@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.
I get that. I'm also making the assumption that they're scrambling to change things. I could be wrong, this could be what they wanted. I doubt it, but I'm not them. I just know that nothing is going to change during the current war. It may not be able to change over the week. Idk. I'd hope things would be well tweaked before the season, but I don't know that either.
I am a huge fan of automated matching tho. I have stated it many times in many different places. And I still am. I'm not a fan of the way things are timed, but I can adapt. As DNA pointed out tho, that's a huge problem for a lot of people. I always assumed the timing would mimic the old system timing, but simply have the war search taken away from the alliances. I just have to assume that'll be worked out. Cuz what else am I gonna do?
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.
One day, if we wait long enough, the game won't exist anymore. My problem is not that I think it will never change. My problem is what's happening now. They've created a bad experience now. Even if it changes in a month, they will still have created a bad experience now. You can't change what already happened.
I'm fine with things being bad today if it is a necessary stepping stone to things getting better tomorrow. But none of this is necessary. Telling me it will be different later means nothing, because that's true for everything in the game. Nothing is forever. But it is unnecessarily broken now.
The last time I think I complained about something as being dramatically and inexcusably wrong, it was when Kabam changed all the mechanics in 12.0 and didn't document them. At the time they said they would release documentation that addressed all of the new mechanical changes. I'm sure that one will get fixed also. Some day.
I sure hope next season gets delayed until all these bugs are worked out. The start times are a joke, there really isn't any point in going through the motions. We have been on a set schedule forever, what's next, moving AQ start times back 6 hours as well ? Not only that, when the window finally opens for us to move in war, we get emergency maintenance.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised by any of this. It’s obvious once again that the USERS are the QA department for Kabam.
There’s no way this was tested properly. The information sent out was wrong, the matchmaking “improvements” are laughable at best, the community wasn’t brought to the table for ideas on start times, etc, etc.
@Helicopter_dugdugdug , this morning someone had pointed out that your opponent (MMXIV) only had 15 members left in it. Not gonna speculate as to why (bans or shell alliance swapping might be reasons other alliances may be in similar situation), but that appears to confirm that Kabam does include current alliance rating (or AQ style top-5 heroes per member prestige, or similar) in their matchmaking calculations (not just War Rating, which if significant membership changes occurred would be severely misleading as to matching up for current war). And since game currently down for maintenance, can’t get in and see if their roster is still like that or not.
@DNA3000 you’re right I didn’t calculate numbers or anything. I’m just saying they can happen in batches without there being a four hour time window of which you have zero control of start time. My main complaint is still hour early they CAN start. I have to believe multiple matches were happening, wars been starting at the same time in the old system Without server overload...I don’t want to get too wrapped up in math 😂
That being said I don’t really get the argument on overloading servers. Finding matches is just crunching data a computer can do in a second. Everybody being in a war at the same time… Everybody IS in war at the same time. Everybody’s in AQ at the same time. Are we really thinking that INITIATING and entering a war is so much more taxing on servers? A request to a server is a request is it not? Whether you’re initiating access into the game it’s self, a war, AQ… even if this is not true why don’t they just find matches and “initiate” wars at their leisure during matchmaking if that is what is so taxing. We just won’t have access to the war or see our opponent until the designated time when they officially start Which could be a 30 minutes or even an hour block of time later then what it is now. Later than now being the key point
I guess I don’t understand the overtaxing the server argument. To be fair, I will concede this could be ignorance on my part, server maintenance/operation is not profession
We can only HOPE they're working towards a fix. Just painful to hear that this potentially could roll right into the Season. If they can get it sorted quick, awesome. Would be GREAT! I'm just setting my expectations low, and will continue to beat on this until we see something done about it. I will remain civil. I will remain cautiously optimistic while maintaining my lowered expectations. Getting upset and slinging mud online just makes a mess.
Expressing distaste towards this situation is perfectly understandable, but try to show some class and keep it civil. One can only HOPE this is NOT what was intended. 2 things have been made VERY CLEAR by ALL... The timing. Fix it. Matchmaking. Fix it. Otherwise Season 8 will likely see a record number of players quitting and Alliances splintering. I can't imagine even the top tier Alliances enjoying the start timing as is. As previously stated, I haven't heard anyone speak kindly of the timing.
@Helicopter_dugdugdug , this morning someone had pointed out that your opponent (MMXIV) only had 15 members left in it. Not gonna speculate as to why (bans or shell alliance swapping might be reasons other alliances may be in similar situation), but that appears to confirm that Kabam does include current alliance rating (or AQ style top-5 heroes per member prestige, or similar) in their matchmaking calculations (not just War Rating, which if significant membership changes occurred would be severely misleading as to matching up for current war). And since game currently down for maintenance, can’t get in and see if their roster is still like that or not.
They broke up. Couldn't tell you how the timing aligned with opting in for war tho.
A simpler solution will be just to change Defense Phase back to 24 hours after matching. This will realign the start times of attack phase back to the usual timings everyone is used to (since it takes time finding a match under the old system as well).
@Helicopter_dugdugdug , this morning someone had pointed out that your opponent (MMXIV) only had 15 members left in it. Not gonna speculate as to why (bans or shell alliance swapping might be reasons other alliances may be in similar situation), but that appears to confirm that Kabam does include current alliance rating (or AQ style top-5 heroes per member prestige, or similar) in their matchmaking calculations (not just War Rating, which if significant membership changes occurred would be severely misleading as to matching up for current war). And since game currently down for maintenance, can’t get in and see if their roster is still like that or not.
Problem is though rating and wat not does not take skill into account where war rating is an indication of war skill.
You need the right balance of everything.
But 15 mmxiv members used to winning t1 wars will almost certainly outskill a t7 alliance.
But yeah itnis possible that these inflated matchups are going to be an adjustment period to a new matching algorithim that will stop shell allies.
There has recently been alot of allies with massive war rating sold. So a bunch of unskilled low players may be at the helm of a 3000+ war rating ally. Clearly they dont deserve it or have the skilss
To back it up.
So Maybe the algorithm is right in calculating prestige or similar and it will be fair.
Only time will tell.
Overinflated allies will begin to fall amd everything will balance.
My 16 mil alliance enlisted for the war as normal during placement phase we noticed we weren’t on the tier 5 war map which is odd because we’ve been in tier 5 for the whole of last season. When it came to the start of attack day we looked at our opponent defence noticing they had placed r3 4*s all over the place, we instantly assumed they were tanking for the next season that was until we realised it was a 4 mil alliance that was in silver 3 with 750 less war rating than us
How can your amazing new war system match our two alliances together and how can it lower our map to there level when on the menu it clearly states tier 5
Please take this back to the drawing board. The floating start times is a terrible idea. All time options are too early and being forced to have war start/end at the start of a work day/morning of work day for most is absolute garbage.
Like seriously who in the world thought this was a good idea to have wars be around this time? How often during your morning meeting schedule can you break out a video game or sneak away to get some moves done? Now think about for people who don’t work in a gaming company.
Give some options for start times then these are the gaurenteed start times. Not floating times. We have lives and schedules and we build alliance plans in respect for our member and their personal lives(yes the things that exist outside of this game).
This move just seems not Fully thought out or just not considerant of our outside commitments.
Thank you all for your feedback on the new matchmaking system. Based on that feedback and the results we're seeing, we are actively exploring some improvements.
The improvements being discussed include your concerns on match quality, bugs surrounding new recruits during enlistment phase, and the overall schedule. We will have more information for you soon.
You should not start matching during enlistment period (as per original post). I think what was intended and what is being implemented is totally different
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. (11PM 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.
I also don't like the new start times...but I also have some other concerns.
I still find this a bit confusing...."When your Alliance enlists, the Matchmaking window will start". Does the time you enlist have any factor in the matchmaking process? The fact that new recruits are locked out seems to make this likely. It seems more like "enlistment" is when the actual matchmaking happens and "matchmaking" is just the job to push AWD live. I enlisted early on and got matched early so maybe that's possible. I might enlist late the next time and see if that changes my matched time.
And another thing I'm concerned with is "the Matchmaking system prioritizes Alliances with higher prestige and war ratings". Why was prestige mentioned before war rating? Is it being given a higher weight value in this new matchmaking process? Why is prestige really a factor? Since prestige is based on only the top 5 champs, there can be a huge difference between alliances with the same prestige if they don't have a huge roster of defenders. I understand they want to get a better matchup, but prestige should not be the top factor. With war rating being the deciding factor for tier lvl and therefore map/nodes and season multiplier, it should be the most important consideration. Besides, prestige is a hidden number except when looking at AQ day 1 but only for your own alliance. When I look at an opponent, I can see war rating, alliance rating, average member rating, last season tier rankings, and current season tier rankings. If I'm matched by prestige but all others are significantly different, why wouldn't I yell "BAD MATCHUP"
Dungeon reward tiers are no longer based on prestige but individual rosters of how many rarity champs you have. Implement something similar for alliances to use in war matchups. Or past defender rating placements, you already have that info for determining MVP.
I also have low expectations that this will be fixed prior to the start of next Season so it should be delayed.
Thank you all for your feedback on the new matchmaking system. Based on that feedback and the results we're seeing, we are actively exploring some improvements.
The improvements being discussed include your concerns on match quality, bugs surrounding new recruits during enlistment phase, and the overall schedule. We will have more information for you soon.
Thank you for the update sir. It would be fantastic if this can be sorted and rolling smoothly before the tentative launch of Season 8. I say tentative because you never know, we've seen delays before. I wouldn't be opposed to a delay if it means having a solid, properly functioning AW matchmaking system during the Season. Everyone deserves to have a fair shot at winning, and acquiring the highest point output possible for their Alliance. It's nice to know things are at least being considered now. Hope everything pans out nicely and this little hiccup gets left in the past where it belongs.
Are we really thinking that INITIATING and entering a war is so much more taxing on servers? A request to a server is a request is it not?
I don't have as much experience with modern cloud-based or cloud-engineered mobile games, but I do have some experience with the technology of (conventional) MMOs. When players would enter a mission or map in an MMO, there was usually a start up sequence that initialized the map for the players (some games refer to these as "map servers" and in this case "server" doesn't refer to hardware servers or even virtual servers, but rather a piece of software that "serves" the players and the map they are on). In an MMO the map server start up burned significant resources, but relative to the amount of computational resources that the players consumed it was relatively small. But in a mobile game like MCOC where you aren't burning nearly as much computational resources on the server side (the actual combat happens on our phones, not in the servers) the memory and CPU resources associated with launching an AW map could be substantial relative to the resources dedicated to the game at large.
On the server side there is a substantial amount of data that has to be fetched from the player records to construct the defensive map (this could also be prefetched from the player records at placement time, but it still has to be loaded into the AW maps at match making time): 300 champions worth of data for both sides at least before other housekeeping. That has to be fetched from databases that are probably on disks, not in fast memory. Even on 50k IOPS flash disks or 10k IOPS databases this could take anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds. If it takes, say, half a second to calculate a match, fetch all the data and initialize the war, then it would take about 6500 seconds to start 13,000 wars, which is about 1.8 hours. Given the large uncertainties in speed and computation, allocating four hours for match making is roughly consistent with these guestimates.
Probably the thing that affects this the most that perhaps most people aren't generally considering is that there isn't a game "server" or even a single cluster of servers running the game. More likely there are a bunch of distributed resources doing different things. There are probably "instances" of computational resources that run wars. Those computational nuggets have to have the appropriate data loaded into them so they can then go off and actually run the wars (same with AQ). The data is centrally managed (i.e. player and champion roster data) so this data can't simply be spread out constantly: it has to be transferred from central repositories to the computational engines that run war. All this data shuffling has to happen across networks and to and from disks that are not infinite in speed, not even in high speed cloud clusters. In fact, in my experience getting consistent, reliable, *fast* disk performance in the cloud is one of the hardest things to get, at any price. I was in command of half a million dollars of flash once whose actual single threaded performance was slower than my laptop. The reason being: it wasn't optimized for single threaded performance. But if you wanted to do just one thing just one time, performance was actually laughable. Hugely expensive, but laughable.
The world of cloud clusters and distributed gaming is not extrapolatable from personal computing. It isn't even extrapolatable from enterprise computing.
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. (11PM 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.
These timings are definitely not what is live. The current war attack phase for my alliance started at 8am PST so I'm assuming the 20 hour defence placement is what is dragging all the times back and making everything so early if you match straight away
Is there any possibility that we loose another 4 hours from start times on the next round of wars, maybe even get glitched out altogether ? I'm really skeptical about that happening, like maybe they messed up something in the 4-20-24 equation somehow and set enlistment to overlap, thereby starting next placement 20 hours into attack.
Thank you all for your feedback on the new matchmaking system. Based on that feedback and the results we're seeing, we are actively exploring some improvements.
The improvements being discussed include your concerns on match quality, bugs surrounding new recruits during enlistment phase, and the overall schedule. We will have more information for you soon.
Hey there.. thanks for realizing this isn't acceptable and working on correcting. It's appreciated.
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!
There are 3 Enlistment Periods each week. Alliances must opt-in to their next war during these times.
The Matchmaking window is from 11AM to 3PM PST (7PM UTC - 11PM UTC).
As soon as 2 Alliances are matched, the Defence Placement Phase starts.
Once the Defence Placement Phase ends, the 24hr attack phase begins.
I am amazed to learn my attack phase will end 4hrs before 11AM PST Friday.
So, where is my 24hr attack phase? instead, it's just 20hr attack phase.
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 new system will help to improve the following:
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. (11PM 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.
I am amazed to learn my attack phase will end 4hrs before 11AM PST Friday.
So, where is my 24hr attack phase? instead, it just 20hr attack phase.
No, it's 24 hours. The placement phase is 20 hours causing the attack phase to start 4 hours earlier than whatever time you matched. It's garbage regardless but it sounds like they are going to adjust it. Time will tell
If everyone could band together and not do any wars until this is fixed would be the best way to ensure it gets fixed.
Whilst we complain but still continue to do wars our voices are much softer and easier for kabam to pass over as they look at the data and see that wars are still being had.
And thats wat matters.
If everyone who is unhappy with this syste #boycottedwars then kabam would be forced to listen.
They would see that the community was unhappy with this and will not tolerate it as no wars were being had. They would need to chamge it to once again engage the commmunity in AW, else watch the game mode die.
Personally i feel everything here is a joke.
I was against the fixed start time from when it was first announced, i was disgusted when i saw that it was infact a flexible start window that meant wars earlier than ever before seen, i was mortified to see kabam then feeding us more mis-information when inital posts said one thing and then they clarified the opposite. And then to make matters worse seeing screenshots from peoples war matchups that are by far even worse than any we have seen before.
Kabam have attempted to fix a crack in the wall by demolishing an entire building and rebuilding it to now having a steaming pile of rubble in place of what was a cracked building.
I amongst others have offered some suggestions as ways to fix this in amongst our comments standing against it. It is now time for the action.
I feel the only way to ensure kabam listens is by forgoing wars until we see a system we are happy with. We may lose loyalty rewards but if we are not foghting wars we can do without purchasing boosts and such and can miss out on loyalty.
We need to stand together and show labam that the player base will not stand for this.
If everyone could band together and not do any wars until this is fixed would be the best way to ensure it gets fixed.
Whilst we complain but still continue to do wars our voices are much softer and easier for kabam to pass over as they look at the data and see that wars are still being had.
And thats wat matters.
If everyone who is unhappy with this syste #boycottedwars then kabam would be forced to listen.
They would see that the community was unhappy with this and will not tolerate it as no wars were being had. They would need to chamge it to once again engage the commmunity in AW, else watch the game mode die.
Personally i feel everything here is a joke.
I was against the fixed start time from when it was first announced, i was disgusted when i saw that it was infact a flexible start window that meant wars earlier than ever before seen, i was mortified to see kabam then feeding us more mis-information when inital posts said one thing and then they clarified the opposite. And then to make matters worse seeing screenshots from peoples war matchups that are by far even worse than any we have seen before.
Kabam have attempted to fix a crack in the wall by demolishing an entire building and rebuilding it to now having a steaming pile of rubble in place of what was a cracked building.
I amongst others have offered some suggestions as ways to fix this in amongst our comments standing against it. It is now time for the action.
I feel the only way to ensure kabam listens is by forgoing wars until we see a system we are happy with. We may lose loyalty rewards but if we are not foghting wars we can do without purchasing boosts and such and can miss out on loyalty.
We need to stand together and show labam that the player base will not stand for this.
I completely agree about a community effort.. unfortunately this community is all about themselves.. or at least each alliance is.. but absolutely the only way to see any change in this game.. is for the majority of the player base to agree and speak with one voice..
This aw is a lost for us. That is only for 1 reason. Aw started to early and we had no time to make a proper defence. We normally start at the same time as aq, but now is hours and hours to early!!
Thank you all for your feedback on the new matchmaking system. Based on that feedback and the results we're seeing, we are actively exploring some improvements.
The improvements being discussed include your concerns on match quality, bugs surrounding new recruits during enlistment phase, and the overall schedule. We will have more information for you soon.
Let's hope so, because an improvement that creates more problems than solves is not improvement at all. And the current AW system is simply much more troublesome
1. AW Attack should start at the same time like AQ !
1.1 All AW starting at the same is to heavy load for your servers ?
I'm working as a senior developer and IT project manager since over 20 years!
A lot of my customers running solutions with 1 million+++ requests and database operations per sec.
If your server can't handle they small about of data, your development is doing something completely wrong!
Feel free to hire me, to get the **** out of your servers xD
Payment in odins are accepted xD
1.2 Anyways, let's keep the fact your servers can't handle "big" amount of data at the same time,
because Kabam is a "special case" also struggling to handle many clients requests showing us
"Problems to connect to network ... Please check your connection!"
In 99,9% it's not OUR connection, it's your servers ... over and over .. so annoying ...
If u can't fix that in time, just skip this big message , give us a small red Symbol somewhere,
this info in fight is so .... hiding complete power bars in fight ...
Back to the point:
If u can't start all AW at the same time:
- begin at AQ start and start a AW all X seconds, so it's not the SAME time and starting times doesn't differ to much
- alternative let each Alliance select, when the want to start attack in a range of six hours !
Yes, that would mean war is not ending at the same time for both sides , BUT WHO CARES ?
There's no interaction between opponents
1.3 Please keep in mind that start of attack in AW means a lot of administration work for the officers,
path and Champs should be assigned dynamically each war !
If war starts, while u are sleeping, at work, or whatever it's just pain in the a...
2. Matchmaking:
- I can accept the fact that u can't provide detail information about how matchmaking works,
because the information definitely will lead to fishy tricks .... sad but true
- i've seen so many crazy matching screens, there's an adjustment needed for sure
Comments
I get that. I'm also making the assumption that they're scrambling to change things. I could be wrong, this could be what they wanted. I doubt it, but I'm not them. I just know that nothing is going to change during the current war. It may not be able to change over the week. Idk. I'd hope things would be well tweaked before the season, but I don't know that either.
I am a huge fan of automated matching tho. I have stated it many times in many different places. And I still am. I'm not a fan of the way things are timed, but I can adapt. As DNA pointed out tho, that's a huge problem for a lot of people. I always assumed the timing would mimic the old system timing, but simply have the war search taken away from the alliances. I just have to assume that'll be worked out. Cuz what else am I gonna do?
One day, if we wait long enough, the game won't exist anymore. My problem is not that I think it will never change. My problem is what's happening now. They've created a bad experience now. Even if it changes in a month, they will still have created a bad experience now. You can't change what already happened.
I'm fine with things being bad today if it is a necessary stepping stone to things getting better tomorrow. But none of this is necessary. Telling me it will be different later means nothing, because that's true for everything in the game. Nothing is forever. But it is unnecessarily broken now.
The last time I think I complained about something as being dramatically and inexcusably wrong, it was when Kabam changed all the mechanics in 12.0 and didn't document them. At the time they said they would release documentation that addressed all of the new mechanical changes. I'm sure that one will get fixed also. Some day.
There’s no way this was tested properly. The information sent out was wrong, the matchmaking “improvements” are laughable at best, the community wasn’t brought to the table for ideas on start times, etc, etc.
Do better. Please.
@Helicopter_dugdugdug , this morning someone had pointed out that your opponent (MMXIV) only had 15 members left in it. Not gonna speculate as to why (bans or shell alliance swapping might be reasons other alliances may be in similar situation), but that appears to confirm that Kabam does include current alliance rating (or AQ style top-5 heroes per member prestige, or similar) in their matchmaking calculations (not just War Rating, which if significant membership changes occurred would be severely misleading as to matching up for current war). And since game currently down for maintenance, can’t get in and see if their roster is still like that or not.
That being said I don’t really get the argument on overloading servers. Finding matches is just crunching data a computer can do in a second. Everybody being in a war at the same time… Everybody IS in war at the same time. Everybody’s in AQ at the same time. Are we really thinking that INITIATING and entering a war is so much more taxing on servers? A request to a server is a request is it not? Whether you’re initiating access into the game it’s self, a war, AQ… even if this is not true why don’t they just find matches and “initiate” wars at their leisure during matchmaking if that is what is so taxing. We just won’t have access to the war or see our opponent until the designated time when they officially start Which could be a 30 minutes or even an hour block of time later then what it is now. Later than now being the key point
I guess I don’t understand the overtaxing the server argument. To be fair, I will concede this could be ignorance on my part, server maintenance/operation is not profession
Expressing distaste towards this situation is perfectly understandable, but try to show some class and keep it civil. One can only HOPE this is NOT what was intended. 2 things have been made VERY CLEAR by ALL... The timing. Fix it. Matchmaking. Fix it. Otherwise Season 8 will likely see a record number of players quitting and Alliances splintering. I can't imagine even the top tier Alliances enjoying the start timing as is. As previously stated, I haven't heard anyone speak kindly of the timing.
They broke up. Couldn't tell you how the timing aligned with opting in for war tho.
Problem is though rating and wat not does not take skill into account where war rating is an indication of war skill.
You need the right balance of everything.
But 15 mmxiv members used to winning t1 wars will almost certainly outskill a t7 alliance.
But yeah itnis possible that these inflated matchups are going to be an adjustment period to a new matching algorithim that will stop shell allies.
There has recently been alot of allies with massive war rating sold. So a bunch of unskilled low players may be at the helm of a 3000+ war rating ally. Clearly they dont deserve it or have the skilss
To back it up.
So Maybe the algorithm is right in calculating prestige or similar and it will be fair.
Only time will tell.
Overinflated allies will begin to fall amd everything will balance.
I HOPE
How can your amazing new war system match our two alliances together and how can it lower our map to there level when on the menu it clearly states tier 5
Like seriously who in the world thought this was a good idea to have wars be around this time? How often during your morning meeting schedule can you break out a video game or sneak away to get some moves done? Now think about for people who don’t work in a gaming company.
Give some options for start times then these are the gaurenteed start times. Not floating times. We have lives and schedules and we build alliance plans in respect for our member and their personal lives(yes the things that exist outside of this game).
This move just seems not Fully thought out or just not considerant of our outside commitments.
Thank you all for your feedback on the new matchmaking system. Based on that feedback and the results we're seeing, we are actively exploring some improvements.
The improvements being discussed include your concerns on match quality, bugs surrounding new recruits during enlistment phase, and the overall schedule. We will have more information for you soon.
I also don't like the new start times...but I also have some other concerns.
I still find this a bit confusing...."When your Alliance enlists, the Matchmaking window will start". Does the time you enlist have any factor in the matchmaking process? The fact that new recruits are locked out seems to make this likely. It seems more like "enlistment" is when the actual matchmaking happens and "matchmaking" is just the job to push AWD live. I enlisted early on and got matched early so maybe that's possible. I might enlist late the next time and see if that changes my matched time.
And another thing I'm concerned with is "the Matchmaking system prioritizes Alliances with higher prestige and war ratings". Why was prestige mentioned before war rating? Is it being given a higher weight value in this new matchmaking process? Why is prestige really a factor? Since prestige is based on only the top 5 champs, there can be a huge difference between alliances with the same prestige if they don't have a huge roster of defenders. I understand they want to get a better matchup, but prestige should not be the top factor. With war rating being the deciding factor for tier lvl and therefore map/nodes and season multiplier, it should be the most important consideration. Besides, prestige is a hidden number except when looking at AQ day 1 but only for your own alliance. When I look at an opponent, I can see war rating, alliance rating, average member rating, last season tier rankings, and current season tier rankings. If I'm matched by prestige but all others are significantly different, why wouldn't I yell "BAD MATCHUP"
Dungeon reward tiers are no longer based on prestige but individual rosters of how many rarity champs you have. Implement something similar for alliances to use in war matchups. Or past defender rating placements, you already have that info for determining MVP.
I also have low expectations that this will be fixed prior to the start of next Season so it should be delayed.
Thank you for the update sir. It would be fantastic if this can be sorted and rolling smoothly before the tentative launch of Season 8. I say tentative because you never know, we've seen delays before. I wouldn't be opposed to a delay if it means having a solid, properly functioning AW matchmaking system during the Season. Everyone deserves to have a fair shot at winning, and acquiring the highest point output possible for their Alliance. It's nice to know things are at least being considered now. Hope everything pans out nicely and this little hiccup gets left in the past where it belongs.
I don't have as much experience with modern cloud-based or cloud-engineered mobile games, but I do have some experience with the technology of (conventional) MMOs. When players would enter a mission or map in an MMO, there was usually a start up sequence that initialized the map for the players (some games refer to these as "map servers" and in this case "server" doesn't refer to hardware servers or even virtual servers, but rather a piece of software that "serves" the players and the map they are on). In an MMO the map server start up burned significant resources, but relative to the amount of computational resources that the players consumed it was relatively small. But in a mobile game like MCOC where you aren't burning nearly as much computational resources on the server side (the actual combat happens on our phones, not in the servers) the memory and CPU resources associated with launching an AW map could be substantial relative to the resources dedicated to the game at large.
On the server side there is a substantial amount of data that has to be fetched from the player records to construct the defensive map (this could also be prefetched from the player records at placement time, but it still has to be loaded into the AW maps at match making time): 300 champions worth of data for both sides at least before other housekeeping. That has to be fetched from databases that are probably on disks, not in fast memory. Even on 50k IOPS flash disks or 10k IOPS databases this could take anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds. If it takes, say, half a second to calculate a match, fetch all the data and initialize the war, then it would take about 6500 seconds to start 13,000 wars, which is about 1.8 hours. Given the large uncertainties in speed and computation, allocating four hours for match making is roughly consistent with these guestimates.
Probably the thing that affects this the most that perhaps most people aren't generally considering is that there isn't a game "server" or even a single cluster of servers running the game. More likely there are a bunch of distributed resources doing different things. There are probably "instances" of computational resources that run wars. Those computational nuggets have to have the appropriate data loaded into them so they can then go off and actually run the wars (same with AQ). The data is centrally managed (i.e. player and champion roster data) so this data can't simply be spread out constantly: it has to be transferred from central repositories to the computational engines that run war. All this data shuffling has to happen across networks and to and from disks that are not infinite in speed, not even in high speed cloud clusters. In fact, in my experience getting consistent, reliable, *fast* disk performance in the cloud is one of the hardest things to get, at any price. I was in command of half a million dollars of flash once whose actual single threaded performance was slower than my laptop. The reason being: it wasn't optimized for single threaded performance. But if you wanted to do just one thing just one time, performance was actually laughable. Hugely expensive, but laughable.
The world of cloud clusters and distributed gaming is not extrapolatable from personal computing. It isn't even extrapolatable from enterprise computing.
Hey there.. thanks for realizing this isn't acceptable and working on correcting. It's appreciated.
I am amazed to learn my attack phase will end 4hrs before 11AM PST Friday.
So, where is my 24hr attack phase? instead, it's just 20hr attack phase.
No, it's 24 hours. The placement phase is 20 hours causing the attack phase to start 4 hours earlier than whatever time you matched. It's garbage regardless but it sounds like they are going to adjust it. Time will tell
Whilst we complain but still continue to do wars our voices are much softer and easier for kabam to pass over as they look at the data and see that wars are still being had.
And thats wat matters.
If everyone who is unhappy with this syste #boycottedwars then kabam would be forced to listen.
They would see that the community was unhappy with this and will not tolerate it as no wars were being had. They would need to chamge it to once again engage the commmunity in AW, else watch the game mode die.
Personally i feel everything here is a joke.
I was against the fixed start time from when it was first announced, i was disgusted when i saw that it was infact a flexible start window that meant wars earlier than ever before seen, i was mortified to see kabam then feeding us more mis-information when inital posts said one thing and then they clarified the opposite. And then to make matters worse seeing screenshots from peoples war matchups that are by far even worse than any we have seen before.
Kabam have attempted to fix a crack in the wall by demolishing an entire building and rebuilding it to now having a steaming pile of rubble in place of what was a cracked building.
I amongst others have offered some suggestions as ways to fix this in amongst our comments standing against it. It is now time for the action.
I feel the only way to ensure kabam listens is by forgoing wars until we see a system we are happy with. We may lose loyalty rewards but if we are not foghting wars we can do without purchasing boosts and such and can miss out on loyalty.
We need to stand together and show labam that the player base will not stand for this.
I completely agree about a community effort.. unfortunately this community is all about themselves.. or at least each alliance is.. but absolutely the only way to see any change in this game.. is for the majority of the player base to agree and speak with one voice..
Well does anyone know a nice AQ only alliance landing top 500? Lol
Let's hope so, because an improvement that creates more problems than solves is not improvement at all. And the current AW system is simply much more troublesome
1. AW Attack should start at the same time like AQ !
1.1 All AW starting at the same is to heavy load for your servers ?
I'm working as a senior developer and IT project manager since over 20 years!
A lot of my customers running solutions with 1 million+++ requests and database operations per sec.
If your server can't handle they small about of data, your development is doing something completely wrong!
Feel free to hire me, to get the **** out of your servers xD
Payment in odins are accepted xD
1.2 Anyways, let's keep the fact your servers can't handle "big" amount of data at the same time,
because Kabam is a "special case" also struggling to handle many clients requests showing us
"Problems to connect to network ... Please check your connection!"
In 99,9% it's not OUR connection, it's your servers ... over and over .. so annoying ...
If u can't fix that in time, just skip this big message , give us a small red Symbol somewhere,
this info in fight is so .... hiding complete power bars in fight ...
Back to the point:
If u can't start all AW at the same time:
- begin at AQ start and start a AW all X seconds, so it's not the SAME time and starting times doesn't differ to much
- alternative let each Alliance select, when the want to start attack in a range of six hours !
Yes, that would mean war is not ending at the same time for both sides , BUT WHO CARES ?
There's no interaction between opponents
1.3 Please keep in mind that start of attack in AW means a lot of administration work for the officers,
path and Champs should be assigned dynamically each war !
If war starts, while u are sleeping, at work, or whatever it's just pain in the a...
2. Matchmaking:
- I can accept the fact that u can't provide detail information about how matchmaking works,
because the information definitely will lead to fishy tricks .... sad but true
- i've seen so many crazy matching screens, there's an adjustment needed for sure
3. Please, listen to the user base !!!
Greetz !!!