You guys do know matchmaking is a 2 way street right? It takes 2 alliances of similar ratings to search about the same time to match fast. Otherwise the algorithm expands the matching criteria until someone is found.
Hence, probably starting your search early would be probably best. It’s the 3rd war for this week and my alliance matched at 3:15am (matchmaking starts at 2am for my timezone).
So an hour and a half isn't enough time for their matchmaking algorithms to expand the criteria and find an opponent?
In this situation apparently few alliances anywhere near the same rating were looking for match: even when the match happened the match was way unbalanced. It is somewhat arbitrary how long the game should wait before expanding the match criteria, and it probably doesn't happen in a single stage. The game probably looks for a certain period of time, say a half hour, waiting for a close match. If none are found the game expands the match criteria and continues to wait, and after another half hour expands the criteria again. In corner cases you will get matches like this, just because of the situation, and because no system is going to work as the players want correctly in all situations.
The fundamental problem is the game is attempting to perform a double match: match on rating *and* alliance rating. This is fundamentally wrong. However, a ton of people complained that pure rating matches against disparate alliance ratings was "unfair." They were wrong, but apparently Kabam decided to listen to them and change match making (for the umpteenth time) a while back to incorporate this match criteria. Because of this, you don't just have a tricky match situation at the very top, you actually have this tricky match situation in multiple places in the alliance rankings due to alliance rating vs war rating distributions. This was analyzed by some players a while back, and the direct evidence was that this more "fair" double match criteria will exacerbate matching until Kabam decides that in this case the players are idiots and revert the matching to the "less fair" but more mathematically correct war rating only match system, and eat the complaints about those "unfair" matchings. Until they do, this is an intractable problem to solve. You can only push the problem away from one bad result to other bad results that other players will complain about.
Comments
In this situation apparently few alliances anywhere near the same rating were looking for match: even when the match happened the match was way unbalanced. It is somewhat arbitrary how long the game should wait before expanding the match criteria, and it probably doesn't happen in a single stage. The game probably looks for a certain period of time, say a half hour, waiting for a close match. If none are found the game expands the match criteria and continues to wait, and after another half hour expands the criteria again. In corner cases you will get matches like this, just because of the situation, and because no system is going to work as the players want correctly in all situations.
The fundamental problem is the game is attempting to perform a double match: match on rating *and* alliance rating. This is fundamentally wrong. However, a ton of people complained that pure rating matches against disparate alliance ratings was "unfair." They were wrong, but apparently Kabam decided to listen to them and change match making (for the umpteenth time) a while back to incorporate this match criteria. Because of this, you don't just have a tricky match situation at the very top, you actually have this tricky match situation in multiple places in the alliance rankings due to alliance rating vs war rating distributions. This was analyzed by some players a while back, and the direct evidence was that this more "fair" double match criteria will exacerbate matching until Kabam decides that in this case the players are idiots and revert the matching to the "less fair" but more mathematically correct war rating only match system, and eat the complaints about those "unfair" matchings. Until they do, this is an intractable problem to solve. You can only push the problem away from one bad result to other bad results that other players will complain about.
We are so sorry to hear about the issues you've experienced with AW wait times.
Please take the time to reach out to our Support Team about this issue. They can provide further assistance for you:
http://kabam.force.com/PKB/KbContactUsForm
Kind Regards,
Porkchop