Now finish the job

Kudos on cracking down on cheaters. Always love to see it.

And I'm not here to argue whether the appropriate actions were taken or suggest other penalties...

What I'd like to discuss is making aw less cheatable overall. Piloting penalties/bans should continue and increase as the post from Miike suggests but all that overlooks a major drawback of aw matchmaking.

Alliances will still collude, still make deals with each other, and still manipulate the matching system to maintain their rank. Let's get rid of the find a match button altogether. Instead, have an opt-in/opt-out button for alliances. If they are opted-in for war, all matching would take place at the same, designated time. This would negate the ability to "choose" your own matchup by coordinating with another alliance. If opted-out, you won't be matched this round.

Along the same lines, get rid of the +/- altogether during placement phase. The only legit purpose of this is to have a ballpark on how tough a match will be, but that's totally unnecessary. The other use of this is to figure out who you're matched against. That information can be used in numerous ways for bad things, the main possibility being that you could strike a deal with that alliance. These deals happen more often than anyone should like and include low ranked defenders, leaving defenders up, throwing wars altogether, allowing one team to gain x points to achieve a certain rank, etc etc. Basically, this feature needs to disappear. It's only useful for these purposes at certain ranks and wow what a surprise... Many in those ranks just happen to be the worst offenders in the game.

In fact, I don't need to even know which alliance I'm facing in the end. It doesn't make a difference who they are except for the purposes of trash talk on Line. Get rid of war chat as well. The chat function itself is abysmal to start, throw in censors that don't really work and the possibility of more collusion and the chat function isn't worth the price of admission.

So... Automated, anonymous matches. No chat. No +/-. Pretty simple to code, pretty simple to implement, pretty common sense if you know the ways in which people are cheating. It's difficult to come up with arguments against these outside of time zone issues for matchmaking... But you still get 24 hrs for each phase so no big deal. That style works for aq, it will work for aw.

In conclusion, the battlerealm is a land of contrasts

Comments

Greywarden

Totally agree with all of that.

To tack on I believe the punishment doesn't really fit the crime. Deducting points is 100% spot on, exactly what should happen. The most severe thing that could happen is lock out that alliance from even being able to search for a war for the rest of the season but I believe that is too harsh for the "clean" alliances that had one bad egg.

What should NOT happen is lowering their rating. The second half of the season for these groups that CHEATED will almost surely all be wins against groups that did NOT cheat.

Any alliance that was 3k got dropped to 2700. 99% of those wars will be wins for them. The difference between a 2700 alliance and a 3k rating alliance is massive. Less so the lower you go but for the clean groups fighting to reach the next tier in platinum it's a slap in the face.

Raganator

People will complain about different time zones for matching. This could also be addressed by having hour long (or two hour long) blocks where you opt in, and you would match against all those that opted in during the specific hour. All wars for that opt in hour would then start at the same time (i.e., if the opt in is from 12:00-1:00 - all those that opted in during that time would start at 1:00). Rinse and repeat. Alliances basically have 7-8 hours to find their first match so not all alliances in masters could avoid each other. There is still room for certain alliances to avoid each other, but it at least prevents what is currently happening.

I agree that the +/- should be removed. The only justification for including it would be if there was a terrible matchup for one alliance where they knew they didn't stand a chance, so they place bad champs and focus on other areas of the game during that time. I don't think that is sufficient justification for including the +/-.

chunkyb

Imo kabam needs to focus on closing the doors they created that allow cheating. The penalties, the monitoring... That needs to continue and become more severe. But as long as there are built-in tools that enable diff forms of cheating that aren't detectable thru the game itself, kabam is ignoring half the issues and allowing them to continue.

Especially when you take into account this recent ban/penalty wave. The next step for cheaters is to reaccess what they can get away with. As DNA often says, it's a risk vs reward calculation. Using the game's built-in features to exploit matchmaking and make deals is low risk, high reward. The only wildcard is keeping people quiet.

Even tho we've seen evidence of these types of cheats, much more happens that we don't know about. And we have the examples last season where everyone saw what was happening in game and kabam either wasn't provided with adequate proof or didn't find the proof valid. Making the changes I mentioned above cuts all that out. It also cuts out the chances that players photoshop "evidence" to frame other players.

The fun part of all this is that to any normal person, this all sounds stupid, absurd, and sad. And that's mainly because it is. But that doesn't change the fact that it happens regularly. These are just some of the lengths that people will go to for digital rewards on a phone game.

At the end of last season, deals were made to allow and ensure certain alliances placed in certain ranks. Nothing happened to them. Whether they worked together to create the match or just used a random matchmaking outcome as the opportunity, I don't know and it doesn't really matter. Whether enough evidence was provided to kabam or not, idk. I just know it happened, was admitted to, evidence was posted in several places, and nothing happened.

Just remove the features that enable this sort of stuff and you immediately kill off a large portion of the management and babysitting headaches that you have, kabam.

Solswerd

We have seen people post on here that they were banned from arena. (They could play the game, but when they went to arenas, they were not available to them)
Why not ban these folks from just AW?

(also love @chunkyb suggestions)

chunkyb

Hey mods. Way to go with the latest war rating dock and ban wave. I'm excited to see you seem to be making it a regular thing. I hope it continues.

Now can we discuss the suggestion above?

I'd like to add that it's well past time that lower tiered alliances stop being punished for other people's cheating and having to face alliances way out of their league. That step just makes no sense at all. And while no honest player wants you to stop punishing cheaters... We are getting tired of the terrible matchups we get because of it. For those fighting to hold bracket or struggling to reach a higher one, those matchups can be a season ender.

It also seems like these matchups make it much easier for the punished alliances to get back to where they were before the punishments.

We're getting closer to having a game mode that is what it was touted as being when it was first announced but we're not there yet.

DTMelodicMetal

Great post OP and great comments so far. Kabam is closer than they've ever been to establishing AW as a fair a honest game mode. Keep it up and please read over what players have suggested in this thread.

ContestOfNoobs

We faced alot of these docked alliances last season and this season

Alot of alliances from master season 3 especially arent even there anymore this season.

So far we faced multple alliances before the dock and now we been facing alliances who has been effected by the dock.

Really sucks we cant get points back or how legit alliances dont get any benefit from facing these alliances

There has been multiple alliances who was hit with penalties before in the past and also even alliances who was hit twice this season and allaince who was hit 3 times this season...yet they have been docked but can still search war and beat the lower teams quite easily..

Hopefuly kabam does something to alliances who keep doing it

unknown

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mum_m2

I agree with the cheating stuff but what the heck...I love smack talking the other alliance in war chat. It's one of the hidden gems of the game. It's all about bragging rights. If you lose, own up to the loss, but if you win rub it in their faces

Kpatrix

Having an opt in timer that goes from 12-1, 1-2, 2-3 etc. would still allow alliances to manipulate. Alliance 1 claims first hour to search, alliance 2 claims the next, and so on. These top guys would never have to face each other like that. Any system they make will never be foolproof. As long as the rewards are so disparate between tiers and affect everything else in game, people will do shady things to reach the top.

chunkyb

The system doesn't have to be 100% foolproof to be effective, honestly. It just has to create enough difficulty to cut down on the dirty stuff. That's enough for now.

Many people tend to say that if things can't be fixed all the way then nothing should be done and I've never understood that defeatist attitude. The fact that alliances are getting their 2nd and 3rd war rating hits this season shows that people will continue to do what they want no matter the cost. But despite that, I see alliances that have previously used every manipulation they could in the past decide to go clean now. That's a net positive. And honestly, that is spreading to more alliances as they see others' seasons being wasted.

I'm not a fan of staggered searches in this proposed system. Aq starts at one specific time globally. I see no reason as to why war couldn't be the same. The less options/control you give the players, the less opportunity for manipulating things they have. It's both dumb and sad that we're at that place, but here we are.

And there's still a laundry list of things to fix, but one step at a time. A few of the steps listed in my previous posts could go a long way towards not just fixing the immediate issues mentioned, but other related issues as well.

Either way, I'm seeing stubborn cheaters give up the game now. That's a good thing. Faced with the decision of play cleanly or don't play, they're literally giving up the game. Those are people who had no intent of ever playing fairly and once they decided it was too hard to get what they wanted by cheating, they're out. Good riddance. That's 100% happening bc kabam has shown they're no longer just giving lip service/taking action when they're forced to bc of outcry.

With the way things are right now in the community, if kabam pushes more in the right way in the next few weeks... They can fix about 70% of the player-created issues. That'd create a significantly better game and experience for honest players. And I hope they're listening and reading between the lines lol