Alliance War matchmaking seems unjustly "balanced"

FayleFayle Member Posts: 11
tl;dr: getting constantly matched with 11-13 million PI alliances at tier 9 while there are 5-8 million PI alliances at ranks 5-6 feels wrong.

It seems to me that when the "diversity" changes went in effect for Alliance Wars a few months ago, there were other, quiet changes as to how AW matchmaking works. This post is not to complain about diversity.

Before then, we had an alliance PI of around 10 million and we were hovering around tier 3. Rarely we would even make it up to tier 2, other times we would have a bad streak and drop down to rank 4-5. The matches we would get varied in strength, sometimes we were matched against teams of 12-13 million, other times our foes were 6-7 million. Yet always our opponents had an AW score close to ours. It seemed logical: our AW score was the determining factor of the opponents we faced, not our alliance PI.

Then came the diversity changes. Suddenly, the strength of our opponents was a lot closer to ours. We fought, won some, lost more. As expected, with mounting losses our tier dropped. Tier 3 became 4, then 7 and now, months later, tier 9. Yet somehow we still get matched against alliances with similar strength to ours. There are alliances with a PI of 6-7 million hovering around tier 5, but it has been months since we were matched with such an opponent.
It appears as if we have been placed in a bucket or league or whatever with 11+ million alliances and are being matched only against them.
I am sorry, but this is wrong. When a sports team plays at a certain league, they are eligible to play against all the teams on that league, strong and weak, not just against teams with a similar "roster value" or whatever.
I am sure that a common game design principle is that harder content gives better rewards. This is true for story quests of MCoC, where act 5 gives better rewards than act 4. This is true for Event Quests of MCoC, where "Master" difficulty quests give better rewards than "Intermediate". This is true for Alliance Quests of MCoC, where map 5 is tougher and gives more points (and thus better rewards in the end) than map 4.
This does not seem to apply Alliance Wars. If the alliances are placed on different groups based on alliance PI, then stronger groups (and thus harder content) should get better rewards. The AW score of an alliance should be the only determining factor during matchmaking, nothing else. Otherwise, it feels that we are being penalized for simply growing stronger over time.

Thank you

Comments

  • Speeds80Speeds80 Member Posts: 2,017 ★★★★
    Yes we got stuck in this exact dilemma, we dropped from tier 3 to tier 8 and can't get an easy matchup anymore, been lucky and won most since the change back from diversity so finally climbed back to 6 and at least we are competing for 5* shards again. But it is a bizarre system now and I don't like it
Sign In or Register to comment.