New Alliance Wars Matchmaking System & Season 8 Details

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Comments

  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,832 Guardian
    QuikPik wrote: »
    Assuming attack phase starts at 11am PST which is the earliest any alliance can find a match.

    If you match at 11am PST, your attack phase will start at 7am the next day: 20 hours later (defense placement is exactly 20 hours long, followed immediately by attack phase). Your attack phase would only start at 11am PST if you happen to match at the exact end of the match making phase (which is unlikely) at 15:00 PST (3pm).
  • QuikPikQuikPik Member Posts: 815 ★★★★
    @DNA3000 you are right, I've corrected my post.
  • Daddylonglegs93Daddylonglegs93 Member Posts: 26
    @DNA3000 bless you for finding the @Kabam Miike quote specifically stating matchmaking would work the way Lyra then said was impossible. The issue there isn't just vagueness, it's that Kabam so often issues clarifications that later turn out to be completely wrong, and then they imply we just didn't understand.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    My alliance took this war off....
    And now i al very glad we did...
    Atleast we dont get a nasty suprise....
    Atleast we will go into our next war knowing that kabam have screwed our chances....
    Certainly dont have much hope for 100% the bgs....
  • Crine60Crine60 Member Posts: 1,444 ★★★★
    I believe Kabam mods said if you had new members join alliance after enlistment was activated but before matchmaking occurred they could participate. This is not how it is working. We were adding a bunch of new players after enlistment but before matchmaking and none of them can play.
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  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,832 Guardian
    Drooped2 wrote: »
    Crine60 wrote: »
    I believe Kabam mods said if you had new members join alliance after enlistment was activated but before matchmaking occurred they could participate. This is not how it is working. We were adding a bunch of new players after enlistment but before matchmaking and none of them can play.

    They said you could add members during enlistment. They never said you could add members while enlisted.

    The question was "does it have to be before match making or before enlistment" and the answer was "before matchmaking." In that specific context, I don't see how anyone could assume that this meant "before the match making phase but after the enlistment action." Anyone guessing that would have been correct only by blind luck.

    My interpretation of the full answer "it will be before matchmaking. You can find a new recruit during Enlistment" was that you have the entire Enlistment phase to find new recruits (which is why "Enlistment" is capitalized: it refers to the proper name of the phase, not a generic action) and as long as they are present before the matchmaking process begins you should be fine. That clearly appears to be wrong, but the answer seems to go out of its way to imply that this would be true, since it goes beyond answering the question to emphasize you have the entire Enlistment phase to find recruits.

    The obvious way to state what seems to be happening is "recruits must be members of the alliance before you enlist. You have the entire Enlistment phase to find a recruit, just as long as you find them and add them before the Enlistment phase ends because you must enlist before that phase ends to ensure you find a match for the upcoming war." That seems impossible to misinterpret accidentally.
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  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,832 Guardian
    Drooped2 wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    Drooped2 wrote: »
    Crine60 wrote: »
    I believe Kabam mods said if you had new members join alliance after enlistment was activated but before matchmaking occurred they could participate. This is not how it is working. We were adding a bunch of new players after enlistment but before matchmaking and none of them can play.

    They said you could add members during enlistment. They never said you could add members while enlisted.

    The question was "does it have to be before match making or before enlistment" and the answer was "before matchmaking." In that specific context, I don't see how anyone could assume that this meant "before the match making phase but after the enlistment action." Anyone guessing that would have been correct only by blind luck.

    My interpretation of the full answer "it will be before matchmaking. You can find a new recruit during Enlistment" was that you have the entire Enlistment phase to find new recruits (which is why "Enlistment" is capitalized: it refers to the proper name of the phase, not a generic action) and as long as they are present before the matchmaking process begins you should be fine. That clearly appears to be wrong, but the answer seems to go out of its way to imply that this would be true, since it goes beyond answering the question to emphasize you have the entire Enlistment phase to find recruits.

    The obvious way to state what seems to be happening is "recruits must be members of the alliance before you enlist. You have the entire Enlistment phase to find a recruit, just as long as you find them and add them before the Enlistment phase ends because you must enlist before that phase ends to ensure you find a match for the upcoming war." That seems impossible to misinterpret accidentally.

    I fully agree its phrases wrong. Kabam is vague on these things and offers zero concrete answers. I for one never assumed that while enlisted you could add people to that war.

    I brought that up and I was 100 percent correct

    In retrospect you were right to question the situation, but I'm simply stating that had a moderator point blank answered you to say you were wrong and someone else *still* suspected you couldn't do that, then they'd be right in retrospect and you'd be the one to feel a bit cheated by the answer.

    There's a lot of reasons to be suspicious about adding players *during* the match making phase, but there's actually every reason to believe you could add people during enlistment, because nothing is actually "happening" during enlistment. In fact, now that it appears you can't add during enlistment if you're already enlisted, I feel compelled to suggest that the system be changed so that you *can* add people during enlistment but before match making even if you've enlisted, because there seems to be no reason for that limitation to exist. It only seems to make it harder to time enlistment correctly if you are trying to recruit. You can't recruit up to the last minute, because that endangers you with missing the next war if any sort of hiccough occurs (like, say, unexpected downtime).

    Consider: Kabam is saying you have the entire Enlistment phase to Enlist for the next war so you can recruit during that phase. But I'll bet anything that if the servers went down during the last hour of Enlistment Kabam wouldn't compensate anyone for that. They'd simply say that those alliances had the entire Enlistment phase to enlist, and if they chose to wait to the last minute then that's their fault. But that's an unfair position to take if they are also suggesting to alliances to delay enlistment during recruiting or else the recruits can't participate. We don't have that entire phase to recruit, we have some unspecified subset of that phase that we can never be sure we are about to run out of.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    It is fully inconceivable to even imagine why an alliance cant recruit once enlisted.
    The whole point is so that matchmaking can be done fairly. By knowing who can participate in the war. Nothing happens during enlistment. No calculations or matching or anything are done until matchmaking starts. Hense why its called matchmaking and seperated from enlistment.
    So up until the very second that matchmaking begins it should not matter who u have.
    U should be able to enlist with 30 memebers.
    Kick all of them, re-recruit new ones and still habe eveyone abailable for war.
    It makes absolutely 0 sense why one cant.
    I can only assume that this is a coding error / oversight and will be rectified.
    Otherwise during season you Cannot kick/recruit without running a war with 29 members or miss a war. And that is total garbage.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    Also food for thought to those who say alliance rating means nothing for matchmaking,
    the whole thing about not being able to recruit during matchmaking or participate after wars are started shows that it does matter.
    Alliamce rating, number of members, average member rating, some combination of those must count.
    If it was entirely war rating then it would not matter. As it would mean nothing. So it must come into considration when finding an appropriate match.
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  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,832 Guardian
    MaatMan wrote: »
    Also food for thought to those who say alliance rating means nothing for matchmaking,
    the whole thing about not being able to recruit during matchmaking or participate after wars are started shows that it does matter.
    Alliamce rating, number of members, average member rating, some combination of those must count.
    If it was entirely war rating then it would not matter. As it would mean nothing. So it must come into considration when finding an appropriate match.

    It is entirely possible that the reason why you cannot add during match making is because alliances are soft-locked during match making, because it is during that phase that things like participation are determined. I have no problem with people not being allowed to jump into a war if they are added during match making itself, because that's when actual data is actually changing. But literally nothing is happening during enlistment, because the whole point of the fixed match making window is to ensure absolutely no match calculations occur until everyone who will be participating is known in advance.

    Put it this way. The game could ask everyone to "pre-enlist" which indicates your intent to participate in the next war. You can do this any time during the enlistment phase but nothing actually happens. You can still recruit and make membership changes. But as soon as the enlistment phase ends, all "pre-enlisted" alliances are Enlisted for war automatically by the servers, and the match making occurs.

    This *guarantees* that no alliance that signals their intent to participate accidentally fail to enlist within the window, because you have literally days to do that. But you can still recruit right up to the last second of the enlistment phase without worrying that you might miss it. The system guarantees that all alliances that pre-enlisted are automatically enlisted before match making. Even if the servers die, they will still auto enlist everyone before match making so if match making is delayed by a crash no one misses out.

    This seems trivial to implement. You don't even need to actually make a "pre-enlist" system, this can happen virtually with the right database schema and a tiny amount of data processing. You're just reinterpreting what the "enlisted" flag means. It doesn't mean "enlisted" until after a certain moment passes.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    MaatMan wrote: »
    Also food for thought to those who say alliance rating means nothing for matchmaking,
    the whole thing about not being able to recruit during matchmaking or participate after wars are started shows that it does matter.
    Alliamce rating, number of members, average member rating, some combination of those must count.
    If it was entirely war rating then it would not matter. As it would mean nothing. So it must come into considration when finding an appropriate match.

    It is entirely possible that the reason why you cannot add during match making is because alliances are soft-locked during match making, because it is during that phase that things like participation are determined. I have no problem with people not being allowed to jump into a war if they are added during match making itself, because that's when actual data is actually changing. But literally nothing is happening during enlistment, because the whole point of the fixed match making window is to ensure absolutely no match calculations occur until everyone who will be participating is known in advance.

    Put it this way. The game could ask everyone to "pre-enlist" which indicates your intent to participate in the next war. You can do this any time during the enlistment phase but nothing actually happens. You can still recruit and make membership changes. But as soon as the enlistment phase ends, all "pre-enlisted" alliances are Enlisted for war automatically by the servers, and the match making occurs.

    This *guarantees* that no alliance that signals their intent to participate accidentally fail to enlist within the window, because you have literally days to do that. But you can still recruit right up to the last second of the enlistment phase without worrying that you might miss it. The system guarantees that all alliances that pre-enlisted are automatically enlisted before match making. Even if the servers die, they will still auto enlist everyone before match making so if match making is delayed by a crash no one misses out.

    This seems trivial to implement. You don't even need to actually make a "pre-enlist" system, this can happen virtually with the right database schema and a tiny amount of data processing. You're just reinterpreting what the "enlisted" flag means. It doesn't mean "enlisted" until after a certain moment passes.

    I agree and my post above shows that.
    I say how it seems pointless and must be an oversight.

    The post you are replying to merely states how and why i believe the alliamces are locled in the first place. If only war rating was considered there would be no need to lock at all.

    I also have no problem with locking during matchmaking as it is the only way to ensure fair matchups. Otherwise peeps would kick and recruit and manipulte the system.

    As i said i agree that enlistment should not have a locl and you should be able to recruit freely.

  • Fabi1989Fabi1989 Member Posts: 112
    edited February 2019
    Change The Start Time 4h later
  • THX135THX135 Member Posts: 83
    I think we are assuming a key part of Enlistment that is not true. That assumption is nothing is happening during Enlistment. I think this assumption is false.

    Based on the way Enlistment actually works it may mean after you enter Enlistment phase the system will do some pre-calculations for matchmaking phase.

    I say this because Kabam stated they developed the matchmaking intentionally as a phased approach to not overload the servers. Then it stands to reason, Kabam would also perform some pre-calculations during Enlistment for matchmaking phase in an attempt to reduce the load on the servers.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    Fabi1989 wrote: »
    Change The Start Time 4h later

    That would be too easy..... instead of 7-11 window....
    Make it a 11-3....
    Still not good having a random time but atleast it would be within the window of when people are used to running wars. Now it can only possibly be earlier.
    Or as i suggested. Use auto placement.
    It already remembers your defenders, it could also remember the nodes they were on and then placement could be a much smaller window needing only minor adjustments and then attack could be a longer than 24hr period and everyone wins
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    THX135 wrote: »
    I think we are assuming a key part of Enlistment that is not true. That assumption is nothing is happening during Enlistment. I think this assumption is false.

    Based on the way Enlistment actually works it may mean after you enter Enlistment phase the system will do some pre-calculations for matchmaking phase.

    I say this because Kabam stated they developed the matchmaking intentionally as a phased approach to not overload the servers. Then it stands to reason, Kabam would also perform some pre-calculations during Enlistment for matchmaking phase in an attempt to reduce the load on the servers.

    And that is bad for alliances trying to recruit.
    And if that was the case alliances enlisting last minute maybe treated different to those who enlist at the start of enlistment. During normal wars you can enlist while your attack is on for the previous war. How can calculations happen when its such a large window for things to change??
    The whole point of the 4hr window is so calculations can happen across a 4hr period.

    The whole thing seems like kabam done goofed.
    I think they really missed the boat on this one.
    Worst thing i have seen kabam do in my 2years+ playing.
    And yes i was here for the v12.0 change.
  • Rogerio217Rogerio217 Member Posts: 1
    Isso ainda está muito confuso, precisa ser melhor elaborada, já temos problemas com player que não teve tempo de estar na aliança por conta da missão de aliança e com isso ficou fora da listagem da Guerra de aliança...
  • Apocalypse189Apocalypse189 Member Posts: 1,131 ★★★
    edited February 2019
    When does enlistment start and end
  • Timone147Timone147 Member Posts: 1,276 ★★★★
    Ok compromise solution. Have enlistment but give time start options as part of enlistment. You can even limit it to 4 options spaced 6 hours apart. This one option thing just don’t cut it for something like war. AQ it already sucks but mistakes there are not so penalizing as mistakes in war.

    Seriously reconsider this and give some more options to how/when we play these game modes.

    I don’t personally care about the scamming at the top but truth is if that is why we are doing this(the suggestion above could help with general matchmaking issues for the rest of us) then maybe just punish those people directly. Update TOS to reflect these action are not acceptable. Don’t make things more miserable for everyone because a few people don’t want to compete fairly at the top.
  • boss6390boss6390 Member Posts: 35
    MCOC Team wrote: »
    Summoners!

    We’re very happy to announce that Season 8 of Alliance Wars will introduce a brand new Matchmaking system that will improve the quality of matches for Alliance Wars!

    Super Summarized Version:

    A New Matchmaking System is coming for Season 8! Alliance Leaders and Officers will have to choose to Enlist in an upcoming War early. Make sure your Alliance is Enlisted before Matchmaking starts.

    There will be no Wars between February 6th and February 13th. Pre-season for Season 8 lasts from February 13th to February 20th.

    The New matchmaking System comes into effect on February 10th! Read on for more details!

    Enlistment Matchmaking

    This new system will include an opt-in period where Alliances will choose whether or not they would like to take part in the upcoming war.

    The system will then match your Alliance with other Alliances that have opted-in for the upcoming war as well. This also means that all Alliances will enter Defense and Attack phase at the same time from now on.

    This new system will help to improve the following:

    • Helps ensure that Alliances are being matched against other Alliances with similar capabilities.
    • Minimizes Alliances missing Wars based on matchmaking time.
    • Helps to minimize Collusion.

    These are all important steps in making Alliance Wars and Alliance Wars Seasons a fair, and competitive mode!

    How does it work?

    There are 3 Enlistment Periods each week. Alliances must opt-in to their next war during these times.

    There are 3 Enlistment Periods each week. Alliances must opt-in to their next war during these times.

    • Enlistment times will begin Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday.
    • Wars will begin at 11am PST (7pm UTC) on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.
    • Matches will be given over the course of a 4 hour Matchmaking Phase, followed by a 20 hour Defense Placement phase, and a 24 hour Attack Phase.

    Here is the schedule for the Matchmaking phase:
    • Wednesday at 11am - 3pm PST
    • Friday at 11am - 3pm PST
    • Sunday at 11am - 3pm PST

    You must Enlist to join the next Alliance War before this time. You can enlist at any time during the Defense or Attack Phase of the previous war, or at any time during the weekly Matchmaking Downtime (Sunday to Wednesday).

    d7kwrbfqoe3m.jpg

    When you arrive at the Alliance Wars screen, you’ll notice a brand new Tab titled “Next War”. Here, Alliance Leaders and Officers can decide on the number of Battlegroups that they want to participate. They must then choose to “enlist” in the upcoming war.

    ypwzm5n2u068.png

    If you change your mind on how many Battlegroups you would like to run prior to Matchmaking starting, you can simply un-enlist, change your Battlegroup choice, and then re-enlist!

    Your Alliance MUST enlist prior to the Matchmaking Phase beginning. If you do not Enlist before Matchmaking starts, you will not be given a match for the next Alliance War, and will not be able to participate.

    What if there is an odd number of Alliances?

    While one of the benefits of this system is that matchmaking will now be done when all Alliances have opted-in, and will eliminate the issue of Alliances not being able to match for long periods of time and missing a war, it does mean that upto 3 Alliances per week (because of Battlegroup choices) may not find a match.

    The System will work with a top down method for matchmaking, so these Alliances will likely be brand new, or consist of less experienced Summoners.

    For those Alliances, we will be offering a “Bye”. They will be awarded the points, and the rewards for that match. There is a limit to how often an Alliance can be given a Bye, so it cannot be abused.

    Season 8 Schedule

    In order to put this new system into place, and ensure that all Summoners have updated to the latest version of the Game, there will be an extended downtime for matchmaking.

    There will be no Wars from Wednesday, February 6th - Wednesday, February 13th. Enlistment for War will kick off on Sunday, February 10th at 3pm PST.

    Season 8 pre-season will run from Wednesday February 13th until February 20th.

    We hope you’re looking forward to this brand new Matchmaking System, and the improvements it will bring to your War Matches!

    You’ve probably got questions, so ask away! We’ll update this post to better reflect any clarifications we should make.


    War starts too early now.

  • WeaponCanadaWeaponCanada Member Posts: 1
    So our war starts 9am MST. I have 5 guys who live PST, including myself I have 4 in the MST zone. So that means good ild Kabams broken system has war running while 9 of us are at work. WAF joke!!!
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  • RagamugginGunnerRagamugginGunner Member Posts: 2,210 ★★★★★
    Haji_Saab wrote: »
    So, our current match up shows +80 for victory -28 for loss... That is a mismatch which the new system was intended to resolve... you sure the new system is in place?

    I'm +81 -29 so in the same boat. Would be interesting to see other people's matchups to see if the system was even fixed.
  • Madman_marvinMadman_marvin Member Posts: 666 ★★★★
    Not a single mod comment here on how war isn’t starting like it’s supposed to.
  • battleonebattleone Member Posts: 286 ★★
    the grid they released said attack starts at 11am PST. The system is not doing that.
  • Maverick03820Maverick03820 Member Posts: 159
    We are scheduled to start our war at 11:38 AM eastern...I don't remember seeing that on grid
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