Easy Sandbagging Fix, really.

[bjquinniii]

I could fix the sandbagging issue with literally one line of code (well, it depends on how their current code is written, best case is one line of code changing the loop controlling the mechanism where they consider each member of the alliance).

Right now, when they are calculating the overall strength of each side to use in the matchmaking system, they take into account all members of each side. This is easily gamed because of what 0s do to any average. Because each player can get 10 stars while only surrendering 5, there is no consequence to loading the bottom half of the lineup with 0s (in the case of our current war, our opponents have 7 cold war agers nicely balanced out by 8 iron agers... note: the iron age accounts aren't even pretending to be real, not a single wall in any of them).

If you're going to keep the "2 attacks but only 1 loss" setup, then the fix is embarrassingly simple.

Only count the top half of the lineup for matchmaking calculations.

This would instantly remove all incentive to pad your lineup with 0s to game the system (it's a math thing).

 

[pckrn]

this only creates another extreme where alliances start requiring bottom half to be as strong as top half.

if youre not as strong as top half, you will have to leave and find an alliance with members, ALL members, close to your own level. imo this makes things worse than they are now

 

[bjquinniii]

In what way would that version of things be worse that what we have now? Yes, the extreme case would be an alliance team made up of 50 similarly leveled accounts. How is an alliance made up of similarly experienced players bad? How is that worse than the current situation where the extreme case is that 1/2 of the accounts aren't actually played by anyone? And are there solely for the purpose of getting an advantage in war matchups?
As a case in point I need look no further than my current war. It's a 25v25 that we are going to lose dramatically. We'll get maybe 75-80 stars total. We have a few atomics, some globals, and a spread of folks on down from there. Our opponents have 8 cold war age accounts. Their #1 is an age and 81 levels above our highest. The rest of their team consists of a top heavy spread down to industrial age, along with 8 virtually identical iron age accounts. All of levels 13-15. All obviously unplayed by anyone. No sane matchmaking system would ever pair up our two alliances.

 

[Bootney Lee Fonsworth]

At the very least the top half should weigh twice as much as the bottom half of a lineup. Breaking it into quartiles of 40/30/20/10 would be even better, but I digress. Would both of these lead to scenarios as the fellow above mentioned? Yes. But that would shift the pressure to create mega alliances back upwards. As the Polish site shows there simply aren't that many people at the highest levels of the game. Let the people who find a thrill in paying to be on that meaningless, from a gameplay sense, leaderboard have it. Let the vast majority who war for camaraderie and a way to pass the time between upgrades actually get some decent matches. This trickle down crap has gone on for far too long with no action whatsoever by the developers. Let's try some trickle up.

 

[Quovatis]

yep, weighted average is how Supercell does it, and it works well. But they also have 100x the player base.

 

[Bootney Lee Fonsworth]

I really can't fathom why they won't implement this. Will some genuine lower age accounts be hurt by this? Yes. Would we also see more mergers in the top 200 or so alliances thereby providing a bigger pool to battle with among the best of those teams? I think so.

After nearly 2 years sandbagging has worked its way all the way down to around the 16,000 glory range. That's ludicrous. Last year we started a new alliance and had made it to 16,000 in less than six weeks fighting mostly 10s and 15s vs. Not entirely sure it's possible now unless you're talking about a top alliance starting anew to piss in people's corn flakes. Looking at you Koreans. Certainly unlikely for a mixed alliance.

Does it have issues? Absolutely. With a 2 attack, 1 defense set up it'll never be perfect. But why they insist on perfect being the enemy of better is perplexing.