Alliance Wars Discussion Thread

Hey Summoners!

We've just dropped some information on our next iteration of Alliance Wars, and this one includes some big changes to the Scoring method! Take a look at the announcement Thread and let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/36645/alliance-wars-scoring-update-coming-december-13th

We've closed the last discussion thread, because it references older information that is no longer relevant. You can find that archived thread here: http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/31767/alliance-wars-discussion-2-0/

Comments

Carmel1

is something wrong with war?
last war we were in Challenger map and we lost. for some reason instead of staying in challenger map we just noticed that we are in expert.
how is it possible that you lose and climb up??
we weren't expected this and it screw up our planning.

Omni

Carmel1 wrote: »

is something wrong with war?
last war we were in Challenger map and we lost. for some reason instead of staying in challenger map we just noticed that we are in expert.
how is it possible that you lose and climb up??
we weren't expected this and it screw up our planning.

Yup there is an issue and Kabam wolf is looking into it...we are about to wrap up our expert war with no rewards showing...not holding my breath we get anything

DNA3000

shingbab wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

You will eventually "drift" upward, but much more slowly than in the old system. This is why match making should only be driven by rating. It is "auto-tuning" in a way other systems are not. Its not always easy to see that auto-tuning in effect, but this kind of degenerate case magnifies it in ways that make it a lot more obvious by virtue of its absence.

I suppose it has been done to stop the practice of 'resetting' war rating (i.e all members reforming a new alliance) for easy loyalty that some complained of.
I'm not sure how you mitigate against that, but this doesn't seem right. Alliances essentially stuck in whatever tier they're in.

There are complex ways to address that, but for any of them to work they must not have any lasting effect beyond the first couple of wars. After that, if you don't match by essentially win/loss record, you will trap some people who have no way to alter their win/loss record because they are being matched explicitly against alliances with similar strength. By definition, you can't always win against someone of similar strength. That means you're actually significantly stronger.

I suggested one way to deal with this a while back. The idea is that every player "carries around" their alliance's war rating. So if my current alliance has a war rating of 2000, then so do I. Normally, this is just an invisible thing that means nothing, but when I move alliances, we can use this "personal" war rating to adjust the war rating of the alliance I join. If an alliance with war rating of 1500 drops a player and adds me, we could "guestimate" the war rating of the new alliance by a kind of amortization or averaging.

The alliance has 30 members each with a personal rating of the actual alliance - 1500. They lose one and add me. Now that alliance has 29 members with personal rating of 1500 and one person - me - with a personal rating of 2000. That means the alliance's new rating is [1500 * 29 + 2000]/30 = 1517. No biggie really, and most of the time this doesn't really have a big deal effect. And then when the alliance wins or loses and gains or loses rating, my rating then "conforms" to the alliance and things go on as before.

But when a bunch of players in a 2500 alliance try to reform a new alliance, instead of starting at zero they would actually start at 2500, because they would all carry their personal rating into the brand new alliance and cause it to have an initial rating higher than zero.

To make this work, there are some complexities to deal with and some corner cases to eliminate so it is not exploitable, but I think this or something like this could work to address the issues with players simply forming a new alliance for AW purposes. It seems to "fairly" guess what the new alliance's war rating "ought to be" and also addresses the more general issue of high rated players moving to low alliances and vice versa. When it is just one or two players, it hardly matters because even if their personal rating is super high or super low, they will get swamped out by everyone else. It only matters when a very high percentage of players jumps around to the same alliance or tries to form a new one, which is just a special case of handling jumping around.

Carmel1

Omni wrote: »

Carmel1 wrote: »

is something wrong with war?
last war we were in Challenger map and we lost. for some reason instead of staying in challenger map we just noticed that we are in expert.
how is it possible that you lose and climb up??
we weren't expected this and it screw up our planning.

Yup there is an issue and Kabam wolf is looking into it...we are about to wrap up our expert war with no rewards showing...not holding my breath we get anything

Thanks a lot @Omni
I found the thread.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/43710/aw-rewards-not-showing-under-investigation#latest
^ in case anyone else is looking for it.

World Eater

MikeHock wrote: »

What the hell is going on with AW?

... each BG has 1 hidden defender, Node 49.

Would appreciate some response from Kabam about this.

Why is the defender hidden on node 49 only ?

Is this related to war tier? We've never seen this but this was our first time on the Challenger map.

And if this is intended.... why? Why only this 1 node??

Omni

MikeHock wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

What the hell is going on with AW?

... each BG has 1 hidden defender, Node 49.

Would appreciate some response from Kabam about this.

Why is the defender hidden on node 49 only ?

Is this related to war tier? We've never seen this but this was our first time on the Challenger map.

And if this is intended.... why? Why only this 1 node??

It’s like been like in at least t1-3, idk about anything lower then that.

Irc

Hi im not getting any class catalyst even after participanting in Alliance War or Alliance Quest...

MrMojo

Omni wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

What the hell is going on with AW?

... each BG has 1 hidden defender, Node 49.

Would appreciate some response from Kabam about this.

Why is the defender hidden on node 49 only ?

Is this related to war tier? We've never seen this but this was our first time on the Challenger map.

And if this is intended.... why? Why only this 1 node??

It’s like been like in at least t1-3, idk about anything lower then that.

Wonder what the rationale is behind having a single node be hidden only when you're in tier 1-3. It definitely isn't hidden in tier4 and below.

Omni

MrMojo wrote: »

Omni wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

What the hell is going on with AW?

... each BG has 1 hidden defender, Node 49.

Would appreciate some response from Kabam about this.

Why is the defender hidden on node 49 only ?

Is this related to war tier? We've never seen this but this was our first time on the Challenger map.

And if this is intended.... why? Why only this 1 node??

It’s like been like in at least t1-3, idk about anything lower then that.

Wonder what the rationale is behind having a single node be hidden only when you're in tier 1-3. It definitely isn't hidden in tier4 and below.

I don’t think they know how to fix it. There must be an error in the code somewhere and they either can’t find it or it’s so low on their priority list.

This is what happens when you get lazy and just keep writing over old code.

Yankeespank

Is there any update to synergy working in AW placement yet?

Daddylonglegs93

@Kabam Miike can we get any clarity on why matchmaking is taking multiple hours now on a regular basis? My alliance requeued immediately after each war last week and was only able to play two because of how bad it's gotten.

Greywarden

Synergies not working for defenders.
Left mini still only has one path whereas every other mini-boss has multiple.
Rewards getting updated?

Vdh2008

Greywarden wrote: »

Synergies not working for defenders.
Left mini still only has one path whereas every other mini-boss has multiple.
Rewards getting updated?

Coming soon... with bases

NevvB

Been 3 hours.
Already lost out on a war because we had to wait for a member to receive his aq rewards before having him leave.

Search times have been ridiculously long lately, when we search for a war we search to match our schedules but now the times are going to screw us up.

NevvB

Matchmaking took a total of 3hrs 45 min with a point differential of +109/-21.

Looking like another waste of a week.

MagicBenton

Daddylonglegs93 wrote: »

@Kabam Miike can we get any clarity on why matchmaking is taking multiple hours now on a regular basis? My alliance requeued immediately after each war last week and was only able to play two because of how bad it's gotten.

Agreed, it is taking longer than ever before and if nothing was changed with matching then something is bugged and needs to be corrected.

MrMojo

Let's re-cap.

We had to endure 3+ months of war changing constantly to end up with
Act 5 nodes (thanks oh so much for removing Thorns)
5 mini bosses instead of 3
A map that demands 95%+ completion to unlink the boss
and no increase in rewards

Bang up job, Kabam

DNA3000

MagicBenton wrote: »

Daddylonglegs93 wrote: »

@Kabam Miike can we get any clarity on why matchmaking is taking multiple hours now on a regular basis? My alliance requeued immediately after each war last week and was only able to play two because of how bad it's gotten.

Agreed, it is taking longer than ever before and if nothing was changed with matching then something is bugged and needs to be corrected.

I've heard a report that match making may have been reverted recently to the original version or something similar, because match making seems faster and matches seem to be with alliances with similar war rating and dissimilar alliance rating.

MagicBenton

DNA3000 wrote: »

MagicBenton wrote: »

Daddylonglegs93 wrote: »

@Kabam Miike can we get any clarity on why matchmaking is taking multiple hours now on a regular basis? My alliance requeued immediately after each war last week and was only able to play two because of how bad it's gotten.

Agreed, it is taking longer than ever before and if nothing was changed with matching then something is bugged and needs to be corrected.

I've heard a report that match making may have been reverted recently to the original version or something similar, because match making seems faster and matches seem to be with alliances with similar war rating and dissimilar alliance rating.

They definitely changed something back this week, as we are now matching right away instead of 2-3 hours we were the past several weeks.

ClintBeastwood

DNA3000 wrote: »

MagicBenton wrote: »

Daddylonglegs93 wrote: »

@Kabam Miike can we get any clarity on why matchmaking is taking multiple hours now on a regular basis? My alliance requeued immediately after each war last week and was only able to play two because of how bad it's gotten.

Agreed, it is taking longer than ever before and if nothing was changed with matching then something is bugged and needs to be corrected.

I've heard a report that match making may have been reverted recently to the original version or something similar, because match making seems faster and matches seem to be with alliances with similar war rating and dissimilar alliance rating.

I have noticed the same, matchmaking seems to be pairing us significantly quicker with war rating varying only slightly - But I would watch out hurling such "assumptions" around these parts, people will say a change in matchmaking never actually occurred as no official word from Kabam was realeased...

World Eater

Was there an announcement that enemies would be hidden again in AW? Don't think it was like this in the previous war.

Mags

MikeHock wrote: »

Was there an announcement that enemies would be hidden again in AW? Don't think it was like this in the previous war.

Agreed.. Where was this announcement?
Last war they weren't hidden. We lost that war and did NOT move up in tier, yet now the map is hidden?

Carmel1

Another big F.U from the team
Hiding defenders without any announcement is a total BS
I guess we are back to the days of the Russian roulette, but with harder nodes and harder defenders with less options to counter.

Mags

@Kabam Miike @Kabam Vydious
Can one of you please respond about the sudden map changes? Last war, same tier, the map wasn't hidden.
Was there a change? I've searched the forum and cannot find anything about it.

Amonthir

Really could have used a heads up on this, that reallly changes how we would have placed defenders.

Kabam Zibiit

Hey everyone, sorry about this. We did re-instate having defenders hidden in AW, but had intended to give everyone more of a heads-up before we did so. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone.

World Eater

Kabam seems to be running on auto-pilot

ZzyzxGuy

@Kabam Zibiit

Did y'all also make synergies work again?

Could really use a heads up about this too because that will really affect the next war's placement.

Bosley

Kabam Zibiit wrote: »

Hey everyone, sorry about this. We did re-instate having defenders hidden in AW, but had intended to give everyone more of a heads-up before we did so. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone.

What the heck is wrong with you people? Do you have no one there that checks things before they're released? Issues, bugs, or just plain mistakes seem to pop up on weekly basis from changes that you haven't checked properly.

What's the reasoning behind this ? You owe us that much to tell us the truth. In my mind it's another attempt at a cash grab not enhancing any type of gameplay. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Kpatrix

Miike made a post saying defenders would be hidden AFTER next update, so it looks like you guys snuck in an update without telling us. What else did you change ? Where are the release notes, I guess they will be retro'd to what actually works this time instead of a bunch of stuff that doesn't.