Update to World War Glory Matchmaking

[theBobNamedDan]

I think it has worked. We stopped getting matched with top 100 alliances since the change. My alliance is ranked 560 or so. Matches have been easier and closer.

Typically we have a 3 drone age and we get 2-4 drone age opponents.

 

[Dracula3811]

50% of the time, last war the enemy had 3 bases like that.
View attachment 10704

Bases like that aren't actually sandbagging. Look at their town base. Everything they have on their town base counts towards their war weight. They just haven't updated their war base.

 

[IDaedalusI]

Last war 11 out of 15 bases were drone age. All over 380. We had 3. Great job on the balancing.

What's your alliance's ranking? I wonder how this compares to @theBobNamedDan's experience below your comment

 

[Chasingwilma]

What's your alliance's ranking? I wonder how this compares to @theBobNamedDan's experience below your comment

We are ranked 900

 

[Chasingwilma]

Todays war we are up against 6 automation and 6 drone. We have one automation and two drones. This is the joke that keeps on giving. Stop worrying about adding stupid crap to the game and fix the important issues.

 

[Chasingwilma]

The allure of the game I guess is not battling other groups but building and farming a watered down game. More is not better. Solving issues that have plagued this game for years is better.

 

[theBobNamedDan]

I wonder how heavy weight your bases are. Is your 1 automation and 2 drones maxed defense? Your opponents age rushed?

I am one of 2 automated ages in my alliance but I have not upgraded defenses in 2 years except for rocket arsenal, and one each of the troop spawning buildings.

Maybe you are being matched based on bloated defense…. My 2 alt accounts have also stopped upgrading defenses so we take 3 bases that are offense only focused into war.

I find a LOT of people don’t understand how war matchmaking is done and they all rush defense upgrades because they don’t like being raided in MP battles. That makes their war bases very heavy for their age and they get much harder war opponents.

 

[TitanKnight]

I'd like to suggest adjusting war sizes to 10v10 and 20v20.
Let's base war matchups on a Glory range from -1000 to +1000.
Straightforward, right? more competitive wars.

Lighter weight alliances should find their appropriate tier. The issue lies in basing war matchups on war weight.
Truly, Glory is the more accurate metric.

on Domistats.com showing 37% of wars are mismatched, most of the wars (one of the alliance's glory > 23000) > 95% already know which side will win before it begins.

Isn't BHG announced war matching based on Glory tier? Doesn't look like it's been released yet.

 

[theBobNamedDan]

I somewhat disagree. I don’t think glory should be the only factor. If you base on glory alone you will get serious mismatches still. It would start randomly putting heavy weights all drone age plus more often against teams that have 3-5 drone age bases. It would reward consolidation of heavy bases over growing your alliance as is and teaching new players.

Thanks for pointing out that 63% of all war matchups are good matches. System is not completely broken. That is a lot of good matches.

 

[TitanKnight]

37% mismatched wars are very bad matchups. 63% of those are not mean good matchup, definitely not.
Match by Glory, will have some glory snipe alliances play at low glory alliances, but then they will only have boring wars vs weak alliances.
Unlike now base on war weight, those glory snipe alliances move their players to 15k glory alliance and able beat top 100 alliances for 300+ glory.

There are quite some heavy weight alliances but they don't have good museum and skill, really annoying matching them and only can gain +15 glory, waste of time

War matching base on war weight is what cause the long spin time, base on Glory solve this issue.
And of course some have mentioned to reduce only 2 sizes, prefer just 10 vs 10 and 20 vs 20.
There are many alliances available for players to move around.

 

[Toni]

It continues - as I already wrote on 26.09. - with the mismatches against us. For example, at the last WW our opponent (10 players) was 443 level higher on the first 4 positions. We lost again enormously Glory. Meanwhile we save all resources and do not fight anymore. I wonder how hard it must be to exclude such mismatches? 443 level - this may never be a match.

 

[IDaedalusI]

Hey guys, sorry for not being forthcoming earlier, I was simply interested in investigating some of your concerns!

I'm a dev at BHG and in between developing features I try to dive into our War Matchmaking system and compare it to what I've seen you guys talk about. We are certainly aware that bad matches do happen in our system (let's face it, no matchmaking system is perfect) and that there are alliances that at times seem to get especially bad streams of luck with matches. We are still looking into ways to lessen that bad luck.

Having said all that, I do want to clear up some things as I've seen them.

The biggest thing for me is Domistats' war mismatches. First, Domistats is NOT an officially supported system by BHG and while a ton of great community effort went into developing it, it is by no means a definitive representation of what happens with our Matchmaking system. I've tried to figure out how they might calculate mismatches, but would love more details on how their system generates these results..

I've seen quite a few suggestions on what values to focus on, or not focus on, for matchmaking and have a few comments I'd like to share:

"Only use glory for matchmaking" - The problem here is that while your alliance may always go to war with the same 10, 15, 20, or 30 members, not all alliances do. If you went to war with your best members for a while, then you'd reach a higher glory with your alliance. But say you stop for a bit, and start taking lower-leveled members to war in order to show them the ropes? Now your glory doesn't actually match the power of your alliance and therefore is not an accurate metric on its own. As glory is a skill-based metric (the better you are, the more glory you get) it isn't reliable when the overall "skill" of your alliance can change from one war to another based on who you bring along with you.

"I had X level while they had X+Y level!" - While I certainly understand using this value to compare strength, it is important to remember that your level can advance by purely building eco buildings too. It is A metric to use, but a not fully accurate one as your level does not just represent your offensive and/or defensive power alone.

"We had only X drone/auto age players while they had X+Y!" - This follows along the same lines as the above, I could be drone age with only my eco buildings leveled up accordingly and therefore still be a fair match against an Information age player. Of course, eventually I'll be stronger than them if I'm upgrading properly but that is a difference in the future, not one right now.

Now, having said that, I definitely understand that there are wars that get to a point where you are just definitively outmatched. This will still happen at times especially when you're in a "bubble" where there aren't many (or any) alliances of your caliber in matchmaking for a time. We want to match you up with someone though, so we do the best we can with what we've got. This is why joining war sizes with more alliances in them (like 10v10 and 20v20) has worked for many, but we understand it can be more fun to fight in larger wars and so are trying to look into solutions there as well.

Hopefully the above explanations help to shed some light on why we use both glory and "war weight" in our matchmaking, alongside other variables. Yes, there are other variables too, but no I sadly can not share them with you right now however much I may want to in order to have more good discussion!

We are trying to look into ways to improve these issues but a matchmaking system with as many variables and moving parts as ours is easily one of the most complicated systems in our game. The small change we made a bit ago has definitely seemed to help those that we were attempting to help. We are simply looking at all of the knobs and levers we can pull to try to make the best impact with the least consequences and like all things in making games, this takes time.

I do very much appreciate all of the discussion and information you all have around this! While I may intimately know how everything works "under the hood" it is you guys that interact with the system and the results every day more than I ever could! So please do continue to share your thoughts, concerns, ideas, and complaints (in a nice way please ) and I will continue to do my best to help monitor the matchmaking system where I am able and when not working on other cool features to come

All the best,
IDaedalusI

 

[TitanKnight]

Among Top 200 alliances wars, we can see most of the time both alliances have similar war weight, but Glory difference can be > 2000 or more.
That make it an unfair matchup. more likely the other side will just give up.
We can see many top 200 alliances getting < 50 glory for a win in wars (domistats Alliance page).
if both Alliances have similar Glory, the winning side can gain approx. 150 glory, same for the losing side -150 glory ...etc

Is it possible to let the war matching spin longer until it find a closer match which Glory difference < 1000? here 1000 is just a figure # for top 200 alliances (ranked by Glory on domistats.com), can be adjusted as BHG dev. know better.

I still like Glory driven by Skill though, don't know how is other players' thought.
That's how competitive war game should be and might solve majority unfair matchups.

 

[TitanKnight]

Just try to learn how Coc does their war matchup which is base on overall offensive and defensive strength, Coc doesn't have Museum, so it's simplier for Coc.
I see Dominations probably mostly base on war weight, little % base on Museum, I guess. That's why we often matched up with lower glory alliances even though war weight are similar. bad MUSUEM = lower GLORY and hence unfair wars.

Clash of Clan war matchup: Clans are matched up based on the overall strength of its members. Strength is based on each member's attacking power (troops, army camp capacity and spells) and defensive power (defense buildings, walls and traps). Heroes constitute towards a player's offensive and defensive power.

 

[jpsfm]

Hey guys, sorry for not being forthcoming earlier, I was simply interested in investigating some of your concerns!

I'm a dev at BHG and in between developing features I try to dive into our War Matchmaking system and compare it to what I've seen you guys talk about. We are certainly aware that bad matches do happen in our system (let's face it, no matchmaking system is perfect) and that there are alliances that at times seem to get especially bad streams of luck with matches. We are still looking into ways to lessen that bad luck.

Having said all that, I do want to clear up some things as I've seen them.

The biggest thing for me is Domistats' war mismatches. First, Domistats is NOT an officially supported system by BHG and while a ton of great community effort went into developing it, it is by no means a definitive representation of what happens with our Matchmaking system. I've tried to figure out how they might calculate mismatches, but would love more details on how their system generates these results..

I've seen quite a few suggestions on what values to focus on, or not focus on, for matchmaking and have a few comments I'd like to share:

"Only use glory for matchmaking" - The problem here is that while your alliance may always go to war with the same 10, 15, 20, or 30 members, not all alliances do. If you went to war with your best members for a while, then you'd reach a higher glory with your alliance. But say you stop for a bit, and start taking lower-leveled members to war in order to show them the ropes? Now your glory doesn't actually match the power of your alliance and therefore is not an accurate metric on its own. As glory is a skill-based metric (the better you are, the more glory you get) it isn't reliable when the overall "skill" of your alliance can change from one war to another based on who you bring along with you.

"I had X level while they had X+Y level!" - While I certainly understand using this value to compare strength, it is important to remember that your level can advance by purely building eco buildings too. It is A metric to use, but a not fully accurate one as your level does not just represent your offensive and/or defensive power alone.

"We had only X drone/auto age players while they had X+Y!" - This follows along the same lines as the above, I could be drone age with only my eco buildings leveled up accordingly and therefore still be a fair match against an Information age player. Of course, eventually I'll be stronger than them if I'm upgrading properly but that is a difference in the future, not one right now.

Now, having said that, I definitely understand that there are wars that get to a point where you are just definitively outmatched. This will still happen at times especially when you're in a "bubble" where there aren't many (or any) alliances of your caliber in matchmaking for a time. We want to match you up with someone though, so we do the best we can with what we've got. This is why joining war sizes with more alliances in them (like 10v10 and 20v20) has worked for many, but we understand it can be more fun to fight in larger wars and so are trying to look into solutions there as well.

Hopefully the above explanations help to shed some light on why we use both glory and "war weight" in our matchmaking, alongside other variables. Yes, there are other variables too, but no I sadly can not share them with you right now however much I may want to in order to have more good discussion!

We are trying to look into ways to improve these issues but a matchmaking system with as many variables and moving parts as ours is easily one of the most complicated systems in our game. The small change we made a bit ago has definitely seemed to help those that we were attempting to help. We are simply looking at all of the knobs and levers we can pull to try to make the best impact with the least consequences and like all things in making games, this takes time.

I do very much appreciate all of the discussion and information you all have around this! While I may intimately know how everything works "under the hood" it is you guys that interact with the system and the results every day more than I ever could! So please do continue to share your thoughts, concerns, ideas, and complaints (in a nice way please ) and I will continue to do my best to help monitor the matchmaking system where I am able and when not working on other cool features to come

All the best,
IDaedalusI

Thank you very much for the nice information about matchmaking. But you could share some more as it won’t harm BHG, if we have some more details. As I can understand it’s so complicated that no one can manipulate the system.
I also want to say that at some point if you want to raise levels and reach the top you have to win better opponents than you. There comes the skill and the strategy. It is more than possible to win a higher leveled opponent and happens everyday in the game. For me that is the magic of the game. To win similar or lower opponents just doesn’t give the same pleasure as winning better ones

 

[Toni]

Thank you @IDaedalusI for your feedback. I also agreed with @jpsfm - winning against better opponents is what really matters.

However, we also need to look at how the game has changed this year. There is more emphasis on defense. The 3 month buffs and nerfs change the game very significantly. Meanwhile, many in the council building have legendary and epic council members.

The complexity is increasing - this will also become more with the Manufactory. The advantages that Drones and Automation Age players have - even if they are not defensive players - are now so high that an Info Age hardly has a chance to win "up". And a low Drone Age player who is an attacker can hardly beat Automation Age anymore. At the latest from level 333 (and at our last WW we had 3 Auto Age >400 against us) Warweight doesn't play a big role anymore in my opinion either. To get that high, the defense buildings must also be developed - for Auto Age even significantly - developed.

In lower ages we can often win 1 to 2 ages up (I have 8 Acocunts in different ages - can evaluate this well). But - as already mentioned - Drone and Auto Age - if the museum is not totally junk - are another league.

I think it is important to consider all these game development and also temporary changes. Which automatically and the higher the age, also leads to a stronger consideration of the ages in matchmaking.

Additionally - this may not apply to many - due to the more frequent Glory Decay phases we are forced to fight regularly. Knowing that we now permanently get too strong opponents and lose our hard-earned ranking.

I understand that it is very complicated to achieve a good matching. I also like that you keep making the game challenging by making changes. But these changes must always be checked against the matching. At the moment I don't think that is the case. At least (and I only have this perspective) from the perspective of our alliance.

 

[oddin]

"Only use glory for matchmaking" - The problem here is that while your alliance may always go to war with the same 10, 15, 20, or 30 members, not all alliances do. If you went to war with your best members for a while, then you'd reach a higher glory with your alliance. But say you stop for a bit, and start taking lower-leveled members to war in order to show them the ropes? Now your glory doesn't actually match the power of your alliance and therefore is not an accurate metric on its own. As glory is a skill-based metric (the better you are, the more glory you get) it isn't reliable when the overall "skill" of your alliance can change from one war to another based on who you bring along with you.

Hey! Nice to meet you.

WW matchmaking is one of the most discussed topics in dominations cause all the hardcore players are devoted to this part of the game.
We are competitive players and our alliances battle other alliances for glory. We may indeed not use the exact same players every time BUT in a competitive environment, the leaderboard SHOULD BE LIKE A LADDER.
i.e. You win #112, You get matched with something close by. You win that too? Expect to get matched with #100-#120 alliances...
IF that alliance wins most of their matches, then their next match-ups should be against #70-#90 ranked alliances and so on.
IF they lose at some point, then give them opponents around the same rank for a few more times. See if they lose or win again. IF they keep losing then they reached their ceiling and that's where they should be.
IF they lose a couple wars but still win some others then the algorithm should give them alliances higher ranked than them.

That way, every alliance expects the alliances on top of them to be more competent and battle rdy than the ones beneath their ranking.
This goes all the way to council stats, museum stats, paid TTs, paid buildings etc etc
This totally eliminates sandbagging and alliances like Den of Thieves that have few drone/auto age players , yet they are so high on the leaderboard. Also, the ranking achieved is the rank of the ALLIANCE and not of individual player ranking, therefore it should reflect exactly that, regardless if we use our best 15 players or our "worst" line up.

The main issue here is that alliances do not all select the same WW size. And here comes the real riddle!! How do you do the above setup when you can have this:

• 10v10 48%
• 15v15 26%
• 20v20 21%
• 30v30 5%

This needs some radical thinking. The one I can think of is rather simple. We have been playing this game for many years and nothing has changed on the WW part of the game. It remains exactly the same. Although we like it, we all need a new look, new rules and a new setup. Probably faster paced than the current one.

- So, ditch the 47 hour per WW and the 4 pools of matchmaking (10/15/20/30) and make it only one. The 15vs would be ideal for every alliance as it doesn't require that many players. Now we all play in the same pool and matchmaking can be faster and more to the point.
- Also, those big alliances with 30+ active players... Why constraint such alliances to only a single war? Allow those alliances to have 2 wars at the same time with 2 different line ups. If that is not doable, then allow only 15 and 25vs wars.
- And last of all , make the WW shorter. It is commonly accepted that we like to play WW. Let's make it faster then!
- But sometimes we are bored when we get a mismatch . So, create that "Surrender" button and lets go to the next WW. Why waste 2 days for it? Why should it be 2 days in the first place? 12-16 hours prep, 12-16 hours attack day should be enough for all.

If the single pool of 15vs matchmaking looks too extreme to you, then the middle ground might be a nice alternative. The possibilities are endless. We could have two pools, 10vs and 15vs only which cover 74% of the wars in this game.

I think i said too many things at once but WW is the best aspect of this game and there are so many possibilities that it is a shame to play 8 years the same WW format while we could do so much more.

 

[TitanKnight]

Just 15 vs 15 is great idea, love it.
and war match base on Glory !!!
Shorter war planning day and war day are nice, even just reduce by 6 hours each phrase will be nice.

 

[IDaedalusI]

In principle, I like the idea of taking into account the strength of the off/def in addition to the overall level. If you have values for that, how about showing us those as well so we can see for ourselves that it's actually a "fair" match?

It is certainly something that I have and will continue to talk to people about, but part of our concern is people finding ways to "game" or take advantage of our matchmaking system in ways we don't want. The more data players have from the internals of the system, the easier it becomes to take advantage of.

Higher ages have an advantage in defense simply because of the partly much larger number of buildings. For example, a fully developed global age has no chance against a rushed space age (with only half developed defense buildings) although both may have the same (total) level.

Personally I haven't thought about "has more buildings means easier defense" before. But, it is something that our war weight system takes into account!

Especially in your example Information Age vs Drone Age the drone has clear advantages due to the drone post, which helps in defense e.g. by blocked sabotage or suppressed airfield troops - even if other defense buildings are not fully upgraded.

When developing drone factory we knew that it would have a large affect on offensive and defensive capabilities so we made sure to take it into account when calculating war weight I'll also add that we expect Manufactory to have an impact too and have taken steps to ensure its included in war weight as well!

Also, I have a hunch that even the "war weight" of players who are in the alliance but not in the lineup of the war is taken into account. This also distorts the search for a suitable opponent in my eyes.

I looked into this again just to be sure but can confirm that we only take into account the war weight of players who are participating in the given war.

Just try to learn how Coc does their war matchup which is base on overall offensive and defensive strength, Coc doesn't have Museum, so it's simplier for Coc.
I see Dominations probably mostly base on war weight, little % base on Museum, I guess. That's why we often matched up with lower glory alliances even though war weight are similar. bad MUSUEM = lower GLORY and hence unfair wars.

Clash of Clan war matchup: Clans are matched up based on the overall strength of its members. Strength is based on each member's attacking power (troops, army camp capacity and spells) and defensive power (defense buildings, walls and traps). Heroes constitute towards a player's offensive and defensive power.

Our calculations already take the overall strength of an alliance's participating members into account, this is part of what I'm referring to when I mention our "war weight".

Thank you very much for the nice information about matchmaking. But you could share some more as it won’t harm BHG, if we have some more details. As I can understand it’s so complicated that no one can manipulate the system.

You're welcome! Sadly, as I said above, sharing too many details on how our matchmaking works can harm the game if someone finds a way to manipulate the system in ways we don't want.

Hey! Nice to meet you.

WW matchmaking is one of the most discussed topics in dominations cause all the hardcore players are devoted to this part of the game.
We are competitive players and our alliances battle other alliances for glory. We may indeed not use the exact same players every time BUT in a competitive environment, the leaderboard SHOULD BE LIKE A LADDER.
i.e. You win #112, You get matched with something close by. You win that too? Expect to get matched with #100-#120 alliances...
IF that alliance wins most of their matches, then their next match-ups should be against #70-#90 ranked alliances and so on.
IF they lose at some point, then give them opponents around the same rank for a few more times. See if they lose or win again. IF they keep losing then they reached their ceiling and that's where they should be.
IF they lose a couple wars but still win some others then the algorithm should give them alliances higher ranked than them.

That way, every alliance expects the alliances on top of them to be more competent and battle rdy than the ones beneath their ranking.
This goes all the way to council stats, museum stats, paid TTs, paid buildings etc etc
This totally eliminates sandbagging and alliances like Den of Thieves that have few drone/auto age players , yet they are so high on the leaderboard. Also, the ranking achieved is the rank of the ALLIANCE and not of individual player ranking, therefore it should reflect exactly that, regardless if we use our best 15 players or our "worst" line up.

Hi! I certainly understand the competitiveness of WW in Dominations (its why I try to delve into it whenever I can!) I do want to clarify that we do use glory in the matchmaking process, it is just alongside our "war weight" system as well. We just want to be sure that all players in your alliance can help contribute to your glory and not just your best players. We feel that World War should be enjoyed by all! (Please don't take that last sentence out of context )

- So, ditch the 47 hour per WW and the 4 pools of matchmaking (10/15/20/30) and make it only one. The 15vs would be ideal for every alliance as it doesn't require that many players. Now we all play in the same pool and matchmaking can be faster and more to the point.
- Also, those big alliances with 30+ active players... Why constraint such alliances to only a single war? Allow those alliances to have 2 wars at the same time with 2 different line ups. If that is not doable, then allow only 15 and 25vs wars.
- And last of all , make the WW shorter. It is commonly accepted that we like to play WW. Let's make it faster then!
- But sometimes we are bored when we get a mismatch . So, create that "Surrender" button and lets go to the next WW. Why waste 2 days for it? Why should it be 2 days in the first place? 12-16 hours prep, 12-16 hours attack day should be enough for all.

If the single pool of 15vs matchmaking looks too extreme to you, then the middle ground might be a nice alternative. The possibilities are endless. We could have two pools, 10vs and 15vs only which cover 74% of the wars in this game.

I think i said too many things at once but WW is the best aspect of this game and there are so many possibilities that it is a shame to play 8 years the same WW format while we could do so much more.

I definitely appreciate the list of ideas! It always helps to give us inspiration when we are trying to figure out what we want to work on or improve next!

 

[Helmsman]

Part of the war matching problem is having a real heavy top part of the line up, and then having bases in the lower half of the line up with just a couple of buildings, but the user has been as high as drone age, known as Sandbaging. With each player in the war having 2 attacks the sandbagers are able to wipe out the other alliance, cause most times the match up is against an alliance that has a balanced line up. How about cutting the war attacks down to 1, make each attack count and thus make it a better experience for all. The last part would be to cut the planning time down to 12 hours, and allow for each participant to fill their own TC, and Stronghold.