**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.
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Matchmaking Discussion [Merged Threads]
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War isn’t about who can beat up the most evenly matched team the most times. It’s about who has the strongest and most skilled team.
The ONLY viable AW system is more in line with equality. You are begging for equity which is a terrible thing for a competitive game mode.
I've already agreed the Rewards needed to be realigned. I didn't agree that it should have been done this way.
It's really dissociative to keep brushing off their complaints when we all know what they're complaining about, by saying it will all be better in the end. That end isn't here and they're complaining about the effects of this.
When you say they I suppose you are referring to smaller alliances. And in general I'm assuming you are correct. However, I can absolutely assure you that it does NOT include all of them.
If you think an alliance with 8-10 boss killers and 20-22 puny 3-4k accounts were just teaching newbs how to "git gud" I have a bridge for sale.
I know this because my alt was in one of those allys. It was very early on as well so this has been around for quite some time. Almost since the change to be honest. I left once I understood what was going on but how many didn't?
Yes technically it's not cheating, but it certainly isn't fair play either.
So yeah, when people say smaller allys don't belong where they are, it absolutely applies to some. And more than you might think.
Was very unfair having small alliances win easy matches and getting high rewards.
An example might be necessary. Imagine an alliance with half the members super strong and the other half very weak. If I present the narrative that this is an alliance with super strong players that recruited a bunch of weak players just to manipulate their rating downward you'd probably say that's exploitive and their rating shouldn't change just because it added those weaker players. But what if the reverse happened: the super strong players all joined the weaker alliance to try to appropriate that lower rating. Now you'd say that was also exploitive and would want the alliance's rating to jump upward with those additions. But in the general case, you're not going to know what the narrative is. The game is just going to see an alliance composed of players and will have to take some action based on that.
The problem is the definition of rating is tied to the alliance, not to the players. That's why when players join an alliance the alliance's rating doesn't change. It is blind to the composition of the alliance, only to the win/loss record of the alliance. If we change that to say that alliance rating should be some composite of the members, then in a sense it isn't cheating to replace a strong member with a weak one to get a lower rating, because the system implies that having a weaker player is the reasonable cost for slightly lower rating.
But of course, in the real world there are all sorts of edge cases. Quite a few, each requiring some additional guardrails to prevent exploiting extremes. But I think they are all addressable.
Any system that matches using any metric that isn't influenced by win/loss record always has a variation of this problem. When you can't win your way out of your situation and you can't *lose* your way out either, bad things inevitably happen. In the current system, no bad situation lasts long. That's why these systems are so commonplace. They recognize that mismatches are inevitable simply because we never have perfect knowledge of who's stronger and who's weaker. But the system very quickly resorts everyone to the correct rating. But any system not directly influenced by wins and losses can't use that information to self correct. When it makes a mistake, that mistake is forever.
1. Equivalence. If two alliances have the same rating, they should have roughly the same strength. Self explanatory.
2. Ordinality. If alliance A has higher rating than alliance B, alliance A is also stronger than alliance B. The greater the difference, the greater the strength difference. Also self explanatory.
3. Transitivity. If alliance A has higher rating than alliance B, then given a mutual set of competition A will win at a higher percentage than B. In other words, if A and B both face a set of opponents XYZ, A will generally have a higher win percentage than B.
They probably all sound good, but they aren't just nice to have properties. There's a reason why they are important to the overall fairness of the competition. We award higher rewards to alliances that score more points, and we presume that if an alliance scores more points it is because they did more to do so (Ordinality). The multipliers try to enforce that: higher war ratings equals higher multipliers. Which is fine if higher war ratings equals stronger alliances who demonstrated that strength by winning more often against comparable competition (Transitivity). But if that's not the case, because different alliances with the same rating don't have the same strength and don't face comparable competition (Equivalence) then we aren't tying rewards to actual war performance. Alliances that do more aren't necessarily getting more rewards.
In the current system, all three are true, or at least the system tries to converge to a state where all three are true. In the old system, all three were false, and not even goals of the system.
This is as it should be.
Unsure how anyone thinks that just because matchmaking didn’t give you an alliance you can beat it’s unfair.
If you are a 15 million alliance been playing 1-2 years and you can’t beat a 30 million alliance with people that have been playing for 5 years it’s pretty obvious the bigger alliance should be ranked higher than you.
It’s not bracketed with different rewards per bracket. War is an absolute contest across all alliances.
Once the dust settles people will all be matching of even skill not even size or prestige - and that is as it should.
If they have invested the time, money and resources into then yes they deserve the win.
You get rewarded for what you put into the game not just the one fight.
How much you play the game, the decisions on who and how you rank they should absolutely all play a part in deciding the winner.
The game used to have brackets like in AQ and it was an unnecessary complication.
Let's go all the way with this. To be frank, if you think no 6 million alliance can beat no 40 million alliance, you're wrong. But let's go all the way. No 100k alliance can beat any 40 million alliance, not even if the 100k alliance has the best players that exist and the 40 million alliance is played by blind people. Done.
What this means is the 100k alliance should have absolutely no shot at the same rewards as the 40 million alliance. There should be zero overlap in their competition under normal circumstances. No sane person would argue that the 100k alliance should be able to place higher than the 40 million alliance under *any* circumstances.
And yet, it was mathematically possible for the 100k alliance to actually score more points than any other alliance including the 40 million alliance under the old system. It would take extreme conditions, but it was mathematically possible. Points are given out based on multiplier and wins. If the 100k alliance *only* faced other 100k alliances and beat them all, the 100k alliance could theoretically reach any war rating. They do not need to face anyone else except other 100k alliances to get 3000 rating: the game doesn't limit your rating in that way. So *if* they just won war after war against nothing but other 100k alliances, any rating is possible. And if their rating grew to be higher than all other alliances, they would have the top multiplier. Having the top multiplier and winning all your wars pretty much guarantees you a Master spot, if not the top spot.
This is completely broken. We've just demonstrated that an alliance hopelessly outmatched against literally all of the competition above them can nevertheless shoot right past all of them without having to face any of them and grab the top spot in seasons, simply because they can claim to "always fight fair fights against equal competition."
Under the current system, no such thing can occur, but also that 100k alliance will never face anything close to the 40 million alliance ever, because in the current system war rating means something, and those two alliances will never have the same rating, and thus will never match. This is only happening now (to a lesser extent) because the old system *broke* rating, and actually forcing all alliances that claim to have the same rating fight each other is the only way to fix it.
The current system forces all alliances that claim to have the same rating actually have about the same strength. Because it does that, it *protects* alliances from huge mismatches, at least when it functions properly and when no cheating occurs. And that disclaimer is necessary only because all match systems, including the previous one, are vulnerable to some kind of manipulation and susceptible to bugs of implementation.
But conversely, we've beaten alliances I didn't think we'd beat. You just never know with absolute certainty. An alliance might have huge prestige but be full of 80 year olds with cataracts. They might live in an area currently undergoing an alien invasion and internet is spotty. They might have placed defenders but then decided to take Ramadan off. Or you might just have the best war of your life and play out of your mind on that day. I've seen that happen also.
None of us knows whether a 15 million alliance will win against a 16 million alliance, or a 20 million alliance, or a 30 million alliance. We don't know. So we play the game. We don't have to guess. We don't tell people who they can beat and who they can't. It is *unlikely* that a 6 million alliance will beat a 40 million alliance, but *if* the 6 million alliance beats 9 million alliances and moves up, and then beats 12 million alliances and moves up again, and then beats 25 million alliances and keeps moving up, who are we to say they have no shot at that 40 million alliance.
If we pick a random 6 and a random 40 and match them, it is going to be a bloodbath. But that never happens. In the current system that 6 isn't going to wake up tomorrow and face a 40. He's going to face another 6. But if he keeps beating all the 6s, he's going to face 8s. And if and only if he beats enough of the 8s, he's going to face 10s. And then 12s. And who are we to say at any point in this chain that it is impossible? Yes, it is very likely they are going to eventually get stopped. They'll discover they are really, really good, but at some point they will find they just can't consistently beat the 18s often enough to go higher.
But a 6 that matches against a 40 in the current system - once ratings settle down - must have kicked the snot out of a lot of 32s to get there. Would you bet against them if that was the case? I wouldn't.