This is a big problem, alliances are intentionally tanking War rating so they start seasons lower and can move up with relatively easy wins. They will most likely explore 80% to get max exploration rewards and just stop handing you the win. It would be nice to see War rating locked after seasons, so you don't have this happening.
Yeah they could be tanking prior to the season so they can rattle off a bunch of wins when the season starts. Lots of alliances are doing that since in the lower tiers (1-3) your win/loss ratio will be lower. But a tier 2/3 tier dropping down to tier 5 they will most likely be way more skilled and have better defenses then who they will face for the first part of the season when it starts.
Which is really another brand of cheating... I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to face a platinum I alliance in Gold I tier.
Facing a plat 1 alliance is unlikely. However, I see both sides. I understand the Gold 1 alliances issues with this bc the system is designed in the attempts to keep matchups of alliances even. Problem is we all to some extent either have a significant amount money involved or lots of time involved. So its a matter of strategy. What will yield the best outcome for the season?
So in reality a fix to this is locking alliances into tiers they reached during the season. While the offseason would be used to bring in new players and test new strategies rather than just flat out tanking to destoy the weaker competition.
You also have alliances actively getting caught piloting on purpose since thats an automatic 300 point drop in war rating. Players will always find a way to get around the system. Which is just kinda like how it is in life.
I think another way to solve this would be to first and foremost match alliances with other alliances that have similar alliance ratings and not war ratings. You shouldn't be able to match alliances that can flat out destroy you. I understand being dropped into a lower tier because of the automatic 300 point drop, but I don't think that should effect other players in that tier. They should still be getting matched with alliances in the tier they dropped from.
I agree the system still needs a lot of tweaking and to kabams credit they have tried to make adjustments to make it more fair.
So long as its a possibility and not against TOS its a strategy being used. Like Mohammed Ali and the rope a dope.
It is a possibility yes, and not directly against TOS, but then again neither was collusion in wars. It is kind of one of those scenarios that is indirectly against TOS.
Yes, very true and trust me I understand where youre coming from and dont like it either.
Thats why the only solution i can think of is freezing the tiers in off season. Especially since they have made this huge push for the season to matter more then anything in the game right now. The off season should be as such, But thats me taking try to take a fair approach to things. We know people will always find a loophole. So really only option is do your best to close as many as possible. Hopefully its on Kabams radar and post like this can maybe provide them some ideas.
This is a big problem, alliances are intentionally tanking War rating so they start seasons lower and can move up with relatively easy wins. They will most likely explore 80% to get max exploration rewards and just stop handing you the win. It would be nice to see War rating locked after seasons, so you don't have this happening.
BECAUSE THIS. This is reasoning behind doing this.
you DO NOT lose attack bonus. for every defender they didn't place, that's 50 per group, automatically lose points at the beginning of the war. they gave you a huge advantage intentionally so that they can score more points in war season since dropping a tier gives them an advantage as they can find weaker opponent
Yeah they could be tanking prior to the season so they can rattle off a bunch of wins when the season starts. Lots of alliances are doing that since in the lower tiers (1-3) your win/loss ratio will be lower. But a tier 2/3 tier dropping down to tier 5 they will most likely be way more skilled and have better defenses then who they will face for the first part of the season when it starts.
Which is really another brand of cheating... I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to face a platinum I alliance in Gold I tier.
Facing a plat 1 alliance is unlikely. However, I see both sides. I understand the Gold 1 alliances issues with this bc the system is designed in the attempts to keep matchups of alliances even. Problem is we all to some extent either have a significant amount money involved or lots of time involved. So its a matter of strategy. What will yield the best outcome for the season?
So in reality a fix to this is locking alliances into tiers they reached during the season. While the offseason would be used to bring in new players and test new strategies rather than just flat out tanking to destoy the weaker competition.
You also have alliances actively getting caught piloting on purpose since thats an automatic 300 point drop in war rating. Players will always find a way to get around the system. Which is just kinda like how it is in life.
I think another way to solve this would be to first and foremost match alliances with other alliances that have similar alliance ratings and not war ratings. You shouldn't be able to match alliances that can flat out destroy you. I understand being dropped into a lower tier because of the automatic 300 point drop, but I don't think that should effect other players in that tier. They should still be getting matched with alliances in the tier they dropped from.
Oh my god no. You cannot match with alliance rating. It causes tremendous problems. First of all, you end up matching alliances with high ratings against each other even though alliance rating doesn't correspond to ability to win wars. This causes a lot of collateral problems with wildly mismatched wars. And second, alliance rating can be manipulated even easier than war rating. You just dump all your low rated champions and you will have a huge advantage against alliances that play normally and keep all their champions. This then rewards degenerate play, and forces players to decide if they want a huge advantage in war, or a huge disadvantage at the cost of selling off most of their champions.
You cannot force alliances to win, period. If they decide to lose, then they lose. It doesn't offer a large advantage in seasonal points, because losing often enough to significantly affect how strong the competition is also drops multiplier by enough to cost you the points in most cases.
As it is, match making is already factoring in alliance rating on top of war rating, and as other players have discovered, that creates significant match making problems that skew the competition in completely undesirable ways. The correct way to decide how to match competitors is by their ability to win, as measured by their win record. Anything else creates problems.
Yeah they could be tanking prior to the season so they can rattle off a bunch of wins when the season starts. Lots of alliances are doing that since in the lower tiers (1-3) your win/loss ratio will be lower. But a tier 2/3 tier dropping down to tier 5 they will most likely be way more skilled and have better defenses then who they will face for the first part of the season when it starts.
Which is really another brand of cheating... I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to face a platinum I alliance in Gold I tier.
Facing a plat 1 alliance is unlikely. However, I see both sides. I understand the Gold 1 alliances issues with this bc the system is designed in the attempts to keep matchups of alliances even. Problem is we all to some extent either have a significant amount money involved or lots of time involved. So its a matter of strategy. What will yield the best outcome for the season?
So in reality a fix to this is locking alliances into tiers they reached during the season. While the offseason would be used to bring in new players and test new strategies rather than just flat out tanking to destoy the weaker competition.
You also have alliances actively getting caught piloting on purpose since thats an automatic 300 point drop in war rating. Players will always find a way to get around the system. Which is just kinda like how it is in life.
I think another way to solve this would be to first and foremost match alliances with other alliances that have similar alliance ratings and not war ratings. You shouldn't be able to match alliances that can flat out destroy you. I understand being dropped into a lower tier because of the automatic 300 point drop, but I don't think that should effect other players in that tier. They should still be getting matched with alliances in the tier they dropped from.
Oh my god no. You cannot match with alliance rating. It causes tremendous problems. First of all, you end up matching alliances with high ratings against each other even though alliance rating doesn't correspond to ability to win wars. This causes a lot of collateral problems with wildly mismatched wars. And second, alliance rating can be manipulated even easier than war rating. You just dump all your low rated champions and you will have a huge advantage against alliances that play normally and keep all their champions. This then rewards degenerate play, and forces players to decide if they want a huge advantage in war, or a huge disadvantage at the cost of selling off most of their champions.
You cannot force alliances to win, period. If they decide to lose, then they lose. It doesn't offer a large advantage in seasonal points, because losing often enough to significantly affect how strong the competition is also drops multiplier by enough to cost you the points in most cases.
As it is, match making is already factoring in alliance rating on top of war rating, and as other players have discovered, that creates significant match making problems that skew the competition in completely undesirable ways. The correct way to decide how to match competitors is by their ability to win, as measured by their win record. Anything else creates problems.
Ah yes... Good point. I knew there was something I wasn't thinking of... So maybe its time to think about using prestige in war. If war matches were based off of the average of the alliances top 5-10 champions you might be able to more accurately match alliances with one another. The problem that this thread was addressing though was that alliances are tanking before seasons begin so that when they do start they have a long road of wins ahead of them. I don't think that is fair at all to the alliances they face on the way back up to their respective tier. I do like your idea of matching against others with similar win records, but this could also still place high tier alliances against low tier ones, so they would still have to factor in alliance rating, war rating, Average alliance prestige, or all of the above.
Yeah they could be tanking prior to the season so they can rattle off a bunch of wins when the season starts. Lots of alliances are doing that since in the lower tiers (1-3) your win/loss ratio will be lower. But a tier 2/3 tier dropping down to tier 5 they will most likely be way more skilled and have better defenses then who they will face for the first part of the season when it starts.
Which is really another brand of cheating... I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to face a platinum I alliance in Gold I tier.
Facing a plat 1 alliance is unlikely. However, I see both sides. I understand the Gold 1 alliances issues with this bc the system is designed in the attempts to keep matchups of alliances even. Problem is we all to some extent either have a significant amount money involved or lots of time involved. So its a matter of strategy. What will yield the best outcome for the season?
So in reality a fix to this is locking alliances into tiers they reached during the season. While the offseason would be used to bring in new players and test new strategies rather than just flat out tanking to destoy the weaker competition.
You also have alliances actively getting caught piloting on purpose since thats an automatic 300 point drop in war rating. Players will always find a way to get around the system. Which is just kinda like how it is in life.
I think another way to solve this would be to first and foremost match alliances with other alliances that have similar alliance ratings and not war ratings. You shouldn't be able to match alliances that can flat out destroy you. I understand being dropped into a lower tier because of the automatic 300 point drop, but I don't think that should effect other players in that tier. They should still be getting matched with alliances in the tier they dropped from.
Oh my god no. You cannot match with alliance rating. It causes tremendous problems. First of all, you end up matching alliances with high ratings against each other even though alliance rating doesn't correspond to ability to win wars. This causes a lot of collateral problems with wildly mismatched wars. And second, alliance rating can be manipulated even easier than war rating. You just dump all your low rated champions and you will have a huge advantage against alliances that play normally and keep all their champions. This then rewards degenerate play, and forces players to decide if they want a huge advantage in war, or a huge disadvantage at the cost of selling off most of their champions.
You cannot force alliances to win, period. If they decide to lose, then they lose. It doesn't offer a large advantage in seasonal points, because losing often enough to significantly affect how strong the competition is also drops multiplier by enough to cost you the points in most cases.
As it is, match making is already factoring in alliance rating on top of war rating, and as other players have discovered, that creates significant match making problems that skew the competition in completely undesirable ways. The correct way to decide how to match competitors is by their ability to win, as measured by their win record. Anything else creates problems.
Ah yes... Good point. I knew there was something I wasn't thinking of... So maybe its time to think about using prestige in war. If war matches were based off of the average of the alliances top 5-10 champions you might be able to more accurately match alliances with one another. The problem that this thread was addressing though was that alliances are tanking before seasons begin so that when they do start they have a long road of wins ahead of them. I don't think that is fair at all to the alliances they face on the way back up to their respective tier. I do like your idea of matching against others with similar win records, but this could also still place high tier alliances against low tier ones, so they would still have to factor in alliance rating, war rating, Average alliance prestige, or all of the above.
Alliances that deliberately tank their ratings before the seasons start don't have a significant advantage. It requires a very specific and contrived set of circumstances to make this have even a tiny benefit. The problem comes down to the fact that when you are in your "correct" tier - the tier where the competition is, on average, just as strong as you are - you tend to win about half the time. That means tanking to make war easier doesn't have the advantage it might look like. You aren't getting an extra 50k per war, you are, on average, only getting about 25k per war doing that. And you're getting that extra points on a smaller multiplier, and by definition if you are winning all the time you're increasing in rating which means very quickly that winning advantage has to go away. If you guestimate the advantage as being about 25k per war to start (converting 50% win percentage to 100% win percentage) and then that advantage decays evenly as you rise back to your proper tier, the advantage is actually about half of that, or 12.5k.
In higher tiers you'd expect to get at least 120k points win or lose. That point benefit above is thus about 10% increase in raw points. But it is being earned at a lower multipler. Since the difference between multiplier tiers is more than 10% in the upper brackets, this then offers no net points advantage.
You could squeeze a tiny advantage out of doing things like earning as much points as possible while still losing, but not losing enough to drop multiplier tier, then winning back to the top of your bracket again. But this only works if you happen to be in a bracket where you know exactly how many points to score to both lose and not fall behind the other alliances who are also losing. This is non-trivial to pull off. You are more likely to screw yourself out of standings.
The point, though, is that it is impossible to regulate losing: an alliance that wants to lose can lose in a way that is undetectable to any outside observer. But since you cannot tell the difference between an alliance that is losing because it is outmatched and one that is deliberately losing, you have to assume in both cases that such an alliance is in fact outmatched and should be matched against lower strength alliances in the next war. Anything that tries to "solve" this problem will start matching alliances against other alliances they are hopelessly outgunned against. Those losses have to translate into matching against lower strength alliances to get them out of that hole, or that hole becomes inescapable.
Such abuses of game systems are fairly common in just about any game where the player has any way to impact the matching. Its hard to combat since, aside from the most blatant of actions, you can't really tell when an alliance it trying to lose or when they're just having an off day.
Generally, rather than try to play whack a mole to figure out who is intentionally doing poorly and who is just having a bad day, the devs add in some form of self correction to the system. Tanking may give an alliance an easy ride for a couple matches, but as they win, they get pushed up into the tier where they belong again. It sucks for the people getting matched against the alliances that manipulated the system, but early losses just mean you'll get pushed down to where you'll win easily, then bounce back up again.
Such abuses of game systems are fairly common in just about any game where the player has any way to impact the matching. Its hard to combat since, aside from the most blatant of actions, you can't really tell when an alliance it trying to lose or when they're just having an off day.
Generally, rather than try to play whack a mole to figure out who is intentionally doing poorly and who is just having a bad day, the devs add in some form of self correction to the system. Tanking may give an alliance an easy ride for a couple matches, but as they win, they get pushed up into the tier where they belong again. It sucks for the people getting matched against the alliances that manipulated the system, but early losses just mean you'll get pushed down to where you'll win easily, then bounce back up again.
It isn't just a question of those two options being the only gameplay options either. In between going all out and sandbagging, there's the case where an alliance decides to back off and not spend potions or units on a fight and coast because they believe it is in their best interests to do so for that particular war. It isn't maximum competition, but it is difficult to argue that it is in some way "cheating" the game either.
Such abuses of game systems are fairly common in just about any game where the player has any way to impact the matching. Its hard to combat since, aside from the most blatant of actions, you can't really tell when an alliance it trying to lose or when they're just having an off day.
Generally, rather than try to play whack a mole to figure out who is intentionally doing poorly and who is just having a bad day, the devs add in some form of self correction to the system. Tanking may give an alliance an easy ride for a couple matches, but as they win, they get pushed up into the tier where they belong again. It sucks for the people getting matched against the alliances that manipulated the system, but early losses just mean you'll get pushed down to where you'll win easily, then bounce back up again.
It isn't just a question of those two options being the only gameplay options either. In between going all out and sandbagging, there's the case where an alliance decides to back off and not spend potions or units on a fight and coast because they believe it is in their best interests to do so for that particular war. It isn't maximum competition, but it is difficult to argue that it is in some way "cheating" the game either.
True. Trying to say refusing to use items is in some way cheating would be quite hard to defend, especially since items are generally not something you can reliably farm and the cost for revives/heals is fairly high.
I know my alliance generally won't waste items when its a lost cause. We'll stockpile the items for when its a close match and those items make a difference.
Such abuses of game systems are fairly common in just about any game where the player has any way to impact the matching. Its hard to combat since, aside from the most blatant of actions, you can't really tell when an alliance it trying to lose or when they're just having an off day.
Generally, rather than try to play whack a mole to figure out who is intentionally doing poorly and who is just having a bad day, the devs add in some form of self correction to the system. Tanking may give an alliance an easy ride for a couple matches, but as they win, they get pushed up into the tier where they belong again. It sucks for the people getting matched against the alliances that manipulated the system, but early losses just mean you'll get pushed down to where you'll win easily, then bounce back up again.
It isn't just a question of those two options being the only gameplay options either. In between going all out and sandbagging, there's the case where an alliance decides to back off and not spend potions or units on a fight and coast because they believe it is in their best interests to do so for that particular war. It isn't maximum competition, but it is difficult to argue that it is in some way "cheating" the game either.
True. Trying to say refusing to use items is in some way cheating would be quite hard to defend, especially since items are generally not something you can reliably farm and the cost for revives/heals is fairly high.
I know my alliance generally won't waste items when its a lost cause. We'll stockpile the items for when its a close match and those items make a difference.
I agree with this 100%, I hate to use items in war. I guess in this specific case it just feels kinda ridiculous because they placed no champs. They aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are tanking. And in the end I realize it all balances out, so then why tank in the first place? It just ends up frustrating other alliances with the matchmaking system.
Our last war was something similar to the OP’s example, map was half empty and they didn’t even bother to attack... I didn’t mind it, free shards... Now that I see it’s some sort of a strategy I still don’t mind it... War is usually battle of strategies between two sides... Just look at each war as an individual battle that’ll bring victory at the end of the season and realize that sometimes you can choose to lose today in order to win tomorrow. Don’t know why are you all fussing about it... Everyone is free to choose their own strategy as long as it’s not in conflict with TOS and I don’t see how empty map, or not attacking is in conflict with TOS... So as long as our opponents are not using any mods or hacks I don’t mind any strategy, we’ll either win or lose but we’ll sure give our best since that’s how we agreed in our ally and we sure ain’t gonna cry that our opponents chose different strategy... Better whine about bugs in the game than about this...
Comments
Yes, very true and trust me I understand where youre coming from and dont like it either.
Thats why the only solution i can think of is freezing the tiers in off season. Especially since they have made this huge push for the season to matter more then anything in the game right now. The off season should be as such, But thats me taking try to take a fair approach to things. We know people will always find a loophole. So really only option is do your best to close as many as possible. Hopefully its on Kabams radar and post like this can maybe provide them some ideas.
BECAUSE THIS. This is reasoning behind doing this.
you DO NOT lose attack bonus. for every defender they didn't place, that's 50 per group, automatically lose points at the beginning of the war. they gave you a huge advantage intentionally so that they can score more points in war season since dropping a tier gives them an advantage as they can find weaker opponent
Oh my god no. You cannot match with alliance rating. It causes tremendous problems. First of all, you end up matching alliances with high ratings against each other even though alliance rating doesn't correspond to ability to win wars. This causes a lot of collateral problems with wildly mismatched wars. And second, alliance rating can be manipulated even easier than war rating. You just dump all your low rated champions and you will have a huge advantage against alliances that play normally and keep all their champions. This then rewards degenerate play, and forces players to decide if they want a huge advantage in war, or a huge disadvantage at the cost of selling off most of their champions.
You cannot force alliances to win, period. If they decide to lose, then they lose. It doesn't offer a large advantage in seasonal points, because losing often enough to significantly affect how strong the competition is also drops multiplier by enough to cost you the points in most cases.
As it is, match making is already factoring in alliance rating on top of war rating, and as other players have discovered, that creates significant match making problems that skew the competition in completely undesirable ways. The correct way to decide how to match competitors is by their ability to win, as measured by their win record. Anything else creates problems.
Ah yes... Good point. I knew there was something I wasn't thinking of... So maybe its time to think about using prestige in war. If war matches were based off of the average of the alliances top 5-10 champions you might be able to more accurately match alliances with one another. The problem that this thread was addressing though was that alliances are tanking before seasons begin so that when they do start they have a long road of wins ahead of them. I don't think that is fair at all to the alliances they face on the way back up to their respective tier. I do like your idea of matching against others with similar win records, but this could also still place high tier alliances against low tier ones, so they would still have to factor in alliance rating, war rating, Average alliance prestige, or all of the above.
Alliances that deliberately tank their ratings before the seasons start don't have a significant advantage. It requires a very specific and contrived set of circumstances to make this have even a tiny benefit. The problem comes down to the fact that when you are in your "correct" tier - the tier where the competition is, on average, just as strong as you are - you tend to win about half the time. That means tanking to make war easier doesn't have the advantage it might look like. You aren't getting an extra 50k per war, you are, on average, only getting about 25k per war doing that. And you're getting that extra points on a smaller multiplier, and by definition if you are winning all the time you're increasing in rating which means very quickly that winning advantage has to go away. If you guestimate the advantage as being about 25k per war to start (converting 50% win percentage to 100% win percentage) and then that advantage decays evenly as you rise back to your proper tier, the advantage is actually about half of that, or 12.5k.
In higher tiers you'd expect to get at least 120k points win or lose. That point benefit above is thus about 10% increase in raw points. But it is being earned at a lower multipler. Since the difference between multiplier tiers is more than 10% in the upper brackets, this then offers no net points advantage.
You could squeeze a tiny advantage out of doing things like earning as much points as possible while still losing, but not losing enough to drop multiplier tier, then winning back to the top of your bracket again. But this only works if you happen to be in a bracket where you know exactly how many points to score to both lose and not fall behind the other alliances who are also losing. This is non-trivial to pull off. You are more likely to screw yourself out of standings.
The point, though, is that it is impossible to regulate losing: an alliance that wants to lose can lose in a way that is undetectable to any outside observer. But since you cannot tell the difference between an alliance that is losing because it is outmatched and one that is deliberately losing, you have to assume in both cases that such an alliance is in fact outmatched and should be matched against lower strength alliances in the next war. Anything that tries to "solve" this problem will start matching alliances against other alliances they are hopelessly outgunned against. Those losses have to translate into matching against lower strength alliances to get them out of that hole, or that hole becomes inescapable.
Generally, rather than try to play whack a mole to figure out who is intentionally doing poorly and who is just having a bad day, the devs add in some form of self correction to the system. Tanking may give an alliance an easy ride for a couple matches, but as they win, they get pushed up into the tier where they belong again. It sucks for the people getting matched against the alliances that manipulated the system, but early losses just mean you'll get pushed down to where you'll win easily, then bounce back up again.
It isn't just a question of those two options being the only gameplay options either. In between going all out and sandbagging, there's the case where an alliance decides to back off and not spend potions or units on a fight and coast because they believe it is in their best interests to do so for that particular war. It isn't maximum competition, but it is difficult to argue that it is in some way "cheating" the game either.
True. Trying to say refusing to use items is in some way cheating would be quite hard to defend, especially since items are generally not something you can reliably farm and the cost for revives/heals is fairly high.
I know my alliance generally won't waste items when its a lost cause. We'll stockpile the items for when its a close match and those items make a difference.
I agree with this 100%, I hate to use items in war. I guess in this specific case it just feels kinda ridiculous because they placed no champs. They aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are tanking. And in the end I realize it all balances out, so then why tank in the first place? It just ends up frustrating other alliances with the matchmaking system.
Cheers