KABAM, what is your AW Match making logic??? Please make it fair and transparent!!!

We are a Plat1 alliance and our AW Match-making does not make any sense to me.

Last season in 12 wars we were matched with 8 master alliances and 3 of them were top 10 alliances. We ended up with Plat1 ranking.

This season after 5 wars, we were already matched with 4 master alliances and 3 of them were in the top 10.

In the last few seasons, 70% of our match making were matched-up rather than matched-down (meaning our opponent is high ranked than us). Please help to make your match making logic fair and transparent and stop bullying alliances such as ours.

Comments

Demonzfyre

This is how matchmaking works. For AW, if it can't match you with someone in your tier, it expands it's search. You're in 3rd place in plat 1 which basically means you're close enough to masters. You play on the same map and there shouldn't be that big of a difference.

It's possible the masters alliances couldn't find a match so it expanded to plat 1. Since you're at the top, it matched with you.

MesutSanchez

If it is just one match, we accept the luck is against us. But 3 top 10 master alliances in first 5 matches of the season? Come on. There are plenty alliances having similar ranking and similar war rating as ours in Plat1 top 10. I don’t accept it is just luck. Or Kabam should consider the match up history to avoid consistent “bad luck” for certain alliances.

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SummonerNR

Just to add a little oddity about trying to have even # of matches against Ally’s above you, as with below you.
And how that is not actually feasible for Ally’s within say the top 20 or 25, or so, of WR.

Let's take the #1 WR team..
They (by definition) can NOT play any team rated higher than them.
Every single one of their wars (provided WR placings are not really changing during season) have to be against teams lower than them.

And, gradually, as you look at each subsequent team down the WR list (#7), you get to a point where, yes, there are indeed 6 teams above them as are below.
But then you're saying they HAVE TO play each of the top #1-6 teams (as well as what would correspondingly be the #8-13 teams too).

Extrapolated out, team #13 would have to face ONLY TEAMS ABOVE THEM (#1 thru 12).
Sort of unfair to them.
**unless they implement fixed season “Leagues” consisting of 13 teams each, and rewards for finishing last in top League would sort of be similar to best team in the 14-26 League. (But that's not what we have)

So instead, if they have some randomness into the matchings, so that the conditions I mentioned above don’t happen, teams that are still close enough to the top get dragged into the upper matching.

Since #1 team can ONLY (by definition) match against teams LOWER than them. (And a coin only has 2 sides to it.)
As you get to some lower teams like 14-25 maybe, they will (by extrapolation) have to (cumulatively) have a disproportionate number of teams where they face HIGHER versus facing LOWER.

In order to make the “grand cumulative” Higher vs Lower of all (approx) top 25 teams (when you include #1-13) come out to an even 50/50.

@DNA3000 , how's this math ?

(Caveat, don’t know if you have been facing an even greater disproportionate share of higher vs lower than what might be calculated out to because of above or not. Just that there *WILL* be some amount of it.)

Lvernon15

I’m in lvt, and yeah us matching today makes no sense, especially when other alliances like ssx are constantly matching p1 alliances, matchmaking is massively flawed currently

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danielmath

Good luck against ssx in your next war!

Demonzfyre

If it is just one match, we accept the luck is against us. But 3 top 10 master alliances in first 5 matches of the season? Come on. There are plenty alliances having similar ranking and similar war rating as ours in Plat1 top 10. I don’t accept it is just luck. Or Kabam should consider the match up history to avoid consistent “bad luck” for certain alliances.

I'm not saying it's not weird or strange by any means. But you are on the cusp of masters as it is. AW has done this for years. I don't know your history with AW but if this is your first time at the top of plat 1, it's why you're surprised. It happens in all tiers and just the way the M.M is supposed to work. If it can't find a match in your tier, it expands.

I just don't know if it was not finding one for you or for the masters alliances.

DNA3000

This is how matchmaking works. For AW, if it can't match you with someone in your tier, it expands it's search. You're in 3rd place in plat 1 which basically means you're close enough to masters. You play on the same map and there shouldn't be that big of a difference.

It's possible the masters alliances couldn't find a match so it expanded to plat 1. Since you're at the top, it matched with you.

Just a reminder: AW does not match on bracket. It matches on rating. The season brackets - Gold, Platinum, Masters - are season point rankings. They have no impact on war matches.

The war match maker is supposed to look for matches on or around your war rating, and mostly within your war tier. So if you are a tier 4 alliance, the match maker should look for matches of similar rating within tier 4. There are a couple caveats here. Suppose that tier 4 encompasses war ratings from 2000 to 2300 (just making up numbers here) and your alliance has rating of 2100. The matcher will try to look for matches in a certain range, say, from 2080 to 2120, plus or minus 20. But if your alliance rating is 2005, it is not going to look in the same range, because -20 is 1995 which is in tier 5. It will try to look for matches in the range 2000 to 2025 (again, making up some numbers here just for discussion purposes). It will still look in that plus or minus range, but also try to stay in the same tier. So alliances that happen to fall right near the bottom of their tier might find their matches biased upward, because there are very few alliances lower than them but still in the same tier.

The other caveat is that tier 1 is itself weird due to ratings density. In tier whatever, there are a lot of 2000 rating alliances, a lot of 2200 ratings alliances. Whatever your rating, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of alliances with the same or similar rating. But when you get to tier 1, that's no longer the case. Tier 1 encompasses a huge ratings envelope of something like 3500 to 4200. There are a few dozen alliances spread out across seven hundred points of rating or more. So you aren't going to actually find a lot of matches nearby consistently, and I believe on top of that the game tries to avoid rematches within a single season. So if there's less than eleven alliances nearby, you're going to have to match against alliances further apart.

it is difficult to say if what the OP is experiencing is unusual, in two senses. First, I'm not sure it is unusual in the sense that this doesn't happen all the time. I hear all kinds of stories about weird match making in tier 1 due to various things the match maker does to try to work at all in that tier, with varying degrees of success. And second, I'm not sure if this is unusual in the sense of some of this is inevitable due to how the ratings are distributed, or it is avoidable but the game is doing a poor job of avoiding it. To be candid, the AW match maker is not something I have studied carefully in a few years.

I did a spot check on ratings in the P1 to Masters brackets just to see how alliance ratings were distributed. My gut instinct is that there is a lot of ratings funkiness going on in tier 1, i.e. things I would not expect to see mathematically. However, my lack of experience with and in tier 1 makes that a very fuzzy assessment.

danielmath

This is how matchmaking works. For AW, if it can't match you with someone in your tier, it expands it's search. You're in 3rd place in plat 1 which basically means you're close enough to masters. You play on the same map and there shouldn't be that big of a difference.

It's possible the masters alliances couldn't find a match so it expanded to plat 1. Since you're at the top, it matched with you.
Just a reminder: AW does not match on bracket. It matches on rating. The season brackets - Gold, Platinum, Masters - are season point rankings. They have no impact on war matches.

The war match maker is supposed to look for matches on or around your war rating, and mostly within your war tier. So if you are a tier 4 alliance, the match maker should look for matches of similar rating within tier 4. There are a couple caveats here. Suppose that tier 4 encompasses war ratings from 2000 to 2300 (just making up numbers here) and your alliance has rating of 2100. The matcher will try to look for matches in a certain range, say, from 2080 to 2120, plus or minus 20. But if your alliance rating is 2005, it is not going to look in the same range, because -20 is 1995 which is in tier 5. It will try to look for matches in the range 2000 to 2025 (again, making up some numbers here just for discussion purposes). It will still look in that plus or minus range, but also try to stay in the same tier. So alliances that happen to fall right near the bottom of their tier might find their matches biased upward, because there are very few alliances lower than them but still in the same tier.

The other caveat is that tier 1 is itself weird due to ratings density. In tier whatever, there are a lot of 2000 rating alliances, a lot of 2200 ratings alliances. Whatever your rating, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of alliances with the same or similar rating. But when you get to tier 1, that's no longer the case. Tier 1 encompasses a huge ratings envelope of something like 3500 to 4200. There are a few dozen alliances spread out across seven hundred points of rating or more. So you aren't going to actually find a lot of matches nearby consistently, and I believe on top of that the game tries to avoid rematches within a single season. So if there's less than eleven alliances nearby, you're going to have to match against alliances further apart.

it is difficult to say if what the OP is experiencing is unusual, in two senses. First, I'm not sure it is unusual in the sense that this doesn't happen all the time. I hear all kinds of stories about weird match making in tier 1 due to various things the match maker does to try to work at all in that tier, with varying degrees of success. And second, I'm not sure if this is unusual in the sense of some of this is inevitable due to how the ratings are distributed, or it is avoidable but the game is doing a poor job of avoiding it. To be candid, the AW match maker is not something I have studied carefully in a few years.

I did a spot check on ratings in the P1 to Masters brackets just to see how alliance ratings were distributed. My gut instinct is that there is a lot of ratings funkiness going on in tier 1, i.e. things I would not expect to see mathematically. However, my lack of experience with and in tier 1 makes that a very fuzzy assessment.

Are you sure war matches by rating? Prior to last season, in lvt we pretty much always knew who we were gonna match. You would never see a 4-0 alliance match a 1-3 alliance even if their ratings are equal. It all got weird last season when ssx was able to avoid matching anyone the first 10 wars and this season where they have been able to do the same so far.

DNA3000

This is how matchmaking works. For AW, if it can't match you with someone in your tier, it expands it's search. You're in 3rd place in plat 1 which basically means you're close enough to masters. You play on the same map and there shouldn't be that big of a difference.

It's possible the masters alliances couldn't find a match so it expanded to plat 1. Since you're at the top, it matched with you.
Just a reminder: AW does not match on bracket. It matches on rating. The season brackets - Gold, Platinum, Masters - are season point rankings. They have no impact on war matches.

The war match maker is supposed to look for matches on or around your war rating, and mostly within your war tier. So if you are a tier 4 alliance, the match maker should look for matches of similar rating within tier 4. There are a couple caveats here. Suppose that tier 4 encompasses war ratings from 2000 to 2300 (just making up numbers here) and your alliance has rating of 2100. The matcher will try to look for matches in a certain range, say, from 2080 to 2120, plus or minus 20. But if your alliance rating is 2005, it is not going to look in the same range, because -20 is 1995 which is in tier 5. It will try to look for matches in the range 2000 to 2025 (again, making up some numbers here just for discussion purposes). It will still look in that plus or minus range, but also try to stay in the same tier. So alliances that happen to fall right near the bottom of their tier might find their matches biased upward, because there are very few alliances lower than them but still in the same tier.

The other caveat is that tier 1 is itself weird due to ratings density. In tier whatever, there are a lot of 2000 rating alliances, a lot of 2200 ratings alliances. Whatever your rating, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of alliances with the same or similar rating. But when you get to tier 1, that's no longer the case. Tier 1 encompasses a huge ratings envelope of something like 3500 to 4200. There are a few dozen alliances spread out across seven hundred points of rating or more. So you aren't going to actually find a lot of matches nearby consistently, and I believe on top of that the game tries to avoid rematches within a single season. So if there's less than eleven alliances nearby, you're going to have to match against alliances further apart.

it is difficult to say if what the OP is experiencing is unusual, in two senses. First, I'm not sure it is unusual in the sense that this doesn't happen all the time. I hear all kinds of stories about weird match making in tier 1 due to various things the match maker does to try to work at all in that tier, with varying degrees of success. And second, I'm not sure if this is unusual in the sense of some of this is inevitable due to how the ratings are distributed, or it is avoidable but the game is doing a poor job of avoiding it. To be candid, the AW match maker is not something I have studied carefully in a few years.

I did a spot check on ratings in the P1 to Masters brackets just to see how alliance ratings were distributed. My gut instinct is that there is a lot of ratings funkiness going on in tier 1, i.e. things I would not expect to see mathematically. However, my lack of experience with and in tier 1 makes that a very fuzzy assessment.
Are you sure war matches by rating? Prior to last season, in lvt we pretty much always knew who we were gonna match. You would never see a 4-0 alliance match a 1-3 alliance even if their ratings are equal. It all got weird last season when ssx was able to avoid matching anyone the first 10 wars and this season where they have been able to do the same so far.

I know it has always done so in the past in tiers below tier 1/2. But as I said, tier 1 in particular is funky because it often can’t do that for lack of consistently finding reasonable matches. It’s entirely possible that there are special match rules in tier 1, or the combination of *trying* to match by rating and some other rules the devs haven’t specified combine to make the defacto match system work observational differently. I’m pretty sure, however, the match maker isn’t supposed to factor in bracket status.

I’m casually aware of the SSX situation, which is why I said I’ve heard all kinds of weird stories in tier 1. That one is the most recent, but not the only story I’ve heard over time. I have no explanation for what’s going on there nor have I heard one from the devs specifically, which is one of the reasons I can’t pass judgment on the OP’s observations. It might be related, it might be something different, it might be evidence the devs are tweaking the match maker at high tiers to solve some problem that surfaced last season, and generating weird results.

MesutSanchez

If it is just one match, we accept the luck is against us. But 3 top 10 master alliances in first 5 matches of the season? Come on. There are plenty alliances having similar ranking and similar war rating as ours in Plat1 top 10. I don’t accept it is just luck. Or Kabam should consider the match up history to avoid consistent “bad luck” for certain alliances.
I'm not saying it's not weird or strange by any means. But you are on the cusp of masters as it is. AW has done this for years. I don't know your history with AW but if this is your first time at the top of plat 1, it's why you're surprised. It happens in all tiers and just the way the M.M is supposed to work. If it can't find a match in your tier, it expands.

I just don't know if it was not finding one for you or for the masters alliances.

Yes I understand your point and how master alliances will be matched against lower tier. I think this logic can be further improved to avoid some alliances being unlucky and always be the ones that matched against higher ranked opponents, which is the situation we are in right now. Or some kind of manual adjustment can be done if such scenarios happen.

MesutSanchez

One refined logic that Kabam can consider is the total war rating or war points of the opponents that each ally faced in a season. This total points can be used in match making to avoid extreme lucky or unlucky situations.

MesutSanchez

I would suggest Kabam to be more transparent on match making. At least show us top tier match-ups or even results for each war. It will also make AW more interesting. Now the feeling is luck in match making is more important than how we play each war. I just don’t like that.