Matchmaking update? A lie?
November 30, 2018 8:00PM
edited November 2018
Wai? I think not.
We are in at 45/50, they are in at what I can assume is 42/50 as we are only allowed 21 per zone.
Their gp is 138mill with 45/50 members. Out of those 42 profiles listed on swgoh.gg (42) 6 have revan maxed out. 5 have traya at 7* g10+
We have 142mill gp (as of today) with 50/50. We have no trayas, no revans..... Hell it's a struggle to just get people with jtr for kittens sake.
So that being said. CG, you failed, yet again.
Tw matchmaking cannot alone be based on comparitive gp of the guild. Legendary characters, (revan, jtr, Luke etc) and trayas can easily sway the Ballance of any short comings in any tw.
I now have a guild that I have to report to, saying pretty much "bend over" as we will yet again loose another tw despite our best efforts to place strong defenses.
All they have to do is set revans teams in each of the front two zones and it's over. We have yet to beat any revan teams we have come up against since his release, in tw.
Thanks again for completely demoralizing my guild and the 45 people who want a fair fight.
We are in at 45/50, they are in at what I can assume is 42/50 as we are only allowed 21 per zone.
Their gp is 138mill with 45/50 members. Out of those 42 profiles listed on swgoh.gg (42) 6 have revan maxed out. 5 have traya at 7* g10+
We have 142mill gp (as of today) with 50/50. We have no trayas, no revans..... Hell it's a struggle to just get people with jtr for kittens sake.
So that being said. CG, you failed, yet again.
Tw matchmaking cannot alone be based on comparitive gp of the guild. Legendary characters, (revan, jtr, Luke etc) and trayas can easily sway the Ballance of any short comings in any tw.
I now have a guild that I have to report to, saying pretty much "bend over" as we will yet again loose another tw despite our best efforts to place strong defenses.
All they have to do is set revans teams in each of the front two zones and it's over. We have yet to beat any revan teams we have come up against since his release, in tw.
Thanks again for completely demoralizing my guild and the 45 people who want a fair fight.
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And they gave some hints last spring, but they can't reveal too much or people will exploit it.
This right here kinda raises the point right there, if you are raid focused and they are TW focused, you are "not prepared". So his argument is valid.
We are 10GP HIGHER than our opponent and they wiped the floor with us and have blockers keeping us from moving forward. They clearly have whales buying the win.
But if you are saying that prep for both goes hand in hand, and a guild prepped and got further into the the Sith raid and have more treya than you, they shouldnt get matched against someone who is behind....
Being raid focused doesnt mean players in your guild cannot be developing solid counters to expected teams, that would be TW focus.
That idea is never going to fly, the goals of every competitive game mode is to promote development. Developing a team that the other side will have trouble beating, and developing counters to counter teams you will see.
A football team focused on running the ball and stopping the run, will get matched against a team that has a great receiving team. That's all part of the game.
Each group has choices about how they develop, no matches should be based on players not having a particular toon.
I'm not saying there are not issues that they are trying to address with matching, but this argument is similar to saying there should be arenas for f2p and p2p, that's not fair either, players develop how they want and it is designed to beat the players they are expecting to see. This means that someone in that guild wants to get revan ($$) to be able to throw a wrench in TW for the opponent, that doesnt mean they should be particularly matched so that is a less effective strategy.
One thing that's crystal clear is guilds with ridiculous speed hide at lower gp but gain a huge unfair advantage in matchmaking. Perhaps matching off speed or other moded traits would create better parity.
This TW, we were matched up pretty evenly with a guild that had about an equal number of Traya and other key characters. We both cleared the board and the match was decided solely by banner efficiency. Our Active GP's were almost dead even as well, which meant that they were down a few players as their total guild GP was about 7M over ours. We probably had the most even matchup in our guild's history.
The match—up didn't seem far off. A GP difference of less than 5 million. Apparently your opponent are either better prepared fir TW, better organised or better at executing their match. Can't blame the match—making algorithm in this case.
Having toons ready and geared is the game. Is there any other way to be prepared in this game?
Revan is a harder team but both of them have counters that are not mirror matches.
That's part of it, yes. They began farming Traya earlier than you = they came better prepared. They decided to whale out on more Revans than you = the came better prepared.
They earned their victory.
Why were they ready to farm Traya earlier than you? Why did they have this head start? No, it wasn't pure luck or randomness.
Again: The match—up seems quite fair to me. They earned their victory.
Second, I’m not going to mention GP in reference to TW. As is pointed out 2.8 secs after every post about matchmaking goes up, there is very little in TW matchups "being fair" that have anything to do with GP. I also understand the limitations of the information sources we have, namely swgoh.gg. It is what we have and the “fundamentals” of the issues we experienced are there regardless of whether the numbers extracted from it have some errors.
We are 42-11 in TW and I personally think TW has provided my guildmates and I with some of the most fun and excitement we’ve had gaming – period – in a good 12 or 15 of those games. However, since the summer as we have gone from a borderline 100M guild, to over 130M in GP with Heroic Sith on farm, and have seen “combat power” discrepancies growing in our matchups. Some 6 or 7 of those 11 losses were “nothing we could do about it” cases where they slicked us and we hit a wall we just didn’t have the firepower to breach. Not much fun when you have no chance. But for each of those there has been a super close one or 2, so we understand there is only so much you can do, and you acknowledged there were issues and you were working to improve it, So I collected info about our matchup to help improve our performance and see if there is a difference in matchups in the new matchmaking environment.
It did not appear anything had changed regarding the "one-sidedness" of our recent TW matchups.
When we found out the guild we were up against, I used “dsrbot” to get info about the matchup right at the start. The result (I can provide the guild names upon dev request if desired) was:
Members 50 vs 50
GP 160,052,201 vs 132,191,636
Avg Arena Rank 119.30 vs 272.34
Avg Fleet Arena Rank 59.10 vs 142.42
Trayas 47 vs 6
G11+ Trayas 24 vs 2
G11+ Enfys Nest 18 vs 7
zBastilla 32 vs 27
Chewbacca (Legendary) 38 vs 23
zBossk 25 vs 21
Jedi Knight Revan 9 vs 3
G8+ Bastilla Shan (Fallen) 21 vs 10
G11 905 vs 624
G12 1572 vs 973
Zetas 1493 vs 1076
6 dot mods 598 vs 186
10+ speed mods 4417 vs 2815
15+ speed mods 977 vs 558
20+ speed mods 159 vs 79
In looking at these reports it’s the “internals” that cue me to whether we are going to need to take risks defensively to keep extra attackers to make up for “on paper” disparities (that we have often overcome) and how much.
This report took me aback though. How could the new system result in such an obvious mismatch???
1572 g12 toons to 973, 1493 to 1076 zetas, and 977 15+ speed mods to 558.
47 Trayas (24 g11+) to 6 (2) and 9 JKRs to 3.
Huh?
Under the old system earlier in the month we were matched against one of the senior guilds in our Alliance. It was a similar sort of mismatch, and one we knew the exact details of, because we were very familiar with each other’s rosters. The dsrbot report was pretty much spot on. We fought hard, but like the match up above, when nearly EVERY player that was against us had a Treya arena squad (and a few also had Revans as well) and at least 1 other high end squad, whose combination of the g12+ gear and extra splicing mats that a guild that had been HSR on farm for months had, well, it put them in a fundamentally different class of guild than us competitively speaking.
We rapidly reached the point where no matter how well you plan, or execute attacks, when you have g10/11 squads left and they have to fight g11/12 squads, there is not much question as to the outcome. We considered it a learning opportunity and actually won a handful with smart faction choices, (with much sibling smack talk on discord) but they had the horses to put g11/12 squads in every slot in every territory and have enough to clear nearly all our territories! We knew that the moment we drew them and knew they had Traya arena squads and the “Combat multipliers” that come with months of HSR farming and we didn’t. They had 50 or 60 more high end g11/g12 squads than us. Not rocket science. 50% more g12 squads – that are also qualitatively better. We were doomed. But we died well! And it was gonna improve!
Except it didn’t. How come?
When preview phase ended and deployment started we were surprised to find only 21 slots to fill (we had 50/50) so I ran dsrbot again and got:
Members 45 vs 50
GP 142,667,348 vs 132,737,556
Avg Arena Rank 114.82 vs 262.18
Avg Fleet Arena Rank 60.82 vs 141.50
Trayas 42 vs 6
G11+ Trayas 20 vs 2
G11+ Enfys Nest 16 vs 7
zBastilla 28 vs 28
Chewbacca (Legendary) 33 vs 23
zBossk 22 vs 21
Jedi Knight Revan 9 vs 3
G8+ Bastilla Shan (Fallen) 17 vs 10
G11 784 vs 625
G12 1392 vs 981
Zetas 1317 vs 1085
6 dot mods 533 vs 193
10+ speed mods 3847 vs 2855
15+ speed mods 872 vs 567
20+ speed mods 135 vs 81
They had shed players to close the GP differential, and even at that not all of their 45 rostered players had joined TW. So given their average of something over 3M, with 42 or 43 players to get 21 slots, They probably were very close to exactly the same total GP as us – but the QUALITY of that GP was head and shoulders over ours. By a LOT! We have overcome g12 differences of 150 or even 200 toons. A good defense hit by poor attacking can easily result in a 30 or 40 attack difference in “extra attacks”. But a 400 g12 toon difference – an extra attack differential of 80 is not going to happen when coupled with the both QUALITY and QUANTITY!
Average Arena rank is an indication or our respective "high end" squads – they were 114 to our 262. While most arena shards top 100 are in a similar class, the squads in the 250-300 slots are not competitive with the squads in the 75 to 125 slots. A few may win with good RNG, but head to head, overall they will lose. That’s the way ladder competition works! They are outclassed. And in this case, it would appear that the guild we were up against manipulated their roster to make it the highest possible “combat power” for its GP and manipulated the slot numbers to give them the strongest “Wall” and leave them extra attackers in case we were not the patsies we ended up being.
And good for them! If you are hyper-competitive and pride yourself in as close to a perfect TW record as you can, “gaming the game” in that way to gain advantage is just like fighting RJT teams on airplane mode and closing it if you lose to keep from spinning up their turn meter. It’s a competitive advantage gleaned from investing time to gain experience in how the game works.
BUT from our point of view we knew we were going into a buzzsaw, If WE could “See it coming” so clearly, how could this sort of quality disparity happen in a match – particularly one resulting from previous complaints of this sort of thing happening? If the devs – without saying anything about the specifics of their algorithm – would let us all know if this sort of thing is part of the competitive framework they intend the game to have, then we would know that these mismatches will occur because the essence of the competitive framework is “creating the highest combat power concentration you can with a given GP budget”.
If that is what you, the devs, intend, then just let us know and we can make our guild decision as to how much effort we want to put into “playing that game” in the way our opponent did this last time.
Those in our guild, and a lot of friends of mine in the game however, desire the thrill of sitting on discord watching attacks tick up on that last squad – whose fate will decide the game as the clock winds down and celebrating or commiserating on the buzzer beater going either way. We want as many of THOSE games as we can get! Getting those sorts of games won’t happen when the matchmaking doesn’t consider obvious indicators of the relative “combat power” and quality maturity of each guild – something that the sort of comparison bots like dsr-bot can determine – like the differential in g12 toons, zetas, 6dot/high speed mods and key toons like Revan, Traya, Nest and Bossk at high gear level.
In particular, unless you intend for the competitive framework to be “10 pounds of whoop **** in a 5 pound sack of GP”, then there is no excuse for a mature HSR guild to be matched against a guild that isn’t farming HSR or just started, but share a similar GP. A count on Traya’s can tell you that. Same with Revans. A non-HSR guild can’t beat a mature HSR guild. It just can’t. If after your changes to the matchmaking, combat power disparities like we just experiences under the new system is “working as intended” then just let us know that rewarding guilds that put the effort into creating the most combat power for a given GP budget is part of the game.
If your intention is to create as many close, tense, buzzer-beater games, as you can, then having a matchup like we just experienced means you still have fundamental issues with how you are evaluating “Fair matchups”. Maybe you need two different formats for those looking for the two different types of experiences? In one, matches strive for “fair battles” and look at dsrbot style analysis to create them, in the other, maximizing competitive advantage within a “budget constraint” of GP. Its obvious from the comments to these “matchmaking gripe” posts that a lot of people like the “if you are outclassed get your butt in gear and finish farming HSR and “make it fair” – its on YOU and your guild, not the devs. I totally understand that point of view.
But its fundamentally at odds with the “but we want fair matchups and exciting, close battles as often as possible”. Neither is right – just different. But the confusion as to the fundamental nature of the competition creates bad feeling between those with the different points of view, and the devs. Improving communication of your intent for what the “framework for competition” is would help.
Thanks for all you do to make this my favorite mobile game!