Let’s say you have for example major league and little league
A major league team has a tough season against the other major league teams and loses all/most of their games and finishes last.
A little league team has a hell of a season and crushes all the other little league teams.
Do you give the winning little league team major league salary’s because they won all their games and the major league team gets a pat on the back?
No because in almost all scenarios the major league team is gonna wipe the floor if the played that little league team.
And let’s just say there is a miracle and the little league team beats them. Well that’s a different story but how will we ever know if they never play each other??
That’s the way I see the current war system. It sucks because the end of season rewards are not accurately reflecting how good the alliances actually are in relation to all other alliances around them
Anything Kabam? You had 5-7k prestige alliances finishing in Gold 1 or better because they only got matched against other alliances of similar prestige.
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
Please see my post on page 2 where I updated the list to show alliance prestige.
Prestige is a much more closely correlated to alliance strength than alliance rating, but it is still not perfect. The same argument applies. If you say "there's no way an alliance with 30% less prestige will beat a higher rated alliance" then you're saying that matching between those alliances is unfair, and thus you're echoing the people who say those two alliances should never be matched together. But you *want* those alliances to be matched against each other. So you can't say it is impossible for one to beat the other.
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.
DNA, I am saying this with all due respect, but you are knitpicking on technicalities on the words people are using. It comes off a repugnant and demeaning. I know you really do not intend to be that way, you are just trying to constructively criticize.
QuikPik does mean that if they are able to fight in the bracket, the lower prestige team should fight their opponents.
While the data QuikPik has given in the charts doesn’t show the low prestige teams are not fighting, I have a video on YouTube that shows we have not had a match with greater than a 500 Prestige all AW Season. We ended in Gold 2 and have 2000+ Prestige compared most alliances in the top 50 of our bracket. We were in this bracket for 7 matchups, and not one was more than 500 Prestige difference.
I am sorry, but the alliances are not fighting... Here are our most recent matches... one dropped in Prestige because they lost members:
We were at a 9,600 Prestige, but we have not seen anything over a 500 Prestige difference for 2 seasons now... how can this be happening if we are in a bracket with tons of 7,000 and 8,000 Alliances. The number of alliances make it a statistical improbability to not have at least 1. If the 7,000-8,000 are skilled enough to be in our bracket, then we should be able to face each other. This is a tournament where skill should matter. If an Alliance goes into a bracket with skilled players and bigger rosters, than they shouldn’t have a problem if they are equally skilled. If they do not have the ability to face those teams, then they shouldn’t be in that bracket.
@Midknight007 Keep on Preaching buddy! It's obvious this is what is happening and it's not fair. AW was pitched to us as a skill mode. It's not anymore and it's a shame. Kabam needs to lay out how Matchmaking will be done before the next season. Is it going to be about skill? Or is it going to be about making them money? I'm guessing they will choose the latter which is why so many people are quiting this game.
As a test, I have a retired alliance consisting of 8k prestige players and we filled the rest with almost 0 prestige players essentially making us a 4k prestige alliance. The lowest alliance we have fought was 800k but our prestige pretty close. We have an alliance rating of 4m. This shows that the primary match making criteria is prestige and then war rating.
I can understand a few outliers where they are very good at war but a 1/3 of each tier is taken up by lower level alliances. I doubt there are that many alliances that are great at war that can take down alliances 2k+ prestige or more on a consistent basis to maintain their high war rating.
@Midknight007 Keep on Preaching buddy! It's obvious this is what is happening and it's not fair. AW was pitched to us as a skill mode. It's not anymore and it's a shame. Kabam needs to lay out how Matchmaking will be done before the next season. Is it going to be about skill? Or is it going to be about making them money? I'm guessing they will choose the latter which is why so many people are quiting this game.
At one point, that may have been true. Until Alliances started manipulating the system by Tanking and other methods. The system is only a reflection of skill so long as the results reflect the skill of the participants. When you have a number taking dives, the system falls apart as a reflection of skill. That has effects which snowball downward and shift the entire Ranking. When Alliances play and win or lose based on ability, they win or lose Rating that reflects their skill. When they lose a number on purpose to peck off weaker Alliances, that makes it a moot gauge of skill. Those under them cannot progress properly, and it trickles down.
Let’s say you have for example major league and little league
A major league team has a tough season against the other major league teams and loses all/most of their games and finishes last.
A little league team has a hell of a season and crushes all the other little league teams.
Do you give the winning little league team major league salary’s because they won all their games and the major league team gets a pat on the back?
No because in almost all scenarios the major league team is gonna wipe the floor if the played that little league team.
And let’s just say there is a miracle and the little league team beats them. Well that’s a different story but how will we ever know if they never play each other??
That’s the way I see the current war system. It sucks because the end of season rewards are not accurately reflecting how good the alliances actually are in relation to all other alliances around them
Even before Seasons, that wasn't the case. The top never faced each other, and stayed the top.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
@Midknight007 Keep on Preaching buddy! It's obvious this is what is happening and it's not fair. AW was pitched to us as a skill mode. It's not anymore and it's a shame. Kabam needs to lay out how Matchmaking will be done before the next season. Is it going to be about skill? Or is it going to be about making them money? I'm guessing they will choose the latter which is why so many people are quiting this game.
At one point, that may have been true. Until Alliances started manipulating the system by Tanking and other methods. The system is only a reflection of skill so long as the results reflect the skill of the participants. When you have a number taking dives, the system falls apart as a reflection of skill. That has effects which snowball downward and shift the entire Ranking. When Alliances play and win or lose based on ability, they win or lose Rating that reflects their skill. When they lose a number on purpose to peck off weaker Alliances, that makes it a moot gauge of skill. Those under them cannot progress properly, and it trickles down.
That’s the thing. Kabam stopped off season tanking by freezing the scores of tier 5 and up. But now alliances that were tanking are using shell alliances to efffectively do the same thing, which seems to point towards their Prestige based matchmaking instead of War Rating.
You will need to force Alliances to stop swapping alliances in order to place in lower brackets before an AW Season... the only thing that would de-incentivize them is loss of rewards for the season placement for the swap for one whole season. It may hurt a merger or a single player, but swaps should only be in the upmost needs when a player is frustrated with their old alliance and is willing to tough it out. It would also make the members more dedicated to and alliance and prevent jumping.
Top, skilled alliances don’t want to lose during a Season, which is why they use to tanked and now swap to a lower alliance during off season. You literally have to force them into playing in the tiers they ended up in from the previous season. They specifically do not want to face each other in the first few matches. I get using prestige prior to establishing the current Season’s rankings, but once rankings are established, then the algorithm should look at the tier/bracket first for matchmaking.
Only in the off chance that an alliance didn’t enter the matchmaking and there is an odd number, should the system look to a lower bracket/tier. It may allow for “mismatches”, but that is the nature of a tournament based system that uses rankings. What happens when a 7000 starts landing in Master. Kabam is only going to kill AW all together and top alliances will just stop aggressively ranking or playing, as their wins will become mute as skill at tackling tougher opponents no longer matters. You have alliances with 6000-7000 Prestige in tier 5 and up that are not facing tier 5 alliances that are in wildly higher Prestige. Why? It is only handicapping their score and by not allowing the lower prestige alliance the opportunity to play a stronger alliance, you are robbing them the opportunity to improve their game play at the sake of “protecting their feelings” from a loss.
At that rate, why don’t we just give everyone equal rewards for AW (much like participation trophies), as skill doesn’t matter. It is only the wins. Skill should always be a factor.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
How do you think tanking actually affected anything? You seriously think people were tanking from T1 down to T3 and still making it back to T1 and placing Master? That wasnt happening bc the numbers don't add up. No one was dropping outside their placed tier, you couldn't afford the lower multiplier to start with.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
How do you think tanking actually affected anything? You seriously think people were tanking from T1 down to T3 and still making it back to T1 and placing Master? That wasnt happening bc the numbers don't add up. No one was dropping outside their placed tier, you couldn't afford the lower multiplier to start with.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
Dude, tanking is a huge issue and mostly happens within T3-T5. If it wasn’t an issue, Kabam would not said so and would not have frozen War Rating between Seasons for the top five tiers. You are arguing for the sake of arguing on an aspect of the game that you yourself stated you do not care about, so I doubt you have spent time analyzing and understanding what is happening.
We are not talking about master. The lower Platinum and top Gold are the most impacted by shell alliances (and previously tanking). A Platinum 1-2 Alliance would drop their War Rating (or now swap to an alliance with a lower one) as to start in low Gold 1 or high Gold 2. This would put them against Alliances that were less skilled (due to lower War Rating) for the first handful of matches and cost less in Pots and Revives. They can clear maps against inferior defenses and skill level with almost no deaths and rack up points for all wins for the first 5-6 matches. They would find themselves in Platinum 1-2 with a good chance at ending there, as they pad their wins earlier in the Season against inferior Alliances. This pushes normally Gold 1 teams to Gold 2 due shell/tanking alliances and solidifies the Platinum 1-2 for the team doing the shell/tanking. As the season continues, there is little movement in tiers in the later half as opposed to the first half. This makes tanking/shells advantageous in concreting your ranking at the end of the season by ensuring easier matches at the beginning.
Most of the shell/tanking is in middle tiers, and always has been. Kabam has acknowledged the issue and has been chasing a fix ever since. They locked War Rating, which gave birth to Shell Alliances. Now they are chasing Prestige matchmaking in order to compensate for Shells. However, this creates a disjointed leaderboard where teams that never face one another will achieve ranks within low Platinum and Gold because of matchmaking not allowing huge Prestige deficits. It is artificially raising War Rating of higher skilled alliances with low Prestige by preventing them from facing matches of higher Prestige Alliances in the same bracket.
This all came about because of Tanking, and later Shell Alliances... Kabam views this as an issue. Simply going to War Rating only promotes Shell Alliances and will allow the practice to continue. Instead, Kabam needs to look at penalties for swapping alliances. This can be on a player level or for the whole alliance. If on the whole alliance, it could be if there is greater than 60% change in a roster within the off season... if so, the alliance cannot gain AW rank rewards. If there is an honest merger, there is hardly above a 60% change in membership. If there is a greater than 60%, they can obviously merge the other way as to avoid the penalty. So, pointing to mergers as a problem is a intellectually lazy argument.
Or it could be on the Player level. That means the player is in a probation period. I personally like the Alliance one, as the biggest impacted would be those using Shell Alliances.
These actions would be so we can affix a proper War Rating to an Alliance and ensure fair match ups based on War Rating moving forward. There is an issue that some lesser skilled Alliances with low Prestige might get some mismatches for a couple of seasons until their War Rating adequately reflects their ability. This is an unfortunate byproduct of what seems to be a matchmaking algorithm that was heavily considering Prestige.
We can all agree that Prestige and Alliance Rating is not a sign of skill. We can all pretty much agree War Rating is supposed. How can War Rating be a factor of skill if: 1) It can be manipulated with no consequences. 2) Teams can fight teams with similar War Rating regardless of Prestige or Alliance Rating. If you are Tier 5 and up, the difficulty of the defense you face shouldn’t matter, as your War Rating states you are able to beat thOse odds despite having a smaller or less advanced roster.
Our Alliance is heavily focused on AW, and as QuikPik has shown... we do pay attention to the smaller details like the Alliance Rating and now Prestige of the top alliances in each Bracket. We have been noticing that we are only facing opponents with a 500 Prestige variance, despite being in Brackets that is filled with alliances with much less Prestige. The probability of at least facing one 7000 is pretty much proven to be null, as it has never happened within a bracket which 70-80% above the top alliances having much lower Prestige.
All of us are pretty much saying War Rating should be the ultimate factor, but we do have to acknowledge that Kabam views tanking/shell alliances are an issue. We need to preserve War Rating as a true indication of skill in order for it to be used as the sole factor for matchmaking (as it is being manipulated).
That system is super bad because those small aliances play only against same size aliances. So in masters there 50m+ aliances going against each other AND 20m aliances are never paired against them. If those small aliances will goes against 50m ally (which they should as they are in same bracket and has same rating.) They never win. So they dont belong there as they never fight real masters alliances
My friend's alliance that finished in Plat4 with 8200 prestige had these match ups for their last 10 wars.
The match making algorithm searched across 2 tiers to find matches in their prestige range. Not once did they get matched against a larger alliance that has a similar war rating. All of their matches are within a narrow prestige band.
These are our last 10 wars.
We never got a match against an alliance with less than 9200 prestige even though there are a ton of smaller alliances with the same war rating as us. Look at all these large alliances sitting in Gold 1/2, all we ever do is beat up on another without ever having the chance to face any other alliance outside of our prestige range regardless of war rating.
In the old system, if you had a bad string of wars with a few consecutive losses eventually you'd get matched up against an over achieving smaller alliance because your war ratings were very close. In that scenario, if the smaller alliance won then more power to them. They deserve their war rating. However, if they lost it means they are not ready to play against the larger alliances.
I'd be interested to see other alliances matches at various prestige ranges.
I don't understand these arguments about skill. Surely war is still about skill. Matchmaking is based on prestige but the most skilled alliances of their prestige banding reach the top. If you take war seriously, have high prestige and are stuck in gold 2, that has little to do with matchmaking imo. It means your ally has gold 2 war skills relative to your prestige.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
How do you think tanking actually affected anything? You seriously think people were tanking from T1 down to T3 and still making it back to T1 and placing Master? That wasnt happening bc the numbers don't add up. No one was dropping outside their placed tier, you couldn't afford the lower multiplier to start with.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
Dude, tanking is a huge issue and mostly happens within T3-T5. If it wasn’t an issue, Kabam would not said so and would not have frozen War Rating between Seasons for the top five tiers. You are arguing for the sake of arguing on an aspect of the game that you yourself stated you do not care about, so I doubt you have spent time analyzing and understanding what is happening.
We are not talking about master. The lower Platinum and top Gold are the most impacted by shell alliances (and previously tanking). A Platinum 1-2 Alliance would drop their War Rating (or now swap to an alliance with a lower one) as to start in low Gold 1 or high Gold 2. This would put them against Alliances that were less skilled (due to lower War Rating) for the first handful of matches and cost less in Pots and Revives. They can clear maps against inferior defenses and skill level with almost no deaths and rack up points for all wins for the first 5-6 matches. They would find themselves in Platinum 1-2 with a good chance at ending there, as they pad their wins earlier in the Season against inferior Alliances. This pushes normally Gold 1 teams to Gold 2 due shell/tanking alliances and solidifies the Platinum 1-2 for the team doing the shell/tanking. As the season continues, there is little movement in tiers in the later half as opposed to the first half. This makes tanking/shells advantageous in concreting your ranking at the end of the season by ensuring easier matches at the beginning.
Most of the shell/tanking is in middle tiers, and always has been. Kabam has acknowledged the issue and has been chasing a fix ever since. They locked War Rating, which gave birth to Shell Alliances. Now they are chasing Prestige matchmaking in order to compensate for Shells. However, this creates a disjointed leaderboard where teams that never face one another will achieve ranks within low Platinum and Gold because of matchmaking not allowing huge Prestige deficits. It is artificially raising War Rating of higher skilled alliances with low Prestige by preventing them from facing matches of higher Prestige Alliances in the same bracket.
This all came about because of Tanking, and later Shell Alliances... Kabam views this as an issue. Simply going to War Rating only promotes Shell Alliances and will allow the practice to continue. Instead, Kabam needs to look at penalties for swapping alliances. This can be on a player level or for the whole alliance. If on the whole alliance, it could be if there is greater than 60% change in a roster within the off season... if so, the alliance cannot gain AW rank rewards. If there is an honest merger, there is hardly above a 60% change in membership. If there is a greater than 60%, they can obviously merge the other way as to avoid the penalty. So, pointing to mergers as a problem is a intellectually lazy argument.
Or it could be on the Player level. That means the player is in a probation period. I personally like the Alliance one, as the biggest impacted would be those using Shell Alliances.
These actions would be so we can affix a proper War Rating to an Alliance and ensure fair match ups based on War Rating moving forward. There is an issue that some lesser skilled Alliances with low Prestige might get some mismatches for a couple of seasons until their War Rating adequately reflects their ability. This is an unfortunate byproduct of what seems to be a matchmaking algorithm that was heavily considering Prestige.
We can all agree that Prestige and Alliance Rating is not a sign of skill. We can all pretty much agree War Rating is supposed. How can War Rating be a factor of skill if: 1) It can be manipulated with no consequences. 2) Teams can fight teams with similar War Rating regardless of Prestige or Alliance Rating. If you are Tier 5 and up, the difficulty of the defense you face shouldn’t matter, as your War Rating states you are able to beat thOse odds despite having a smaller or less advanced roster.
Our Alliance is heavily focused on AW, and as QuikPik has shown... we do pay attention to the smaller details like the Alliance Rating and now Prestige of the top alliances in each Bracket. We have been noticing that we are only facing opponents with a 500 Prestige variance, despite being in Brackets that is filled with alliances with much less Prestige. The probability of at least facing one 7000 is pretty much proven to be null, as it has never happened within a bracket which 70-80% above the top alliances having much lower Prestige.
All of us are pretty much saying War Rating should be the ultimate factor, but we do have to acknowledge that Kabam views tanking/shell alliances are an issue. We need to preserve War Rating as a true indication of skill in order for it to be used as the sole factor for matchmaking (as it is being manipulated).
There is zero chance you're finishing P1 after dropping to gold even with a perfect season. This is what I'm talking about, those of you the most vocal about this being as big an issue as you think don't even know what was being done.
That's not even how it works, if you dropped from T1 all the way down to like T4, you're not gonna end up finishing P1 at the end losing that many multiplier points trying to get back to the T1 rating. Not happening
We had one matchup with a sub 10k prestige. We finished Plat 3, rank 152. We had matchups with alliances 466 and 600 spots away from us(I didn't even look at that until I read this post). We had matchups from plat 1 to Gold 1. Had nothing to do with matching via war rating and fighting the allies around us on the leaderboard. Was all based on fighting allies based on prestige.
Like I said before. I think this system was created to stop shelling. I think that's absolutely amazing. But you need to turn that system off at a certain war rating. You can't allow a 9000 prestige alliance taking home master rewards if they never fought any alliance over 9300 prestige. That's just not fair.
DNA, I am saying this with all due respect, but you are knitpicking on technicalities on the words people are using. It comes off a repugnant and demeaning
What you call "nit-picking technicalities" is the literal reason we have this problem. It is literally to blame for the situation we're in. If you think you can use the same argument that got us here to get us anywhere else, by all means have a ball.
DNA, I am saying this with all due respect, but you are knitpicking on technicalities on the words people are using. It comes off a repugnant and demeaning
What you call "nit-picking technicalities" is the literal reason we have this problem. It is literally to blame for the situation we're in. If you think you can use the same argument that got us here to get us anywhere else, by all means have a ball.
QuikPik has been very through, but you are ignoring some of his points and focusing on one line from a previous post he already addressed. You have not adapted to the conversation and keep talking around in circles even after he stated that he misspoken about alliances not being in the tier not being skilled to be there.
There is no proof that low prestige alliances are fight, as it is not happening. How many alliances members have stated this in the thread? Quik now even offers proof to that... but you focus on the data he originally providing not support this theory.
You come across as arguing for the sake of arguing instead of politely discussing the matter by ignoring the multitude of claims. Quik has now given the last ten match, which I can attest to as he is my alliance leader. Another member of a different alliance provided there findings, and it concurs.
Another poster in this thread gave theirs, and it shows that alliances are within a very narrow prestige. It is happening regardless of the original post. Your claims that they are skilled enough to in Platinum or Gold is falling flat, as they are not openly competing for spots with others in the same brackets. Their War Ratings are putting them in bracket they most likely cannot compete against the higher prestige alliances.
The only other solution is to separate season based on Prestige, otherwise more Alliance are going to start walking away from Wars. It is not rewarding players who worked hard for there rosters and spent years working hard to get better at the game. It is better to make a F2P account with a 4 year veteran’s experience playing and do AW, as you can easily qualify for Platinum and Gold level rewards with minimal effort.
Meanwhile, beating content like LoL, Act 6, Variants, etc and having a good roster penalizes you to much harder schedules. Even if you semi-retire, you can just join a 7000 Prestige Alliance with a 10k account and make things super hard for other 7000 alliance and reap the benefits of Plat- Gold.
Simply having a great roster doesn’t mean the players are skilled either. They may have an advantage of a better defense, but what if they only focused on Offense? Their defense may be lacking. Regardless of prestige, we should be looking at War Rating and making that the basis of matchmaking. It is the only thing that can reflect skill, provide Kabam addresses the issue with Shells/Tanking.
What I don't understand is how this happens when tier multipliers are a thing. Even if matchmaking is working in such a way that "weak" alliances only play"weak" alliances, those wars are still played at a low war tier, which means a low multiplier is attached to the points derived from the war. So an alliance losing the majority of wars at tier 8 should still place higher than an alliance winning the majority of wars at tier 13. I'm not questioning that it happened; it clearly did, and is outrageous. I just don't understand how it happens when wars at lower tiers are worth, effectively, fewer points. Perhaps if the multipliers were more different, this system might work?
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
How do you think tanking actually affected anything? You seriously think people were tanking from T1 down to T3 and still making it back to T1 and placing Master? That wasnt happening bc the numbers don't add up. No one was dropping outside their placed tier, you couldn't afford the lower multiplier to start with.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
Dude, tanking is a huge issue and mostly happens within T3-T5. If it wasn’t an issue, Kabam would not said so and would not have frozen War Rating between Seasons for the top five tiers. You are arguing for the sake of arguing on an aspect of the game that you yourself stated you do not care about, so I doubt you have spent time analyzing and understanding what is happening.
We are not talking about master. The lower Platinum and top Gold are the most impacted by shell alliances (and previously tanking). A Platinum 1-2 Alliance would drop their War Rating (or now swap to an alliance with a lower one) as to start in low Gold 1 or high Gold 2. This would put them against Alliances that were less skilled (due to lower War Rating) for the first handful of matches and cost less in Pots and Revives. They can clear maps against inferior defenses and skill level with almost no deaths and rack up points for all wins for the first 5-6 matches. They would find themselves in Platinum 1-2 with a good chance at ending there, as they pad their wins earlier in the Season against inferior Alliances. This pushes normally Gold 1 teams to Gold 2 due shell/tanking alliances and solidifies the Platinum 1-2 for the team doing the shell/tanking. As the season continues, there is little movement in tiers in the later half as opposed to the first half. This makes tanking/shells advantageous in concreting your ranking at the end of the season by ensuring easier matches at the beginning.
Most of the shell/tanking is in middle tiers, and always has been. Kabam has acknowledged the issue and has been chasing a fix ever since. They locked War Rating, which gave birth to Shell Alliances. Now they are chasing Prestige matchmaking in order to compensate for Shells. However, this creates a disjointed leaderboard where teams that never face one another will achieve ranks within low Platinum and Gold because of matchmaking not allowing huge Prestige deficits. It is artificially raising War Rating of higher skilled alliances with low Prestige by preventing them from facing matches of higher Prestige Alliances in the same bracket.
This all came about because of Tanking, and later Shell Alliances... Kabam views this as an issue. Simply going to War Rating only promotes Shell Alliances and will allow the practice to continue. Instead, Kabam needs to look at penalties for swapping alliances. This can be on a player level or for the whole alliance. If on the whole alliance, it could be if there is greater than 60% change in a roster within the off season... if so, the alliance cannot gain AW rank rewards. If there is an honest merger, there is hardly above a 60% change in membership. If there is a greater than 60%, they can obviously merge the other way as to avoid the penalty. So, pointing to mergers as a problem is a intellectually lazy argument.
Or it could be on the Player level. That means the player is in a probation period. I personally like the Alliance one, as the biggest impacted would be those using Shell Alliances.
These actions would be so we can affix a proper War Rating to an Alliance and ensure fair match ups based on War Rating moving forward. There is an issue that some lesser skilled Alliances with low Prestige might get some mismatches for a couple of seasons until their War Rating adequately reflects their ability. This is an unfortunate byproduct of what seems to be a matchmaking algorithm that was heavily considering Prestige.
We can all agree that Prestige and Alliance Rating is not a sign of skill. We can all pretty much agree War Rating is supposed. How can War Rating be a factor of skill if: 1) It can be manipulated with no consequences. 2) Teams can fight teams with similar War Rating regardless of Prestige or Alliance Rating. If you are Tier 5 and up, the difficulty of the defense you face shouldn’t matter, as your War Rating states you are able to beat thOse odds despite having a smaller or less advanced roster.
Our Alliance is heavily focused on AW, and as QuikPik has shown... we do pay attention to the smaller details like the Alliance Rating and now Prestige of the top alliances in each Bracket. We have been noticing that we are only facing opponents with a 500 Prestige variance, despite being in Brackets that is filled with alliances with much less Prestige. The probability of at least facing one 7000 is pretty much proven to be null, as it has never happened within a bracket which 70-80% above the top alliances having much lower Prestige.
All of us are pretty much saying War Rating should be the ultimate factor, but we do have to acknowledge that Kabam views tanking/shell alliances are an issue. We need to preserve War Rating as a true indication of skill in order for it to be used as the sole factor for matchmaking (as it is being manipulated).
There is zero chance you're finishing P1 after dropping to gold even with a perfect season. This is what I'm talking about, those of you the most vocal about this being as big an issue as you think don't even know what was being done.
That's not even how it works, if you dropped from T1 all the way down to like T4, you're not gonna end up finishing P1 at the end losing that many multiplier points trying to get back to the T1 rating. Not happening
Says the man that does care about war and hasn’t for some time. Tell me oh wise one... how does it 100% work with tanking/shell. I never said I knew for a fact, I was giving an example of what is happening. It could be they end in low a Platinum 2 to high Platinum 3. Regardless, shell alliances happen.
Stop being so condescending (which you have been when you stated people were dumb) and be a little more intellectually honest.
And if tanking has done “nothing”, why did Kabam prevent it from T1 to T5... Kabam’s direct actions to prevent tanking contradict your conclusion. Nuff said.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
To be fair you guys and the like did just tank so that you didn’t get fair matches. I still like the old system better but the crying was much less of an offense as the tanking. If the spirit of competition was at all important
I dont care about war at all personally nor have I in a very long time. I've never played in an alliance pushing for master as I never thought the effort was worth it. I just don't think tanking ever actually
It used to be that way but people manipulated the system by tanking during the off season.
Could someone elaborate on this? What was the purpose of tanking in the off season? I think WR makes the most sense but this bit here is throwing me because wouldn't tanking your WR just ensure you get less rewards?
About 6 seasons ago, War Rating would change in off season based on wins and losses. Top alliances would tank their rating, as it would determine the type of teams they would face when the new season opened. Because War Rating was mainly used for matchmaking, the top alliances would face gold and platinum (much low skilled teams for the first few matches). This would allow the top alliance to face lower tiers for quick and cheap wins instead of facing other tougher alliances and much higher end points and ranking when the Season was over.
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.
Disqualifying alliances for large changes is beyond dumb. There are still things like mergers and partial disbands that happen that could have huge effects on war ratings and prestige
First, instead off straight saying it is dumb, give an alternative. You need to solve for both shell alliances and tanking in off season. Mergers do happen, and it would be collateral damage. However, there was restrictions to AQ rewards for new members, so this mechanic was not alien. You are not solving for shell alliance an will allow mismatches based on skill which is causing Kabam to factor Prestige. It is not like I haven’t thought of that and it is arrogant to comment as if I hadn’t.
Using prestige at all for matches makes no sense. War rating is the only thing that should be getting used but you all cried about tanking until we got this broken mess.
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
I agree, but the leaderboards for Season AW support this theory. My alliance never had a match above or below 500 in prestige all season.
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
It is though I'm sorry. You guys keep wanting to fix problems that aren't even serious problems and the fix just makes things worse every single time.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
If you don’t care about AW, then don’t reply on an AW thread. You do not have a dog to hunt in the conversation and would have very little to contribute. Tanking makes a huge difference, as it is Alliance manipulating the system for the greatest benefit to themselves. It is practically cheating, but because it is allowed within the current meta... it is often wrongful viewed as ethical. It isn’t.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
How do you think tanking actually affected anything? You seriously think people were tanking from T1 down to T3 and still making it back to T1 and placing Master? That wasnt happening bc the numbers don't add up. No one was dropping outside their placed tier, you couldn't afford the lower multiplier to start with.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
Dude, tanking is a huge issue and mostly happens within T3-T5. If it wasn’t an issue, Kabam would not said so and would not have frozen War Rating between Seasons for the top five tiers. You are arguing for the sake of arguing on an aspect of the game that you yourself stated you do not care about, so I doubt you have spent time analyzing and understanding what is happening.
We are not talking about master. The lower Platinum and top Gold are the most impacted by shell alliances (and previously tanking). A Platinum 1-2 Alliance would drop their War Rating (or now swap to an alliance with a lower one) as to start in low Gold 1 or high Gold 2. This would put them against Alliances that were less skilled (due to lower War Rating) for the first handful of matches and cost less in Pots and Revives. They can clear maps against inferior defenses and skill level with almost no deaths and rack up points for all wins for the first 5-6 matches. They would find themselves in Platinum 1-2 with a good chance at ending there, as they pad their wins earlier in the Season against inferior Alliances. This pushes normally Gold 1 teams to Gold 2 due shell/tanking alliances and solidifies the Platinum 1-2 for the team doing the shell/tanking. As the season continues, there is little movement in tiers in the later half as opposed to the first half. This makes tanking/shells advantageous in concreting your ranking at the end of the season by ensuring easier matches at the beginning.
Most of the shell/tanking is in middle tiers, and always has been. Kabam has acknowledged the issue and has been chasing a fix ever since. They locked War Rating, which gave birth to Shell Alliances. Now they are chasing Prestige matchmaking in order to compensate for Shells. However, this creates a disjointed leaderboard where teams that never face one another will achieve ranks within low Platinum and Gold because of matchmaking not allowing huge Prestige deficits. It is artificially raising War Rating of higher skilled alliances with low Prestige by preventing them from facing matches of higher Prestige Alliances in the same bracket.
This all came about because of Tanking, and later Shell Alliances... Kabam views this as an issue. Simply going to War Rating only promotes Shell Alliances and will allow the practice to continue. Instead, Kabam needs to look at penalties for swapping alliances. This can be on a player level or for the whole alliance. If on the whole alliance, it could be if there is greater than 60% change in a roster within the off season... if so, the alliance cannot gain AW rank rewards. If there is an honest merger, there is hardly above a 60% change in membership. If there is a greater than 60%, they can obviously merge the other way as to avoid the penalty. So, pointing to mergers as a problem is a intellectually lazy argument.
Or it could be on the Player level. That means the player is in a probation period. I personally like the Alliance one, as the biggest impacted would be those using Shell Alliances.
These actions would be so we can affix a proper War Rating to an Alliance and ensure fair match ups based on War Rating moving forward. There is an issue that some lesser skilled Alliances with low Prestige might get some mismatches for a couple of seasons until their War Rating adequately reflects their ability. This is an unfortunate byproduct of what seems to be a matchmaking algorithm that was heavily considering Prestige.
We can all agree that Prestige and Alliance Rating is not a sign of skill. We can all pretty much agree War Rating is supposed. How can War Rating be a factor of skill if: 1) It can be manipulated with no consequences. 2) Teams can fight teams with similar War Rating regardless of Prestige or Alliance Rating. If you are Tier 5 and up, the difficulty of the defense you face shouldn’t matter, as your War Rating states you are able to beat thOse odds despite having a smaller or less advanced roster.
Our Alliance is heavily focused on AW, and as QuikPik has shown... we do pay attention to the smaller details like the Alliance Rating and now Prestige of the top alliances in each Bracket. We have been noticing that we are only facing opponents with a 500 Prestige variance, despite being in Brackets that is filled with alliances with much less Prestige. The probability of at least facing one 7000 is pretty much proven to be null, as it has never happened within a bracket which 70-80% above the top alliances having much lower Prestige.
All of us are pretty much saying War Rating should be the ultimate factor, but we do have to acknowledge that Kabam views tanking/shell alliances are an issue. We need to preserve War Rating as a true indication of skill in order for it to be used as the sole factor for matchmaking (as it is being manipulated).
There is zero chance you're finishing P1 after dropping to gold even with a perfect season. This is what I'm talking about, those of you the most vocal about this being as big an issue as you think don't even know what was being done.
That's not even how it works, if you dropped from T1 all the way down to like T4, you're not gonna end up finishing P1 at the end losing that many multiplier points trying to get back to the T1 rating. Not happening
Says the man that does care about war and hasn’t for some time. Tell me oh wise one... how does it 100% work with tanking/shell. I never said I knew for a fact, I was giving an example of what is happening. It could be they end in low a Platinum 2 to high Platinum 3. Regardless, shell alliances happen.
Stop being so condescending (which you have been when you stated people were dumb) and be a little more intellectually honest.
And if tanking has done “nothing”, why did Kabam prevent it from T1 to T5... Kabam’s direct actions to prevent tanking contradict your conclusion. Nuff said.
I never said you were dumb, I don't know you anywhere near well enough to even begin to make that claim. I did say your idea of penalizing large changes in alliances or individuals when they move was though.
Just bc they made a change to address an issue doesn't mean what they addressed was actually having an effect on anything. It's completely possible that just enough people made enough noise about it that they addressed it as it obviously didn't look good and wasn't "in the spirit of competition". That's far from proof that tanking was having any legitimate effect on final placements though. It's just an easy scapegoat for people to blame poor seasons on.
I also certainly never said shell alliances aren't happening as I'm more than aware they are. I just don't think they, or tanking for that matter, have near the actual impact that a lot of people claim. It's far more beneficial to have more wars at a higher multiplier than "easier" wars at a lower multiplier. Since that's the case, no one with any sense is going to tank much less than the bottom of the tier they would typically finish in anyway and worst case scenario spend one or two wars in one lower tier which is still risky as you have a lower multiplier even if you do win
Certainly, no one with any sense is lowering their rating down multiple tiers as the benefit from having those early wins would be less than losing with the multiplier 2 tiers higher
DNA, I am saying this with all due respect, but you are knitpicking on technicalities on the words people are using. It comes off a repugnant and demeaning
What you call "nit-picking technicalities" is the literal reason we have this problem. It is literally to blame for the situation we're in. If you think you can use the same argument that got us here to get us anywhere else, by all means have a ball.
QuikPik has been very through, but you are ignoring some of his points and focusing on one line from a previous post he already addressed. You have not adapted to the conversation and keep talking around in circles even after he stated that he misspoken about alliances not being in the tier not being skilled to be there.
Says the person quoting a post from five days prior. If people are analyzing wars to determine the prestige range of matches, that's great. That is literally where I said the discussion should go except apparently it is a technicality when I suggest it, but admirable when other people actually do it.
One more technicality to go. When you prove that alliances are being matched by both war rating and alliance rating, if you assume that's true for all alliances you now have to say that's not fair, they should be matched against alliances regardless of alliance rating (or prestige) because that would be more fair as opposed to less fair.
And to be honest, this is something I thought @QuikPik and I were basically in agreement on. I don't know what bee got in your bonnet, but absent a statement from him, I'm going to assume this is entirely a you-thing, and not any misunderstanding between he and I.
The only "proof" that tanking had any effect on anything is that lots of alliances did it. You could just as easily reason that bc alliances saw other alliances doing it, they assumed it had some legitimate effect and just jumped on the bandwagon so as to not "miss out on the advantage" just in case.
I have no more proof that it didn't affect anything than anyone does that it did. All I have is anecdotal "evidence" that while playing in alliances that did both I personally saw no difference. From my experience you were no less likely to get some bad matches in a season you tanked in than one you didn't and more often than not our alliance would place around the same rankings barring an outlier here or there that worked to benefit the arguement for either side
Certainly, no one with any sense is lowering their rating down multiple tiers as the benefit from having those early wins would be less than losing with the multiplier 2 tiers higher
It depends. Multipliers have been different in the past, but let's just use the current numbers. The multiplier at tier 1 is 8x, 7x at tier 2, and 6x at tier 3. A perfect 100% war generates about 150k points (depending on attack bonus). 50k victory bonus means an alliance that wins about half the time generates about 175k raw points. That's 1.4 million at tier 1, 1.225M at tier 2, and 1.05M at tier 3. But an alliance that wins every war can average closer to 200k raw points, which is 1.6M at tier 1, 1.4M at tier 2, and 1.2M at tier 3. So at the very top if you can tank your way to the bottom of tier 2 you could be near 200th place in rankings and still theoretically perform as well as an alliance at the top of tier 1. That's one multiplier lower, but almost two tiers of separation.
Could you be two whole tiers lower and still earn more points? Theoretically it is possible: 200/175 ~= 1.14. So we're looking for two tiers that are two tiers apart and whose multipliers are closer together than 1.14. And there are tiers like that. Tier 6 and 8 are separated by 1.13. Tiers 13 and 15 are separated by 1.11. Tiers 7 and 9 are separated by precisely the same ratio: 1.14.
So the idea is if your "natural" tier is X, if you can tank yourself down to the very bottom of tier X+1, you would be more than one full tier away from your natural tier and thus more likely to get easier matches, and if you win them all you would score more points than normal. At certain tiers you could even tank two whole tiers lower and still get the same advantage.
There's one more advantage in the math: the number of wins matters, but the order of wins and losses matters also. Winning at the beginning and losing at the end generates more points than losing at the beginning and winning at the end (because you'd rather have your multiplier go up then down rather than the reverse). So even if the only thing tanking does is shift your wins to the beginning, that can be worth a material number of points.
Because winning changes rating (and thus tier) the mechanics of this are more complicated than described, but the math says if done correctly it is possible in some situations to generate a material advantage doing this.
I don't understand these arguments about skill. Surely war is still about skill. Matchmaking is based on prestige but the most skilled alliances of their prestige banding reach the top. If you take war seriously, have high prestige and are stuck in gold 2, that has little to do with matchmaking imo. It means your ally has gold 2 war skills relative to your prestige.
No for some alliance it's nothing about skill anymore. There are many alliances with small rosters in platinum and gold. Let's say if you are skilled enough to clear all battlegroups with no death then certainly your opponent can do the same because their job is much much easier. At best It will end up as a tie same as a loss. With many ties you can not keep staying at higher bracket.
Comments
A major league team has a tough season against the other major league teams and loses all/most of their games and finishes last.
A little league team has a hell of a season and crushes all the other little league teams.
Do you give the winning little league team major league salary’s because they won all their games and the major league team gets a pat on the back?
No because in almost all scenarios the major league team is gonna wipe the floor if the played that little league team.
And let’s just say there is a miracle and the little league team beats them. Well that’s a different story but how will we ever know if they never play each other??
That’s the way I see the current war system. It sucks because the end of season rewards are not accurately reflecting how good the alliances actually are in relation to all other alliances around them
Kabam seems to be doing this to solve for the complaints of shell alliances (which does the same thing as tanking, but utilizes 2+ alliances). I know you may not like giving a waiting period of one full AW season for large increases, but you can do it at the individual level for the person joining. Any new members need to wait one full season before being able to receive rewards. It would hurt jumpers mid-season, and gives mergers time to make adjust to the new players.
You do not have to collect rewards immediately when joining a new alliance, and years ago, this was the case. So, acting like this is stupid is quite dishonest. Kabam decreased the penalty when they allowed tanking. This inadvertently promoted shell alliances when the reduced the restrictions on rewards to new members.
It is not that I like the opinion, but it is needed to make sure things are fair. War Rating can be manipulated, so until you solve for that... penalizing new members is really the only option.
QuikPik does mean that if they are able to fight in the bracket, the lower prestige team should fight their opponents.
While the data QuikPik has given in the charts doesn’t show the low prestige teams are not fighting, I have a video on YouTube that shows we have not had a match with greater than a 500 Prestige all AW Season. We ended in Gold 2 and have 2000+ Prestige compared most alliances in the top 50 of our bracket. We were in this bracket for 7 matchups, and not one was more than 500 Prestige difference.
I am sorry, but the alliances are not fighting... Here are our most recent matches... one dropped in Prestige because they lost members:
I can understand a few outliers where they are very good at war but a 1/3 of each tier is taken up by lower level alliances. I doubt there are that many alliances that are great at war that can take down alliances 2k+ prestige or more on a consistent basis to maintain their high war rating.
Weak alliances never matches strong alliances it's becoming ridiculous.
Tanking never made much of a difference. Back when I played in alliances that actually cared about war, we always placed around the same regardless if we tanked or not. It's the same for just about everyone I know. Some seasons you got good and some you got bad matches regardless of what you did in offseason.
No one was placing master instead of P3 or Gold bc they tanked bc no one was tanking outside their normal tier anyway bc losing those points in the first war or two was never worth it.
So go back to matches based solely on war rating and be done with all this. When you start penalizing players for moving (not even they're decision or fault a lot of the time) all you do is make people want to be involved in the game mode less than they already do. Stop breaking things trying to fix things that don't actually have much affect on the game anyway
You will need to force Alliances to stop swapping alliances in order to place in lower brackets before an AW Season... the only thing that would de-incentivize them is loss of rewards for the season placement for the swap for one whole season. It may hurt a merger or a single player, but swaps should only be in the upmost needs when a player is frustrated with their old alliance and is willing to tough it out. It would also make the members more dedicated to and alliance and prevent jumping.
Top, skilled alliances don’t want to lose during a Season, which is why they use to tanked and now swap to a lower alliance during off season. You literally have to force them into playing in the tiers they ended up in from the previous season. They specifically do not want to face each other in the first few matches. I get using prestige prior to establishing the current Season’s rankings, but once rankings are established, then the algorithm should look at the tier/bracket first for matchmaking.
Only in the off chance that an alliance didn’t enter the matchmaking and there is an odd number, should the system look to a lower bracket/tier. It may allow for “mismatches”, but that is the nature of a tournament based system that uses rankings. What happens when a 7000 starts landing in Master. Kabam is only going to kill AW all together and top alliances will just stop aggressively ranking or playing, as their wins will become mute as skill at tackling tougher opponents no longer matters. You have alliances with 6000-7000 Prestige in tier 5 and up that are not facing tier 5 alliances that are in wildly higher Prestige. Why? It is only handicapping their score and by not allowing the lower prestige alliance the opportunity to play a stronger alliance, you are robbing them the opportunity to improve their game play at the sake of “protecting their feelings” from a loss.
At that rate, why don’t we just give everyone equal rewards for AW (much like participation trophies), as skill doesn’t matter. It is only the wins. Skill should always be a factor.
I already said in previous posts in thread that we need to go off War Rating, so you are speaking as if you are adding to the conversation with a fix that has already been discussed. However, the lower Prestige alliances will complain when they face higher Prestige ones, and that will happen with tanking and shell alliances. You need to address War Rating manipulation in order to minimize that happening unless an alliance places obtains a higher War Rating organically by removing manipulation.
I am sorry, but you will need still need to address shell alliances and tanking of War Rating if you go off of War Rating. It needs to be addressed.
Were plenty of people tanking for a very long time? Absolutely. I never saw it have any meaningful effect on anything though.
The reason I'm commenting on war threads when I could not care less about war anymore, is I'm tired of seeing the "fixes" in this game being worse than the issue people invent in their heads that needs to be addressed
We are not talking about master. The lower Platinum and top Gold are the most impacted by shell alliances (and previously tanking). A Platinum 1-2 Alliance would drop their War Rating (or now swap to an alliance with a lower one) as to start in low Gold 1 or high Gold 2. This would put them against Alliances that were less skilled (due to lower War Rating) for the first handful of matches and cost less in Pots and Revives. They can clear maps against inferior defenses and skill level with almost no deaths and rack up points for all wins for the first 5-6 matches. They would find themselves in Platinum 1-2 with a good chance at ending there, as they pad their wins earlier in the Season against inferior Alliances. This pushes normally Gold 1 teams to Gold 2 due shell/tanking alliances and solidifies the Platinum 1-2 for the team doing the shell/tanking. As the season continues, there is little movement in tiers in the later half as opposed to the first half. This makes tanking/shells advantageous in concreting your ranking at the end of the season by ensuring easier matches at the beginning.
Most of the shell/tanking is in middle tiers, and always has been. Kabam has acknowledged the issue and has been chasing a fix ever since. They locked War Rating, which gave birth to Shell Alliances. Now they are chasing Prestige matchmaking in order to compensate for Shells. However, this creates a disjointed leaderboard where teams that never face one another will achieve ranks within low Platinum and Gold because of matchmaking not allowing huge Prestige deficits. It is artificially raising War Rating of higher skilled alliances with low Prestige by preventing them from facing matches of higher Prestige Alliances in the same bracket.
This all came about because of Tanking, and later Shell Alliances... Kabam views this as an issue. Simply going to War Rating only promotes Shell Alliances and will allow the practice to continue. Instead, Kabam needs to look at penalties for swapping alliances. This can be on a player level or for the whole alliance. If on the whole alliance, it could be if there is greater than 60% change in a roster within the off season... if so, the alliance cannot gain AW rank rewards. If there is an honest merger, there is hardly above a 60% change in membership. If there is a greater than 60%, they can obviously merge the other way as to avoid the penalty. So, pointing to mergers as a problem is a intellectually lazy argument.
Or it could be on the Player level. That means the player is in a probation period. I personally like the Alliance one, as the biggest impacted would be those using Shell Alliances.
These actions would be so we can affix a proper War Rating to an Alliance and ensure fair match ups based on War Rating moving forward. There is an issue that some lesser skilled Alliances with low Prestige might get some mismatches for a couple of seasons until their War Rating adequately reflects their ability. This is an unfortunate byproduct of what seems to be a matchmaking algorithm that was heavily considering Prestige.
We can all agree that Prestige and Alliance Rating is not a sign of skill. We can all pretty much agree War Rating is supposed. How can War Rating be a factor of skill if:
1) It can be manipulated with no consequences.
2) Teams can fight teams with similar War Rating regardless of Prestige or Alliance Rating. If you are Tier 5 and up, the difficulty of the defense you face shouldn’t matter, as your War Rating states you are able to beat thOse odds despite having a smaller or less advanced roster.
Our Alliance is heavily focused on AW, and as QuikPik has shown... we do pay attention to the smaller details like the Alliance Rating and now Prestige of the top alliances in each Bracket. We have been noticing that we are only facing opponents with a 500 Prestige variance, despite being in Brackets that is filled with alliances with much less Prestige. The probability of at least facing one 7000 is pretty much proven to be null, as it has never happened within a bracket which 70-80% above the top alliances having much lower Prestige.
All of us are pretty much saying War Rating should be the ultimate factor, but we do have to acknowledge that Kabam views tanking/shell alliances are an issue. We need to preserve War Rating as a true indication of skill in order for it to be used as the sole factor for matchmaking (as it is being manipulated).
The match making algorithm searched across 2 tiers to find matches in their prestige range. Not once did they get matched against a larger alliance that has a similar war rating. All of their matches are within a narrow prestige band.
These are our last 10 wars.
We never got a match against an alliance with less than 9200 prestige even though there are a ton of smaller alliances with the same war rating as us. Look at all these large alliances sitting in Gold 1/2, all we ever do is beat up on another without ever having the chance to face any other alliance outside of our prestige range regardless of war rating.
In the old system, if you had a bad string of wars with a few consecutive losses eventually you'd get matched up against an over achieving smaller alliance because your war ratings were very close. In that scenario, if the smaller alliance won then more power to them. They deserve their war rating. However, if they lost it means they are not ready to play against the larger alliances.
I'd be interested to see other alliances matches at various prestige ranges.
Surely war is still about skill. Matchmaking is based on prestige but the most skilled alliances of their prestige banding reach the top.
If you take war seriously, have high prestige and are stuck in gold 2, that has little to do with matchmaking imo.
It means your ally has gold 2 war skills relative to your prestige.
That's not even how it works, if you dropped from T1 all the way down to like T4, you're not gonna end up finishing P1 at the end losing that many multiplier points trying to get back to the T1 rating. Not happening
We had one matchup with a sub 10k prestige. We finished Plat 3, rank 152. We had matchups with alliances 466 and 600 spots away from us(I didn't even look at that until I read this post). We had matchups from plat 1 to Gold 1. Had nothing to do with matching via war rating and fighting the allies around us on the leaderboard. Was all based on fighting allies based on prestige.
Like I said before. I think this system was created to stop shelling. I think that's absolutely amazing. But you need to turn that system off at a certain war rating. You can't allow a 9000 prestige alliance taking home master rewards if they never fought any alliance over 9300 prestige. That's just not fair.
There is no proof that low prestige alliances are fight, as it is not happening. How many alliances members have stated this in the thread? Quik now even offers proof to that... but you focus on the data he originally providing not support this theory.
You come across as arguing for the sake of arguing instead of politely discussing the matter by ignoring the multitude of claims. Quik has now given the last ten match, which I can attest to as he is my alliance leader. Another member of a different alliance provided there findings, and it concurs.
Another poster in this thread gave theirs, and it shows that alliances are within a very narrow prestige. It is happening regardless of the original post. Your claims that they are skilled enough to in Platinum or Gold is falling flat, as they are not openly competing for spots with others in the same brackets. Their War Ratings are putting them in bracket they most likely cannot compete against the higher prestige alliances.
The only other solution is to separate season based on Prestige, otherwise more Alliance are going to start walking away from Wars. It is not rewarding players who worked hard for there rosters and spent years working hard to get better at the game. It is better to make a F2P account with a 4 year veteran’s experience playing and do AW, as you can easily qualify for Platinum and Gold level rewards with minimal effort.
Meanwhile, beating content like LoL, Act 6, Variants, etc and having a good roster penalizes you to much harder schedules. Even if you semi-retire, you can just join a 7000 Prestige Alliance with a 10k account and make things super hard for other 7000 alliance and reap the benefits of Plat- Gold.
Simply having a great roster doesn’t mean the players are skilled either. They may have an advantage of a better defense, but what if they only focused on Offense? Their defense may be lacking. Regardless of prestige, we should be looking at War Rating and making that the basis of matchmaking. It is the only thing that can reflect skill, provide Kabam addresses the issue with Shells/Tanking.
Stop being so condescending (which you have been when you stated people were dumb) and be a little more intellectually honest.
And if tanking has done “nothing”, why did Kabam prevent it from T1 to T5... Kabam’s direct actions to prevent tanking contradict your conclusion. Nuff said.
Just bc they made a change to address an issue doesn't mean what they addressed was actually having an effect on anything. It's completely possible that just enough people made enough noise about it that they addressed it as it obviously didn't look good and wasn't "in the spirit of competition". That's far from proof that tanking was having any legitimate effect on final placements though. It's just an easy scapegoat for people to blame poor seasons on.
I also certainly never said shell alliances aren't happening as I'm more than aware they are. I just don't think they, or tanking for that matter, have near the actual impact that a lot of people claim. It's far more beneficial to have more wars at a higher multiplier than "easier" wars at a lower multiplier. Since that's the case, no one with any sense is going to tank much less than the bottom of the tier they would typically finish in anyway and worst case scenario spend one or two wars in one lower tier which is still risky as you have a lower multiplier even if you do win
One more technicality to go. When you prove that alliances are being matched by both war rating and alliance rating, if you assume that's true for all alliances you now have to say that's not fair, they should be matched against alliances regardless of alliance rating (or prestige) because that would be more fair as opposed to less fair.
And to be honest, this is something I thought @QuikPik and I were basically in agreement on. I don't know what bee got in your bonnet, but absent a statement from him, I'm going to assume this is entirely a you-thing, and not any misunderstanding between he and I.
I have no more proof that it didn't affect anything than anyone does that it did. All I have is anecdotal "evidence" that while playing in alliances that did both I personally saw no difference. From my experience you were no less likely to get some bad matches in a season you tanked in than one you didn't and more often than not our alliance would place around the same rankings barring an outlier here or there that worked to benefit the arguement for either side
Could you be two whole tiers lower and still earn more points? Theoretically it is possible: 200/175 ~= 1.14. So we're looking for two tiers that are two tiers apart and whose multipliers are closer together than 1.14. And there are tiers like that. Tier 6 and 8 are separated by 1.13. Tiers 13 and 15 are separated by 1.11. Tiers 7 and 9 are separated by precisely the same ratio: 1.14.
So the idea is if your "natural" tier is X, if you can tank yourself down to the very bottom of tier X+1, you would be more than one full tier away from your natural tier and thus more likely to get easier matches, and if you win them all you would score more points than normal. At certain tiers you could even tank two whole tiers lower and still get the same advantage.
There's one more advantage in the math: the number of wins matters, but the order of wins and losses matters also. Winning at the beginning and losing at the end generates more points than losing at the beginning and winning at the end (because you'd rather have your multiplier go up then down rather than the reverse). So even if the only thing tanking does is shift your wins to the beginning, that can be worth a material number of points.
Because winning changes rating (and thus tier) the mechanics of this are more complicated than described, but the math says if done correctly it is possible in some situations to generate a material advantage doing this.