Winning causes AW MatchMaking algorithm to fail

LilMaddogHTLilMaddogHT Member Posts: 1,203 ★★★★
@Kabam Miike @Ad0ra_

Would really appreciate if you and your team could help look into this further.

I'm a leader of the alliance 30kU (I need his prosthetic leg) that participates in 1 BG Alliance Wars. Before Season 1, we would have occasions where we would miss getting a 3rd AW match for the week. In Season 1, this occurred more frequently until changes to the AW MatchMaking algorithm were made, according to your post:
http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/51407/regarding-alliance-wars-matchmaking#latest

This greatly improved the match making results where we didn't really have issues finding 3 matches per week.

In Season 2, our alliance pushed hard to make it into Gold 1 with 1 BG wars because we wanted to get the end Season 6* shard rewards and we knew it was possible with the Tier2 points scored with winning. Overall, we went 20 Wins, 2 Losses, and 2 non-matches for the 24 wars in Season 2. ALL SEASON 2, we were in Gold 1. Even after the missed match in war #9 in week 3 of Season 2 we still remained in Gold 1. After that missed matched, I ensured we started matchmaking immediately once it opened up for the week and immediately after each war ended. All was well and matches were found and we kept winning.

The last week in Season 2, week 8, we started matchmaking immediately and it took 3 hours 50 minutes to find a match for war #22. Then it took just over 3 hours for the next match for war # 23. This left under 2 hours to find the last match of the season, war #24 which it never found. After not being able to get any points for the 2nd time in Season 2, it dropped us out of Gold 1 and we ended up at the near the top of Gold 2, ranked #18, short of Gold 1 by 100k points. Any points from the either/both missed wars, even points from a loss, would have been sufficient to remain in Gold 1... This was a BIG blow to guys that participated in 2 months of work/progress to not get Gold 1 rewards which is the first bracket to start rewarding 6* shards (I, myself (LilMaddogHT account), was not one of the Season 2 AW qualifiers as LilMaddogHT didn't participate in any Season 2 AWs - just leading up our show).

Last week, first week in the off-season, before Season 3 starts and I start matchmaking immediately and it again takes 3+ hours to find matches and we missed getting a 3rd match.

This week, I attempt to start matchmaking when it was supposed to open and it was still locked out, I started a thread about the bug and it took about 1 hour 45 minutes before it was opened up to try and then it took 2 hours and 45 minutes to find our match...
http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/79343/aw-matchmaking-still-disabled
While the week is not over yet, I'm sure we will be up against the clock and not find a 3rd match again for 3 weeks in a row.

So while we keep winning our wars, we are being penalized by the current matchmaking algorithm because our war rating (near top 100 now) has gotten too high to deal with the bounds it works in. #1 BG war'n alliance can't consistently get wars anymore... :/

I've submitted multiple tickets to Kabam support to either get them auto-replied to and closed about the state of AW and AW collusion/cheating/etc that doesn't even relate to the issue at hand or one response from a real person stating to start matchmaking sooner and ensure officers don't cancel an existing search and restart. It's not possible to start any sooner and don't have any officer cancelling our searches to just restart.

Apologize for the long-winded post but with AW Season 3 around the corner and it being half as long, 1 missed matchmaking will cost us a bracket of rewards. What can further be done to help improve the matchmaking process?

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Comments

  • LilMaddogHTLilMaddogHT Member Posts: 1,203 ★★★★
    Thawnim wrote: »
    Why not run more than 1 BG?

    Yeah, while 1 BG is 'untraditional', we just have a group of guys that fits 1 BG and not looking to expand and have to manage the extra mess that comes with a full 30 guys. We've been there and done that. 1 BG fits nicely until you win so much you can't even consistently participate in the one of most fun modes in the game.
  • Bear3Bear3 Member Posts: 996 ★★★
    Yeah we run 1 bg in off season and have nonissie finding wars at tier 4-5... pretty sure it’s lack of opponents in the higher tier.
  • LilMaddogHTLilMaddogHT Member Posts: 1,203 ★★★★
    edited July 2018
    Yeah, I realize that the number of 1 BG war'n alliances is far fewer than a typical 3 BG war'n alliance but there are a good number of them. This issue though is about if you are the best of a 1 BG (or 2 or 3 BG alliance) and you consistently win in AW, you play yourself out of getting a 3rd war for the week due to that success because your AW rating gets too high. I don't know what MNG's win/loss ratio is with them being #1 in Season 1 and Season 2, but if they consistently won and their war rating increased, they would run into a similar situation where matchmaking wouldn't get them 3 matches per week.

    We have played up against well matched alliances, sometimes not so much, but there are 1 BG alliances to compete against. In Season 1, our record was not nearly as flawless as we didn't push for wins as hard. We just made a push to win our wars in Season 2 and we won and now our AW rating won't let us match up with those same alliances as frequently now.
  • ThawnimThawnim Member Posts: 1,461 ★★★★
    The problem is though that at tier 2 you are in the top 0.5% for war. Even if we assumed that there were 100,000 active alliances then that means that you are within the top 500. You'd have to hope that 1 of the other top alliances runs only 1 BG too. And knowing how competitive the top tiers are within war I cannot imagine many, if any, alliances taking less points and running a 1 BG war frequently.
  • LilMaddogHTLilMaddogHT Member Posts: 1,203 ★★★★
    I know what you are saying Thawnim but we still get matched up with non-tier 2 1 BG wars. I'm aware of just a few regular 1 BG alliances that are in Tier 2 or close to it. But this is my whole point. While there are a number of 1 BG war alliances in Tier 3/4, etc. which we have played (before season 2, we have lost some of those matches), we are now on a big winning streak and have increased our AW rating so much that we don't get the match-ups anymore to be considered because it's outside of the bounds of the AW matchmaking algorithm, or at least there just isn't enough Matchmaking time to get to allow that match.

    Just because we win doesn't mean those wars aren't competitive and we should never match again or as frequently which is my whole point. When we were in the 1900-2300 range, we got war matches fairly quickly and consistently. Now that we have climbed to 2600+, we don't don't. The overall pool is the same but we just won ourselves out of it to find 3 matches within the 8 hour matchmaking window (11am PST - 7pm PST)...
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  • LilMaddogHTLilMaddogHT Member Posts: 1,203 ★★★★
    I see what you are saying but I don't see that working in general and we aren't into trying to coordinate with other alliances (should be unnecessary to begin with - the Find Match button should do that work for us like it does for everyone else), what some may also call colluding, cheating, whatever anyone or Kabam wants to call it... We just want to have wars to where we won't lose points in a Season and bump us out of a bracket that we can land in if we consistently play well, win and earn the points available to us.

    "hey, let's team up and do a match with the guys that have beating us the last 'X' amount of times..." See what I'm saying?
  • Murd3R_KiTT3nMurd3R_KiTT3n Member Posts: 20
    Season 1 we had a cpl alliances that we seemed to rotate between yet season 2 matchmaking just took way to long to find a match.. And when we won 95% and were in gold 1 for the entire season, not getting those wars that caused us to drop into gold 2 on the last day of war was definitely frustrating. I needed those shards to be able to obtain another 6*
  • Mirage_TurtleMirage_Turtle Member Posts: 1,868 ★★★★
    Matchmaking issue from season 1

    @LilMaddogHT referenced this moderator post from March in his original post, but it's certainly worth revisiting.

    A single highly-rated alliance had this same issue in season 1. Ad0ra specifically states that "main issue was this Alliance’s incredibly high War Rating" and that it kept the alliance from being matched up. That's exactly what is happening to us in 30kU.

    While there were a few bad matches over the course of season 2, please believe that we didn't steamroll our way through every alliance we faced. We had very few lop-sided match-ups, in fact. We had quite a few VERY close matches that literally went down to the final seconds in some cases and we used PLENTY of items over the course of the season (I'm very glory-poor now). I've got to tell you...watching those nail-biter match-ups was a ton of fun. We ended up winning our close ones, but even if we lost, it was a lot of fun working with the alliance to strategize to figure out how we could improve moving forward. If I'm being honest, those close wars are where I derive the most fun from this game by a wide margin.

    We spent all of Season 2 in Gold 1 and we won the vast majority of our matches, mostly against very evenly-matched rosters. However, as shown in the spreadsheet above, the only time we lost any substantial rank was after we failed to get a match. Even if we had lost the 2 matches that we missed, we would have finished the season pretty close to the middle of Gold 1. I can't tell you how surprising and disappointing it was to miss that final war of the season and then watch as our rank slowly slipped out of Gold 1 as other alliances finished up their final war of Season 2. :(

    While I think adjusting the rewards for us the way they were adjusted for the highly-ranked alliance in Season 1 would be incredibly nice, it's not my main purpose for writing this out. I'm concerned about AW moving forward. Already in the off-season, we've had a hard time finding matches. I can't imagine it'll get much better unless something changes?

    Possible solutions?
    -Deliberately lose matches in the off-season to decrease our War Rating to facilitate more matches during active seasons? Losing on purpose doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the Contest and seems a bit manipulative for my taste.

    -Kabam manually scales back our War Rating before each season to facilitate more matches? I'd be open to talking to Kabam about that.

    -Kabam could alter the algorith? Probably the best option, but also probably quite labor-intensive for the programmers.

    -Kabam looks at this on a case-by-case basis just as they did for the Season 1 alliance discussed earlier? They could check our records and make sure we are always starting war as soon as possible and adjust points at the end of the season. This wouldn't displace anyone and would get us the rewards we earned. This option likely strikes the best balance between what is most fair and what is most realistically achievable.

    Is there any chance someone from Kabam could take a look at this? Our support tickets just get an auto-response stating that we should start matchmaking earlier and never cancel it. We start it right away and we don't cancel it. The support tickets get closed. Help? There's certainly a precedent in place and I'd really like to avoid another sour taste in my mouth from what I consider the most engaging mode of the game.
  • Mirage_TurtleMirage_Turtle Member Posts: 1,868 ★★★★
    edited July 2018
    Is there any way @Kabam Miike or anyone else can take a look at this? My alliance mates and I have submitted tickets and we keep getting cookiecutter responses outlining how matchmaking works...which is clearly already outlined in the posts here. These posts were sent in as supplemental material, but I believe they were ignored.

    Can anyone help? We just missed yet another war. I think we're on 3 weeks in a row with no 3rd weekly match.
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