**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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I'd be down for them to make a legit tournament as the last season of every year and in that tournament there's no consumables of any kind and straight ELO and that would be valid and confer actual bragging rights.
As it is today it's just another resource farming mechanism.
Base points for a war x (war tier based on rating) x (y% of prestige of)
Then at least if your stuck in tight wars with other high prestige alliances you'll at least get bonus season points for your hardship.
Could also make it
% of total prestige between the 2 alliances
Or % of opponent's prestige
Just tossing ideas out since obviously they aren't gonna go back to just war rating matchmaking
In lower tiers, you easily have a mix of newer or weaker ally's looking to progress, alongside experienced and strong ally's who no longer take things as seriously. Pitting a 1000-1500 WR ally with Prestige of 7000 would definitely not be fair to match against a similar 1000-1500 WR but only 3000 Prestige ally. The 7000 Prestige ally which is probably just a casual (or not caring about AW) one would step all over the 3000 Prestige ally who might actually be trying to win and advance their ally.
But once in upper Tiers, matchups should strictly be done by War Rating (and playing against those around you in the standings, so long as the matchups are not repeated).
Suppose I "inject" 50 "low prestige" alliances into the 1500 war rating area. 25 of them will automatically become 1560-ish alliances after one war, 12 will become 1650 alliances, and at least one of them will make it to 1800+ *automatically* because they won't get matched against anyone else besides each other or other low prestige alliances that happen to be already there.
If you think that a 7000 prestige alliance is going to probably "step all over" a 3000 prestige alliance, then with random matching (at the same war rating) a 3000 prestige alliance will eventually by chance face one, and they will only get past them if they are very good. But with prestige matching, those 3000 prestige alliances will never face a 7000 alliance ever, so the only thing they have to do is beat other 3000 prestige alliances. If there are enough of them, some of them will get to very high rating because they can't all lose against each other. It is a kind of positive feedback that a two-criteria match system contains: it takes outliers and creates even more extreme outliers.
To put it another way, if you're saying that on average a 3000 prestige alliance is much weaker than a 7000 prestige alliance, then by definition matching based on prestige (for a give war rating) means all the 3000 prestige alliance have statistically easier wars than the 7000 prestige alliances. Any one 3000 prestige alliance might be stronger than any one 7000 prestige alliance, but you're certainly having an easier time overall if all your matches get pulled from the set of all 3000 prestige alliances than the set of all 7000 prestige alliances. Which means matching by prestige offers an unfair advantage to the lower prestige alliances.
But as you say, let’s start out neutral, and half of the teams win and half lose. Then of those winners (who had all climbed a little in WR), now those “winners” play against each other. And then only the 25% who are double winners continue to move up, then they are playing against 12.5% of their similar Prestige ally's. And gets narrower and narrower.
...(acknowledging that occasionally there may be some odd case wars where they are being match against a same Prestige + WR ally that due to shakeups, etc, is on a downward fall, and not part of the narrowing field of rising alliances)...
So by the time lower Prestige ally's start to reach the “Tournament Caliber” Upper Tiers, there are actually not that many of them. But to continue on from there they are now starting to enter the HIGH LEVELS, where as I propose they now would have to actually start playing much higher Prestige teams.
And that is where basically they will be kept, at the edge of that Tier Cutoff (where matching algorithm ignores Prestige). They will most likely lose matches when they are just above that threshold (matched against a high alliance), and when they fall back under then they might again match against a Same-Prestige team (but any of those low-Prestige teams up there have had to at least keep winning against “all other” low-Prestige teams.
But they WILL NOT realistically be able to climb up WITHIN those upper Tiers. It will keep them just outside of that (so long as they are the “best of the best” of the lower-Prestige ally's).
In general you're either going up, going down, or staying roughly the same in war rating. And eventually, alliances rise or fall to a rough equilibrium, at least to a first order approximation. If you face a 1500 war rating alliance it has to be just as good and just as bad as any other - or else you just happened to match against an alliance that is going up or going down. If they aren't going up or down that means by definition they are about as hard to beat as any other. If they are much harder to beat, that means they are going up and won't be there later. If they are much easier to beat that means they are going down and won't be there later.
But it is literally impossible IF you match just by war rating, for there to be unusually strong alliance at a particular war rating that are much harder to beat than any other. Because in a match system where all alliances have a chance to face all other alliances of the same rating, you can't be stronger than your peers permanently. So blockades as you describe them are mathematically impossible.
Ironically, they *are* possible in match systems that match by both war rating and prestige. Because in such a system, it is possible for an alliance to be much stronger than average or much weaker than average than all other alliances at the same rating, because they don't have to face all other alliances of the same rating. The problem you're describing only happens in the match system you're claiming attempts to address that problem.
And not a single comment from Kabam even though KT1, Prof Hoff and RichTheMan made videos about this problem.
For some further testing, I dropped my test alliance prestige from 4000 to 3200 and guess what...all of our matches also dropped down to other 3200 prestige alliances.
Look at the alliance that's master rank 1 now. Overall master rank 4.
They are the same losers I've been reporting here from the start.
I've kicked many of them from my alliance back when my alliance was around 2500 rating.
They can't even complete map 6 without items.
They are a joke. Some of them aren't even level 60.
And they're about to beat one of the top spending alliances in season rankings.
I'm sure players from those top 3 alliances have emailed kabam.
Kabam can't really afford them not playing.
The only time they do something is when it starts affecting their pocket. Everyone knows this by now.
I may be completely wrong but maybe they're finally fixing it.
And you nailed it the first time - matchmaking is completely based on prestige.
I offered a solution here but no one discussed that further.
I think that solution would work well with everyone.
I wonder if that is what it will take for kabam to change matchmaking back to by war rating instead of by prestige.
Green - highest prestige alliance in tier
Orange - alliances where prestige is less than 20-30% of highest rated alliance
Red - alliances where prestige is at least 30% less than highest rated alliance
It's bad when in Plat 2 there's a 4300 prestige gap between the highest and lowest rated alliance. There's only 50 alliances in that tier. In Gold 2, the discrepancy is even worse. There's a 6800 prestige gap here. Yes there are a lot more alliances in Gold 2 but you should not have 4k prestige alliances in the same tier as an 11k alliance. Kabam is saying that an alliance fielding all R3 6* and R5 5* is as good at war as one that fields at best some R4 4*.
Wonder if the apparent change in matching that may have just happened here mid-season will have the full effect in standings by end of this season, or if maybe won’t truly be reflected until end of next season standings.
If Kabam has modified match making in the current season, it won't make much of a difference by the end of the season. The screen shots I saw in another post of 2 top rated alliances by war rating show something like +48/-8 adjustment. Alliances with inflated war ratings are still going to remain in the same tiers if they're only losing -8 in lop sided matches.