**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.

Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.

New Alliance Wars Matchmaking System & Season 8 Details

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Comments

  • Sketch1037Sketch1037 Posts: 52
    Timing is definitely an issue. The freedom to start at convenient times for individual alliances to plan around work schedules and such has disappeared. It takes away too much choice and takes a bit of fun out of the game.
  • battleonebattleone Posts: 286 ★★
    What is the point of making the defense section 20 hours instead of 24 hours if a match can be found near 11 am pst. It made sense with the assumption that all wars would start attack at 11 am PST. I am sorry for the bluntness, but this seems DUMB. The game has been based on war at most as early as 11 am PST, now for basically no reason at all they can start at 7 am PST? That's a significant change in schedule for like no reason at all.
  • BiancoBianco Posts: 24
    Kabam Lyra wrote: »
    RC51 wrote: »
    Hello Summoners,

    Here’s some additional clarity to our previous announcement regarding the new timelines for Alliance Wars.

    NEW MATCHMAKING SYSTEM - CLARIFICATION
    There are 3 Enlistment Periods each week. Alliances must opt-in to their next war during these times.
    • Enlistment will begin Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday from 3PM PST. (7PM UTC)
    • When your Alliance enlists, the Matchmaking window will start.
    • The Matchmaking window is from 11AM to 3PM PST (7PM UTC - 11PM UTC).
    • You may be matched at any point within this window, however the Matchmaking system prioritizes Alliances with higher prestige and war ratings.
    • Once matched the game will send the matched Alliances a push notification, please turn your notifications on.
    • As soon as 2 Alliances are matched, the Defence Placement Phase starts.
    • Once the Defence Placement Phase ends, the 24hr attack phase begins.

    Trying to get some clarification:

    • ENLISTMENT has a specific start and end time: 3p PST to 11a PST (11p to 7a UTC) (although for some reason, @Kabam Miike wrote "3p PST (7p UTC)" instead of "3p PST (11p UTC)")
    • MATCHMAKING has a specific start and end time: 11a PST to 3p PST (7p UTC to 11p UTC); during this 4-hour matchmaking window, as soon as a match is found, AWD starts.
    • According to Kabam's own infographic:
      AWD is 20 hrs max and always ends NO LATER THAN 11a PST and
      AWA is 24 hrs max and always starts NO EARLIER THAN 11a PST

    81h0rk6pzfvv.jpg

    As an example, we ENLIST and our MATCHMAKING starts at 11a PST; if our match is made at 2p PST, that means AWD also starts at 2p PST. Does this mean that:
    1) AWA starts exactly 24 hrs later, at 2p PST?
    or
    2) AWA starts exactly 20 hrs later, at 10a PST (because according to your infographic, AWD is 20 hrs long, period, and has specific start and end times of 3p PST to 11a PST)?
    or
    3) AWA starts 21 hrs later, at 11a PST, because according to your infographic, no AWA starts before 11a PST?

    Please disregard the infographic if it is making it unclear. Your Defense phase will begin when a match is found and will last 20 hours, then your Attack phase will begin.


    Tell me... what change yours „new matchmaking system”?? Because what I see and I think all players, new matchmaking system doesn’t change anything except we start our AW attack much earlier than usual...
  • WiMakWiMak Posts: 359 ★★
    @Drooped2 I would say that’s a fair point but this game is all about things going live simultaneously. Events, AQ, Old matchmaking started at a specific time… The minute it went live probably had the most server requests.

    So, yeah. A small start up gaming company that would be valid.

    And even if it was the case… Four hours? It’s a computer not a delivery service. Computers work on seconds, milliseconds, nano… You could probably satisfactorily stagger blocks of the entire community within five minutes. Call it 30. So have all start times between 10:30 and 11 pst.
  • Drooped2 wrote: »
    WiMak wrote: »
    Also, if all alliances aren’t are registered for the next war in advance… Why does it take four hours to match all the alliances? I mean, it’s not like you guys are doing this by hand. Or are you for top alliances? It’s logarithm calculated...? Shouldn’t your “Abacus” crunch The numbers in a matter of seconds?

    As a server maintenance guy I stagger jobs alot in case something goes haywire I'd rather it not effect every job.

    So theres 5k wars(again I have no idea how many wars happen a day)

    Would you rather have that many failures or a staggered system so you have say 1666 to reschedule and keep to your advertised timeline

    Its basic delivery of service.
    Ups does it to they tell me my package will be here Friday it's always thursday. The window covers them in case of a failure in the matrix

    Based on the data I track during the season, a rough estimate for the number of wars per day is about 13,000. A four hour match window means they are finding and starting about one match per second (they could be doing so faster because they aren't necessarily using the entire four hour match window at the moment). Generating the match is almost certainly not the limiting factor here: launching the war is.
  • MattcoholicMattcoholic Posts: 29
    With no real responses, I think I'll be heading over to the app store to check my rating and possibly make some adjustments.
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    It's better in the long run to see all the issues now so they can be addressed before season.

    No one is saying anything different. No one wanted this new system to roll out at the start of a season. A lot of people have objections to the system period. Saying we should be happy the changes are rolling out now instead of at the start of a season is like saying we should be thankful we were struck by a car in a hospital parking lot instead of a shopping mall. That's a fortunate circumstance, not a happy one. I wouldn't be thanking the driver for their timing.

    If you say so.
    But imo, it's more like you're stuck in a car on the side of the road after narrowly avoiding death in a 20 car pile up. You're not where you want to be, but you're in a better place than you could be. Now, to start work on solving this step.
  • OKAYGangOKAYGang Posts: 524 ★★★
    This is ****. I can't play alliance war while I am working. it's hard enough to to try to start alliance quest while I work. Also, why is there not some kind of clear and concise in game documentation to explain this all? Reading through 20 plus pages of forum posts should not be a requirement to know what changed in the game and only makes your confusing and unnecessary changes seem even more confusing and unnecessary. Furthermore the matchups seem to be even more unbalanced than they were in the old system where at least we could pick our start times ensuring people could actually participate without interrupting their real lives too much.
  • RC51RC51 Posts: 194
    So, according to the latest from @Kabam Miike and @Kabam Lyra, this is what I changed my little chart to:

    bjw46o83q399.jpg
  • chunkyb wrote: »
    Swank777 wrote: »
    Can we just please scrap this system and go back to the old one asap @Kabam Miike clearly no one likes the new system at all.

    I like it. I know others that do. There are definitely things that need to be tweaked. In the end, players have shown they shouldn't be in charge of matching. I'd much rather go thru growing pains to get to a better system than going back to such easy manipulation of the system.

    It's also pretty funny to watch people completely lose their **** over one meaningless war.

    I like the original concept. It's nice in theory. However, it's been shown there's some major oversights timing wise. It's been shown the matchmaking system is off. While you see this as a 'meaningless war', for some, it's not. Some are trying to increase their war rate to be in a better position come start of the Season. Getting matched in an impossible win situation due to the system not performing correctly is grounds for being upset. Being fed conflicting information for almost a week is grounds for being upset.

    Now, I do agree that I'd rather see this grow. Which requires dealing with some less than ideal situations vs back pedaling to the old system. For sure. However, seeing as how this was a clear failure to launch, changes should be implemented ASAP, or the Season start time postponed for at LEAST 1 more week. Will give them time to fix this properly and allow Alliances directly effected by poor matchmaking time to bounce back. Going into the Season like THIS is not right.

    Does anyone believe within these 3 wars this will suddenly sort itself out or provide some magical answer via data? I certainly don't. That might lead to 3 wars going sideways for some. Would it be ok for people to be upset at that juncture? @chunkyb Seriously, I'm interested to hear what you think. Call me skeptical, but I just don't see the system fixing itself. Nor do I see it being rectified without it being shutdown and restarted post repair. Simply monitoring is essentially watching and doing nothing in the hopes the data will provide answers.

    The system timing needs to be altered. That's as clear as day. @DNA3000 you hit the nail on the head multiple times today. Wars NEVER started/ended this early. Ever. So clearly the timing needs to be altered. Matchmaking needs to be investigated and fixed. Until both situations are properly addressed and fixed to the point the majority feel we can proceed into the season with some semblance of fair play.... the Season shouldn't be launched. Doing anything less will lead to a mess. As I previously asked, how many messages will it take before they take us seriously?

    Taking action in the form of non-participation is an option, but a bad one. AW is our primary source for Loyalty. No Loyalty = No Maps 5-7. I'm sure many could miss a week as their Alliance treasury is stocked (like our Alliance), but not everyone's is. In many respects we're being put over a barrel with this current situation. For some it's screwed if you do, screwed if you don't. That's not right, and is cause for concern.

    Typically I'd laugh it off, shrug, and say it's just another day in the world of MCoC. This time it's a bit more alarming if you ask me. To get told they don't plan to do anything but watch currently is alarming. To know there's 2 more wars that will be as is, is alarming. Next matchup for anyone could be just as horrid as some pictured prior. That's not right at all. The sheer lack of respect displayed is sad. You cannot claim to care and do nothing at the same time. It's contradictory. Caring is displayed through actions, not words. We want to see something done. I cannot find 1 reply that explicitly states all is well, let's go with it as is.

    All agree, there's some problems here. Great idea overall. It is. I like how this could help level the playing field. However, it could very well end up leveling the playing field in a completely different context. All we can do now is wait and hope our suggestions are taken into consideration. Sad truth of today.

    I don't disagree with most of what you say tbh. But I also know that yelling at them, calling for people to step down, and expecting something more than identifying bad information, apologizing for the bad information, and attempting to correct that information simply won't get us anywhere. That's what this thread had become earlier today.

    I, too, try to go with the laugh it off method. In this case and imo, the most broken part is matching, itself. That SHOULD be an easy fix. Better, more even matches increases the happy factor. Then comes timing. You'll never make everyone happy with this, and I'm sure they understand that fact. But, I do not like the way things are timed now. Again, that's an easy fix. Shift the schedule.

    Obv there are intricacies to this stuff that I'm/we're not aware of... But I'm still of the mindset that when troubleshooting an issue, it's a much easier job when you can see they issues compared to just trying to intuit them.
  • chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    It's better in the long run to see all the issues now so they can be addressed before season.

    No one is saying anything different. No one wanted this new system to roll out at the start of a season. A lot of people have objections to the system period. Saying we should be happy the changes are rolling out now instead of at the start of a season is like saying we should be thankful we were struck by a car in a hospital parking lot instead of a shopping mall. That's a fortunate circumstance, not a happy one. I wouldn't be thanking the driver for their timing.

    If you say so.
    But imo, it's more like you're stuck in a car on the side of the road after narrowly avoiding death in a 20 car pile up. You're not where you want to be, but you're in a better place than you could be. Now, to start work on solving this step.

    If that's the analogy you want to roll with, that's fine with me. The first step is asking why someone deliberately engineered a twenty car pile up on the highway just to see if people could figure out how to get home. Because the current system wasn't an accident, and it wasn't an unforeseeable issue. It was done deliberately, with intent, knowing it would cause a twenty car pile up and assuming that asking people to figure out how to recover from a twenty car pile up is a perfectly reasonable experiment to conduct just to see if maybe this stops a few people from speeding.
  • Rougeknight87Rougeknight87 Posts: 599 ★★★
    RC51 wrote: »
    So, according to the latest from @Kabam Miike and @Kabam Lyra, this is what I changed my little chart to:

    bjw46o83q399.jpg

    Yeah well I’m in Melbourne Australia and my war started at about 3:00am so unless I’m missing something those times are out by about 2-3 hours
  • RodsteinRodstein Posts: 207
    Ugh the time thing is horrible, it totally wreck us bc we will surely miss moves, specially at the end, and the whole better matchmaking was bogus too
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    It's better in the long run to see all the issues now so they can be addressed before season.

    No one is saying anything different. No one wanted this new system to roll out at the start of a season. A lot of people have objections to the system period. Saying we should be happy the changes are rolling out now instead of at the start of a season is like saying we should be thankful we were struck by a car in a hospital parking lot instead of a shopping mall. That's a fortunate circumstance, not a happy one. I wouldn't be thanking the driver for their timing.

    If you say so.
    But imo, it's more like you're stuck in a car on the side of the road after narrowly avoiding death in a 20 car pile up. You're not where you want to be, but you're in a better place than you could be. Now, to start work on solving this step.

    If that's the analogy you want to roll with, that's fine with me. The first step is asking why someone deliberately engineered a twenty car pile up on the highway just to see if people could figure out how to get home. Because the current system wasn't an accident, and it wasn't an unforeseeable issue. It was done deliberately, with intent, knowing it would cause a twenty car pile up and assuming that asking people to figure out how to recover from a twenty car pile up is a perfectly reasonable experiment to conduct just to see if maybe this stops a few people from speeding.

    Or, the 20 car pile up was the old system that was easily manipulated since it's inception and needed to be scrapped in order to have any semblance of a properly working alliance war mode. *shrugs*

    A great man once told a bunch of rednecks in a bar that it'd get worse before it got better. Then he scissor kicked and ballet karate'd his way into the history books and Kelly Lynch's heart.

    nvfm6azuwdhj.gif
  • Mr_PlatypusMr_Platypus Posts: 2,779 ★★★★★
    Your ridiculously shortsighted, idiotic war system is an absolute joke!
    My alliance started wars aiming for around 8-10pm (UTC-0), as back up for my alliance this worked great as I was always able to hop in after work.
    Your idiotic system has randomly assigned us to a 3pm war start/end, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A WORKING DAY which means I can’t get on and it completely ****** up our paths.

    Not only that, there’s multiple screenshots of your poorly designed system creating huuuge mismatches so you’ve still failed in that regard too, so just revert to the old system before the players revolt... again.
  • WiMak wrote: »
    @Drooped2 I would say that’s a fair point but this game is all about things going live simultaneously. Events, AQ, Old matchmaking started at a specific time… The minute it went live probably had the most server requests.

    So, yeah. A small start up gaming company that would be valid.

    And even if it was the case… Four hours? It’s a computer not a delivery service. Computers work on seconds, milliseconds, nano… You could probably satisfactorily stagger blocks of the entire community within five minutes. Call it 30. So have all start times between 10:30 and 11 pst.

    We don't know they are using the entire four hour window. And starting all wars in thirty minutes would be initiating about eight wars per second. Without direct knowledge of what's involved in doing that, no one can reasonably state that is a reasonable thing to attempt.

    If you think it could be done in five minutes (40+ per second) I think you're operating under the misconception that just because CPUs work in timescales of nanoseconds that all other components of computer clusters do likewise. They most certainly do not.
  • ezgoingezgoing Posts: 269 ★★
    edited February 2019
    Haven’t seen posts yet about quality of matchmaking. We just got matched with an ally with substantially lower rating. Sucks for them, although we may still lose, LOL.

    But is this your new system being successful, Kabam?

    [edit: just saw some other posts about bad mismatches, lol, buried among the many posts about timings. But yeah, kabam sucks]

    ot2u2rlrsaqd.jpeg

  • LeNoirFaineantLeNoirFaineant Posts: 8,638 ★★★★★
    @ezgoing if you look through the thread there are tons of mismatches. One alliance actually had +0/-98 lol. We have a +74/-36 match so we'd probably lose except they are tanking and didn't place defense. Looks like everything has been fixed...
  • Dexman1349Dexman1349 Posts: 3,060 ★★★★★
    Also really disappointed that I will have to quit my current war early and relinquish rewards so that I can join a new ally without missing that war too (which still isn't guaranteed if the new ally doesn't successfully navigate the work around).

    Impossible to change alliances without either forfeiting rewards from the old ally or forcing the new ally to play shorthanded (unless it's during the typical weekly maintenance break).
  • Dexman1349Dexman1349 Posts: 3,060 ★★★★★
    Great job Kabam, way to cut off your nose to spite your face...
  • trmeccatrmecca Posts: 24
    So the matchmaking times I don't like but enough have spoke about it. The matching of alliances seems to be severely skewed. We are playing Alliances significantly higher rated than our, even in different brackets. Is there a mistake here?
  • Doomsfist79Doomsfist79 Posts: 922 ★★★
    Just hurry up and scrap this idea.. you're already getting the kind of response as was seen with 12.0 (not as much yet) and the diversity change. Rather than having people continue to be annoyed and some deciding to just leave the game and find another to play, revert to the old system of matchmaking.. this new idea obviously isn't going to work.

    As pointed out by several people in this thread, we are still seeing the complete mismatches (so that idea can be thrown out). Now, it seems you expect people to change their real life schedules to suit the game.. that's simply not going to happen.. if anything people will just stop playing.. or at the very least stop participating in war.

    I realize you guys don't allow for the option of a roll back, so rather than taking the week to see how things are going to go.. be proactive.. take into account all the negative response (I have not seen a single positive post.. maybe BG will like it as it goes against the player base) so far and go back to the old system.. be smart and avoid pissing off your player base further.
  • Col66Col66 Posts: 26
    So if I’m reading this right you can get matched during the enlistment phase. Doesn’t this still allow collusion, alliances just don’t enlist until the other has already matched
  • Col66 wrote: »
    So if I’m reading this right you can get matched during the enlistment phase. Doesn’t this still allow collusion, alliances just don’t enlist until the other has already matched

    Under the current system this is impossible. You have to enlist for the war before *any* match making starts. Once match making starts, you cannot enlist for that war, and you've effectively missed that war.
  • @chunkyb I completely agree that simply yelling at them will not illicit a proper response. Or calling for people to step down, and the like. None of that helps. Absolutely true. The players have spoken. The fixes as we've both, and others have illustrated are rather rudimentary in the grand scheme. I don't see the benefit in waiting here. It's obvious that the roll out as is failed miserably. Between having the wrong picture painted and the absolutely ridiculous matchups that have been reported... it's a bomb. Best we can do now is keep this rolling forward in this thread and keep it civil. Just the same, I do understand why people are losing it right now.
  • DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    It's better in the long run to see all the issues now so they can be addressed before season.

    No one is saying anything different. No one wanted this new system to roll out at the start of a season. A lot of people have objections to the system period. Saying we should be happy the changes are rolling out now instead of at the start of a season is like saying we should be thankful we were struck by a car in a hospital parking lot instead of a shopping mall. That's a fortunate circumstance, not a happy one. I wouldn't be thanking the driver for their timing.

    If you say so.
    But imo, it's more like you're stuck in a car on the side of the road after narrowly avoiding death in a 20 car pile up. You're not where you want to be, but you're in a better place than you could be. Now, to start work on solving this step.

    If that's the analogy you want to roll with, that's fine with me. The first step is asking why someone deliberately engineered a twenty car pile up on the highway just to see if people could figure out how to get home. Because the current system wasn't an accident, and it wasn't an unforeseeable issue. It was done deliberately, with intent, knowing it would cause a twenty car pile up and assuming that asking people to figure out how to recover from a twenty car pile up is a perfectly reasonable experiment to conduct just to see if maybe this stops a few people from speeding.

    Or, the 20 car pile up was the old system that was easily manipulated since it's inception and needed to be scrapped in order to have any semblance of a properly working alliance war mode. *shrugs*

    If that's the position you want to take, that the old system was way worse than the current one, feel free. It isn't the position I'm taking, and presenting an analogy that simply attempts to reframe the same position with automobiles axiomatically isn't going to be convincing. Analogies are supposed to illustrate some point. I don't see what point yours is attempting to illustrate by analogy. That if only we all saw just how bad the old system was, we'd appreciate how different the current one is? The old system had manipulation issues that affected the competition for dozens, maybe hundreds of alliances. The current one probably disrupts thousands. Some players have gone from thinking about a system that might be causing problems in some places to being unable to participate at all in critical parts of the war.

    If I can't convince you that's a far worse problem, that's not a serious problem for me, because the number of people actually experiencing actual problems is high enough and I don't have to work all that hard to convince them that the system itself is both the source of those problems, and the design features of it causing those problems were not even necessary.

    But my real problem isn't simply that the system is obviously broken. It is that Kabam either had to know how broken it was and launched it anyway, or somehow wasn't aware of the problems the system had before they announced it. I'm not sure which one is worse, but I do know that I'd rather alliance war disappear entirely than continue while following a development trajectory steered by either guiding principle.

    I'm not supposed to have to state something this obvious, but I will. One of the absolute worst things you can do as a game operator, one of the singular crash landings that can deal permanent damage to a game, albeit rarely, is to take a choice away from players that they had for a long time and replace that choice with something that not only takes that choice away, but forces many players into a bad situation they have no control over, have no way to avoid, and were dealing with originally with the choices you now take away. I don't expect players to know this. But I expect game developers to know this, and to know that no operational or production expediency overrides it.

    This system teaches me something about how Kabam views alliance war that I cannot unlearn no matter what they do to the system in the future. It tells me they are willing to do *this* and no analogy erases the impact of knowing Kabam is willing to do this. The hands I want alliance war in would never do this to its players. It is not my place to advocate changing the developers, but it is entirely within my right to advocate for removing things I don't think they manage well.

    I don't care if it is funny, or silly, or futile. I do not randomly condemn game changes, and I grant more developmental discretion to the developers than probably anyone on the forums. If me saying I'd rather see Alliance War disappear than see it developed with the priorities this system implies carries any weight at all, its worth it to say. If it doesn't, it doesn't, and I can live with that. I'd rather be laughed at, than wonder if I had any ability to affect change, even the tiniest bit, and remained silent.

    😂😂😂
    I... I brought up cars because you.... You brought up.... Cars

    h7x553ppjgaz.png


    This is becoming a very grounded conversation. Either way, if there's anything I've learned... it'll get fixed. It may be in iterations, it may not be the fix the players like, but things will get fixed. Somehow.
  • VoluntarisVoluntaris Posts: 1,198 ★★★
    the significantly early attack phase time is awful.
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