We need to have a serious conversation AW manipulation
Husky54
Member Posts: 244 ★★
Swaps are back in a brand new edition.
So in case anybody was unaware, war matchups are a function of war RATING and war RATING alone. It doesn't matter what your alliance's combined PI is. It only matters what your war rating is. So, what has this led to?
Well, ladies and gentlesummoners, we now have a new wave of swaps happening whereby top tier alliances are swapping into shells with lower war ratings once every so often while their other alliance shell "cools down" so they constantly have easy war matchups. I could name some examples, but, you know, that's not really allowed here. Ultimately, what this allows these top tier alliances to do is to put up constant win streaks at the expense of lower rated alliances who genuinely have no chance.
Ultimately, the problem lies in the WAR RATING.
There is no incentive for top alliances to participate in difficult wars against alliances who are their equal. War rating is only used to create matches with other alliances of a comparable war rating, regardless of an alliance's PI.
There needs to be a drastic change in the way in which AW matching is done and it needs to be done on the basis of alliance rating--not how many wars an alliance has won/lost.
Relatedly, AW rewards should be a reflection of the relative difference between two alliance's respective ratings. It makes no sense for a 12m rated alliance to get full rewards against an alliance over whom they have a 3-4m surplus in rating. Instead, they should get lesser rewards for doing lesser work.
The current war matching system creates a disadvantage for lower rated alliances, because top rated alliances are manipulating the matching system in their favor and are now using swaps to aid in that process. Yes, it does cost them AQ rewards on occasion, but it still hurts the nature of AW more broadly conceived.
So in case anybody was unaware, war matchups are a function of war RATING and war RATING alone. It doesn't matter what your alliance's combined PI is. It only matters what your war rating is. So, what has this led to?
Well, ladies and gentlesummoners, we now have a new wave of swaps happening whereby top tier alliances are swapping into shells with lower war ratings once every so often while their other alliance shell "cools down" so they constantly have easy war matchups. I could name some examples, but, you know, that's not really allowed here. Ultimately, what this allows these top tier alliances to do is to put up constant win streaks at the expense of lower rated alliances who genuinely have no chance.
Ultimately, the problem lies in the WAR RATING.
There is no incentive for top alliances to participate in difficult wars against alliances who are their equal. War rating is only used to create matches with other alliances of a comparable war rating, regardless of an alliance's PI.
There needs to be a drastic change in the way in which AW matching is done and it needs to be done on the basis of alliance rating--not how many wars an alliance has won/lost.
Relatedly, AW rewards should be a reflection of the relative difference between two alliance's respective ratings. It makes no sense for a 12m rated alliance to get full rewards against an alliance over whom they have a 3-4m surplus in rating. Instead, they should get lesser rewards for doing lesser work.
The current war matching system creates a disadvantage for lower rated alliances, because top rated alliances are manipulating the matching system in their favor and are now using swaps to aid in that process. Yes, it does cost them AQ rewards on occasion, but it still hurts the nature of AW more broadly conceived.
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at least with war rating, it matches war performance as opposed to an alliance rating that isn't indicative of how skilled a team is .
Sure, it would need some tweaking--so perhaps alliance rating as a function of accumulated 4* and 5* champions. Not a difficult change to the equation.
Not to be flippant, but whenever these suggestions come up it is always stated that it would be easy to come up with a formula that factors in all the variables into a fair system. However, as easy as it apparently is to do so, no one has ever actually done so. Perhaps you could break the trend and propose a system that actually implements all the variables into a fair system that does not disadvantage anyone to at least the same degree as the current one and is less vulnerable to manipulation than the current one.
Ok, so you want to punt because the user base (whose job it *isn't*) can't/hasn't come up with a viable formula? That's some pretty bunk logic. It's the game team's job to come up with a system that is fair to the player base.
It is presently UNFAIR to the player base to have top rated alliances manipulating war rating (an *extraneous* metric) for their own benefit. It is presently our job to highlight the faults in the current system so the game team can fix them (as it happened with AQ swaps).
Amen. This is definitely true. The stickied game team post claims they are cracking down on these issues when it is blatantly obvious that they are NOT.
Place defense, then select your attack team, then when all are ready search for an opponent.
If you place a 2* defense to try and get an easy opponent your attack can walk through your attack rating equalizes the search and you end up being disadvantaged
There is no way to game that system and requires all alliances to bring their best teams available.
Simple.
It is the responsibility of the person making the suggestion, in this case you, to present a valid one. It is one thing to note a problem with the existing system, another to make the claim that it would be easy to fix that problem. As far as I can tell, every suggestion made so far, including yours, only opens the door to other problems equally problematic for the players, just different players. The current system satisfies a key property of any match making system: the strength of opponents is presumed strictly from their ability to win. All other systems that factor other things into matchmaking can be manipulated, whereas win/loss record cannot be manipulated without deliberately losing. When you introduce something like PI or alliance rating into the equation, those things can place a significant disadvantage on alliances whose players don't sell lower champs to lower their alliance rating. What is worse is the system doesn't trivially autocorrect: they could continue to lose over and over again because the system continues to presume that even though they are losing, they are stronger than their win/loss record and continue to match them up against stronger opponents. For all its faults, that can't happen in the current system.
So to answer your question: yes, I would rather punt the problem than make it worse. Your suggestion has the potential to make it worse. I say potential because you haven't actually suggested a change that can be analyzed to determine whether it is more or less fair. You've only asserted it would be easy to make one. If it is easy, it should not be so difficult to actually propose one.
It is the game developers' job to come up with a game design implementation. They've done so. It has known flaws. But the notion that those flaws are easy to fix is clearly false, in spite of many people claiming otherwise. If you can't construct a system that is better, you cannot know if it is actually possible to do so.
it only needs to be done once every 2-3 months, if you're doing 3 wars a week and win them all it will take a while to get back up to teir 2-3 where they become difficult
Exactly, the rewards are greater than the blackout.
If I understand what you are saying, you seem to be suggesting that matchmaking should happen on a specific schedule rather than when an alliance requests matchmaking. Everyone would have to place their defense before a cutoff moment, and then all alliances would get matched at the same time.
If I understand that correctly, that would address some of the time-based match making manipulation I've heard happens, but it would not address the problem the OP was highlighting, which was swapping down into a shell alliance for a while so that the "real" alliance's war rating drops. Because each alliance has less overall wins, their respective ratings would be lower than their true win/loss record would imply.
This is a non-trivial problem to address in the general case. There are tweaks you can make to the system to try to address it, but all the ones I can think of create other problems, or shift the problems around, or hurt players that are currently unaffected. The problem in a nutshell is that alliance war strength is not "computable." You can't tell how strong an alliance will be in a war just by the numbers in the profiles of the members. You cannot "know" that an alliance with a particular rating, or even a particular set of top champions, will necessarily be strong or weak because player skill factors greatly into overall performance. But in the general case, rating the members of an alliance based on how strong they perform to track that performance into any new alliance they try to form seems to me to be computationally expensive and extremely complex to get right.
False. I'm not a game dev. I'm a consumer from whom Kabam expects payment for certain services.
Again, fixing the problem is not my job. I'm not receiving payment for my contributions.
Suggestions from the player base are only ever components to a greater solution. I never said I had the be all/end all solution to the clear problem.
Their ability to win against whom? This is the problem your retort encounters.
It is demonstrably more difficult to manipulate alliance PI, or, even prestige.
Prestige is not a function of anything other than your top 5 champs. Selling things like 3* champs have no bearing on prestige.
An alliance with a war rating of, say, over 2k, is not going to intentionally lose enough times successively to produce such a result because the intermittent time period between viable rewards would be too long. This is argumentum absurdum.
My suggestion is a solution in part, not in whole.
Or, it merely requires more input rather than blatant disregard and inferior analysis.
Insufficiently so, for lesser rated alliances.
It's not. They fixed AQ. They can fix AW too. They get paid to do these things. They should earn their salary.
I've provided steps forward, not ultimate solutions. You've provided insufficient arguments lacking broader and long term scope.
It's a hard choice but the company either disciplines all (this includes players showcased as original legends) or the company admits the game has no fair competition and the top players/alliances are accepted exploiters.
Simultaneously, we know full well they do absolutely NOTHING about it.
I've been told something is being done but needless to say I'm not holding my breath lol. If they discipline fairly it will hit the cred of the game as well as profits. I'm not sure many players understand the scope of it. It's a dirty pay to play full of purchased accounts and to clean it up would need to start at the very top imo
Personally the swapping exploits have allowed my alliance to break into top 10 global(we don't swap) so I don't mind too much. Or maybe we just getting better lol.
there would be no time restrictions.
Once matchmaking is live you choose your defense champs and attack champs and that gives you a rating.
Total defense PI + Total Attack PI / Amount of players
If attack has a higher value than defense then divide the attack by defense and multiply the defense by the value
for example - defense total is 485000, attack is 540000, divide attack by defense = 1.113, add 50%, multiply the defense by that and add attack, the value is ((485000 x 1.6695) + 540000)/30 = 44990
That is the war rating and it searches for an available opponent at that rating.
If you place your strongest possible team in defense and offense you will always have a stronger defense team as 5 x r5 4* will equal more Pi than 3 r4 5*
The ONLY way to game this system would be if all alliance members removed their masteries before placing and added them back afterwards but even then they would only be disadvantaging themselves as they would be placing defenders with no masteries.
There's a lot I could say about this system, but to focus on one point only lets see if the system is actually gameable. Given your math and description, here's something I might try.
To simplify the math, lets say that a 5/50 champion has a rating of approximately 5000, a 4/40 about 4000, and so on. Its a simplification just to make the math straight forward: the analysis doesn't require that simplification, but the discussion gets overly long if I don't make it. Let's say I have the ability to decide how everyone in my alliance places defenders and chooses attackers. And lets say I'm able to field an entire team of 5/50 attackers. That would be an offensive rating of 5000 * 3 * 30 = 450,000. If I could also field a full defensive team of 5/50 defenders, that would be a defensive rating of about 5000 * 5 * 30 = 750,000. My net war rating would be (450000+750000)/30 = 40000. It is basically the average total rating of all the placed champions for each player.
So long as my defensive rating doesn't drop below my offensive one, there's no penalty. So what happens if I decide to field 89 5/50 defenders and fill all the rest of the nodes (61 of them) with 1* rubbish champs. I can probably drop my defensive rating down to about 451,100 (assuming I use 1* champs with a rating of about 100). My alliance war rating now drops to (450000+451100)/30 = 30037. Let's just call that 30k for now: clearly I could manipulate the numbers to get to about 30k.
Who would I face as a 30k rated alliance? Well, if the average alliance doesn't play these games and typically places about the same rating champion everywhere (attack and defense), then the average champion being placed will be about 3750. Let's say that an alliance places three 4/40 attackers, three 4/40 defenders, and two 3/30 defenders on average. That would end up being a 30k alliance in your system. That's statistically the average alliance I would face. Of course, there would be lots of different configurations that end up being 30k. But almost none of them have 50/50 attackers and 5/50 defenders, because the only way to do that is how I just did it: by sandbagging a lot of defenders.
Doing this will of course be giving up a lot of nodes practically for free. But on the flip side, my own attackers will be generally steamrolling through 4/40 and 3/30 defenders most of the time, which is going to make things very easy for them. Conversely, our opponents will often be 4/40 attackers facing 5/50 defenders on all the boss nodes and critical paths. I think that most of the time I will have a substantial advantage. What's more, I will likely never lose this advantage because no matter how many times I win, my rating will never go up and I will never have to face stronger opponents.
I doubt I'm the only player that would think of doing this. It encourages degenerate play and would probably engender a lot of unfair complaints, but would be technically perfectly legal under this system.
One last thing: depending on how close your system tried to match up alliances, if I one day ran into another alliance doing the same thing, I could try to avoid them by aiming for a different net rating. We could even collaborate with other alliances to aim for different ratings separated by enough value that we would never face each other. The more you allow matches with different ratings, the more likely you will randomly match up different strength alliances. But the closer to try to match ratings, the easier you make it for alliances to collaborate to avoid matchups.
Surely this would be the simplest way....
And reward tiers the same way....
I am at 170k but sit in a low ally with mates. Our total ally rating is 1.5mil. Our last match up was against 6m ally. Only 4 of us could even do any damage. Needless to say they got 97% exploration and both bg clears and we got only 30% and none.
The only way for an alliance to exploit this system would ve to sandvag their alliance so have say 20 guys with huge rating and then 10 dummy accounts with only 1 1* champ.
and just run 2 bg wars all the time. And doing this would hurt the ally in so many other areas. Would it be worth it? Probably not...
The idea is to make it hard to cheat/game the system without it being punitive to anyone as the black out system hurts people legitimately moving alliances.
Maybe tie the final score of my calcs to War rating so it at least has a bearing on the team you play.
for example when you start matchmaking it finds the closest match to both numbers