8 of our last 10 wars have been against teams that mix high end atomics, with undeveloped accounts to intentionally manipulate the matchmaking algorithm you use. It creates a scenario where a team has significantly more power, both offense and defense, than their opponent. We dont know war weight formulas, which is ok, so all we have to go off of are levels, but those can be a fairly good guide. In many of our wars, if you take our average level, and compare it with the opponents average level after removing their few (usually 10-25% of roster) undeveloped accounts, we are disadvantaged by 35 or more levels. Absolutely insurmountable odds. And it now happens almost every single war. I encourage you to look at our war history to see the effect it is having.
I dont want to say the word 'sandbag' because I feel the community and the developers have different definitions of them. However, in 100% of the examples in our war history, as you can look at, these undeveloped accounts never make hits, and even if they did they only exist because the matchmaking system is so vulnerable to this strategy, and they almost never existed before glory became the only leaderboard alliances have. Even a 10% (2-3 accounts in a 20-30 person war) have been shown to completely skew a match. None of these accounts have been part of a 'diverse team'.
Because our strategy has been to take our best, most prepared members to war, it has hurt us. Instead of taking our best, a better strategy would be to hold great people out, and instead take an iron age account I created yesterday to war. It is SIGNIFICANTLY more advantageous for a team to do this. The supposed penalties put in a few months ago are either so insignificant they cannot be noticed, or they have been taken out entirely. We often face teams in the top 50 who can take hundreds of glory from us with a 35+ level advantage and a 20%+ undeveloped account mix.
This problem will only become even worse, as the maximum strength of players increases, the reduction influence of undeveloped accounts will continue to grow and grow, allowing people to match easier and easier opponents as you develop new content.
With this context, I have the following questions
1) Do you feel that the strategy of taking undeveloped accounts that lower war weight to create a significant mismatch on the top end, is acceptable and should be rewarded more than a team starting their most capable players? If yes, thank you for helping us see the future of the game. If not,
2) How, and when, do you plan on addressing this problem? We have heard too many times "We dont want the game played like this, we are constantly monitoring and trying to improve, etc. The fact remains that no material action has been taken in 9 months and the problem unbelievably continues to grow.
3) If you take action, how will you both protect the ability of the best heavyweight teams to remain at the top of a leaderboard, but in a way that doesnt encourage teams to drop war weight artificially which allows them to ensure they have no real competition in their wars. Said in other words, how will you encourage peers to battle each other rather than teams vastly different in strength, while still giving the best heaviest and strongest teams the ability to rightfully be on top of a leaderboard.
Finally, if possible, a few great suggestions have been given by the community, I would like to know if you have considered them, and what flaws you see to them:
Option A: Gail has suggested giving every base a potential of 10* in defenses, meaning all bases can be hit twice, and every hit will matter....you cant just load a bottom half of your roster with undeveloped accounts that simply dont matter on offense or defense.
Option B: Provide an age range which can be in wars (If you have atomics, you cant take lower than industrial, etc). Although this may in some cases exclude some people on a team from war, I would argue if there are indeed real instances of iron ages learning the game, having them mixed with atomics in war is about the worse experience you'd ever give a person.
Option C: Dont have the bottom ~25% of a roster count for matchmaking reasons.
These are just ideas I thought were fairly good, Im sure none are perfect, but literally anything would be better than the current system for my team, which has ruined the game for us.
