, then 12 million rating alliances and 30 million alliances with the same war rating would in fact be fair matches, because those ratings do not determine the strength of the alliance, only war rating does.
To put it another way, you can't say "a 12 can never beat a 30, let's match them." Clearly, that statement causes problems, because here we are. You have to believe that it is possible for a 12 to beat a 30, if the 12 is strong enough, and that therefore matching a 12 to a 30 is fair - or would be, if we eliminated the extra match condition of looking for similar alliance ratings.
War rating is also subject to manipulation, but it is not as easy to manipulate war rating as it requires changing alliances. Really the only way to change war rating is to win or lose wars, and what people call war rating manipulation (or tanking) is really a side effect of alliance swapping. But you can manipulate alliance rating without having to change alliances at all.
But again: alliance rating manipulation is only manipulation if you believe it doesn't affect the strength of the alliance. If you can lose alliance rating without getting any weaker, that's a potentially unfair advantage the match system could amplify. If you believe lower rating means you are weaker in war and can't beat alliances with much higher rating, then it isn't an unfair advantage to dump rating because it isn't an advantage in the first place.
Not sure why you think I disagree with you but prestige and alliance rating have no business in the match making calculation. If an smaller alliance is really good at war they should get matches against larger alliances with a similar war rating.
The danger of making the case the way you did is evident in this thread, where other posters agreed with this specific statement of yours, that those alliances could not under any circumstances place that high. It is this notion that you can tell where an alliance should place based on their alliance rating that needs to be dispelled, because if people believe alliance rating means nothing, then they won't keep asking for the match system to take it into account.
A 12m should have to at some point start facing 30m of similar War Rating if they truely deserve to compete to stay in those upper War Rating Tiers.
The fact that a good (or spending) 12m is able to beat all other similar 12m Rating/Prestige allies (without having to face any actually deserving top tier stronger allies), does not necessarily justify their being able to climb up into the range of 30m allies (who by Rating/Prestige have had to face off against other 30m allies of their own similarity).
The very best of the 12m allies will by definition of the apparent current system be able to get into the upper tier, because of the lack of having to face any actually much stronger allies. Yes, they did win more, but only against lower allies, doesn’t make them worthy of a top spot.
This lead to a shorter off seasons and the locking of War Rating for tier 5 and up. Which in turn lead these top alliance to switch to shell accounts (having 2 or more alliances that the switch between to do the same thing). The off season rewards do not matter as much as the rewards for high rank at the end of season. It is just a few 4* and 5* shards in most cases.
There are a lot of alliances doing this in order to maximize points. Which is why a rule should be made that any sudden shift in Prestige/AR or % of players in the off season should automatically disqualify the alliance for rewards for 1 season. The loss of the season rewards, would most likely stop shell alliances over night.
I hope that helps explain. The shell accounts may be why Kabam’s matchmaking algorithm is selecting off of a mix of AR and Prestige, which is leading to teams showing up in Platinum without facing much harder alliances. So, there make be a need to evaluate the algorith, how seasons and off season work , and make rules that penalize alliances that have too much of a shift in number of players, Prestige and/or AR.
Let's look at what we want -
1. Everyone wants a fair match-up based on defenders they each face - prestige ensures that.
2. Everyone wants a fair match-up based on other alliances who are playing wars like you - war rating ensures that.
Kabam's solution is ideal - the problem is -
Alliances which do not belong in a certain tier and haphazard match-ups.
So, what needs to be done is -
Kabam should do exactly what they are doing but add just a couple extra conditions to match-ups.
1. Prestige of the two warring alliances should never have a difference of more than 100 prestige points.
2. War ratings of the two warring alliances should never have a difference of more than 10%.
Now, some alliances won't fit into this perfect category - since prestige matters more when matching for a fair match-up - these few alliances will be forced to play with some alliances that have more than 10% difference in war ratings.
These alliances end up getting matched ridiculously easy or ridiculously difficult matches, depending on how you look at it.
Say for eg. 9000 prestige with war rating 3000 gets matched up against 8900 prestige alliance with 2500 war rating.
The war map of this particular match-up should be of the tier of the lower war rating alliance (2500).
They should get season points based on the tier of each map and not the multiplier as is.
So in this hypothetical match - either team who wins will get the points based on a tier 4 war as that 2500 war rating belongs in tier 4 (I think - not sure).
This extra measure will solve both problems -
1. No alliance will be able to take advantage of their season multiplier with ridiculously easy matches and hence these fraudulent alliances with ridiculously low prestige, which are sitting in season rankings where they really don't belong, will be put in their place. (I am angry)
2. None of the retired alliances will have to face tougher match-ups, they will just be playing with others who are like them.
I would really like it if someone points out a flaw in my idea - as I feel I can't have just solved this.
An alliance full of ranked Thor Rags and Phoenix will have much higher prestige than someone with maxed Things, Havoks, Annihilus, etc.... Giving an alliance harder matches based off prestige doesn't even make sense when you take most war defenders and attackers prestige into account.
I don't know when some of you will realize that the more you rabble rabble about something until it gets changed usually winds up with something even worse in its place
If prestige wars are going to be a thing then might as well embrace it BUT give out extra points to those groups that face top tier alliances and less to the groups that are getting constant easy matchups due to prestige. Being a 3k+ rating group beating up on Tier 4-5 alliances and receiving better rewards than groups that have to face Kenob, 4loki, ASR, etc multiple times every season kind of makes no sense. There should be some kind of strength of schedule multiplier using prestige or some other metric.
Here are some interesting FACTS. My allies prestige is 10,364. We are currently plat 3, #158. Do you think we ever matched vs a sub 10k prestige alliance? Answer is NO. Even though there are hundreds of sub 10k prestige alliances higher up and lower than us in plat 3 with the exact same war rating, we never matched with any of them. I found this to be alarming. Most people deem AQ as a barometer for how good/serious an alliance is. We placed 60 in this last AQ. 7 of our last 10 matchups have been vs alliances that placed 75 or higher in AQ! So even though we are plat 3, we are still matching with the toughest allies out there.
One of my good friends in the game lives in Asia. He was in our ally for 2 years, never wanted to leave but schedule and work, he just had to find another ally closer to his time zone. He went to another alliance with 9000 prestige and they finished Masters this season! Do you want to know how many allies they faced this season over 9300 prestige? ZERO! Please explain how this is fair to the thousands of allies above 9300 prestige!?!?
It's so obvious matchmaking matches by prestige. Get rid of it! And get rid of Siphon.
You have to believe it is possible, however unlikely, that with sufficient skill an alliance with 20% less prestige could beat an alliance with 20% more prestige when they have equal war rating. If you don't, and Kabam agrees with you, then those alliances will never get matched against each other, which is the very problem you're trying to solve.
The argument you're making is that those lower prestige alliances could not possibly beat comparable war rating alliances so their presence in the top brackets is proof of a match making problem. But I'm telling you that's not what's going to happen. We know what happens when Kabam believes the players when they say alliance X can never fairly beat alliance Y: the match system is designed so they don't face each other. We know this because this is what Kabam did, more than once.
The argument I think you should be making is this: there are lower prestige alliances in the top brackets. For their presence in those brackets to be fair, they should have had to fight through the same set of alliances as all other alliances in that bracket (or at least the same war tier), and if they aren't being matched that way then they have a potentially easier path to the top bracket which is unfair. Furthermore, if they are doing that by manipulating their alliance rating or their prestige or both, then that's a separate unfair advantage.
There's no smoking gun in that argument, because we can't directly tell who's matching against who in the data. But I think that's the only line of thought that ultimately gets to where you want to go: presuming that all alliances with the same war rating are fairly matched against each other, and no other criteria should be used. Using any other criteria means all alliances of the same war rating *don't* match against each other, some only match against small subsets of all the alliances at the same rating, and that's potentially unfair.