War matchmaking is killing my alliance and this game

[FozzyOH]

i am the leader of Twisted Shadows. 9 of the last eleven matchups have been so poor that we don’t even try. We now will start a war to see if it is close but it isn’t. The war we started tonight shows odds at 570:89... we have 1 atomic level and they have 5. It is only a 15 person war. I am begging people to stay but I keep losing them. Please help

 

[Niblick]

Feel your pain Fozzy. We’ve had a fairly good run of late with just the odd severe mismatch, although that seems to be happening more frequently now. It is, without doubt, the biggest issue with the game. I wish I had an answer for you, but all anyone can say is that it’s fracked up. I really hope they get it sorted out, because as you rightly say, it’s killing the game. People just give up. We’ve got a couple of guys that have been rotated in on more bad matches than good and have had enough. It’s incredibly destructive both to moral and to alliances.

 

[yemen]

We have had 2 good ones in the last ten. The rest were lopsided mismatches, we have had them in both directions. 20% is about average recently, almost getting used to it, but it is pretty terrible when you think about it.

 

[LordAnubis]

the whole purpose of eliminating 35v35 and 45v45 was to speed matching and hopefully match baggers with baggers.

guess what? all they did was move more baggers into the lower war pools. wouldnt surprise me one damn bit this is to force more crown/troop card spending.

 

[Bootney Lee Fonsworth]

Hey, hey, hey. I know something that will surely calm everyone down and no doubt please everybody! I have it on good authority that "Nexon/BHG is aware of the issue." No doubt the cavalry is on the way and a solution will be reached any day now!

There! Feel better? I mean, you wouldn't want them to spend two years blowing smoke up our collective rumps about solutions to a problem of their own making, now would you? Think of the integrity of their amazing matchmaking algorithm and how its delicate balance could be upset by them trying, I don't know, anything at all to improve it!

We're the selfish ones for wanting a solution to poor matchmaking and sandbagging and providing many possible ideas that they've completely ignored all this time, if you really think about it. Clearly we're just not buying into the developers' vision enough. Heck, if that matchmaking algorithm ever becomes self-aware its feelings might get hurt!

Rest assured though, ''they're aware of the issue''! Isn't that what people bought all those bracelets for back in the day? Awareness? Seems like the battle has mostly been won then.

 

[Teutonic]

I complain when my alliance gets a lopsided matchup of 800 plus to 5 or 6 if we win. How is that even a match in wars? It's happened back to back on multiple occassions. it's definitely hard to keep people motivated when our industrial players have to attack cold war/atomic because we don't have the higher quality folks. It used to be somewhat better matches, now it's constant lopsided where their top half is ridiculous, and half of them aren't even sandbagging! The matchmaking is definitely off, maybe reduce the gap in alliance glory won/lost to 500 max instead of 700 to 800 where there's a very high probability of a lopsided outcome. Then people will stop leaving the game. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Bootney Lee Fonsworth]

Just give us a quick match or best match option. I'd rather the Matchotron 5000 strains its "logic" for 12 hours, even a day to get us a war worth fighting than waste 47 hours on an uninspiring blowout, regardless of which side of it I'm on. Hell, given the escalating costs and pitiful loot good matchups are barely worth bothering with in late ages.

While you're at it cough up some more AXP levels to fight for. Glory, and as a result, the leaderboard is a meaningful carrot for maybe 5-10% of alliances in this game at best.

 

[SiuYin]

The fundamental issue is player base.

Imagine that, if most players are in last 2-3 age, there will be much less complain about matching.

But there are 5% players in AA or later, we can foresee mismatch is unavoidable

 

[QuébecGlory]

Why don't you try to do what these other alliances do to match you and beat you. Odds are they sandbag, so sandbag. Odds are they attack better, then watch their replays. Odds are the defend better, then copy their bases. Raise your game. Play with your roster. Learn about standard deviation. Anything but blaming the matchmaking.

This being said, if you lose because your opponent has EA in every stronghold, or attacks with EA, or has bazooka towers, or worse, they cheat by altering the specs of certain units in offense or defence, then you can complain about pay-to-win... not matchmaking. Matchamaking is based on average strengh of all players offense and defense. Learn, adapt.

 

[yemen]

QuébecGlory We are complaining about straight up mismatches here. When neither side is sandbagging, but one side has 6 CWA and 4-5 atomics, and the other side has 1 CWA and 2-3 atomics. This has happened to us, on one side or the other, in many recent wars. In those cases, the matchmaking is the problem, and is justly taking the blame.

Your suggestions don't really provide any workarounds for that.
Making your alliance stronger takes a lot of time - no amount of base copying or attack skill can make up for unit and building upgrades.
Sandbagging just makes more bad matchups. Maybe in your favor, but still boring wars.

And I think we can agree that relatively even match that becomes impossible because the other side has P2W units and buildings on every base just piles on top of terrible matchmaking. No fix for that available at the moment.

So until Nexon gets their matchmaking act together, we are stuck with a lot more bad wars than good ones.

 

[MacMarla]

This has been an ongoing issue for years. I am back from a one year hiatus and many of the problems are the same and unaddressed. Recruit new players only way you can keep an alliance going people will always come and go most don't return. I have been playing since the release watched many awesome people leave. Recruiting allows your team to teach new players engaging them more and should help and will increase the player base so match ups aren't so lopsided. It might be a good strategy to not participate in war match ups that just don't make sense.

 

[QuébecGlory]

Having 10 Atomic on one side and 3 on the other is not a mismatch. Calculate the average of all players on both side, and you'll see that they are really close. You have to adjust up or down a little because economy doesn't weigh in the balance, but it's always pretty close. Most mismatch is due to heavy middle of the line-up which throws the average way up without giving more hope of winning.

Anyways, I think BHG has much bigger problems right now then working on matchmaking.

 

[sileepuppee]

Our worst matchup to date and it's going to cost us big glory. We decided for the first time to 25v25 and man were we screwed over. I understand the law of averages and we aren't really complaining about the sand bagging annoying as it is. I'm the high lvl in my alliance at 215, the next is 224, and than it drops to below 170 and lower. The lowest level player we have is 56 than it jumps to 100. The other alliance has 6 Cold War bases lvl 260-281, 3 lvl 9 sandbags, 2 lvl 40 gunpowder and everything industrial-global in between. This is worst sand bagging against us though normally we have prevailed in the past. The stupid part of this match is that we are going to lose almost 900 glory whereas if we won we would get "8." Freaking 8 gain or 900 lost? The alliance is one that just disbanded and reformed. They are only a level 2 and I guess the game sees that because they are level 2 against our level 10 alliance they can't win. How ridiculous is that. That took us almost a month to get and we are losing it in one swoop. The game just sees them with such low glory that it's only fair? From the moment the war started we knew we lost.

 

[sileepuppee]

We barely lost that travesty of a war. Now we just started a new war and still WTF IS THIS MATCHUP. This time around we went 15 players because some could not playlist. There's no way it's balanced. 8 Cold War bases with 3 classical bases. Again not getting that upset at the balancing but we are getting utterly screwed with glory. They are "level 3" alliance but the same issue as before, just because their lvl 3 and we are level 10 why is it sticking us with handicap. There's no way to win but we lose 690 or gain 100.

 

[yemen]

QuébecGlory - in our case, it is a straightup mismatch, with basically every age on our side one age higher than theirs, and the averages are off by at least 20. We just got another one - 0 cold war to our 6, their lowest is gunpowder and ours enlightenment.

We have had the sort of mismatch where the XP averages are very similar, but actual war strength is nowhere close. It is another problem with Nexon's matchmaking system. We mostly don't take heavy globals to war, as that is seems to be the worst case spot for their system overweighting a player compared to their "actual" capabilities on offense or defense.

But in general, averaging out XP levels and saying they are similar is a poor way to decide if you have a mismatch. It is also an absolutely terrible way to do matchmaking. Sadly, that seems to be exactly what Nexon is doing at times. And to get back to the original point of this post - it is killing the game, and many alliances. We want to have fun matchups with the players we have, not play games with the system to find competitive wars.

 

[yemen]

Glory won / lost is ONLY based on relative glory. Nothing to do with war weight, Alliance level, or anything else you might want to blame. We lost 1000 glory to a leaderboard alliance who had started over a month or so ago. They outclassed us in every way, except for the stack of irons, our 1 was equal to their 12 or so. But the glory was just a function of them having 9k glory or so less than us, as they had just started over and were at 15k or so.

You call it a handicap - that concept doesn't match what the game is doing here at all. No attempt is being made to evaluate relative strength when glory to win / lose is assigned.

A longstanding alliance with low glory probably isn't very good. But a new alliance with new glory could be any strength. And even an older alliance could have added some strong players and suddenly be much better than their glory.

 

[Coccium]

This has been a bane of our alliance for a while, and has resulted in a lot of frustration and some very strong players directing that frustration (rightly or wrongly) at more casual players feet, when in reality it’s the matching system. Competitive wars get the blood pumping, ante interesting, yet when you’re up against a stronger alliance, with SH’s rammed with p2w troops (like ele archers), that unless you’re paying a fortune for you’re screwed. By the same token, we’ve had matchups where we feel for the opposition as you know they will get smashed, a really dull war for us.

As a direct result of this we’ve now lost half a dozen atomic and CW players and those that are left close their eyes when we press the war button now!

It does need fixing, but hopefully after the chat and donation bug is fixed… that and some of the cheating with Howies’ shooting like gat guns!

 

[LordAnubis]

but with only 1.4 million players and 34k alliances according to dominations.pl the war matching will never be perfect. Basic and first rule of statistics, LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS which this game does not have ergo skewed matching.

 

[LordAnubis]

This very true. In my group we have been met with similar odds as OP like 600/50. We won these types of matches because we attack well and smartly.