Hi Team! I’ve been enjoying your game for many years now. It’s been a part of my daily routine and I really enjoy the new features and toons you’ve brought, and really do appreciate the effort you make to keep the playability very high for such a long time by always adding new content. One area that I’m guessing you’re getting sick of hearing about however is the imbalance of certain aspects of the game, namely PvP and Alliance Wars. I know you guys are working on fixing the issue with the occasionally crazy imbalance of PvP matchups, so I’ll focus this post on AW.
AW has always been my favorite part of the game and a really unique feature. I even enjoyed when you added Surprise Attack! One thing that I think is still in need of attention is the imbalance in the matchups. For instance, right now my team (N2BFW) is matched up with OWN, a team with over 10M more power than us. We have 3 lvl 100 players, they have 24. Our total team power is 52M, theirs is 67M.I feel even worse for PR1DE who has only a few members in this war with us and a much higher power disparity with OWN. I am hoping you can look at our current war as an example of an issue of stark power disparity in matchmaking and an opportunity to improve the experience for all users. Thanks for taking the time to listen to my feedback!
Pride has 8/25 currently so must have had around 15 at least at the start of war and their CO is 2.9m they are being severely punished. War matchmaking is more than just total power, it looks at the players power as well alongside number of members. We now know having so few members and high average power results in this matchmaking.
War is a choice, not a requirement. If you find something too stressful to deal with, you can always just walk away and focus on other aspects of the game.
I do appreciate that there has to be some set of rules that define the matching, and those rules are not easy to define. Our alliance ran into the same issue as N2BFW. We had 18 team members and always struggled to find quality recruits that matched our play style & goals. Ultimately we disbanded and scattered.
The issue from my perspective isn’t so much in power, but battle points. A team with 20 members has a total of 400 BP. 25 member alliance has 500 BP. It then becomes a war of attrition.
If it’s not already taken into consideration - maybe the logic should be 2 tiered:
Total alliance power - calculate the total power for the alliance regardless of level to create an initial “ranking”
Alliance members - subdivide those ranks based on alliances sized 15-20 and 21-25 or something similar.
Not a silver bullet, but might alleviate some of the pressure.
There are a number of ways to do better matchmaking for AW.
Easiest way: For the first war, take all alliances within a bracket, sort by power, group into batches of 6. War 2 & 3: Sort by bracket and war rank, then match within a certain % of power. Example: Alliance A is top of the leader board and has X power. They would be matched with the next 5 teams within that % of overall power. Go to the next unmatched team and repeat.
This method would guarantee that the highest power alliance would always face off against each other in the first war. The winners would go on to face other top placing alliances with similar power levels in round 2 and 3. This makes wars more balanced, gives opportunity for any alliance to win each war due to similar power levels and rankings, and can even let lower power alliances rank high because the faced off against similar power alliances. It also makes each war matter instead of 2/3.
