“The Road to Better World War Matchmaking” aka Sandbagging!

[S_How]

Hey everyone. We've improved how we calculate Glory in World War. The Age of the players in a War has always modified the amount of Glory won or lost, and with this update those modifiers have been changed.

The end result is that Alliances who sandbag (bring several low Age players to War) will now be earning substantially less Glory from victory. Likewise, if your Alliance loses to a sandbagging Alliance, you will lose a lot less Glory than before. In the long run, this means sandbagging Alliances will no longer be at the top of the leaderboard.

As mentioned in a previous post, we will continue to monitor this problem. We will look to make additional changes as necessary, such as potentially changing how Alliances are matched with one another. Thanks.

Nb4powerup BFisher

I would like to provide you feedback on this change now that it has been out there for about a month. Although we had some positive experiences initially (maybe alliances reacted by temporarily stopping?), I would like to say that the change was either pulled out recently, or is not even close to strict enough to solve the problem.

Our current war is against Korea United in 35v35. They have about 15% inactive iron age sandbag accounts, this is the most common level of sandbagging and enough to completely throw the matchmaking algorithm into chaos. Even with this level of sandbagging it is usually enough to put teams in scenarios where the opponent has 15+ bases harder than the non-sandbagging team's strongest, and puts the middle ranks mirrored to bases 1-2 ages higher than theirs in upgrades, at a minimum.

Its a particularly good example to look at because our glory is almost the same (ProdigalThieves: 20,137 Korea United: 20,073). So, the influence of glory vs glory in the award calculation is almost non-existent. In this matchup, we could gain 576, and lose 598 glory. Meaning that although they have clearly manipulated the matchup to a great extent, there is ZERO punishment being delivered in the glory reward. They can still win more than we can despite the fact they are sandbagged and we are not. It will most likely be a stalemate. They are not very good as we have faced them before, and are only doing well in war because they can manipulate matchups without any punishment. But it serves as a perfect example of how your change was either pulled out or has done nothing to help situations like this.

You have given plans to limit troop cards, you have improved defenses with atomic, etc. But, there has been nothing of substance communicated on this in ages, and the one small change hasnt helped in all but the most extreme case (We saw it work once with WAR, who had a 40% sandbag roster). Can you give us some sort of update on your actual plans to help here?

 

[Jakob_888]

I also want to give some feedback to your update against sandbagging and the "penalty" for using many iron ages and high level bases in the same war.

Thank you for endding the massive abuse of iron ages to get easy glory!
You simply cant use 10-15 iron ages and 20 Atomic age/global ages in a match and be received a high amount of glory. And if you do, you will get around 0-10 glory

No team can simply "sandbag" their way to the top of the leaderboard and stay there anymore.

This is pretty clear after some time went by after the update, and it will probably get even clearer in the next month.

Im a bit concerned about the "diverse" teams like eg. the Dominion teams. They have a lot of different levels and ages in their teams, and I dont like that they are getting hurt by this update if that is the case.

Teams will of course continue using enlightment ages, gunpowder ages, medevil ages etc in the future to fill up their team. I see no problem in this even though their weight of course are lowered.

But overall, thank you ending the massive abuse of iron ages to get glory!

 

[S_How]

Jakob, I think that the problem of these teams sneaking into the top 10 with huge sandbags (like 40%) was helped and I agree this is a good thing. However, we are still seeing nearly every single war, 4-7 iron age accounts being used with little or no change in glory awards. Anytime a game rewards having 15% of your roster be "dummy accounts" with the only purpose of manipulating matchups, it means there is still a pretty big problem. The game still rewards sandbagging way more than it rewards anything else. Ive never ever run into a team that had a legitimate "diverse" makeup that was hurt by this change.

I really hope that with the changes they've announced for troop tactics, and improved defense in AA, they focus more on the problem of sandbagging which almost as bad as it has ever been for many teams. For me and my team personally, sandbagging is and always was 100x worse than troop card issues, but I recognize both are big problems and must be fixed. Fingers crossed they start a trend of making changes that encourage fair play.

 

[Tenacious D]

Those multi-age alliances should be hurt. That is an intentional manipulation of the war systems. In a 30x30 the bottom 15 in those alliances do not even need to attack. They are the ultimate sandbag.

 

[Vixen]

We have had matches of four or so classics who are not attacking... new age sandbagging...

 

[QuébecGlory]

Recent match-up:

Team 1 2
--------------------
AA 13 6
GA 5 8
IA 4 4
EA 0 2
GP 0 3
Med 2 7
Clas 1 0
Iron 5 0

GP 345 - 221

Was one team outmatched? Are the glory points appropriate? Does team 1 have enough of a deterrent (penalty) to justify removing all sandbags?

 

[QuébecGlory]

Sorry, I can't seem to make straight columns...

 

[Scots Guards No 1]

it sure is a long road Mr Tim Train but there seems to be no light at the end of this tunnel, what are you doing ?

 

[GailWho]

We just matched with a Chinese team with 11/25 Atomic Age and 2 Iron. We have 2 Atomic (our lowest age is EA) and average level is 157. Their average level is 157 with the sandbags (You call them decoys right?) .... 170 without the 2 Iron Age. The glory win/loss for us is 397/480. So how is it that they get a higher glory win than us? Btw... they have a standard deviation of 46 we have a standard deviation of 25 (which is a little high for us as someone's lv94 alt is visiting) I don't see how Nexon did anything here to stop them from getting ''easy glory''. Good thing we are up to the challenge.

 

[poop_]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

 

[poop_]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
(sorry, I wasn't done)

 

[poop_]

Thank you for that. I needed a good laugh.

 

[Toryon]

Did the maintenance on world war today have anything to do with stacking?

 

[Nb4powerup]

I'm sorry but it did not.

 

[Vixen]

Nb4powerup .. can we ask what it fixed? please

 

[QuébecGlory]

I like your comments Poop, intelligent, well written.... you should really keep your positive comments coming, it's a breath of fresh air!

 

[poop_]

Your welcome! Anytime!

 

[S_How]

I believe they have taken out the glory penalty for sandbagging teams. Either that or something went wrong and its just no longer working. We saw it work for like a week, and now the last several wars it appears to not be doing anything.

This is our current matchup against Poland Elite. They have a 15% sandbag with 4-5 undeveloped accounts at the bottom that will surely never make hits. This is a mild sandbag, but it is enough to completely throw off the matchmaking, and is about what most teams will use now. We have 1 player above 200, they have like 8. Its not that big of a deal, it means our top 10 will have to work overtime to cover the bases but we've faced much worse sandbags than this. But, it gets much worse when its the middle section of the rosters. Our middle ranks are having to hit on average targets that are 21 levels higher than them, many have to hit targets 30 levels higher than them. Think about how many upgrades you can do per level once you're past 150...like 3+, right? Hitting bases 30 levels higher than you equates to like 90 more building or library upgrades. Our bottom ranks probably get even worse....they need loot more than anyone and will be left to hit iron age bases for 5k food and gold.

Poland Elites 1-26 rank average 186. These are the players that will hit and participate in war. They have a few questionable bases beneath that, hard to tell if they are active, but no big deal. However if you include their 5 sandbags at the bottom, their average drops to 153, a full 33 levels. This is what a small portion of undeveloped bases at the bottom of your roster can do to matchmaking. Levels arent everything, but if you compare our two alliances our economic upgrades are similar, and the levels scale well with offense/defense upgrades.

One would think that this pretty big mismatch and clear sandbag would qualify under BHG's new policy to "prevent sandbagging teams from advancing in the leaderboard". Haha, hardly. Poland Elite has more glory than us (to their credit, their top end is skilled), so that will impact who gets what.....but they stand to gain 450 glory from us. Anyone in the top 100 glory rankings can tell you, 450 glory is a huge amount of glory to win. There is zero reason for Poland Elite to not manipulate the matchups to this extent if they still have the potential to gain so much glory.

I'll be the last one to complain about a hard war, hard mirrors, etc. If anything, facing all of these artificially strong teams has made my team so much better....but honestly action really needs to be taken. For the last 6 months, the best strategy in Dominations has been to load up your roster with inactive iron age accounts. Any game that caters to that strategy, without action, for this long...is really destined to fail.

Please BHG. Quit telling us you are "reviewing stalemates and sandbagging", we have heard the same thing since Summer 2016. Those words are meaningless now. Only action will matter.

	PT	Poland Elite
Avg Lvl	155	153
Std Dev	30	62
Top 10 avg	186	200
10-25 avg	156	177
26-35 avg	121	70

 

[GailWho]

We lost 480 glory to sandbaggers... if we would have won we would hav only gotten 397. They had 2 Iron Age making the average level 157 same as ours. If you took the 2 sandbags off their average level jumped to 170. Our standard deviation was 25 there's 46.

 

[S_How]

This is why I think it was taken out. It seemed like we were losing 0-100 glory the few wars after the change, then it was right back to normal. The standard deviation was 62 for poland elite in this war, they could win 450 if they beat us and they are already top 50ish, so that much glory is massive to them.