Regarding Alliance Wars Matchmaking

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• [Deleted User] Posts: 724 ★★★★

  March 2018

  Hey Summoners! As some of you may or may not recall, at the start of Alliance Wars Seasons an Alliance at the top end experienced some undesired matchmaking issues. While it’s feasible that an Alliance may miss out on a match in Wars if they enter the matchmaking process late in the window (or delay in searching for their next match), this Alliance entered matchmaking the second it opened and were still unable to find a match. In fact this Alliance took so long to find a match that they were actually prevented from participating in two matches.
  
  To be specific, the main issue was this Alliance’s incredibly high War Rating. Our matchmaker will attempt to match two Alliances as closely as possible but if it can’t find a close War Rating it will look wider to find a match. The War Rating of this Alliance was so high that it took hours to even get close to nearby War Rating Alliances, all of which already matched, so it took hours more to find an Alliance to match with. This issue affects Alliances at the very top and bottom where there are more outliers and a smaller quantity of nearby matches (like a bell curve). We’re focusing on this particular situation because the stakes involve the top upgrade materials in the game, and we want to do our best to ensure a fair competition.
  
  Our team worked to make some improvements to the matchmaking system to alleviate this, and have spent the past few weeks monitoring the situation to ensure this has significantly improved the issue. As you may know, Kabam’s general policy is to resolve a situation, observe and ensure the resolution ‘sticks’, prior to discussing how to rectify the issue from a compensation perspective.
  
  Now that we are confident in the improvements to matchmaking our changes made, we wanted to explain what we would be doing to address how this impacted one Alliance twice. In this instance, the heart of the matter is where it has placed this Alliance in the competitive play landscape, and how this will impact their ability to earn Season end rewards that match the merit of their Alliance’s skill and dedication to The Contest.
  
  This issue impacted only one Alliance and we are only making adjustments for this alliance, yet we wanted to be transparent with the rest of the community regarding how we were resolving this. It’s important to note that this issue was and is different than matchmaking taking a few hours to complete - given the international audience of The Contest, it is realistically possible that some matchmaking timelines will be several hours long.
  
  While still ensuring fair consideration to ALL Summoners within The Contest, our solution is this:
  
  At the end of the first Alliance Wars Season, Kabam will be manually adjusting the rewards this Alliance receives for their performance and play. Our team will be looking at the average points this Alliance earned in the first half of Season 1 for each War they participated in, excluding ‘win bonus’ points. We will then be reviewing this Alliance’s positions in the leaderboards, and counting this bonus point amount for the Alliance Wars that were impacted by this issue. If upon manually calculating these points, this Alliance is supposed to fall somewhere else on the leaderboards, they will be granted whatever the discrepancy in rewards is. Note that we cannot manually alter points on the leaderboard to impact their earned in-game title or leaderboard position, but our team wants to ensure that they will receive the top upgrade materials at the end of the Season that they should have. This also means that no other Alliances will have the rewards they receive or their position on the leaderboards changed - Kabam is simply paying ‘extra’ rewards for whatever position these Alliances would have placed on the leaderboards.
  
  We feel that this is the most fair option for us to proceed with.
  
  - The Contest of Champions Team
  

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