Artifact?
When you end a battle after the battle has started without deploying troops, you don´t lose any medals. Surely you must have noticed that your medal count didn´t change when you did this and even if it did work, why in the world would you wait for 30 seconds instead of just deploying a unit?
I think not. I think its an artifact, and it shows up as a single troop attack in their replay, when no troops are deployed.
No, just take a look at the night witch attacks. it would just show a blank log if there was a log. Take a look back at the force quit from last year. The logs simply won´t show. same thing goes for last years world war glitch when you lost/gained medals from war attacks. You´d just lose hundreds of medals over night (depending on how many opponents attacked your base) without any logs to show for it.
obsidi You have to look at this from the developers point of view. As you mentioned in your first post, the medal system is designed to work as a ladder and meta game for players. Dropping medals for easier matchmaking is something the players have done to increase their income. It was never intended to work that way. Noone is forcing you to drop medals. If you were able to choose your exact medal count, what would be the point with it? It would just change the medal range for the abandonned bases and you would have to randomly search for them by changing your medals all the time.
set a "cap" where you wouldn't ascend past it?
allow us to 'drop' medals by just tapping them awvay?
establish better rewards for being in higher leagues, removing motivations to be low medal for raiding?
1.Allowing people to set a cap would just create brackets and push the abandonned bases out of the bracket of active players. How often would your be allowed to change these "caps"? Seems chaotic.
2.Again, where would these medals go? If they weren't transfered to someone else, there would be no way to match you with an opponent and you'd have to "next" your way through the entire player base instead of a select group.
3. I doubt nexon are willing to increase the battle bonuses. It seems they're going more in the other direction, trying to make progression harder and more tedious so you're incentivized to spend money. With the introduction of food for walls, the rewards from the higher leagues will never outweigh the efficiency of farming abandonned bases below lvl 170.
What you´re looking for isn´t some new ranking system. You want easier matchmaking. Everyone can't be matched against easy bases with millions of resources. It will never happen.
instead of trying to change the system, I suggest you adapt to it. Start using raiders+sappers or tank armies when you're raiding. Make sure you don't get more than 3 stars from a base and don´t spend all your resources before you log out. Make sure you have atleast 3million food/3millon gold left so you can get a peace treaty. Then you won't have to spend all day dropping your medal count.