The main problem with Matchmaking in grand arena, is that there is no incentive to have a large Galactic Power. Players are rewarded with weaker opponents if they have a lower GP. One solution is to give a flat reward based on GP. An example with the current grand arena is to give an extra stun cuff salvage to each participant for every 50 or 100k of Galactic Power they have. In addition there should be bonus rewards tied to the number of defensive squads required(GP Bracket), to compensate players for the extra time required. This extra reward structure should incentivize players, to join Grand arena with their true GP, which will make for more competitive and fair matches.
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Actually players are competing with others who have near identical GP. Squad composition and gear levels will most likely be key element to winning matches.
The large Galactic power comes into play in other areas of the game. Being able to complete all mythics (I can't yet), qualifying for new max out events (C3PO, I'll get you next time) and deploying huge amounts of guild GP in TB's.
So conversely, you could say the real benefit to having a wide roster is that you get to play in every event that is on the schedule, while those with laser focused developed squads miss out on a variety of events.
Players also have the opportunity to not unlock or level the toons they have. Players can hoard gear all year waiting for events. All of this will hurt there guild during TB, costing them stars.
All and all players should be incenivized to grow their GP. This aligns with the developers reasoning against "paper zombie"
And everyone is growing their GP. Some chose to do it a squad at a time, others prefer to bring everyone up at the same time.
As part of a guild effort to stay in a certain TW bracket it might make sense but it's not going to effectively alter GA matchmaking much at all.
However coming from a guild in the highest TW bracket, soon to have all stars in both TB. There needs to be incentive to keep growing GP, otherwise players should only gear their arena squads; then hoard all their gear, shards, credits and mods till a particular event unlocks or the meta shifts. Also I'm not against a little bit of hoarding, but you should still be incenivized to keep growing.
For me GA requires 6 defensive teams that means I only need to use 60 toons for offence and defense. That means, I have 106 toons acting as dead weight. If each of these toons is level 85, gear 6, with level 3 abilities and 6 mods (easy to do, as all required resources should be in excess of 1000+ to spare). That's about 5k per toon adding up to a total of 530k wasted.
That 530k is great when trying to get the last star on dstb however, after that it is a waste.
This will shorten the gap between wide and tall.
Only if you can win every battle on the first try every time, no matter what compositions you happen to face. If you can do that, I doubt a little fluff is really hurting you.
I'll admit, that would be a fun version where you have to place 18, 5 character teams on defense with my 2.5 million roster. I'm not sure where I'd end up, but that would create some offence/defense decisions. Ships are kind of limited with only 4 capital available(now).
Yup... maybe 5-6 isn't the right number but there is a right number and the simplest solution would be that. Ships yeah unfortunately ar limited by 4 cap ships. So Max for that zone could only be 2 defense fleets. But even at 2 it would force people to use there entire fleet.
Or they can't fix it without expending lots of resources, so they can't be bothered to try. As such, I'm going to volunteer my free labour here.
GP is a nonsense metric that doesn't translate into competitiveness in anything more than a weak correlated way. It only works well at very select scenarios:
Comparing unmodded identical characters without zetas.
Comparing identical ships and identical fleets.
For everything else, the values given to mods, abilities, zetas, gear level, stars, and character level appear to have been poorly (or ignorantly) chosen when the metric was created.
Mods are undervalued, and there's no GP distinction between a speed secondary of 0 and 24.
Points for gear level appears to scale linearly, even though utility (and resource expenditure) rises exponentially. Zetas are worth a lot of GP, but the utility ranges from game-breaking (Finn) to pointless (Veteran Smuggler Chewbacca).
Characters with simple kits like First Order Executioner are undervalued while Bounty Hunters are overvalued because of the contract mechanic.
Functionally, players only have Lvl 1 and Lvl 85 (or level cap) characters at end-game, as credits aren't scarce.
Star Level *appears* to be overvalued in a PvP context, although the ability to use higher star levels in PvE content may offset that.
To be fair, some of this stuff was not to be realistically anticipated. At the time at GP was introduced the game was much simpler, and there were no game modes that used it as a measure for competitive purposes (i.e. matchmaking in TW or Grand Arena); it was just a handy way to eyeball teams in the arena and to measure contributions to TBs.
If the devs insist on using it to pair players into "fair" match-ups, they really need to invest some time into analyzing the value of all the items that go into the calculation. Ideally they'd hire someone with a statistics or systems analyst type background, but even without there are plenty of logical thought experiments to improve the equation currently in use.
Here are some suggestions:
If any of the parameters are Lvl 1 (stars, gear, or character level), the character should have no GP at all, as the character has no utility. Set the multiplier for these levels at 0.
The practical value of characters below G7 is negligible, but each gear level beyond that improves the character by 25-50%. Use an exponential function to calculate GP for higher levels of gear. A G8 character should probably only be worth about 25-33% of a G12 one.
Use a more sophisticated algorithm for mod value that weights the primary and secondary stats in a meaningful way. This is a turn-based game, so speed is obviously of more value than defense.
Perhaps introduce real-time adaptive algorithms to measure intrinsic value of characters and zetas using data from PvP game modes where players have a choice in the characters they use. If a character is never used, the player base has deemed it to not be of value. Obsolete characters that fall from favor will naturally lose value while ones that are reworked or rediscovered will rise.
Eliminate the equivalency of ship and character power. You're allowed to use more than one variable when comparing rosters. There's math for that.
tl;dr - As long as GP is an equation someone wrote on a cocktail napkin 2 years ago to use for quick and dirty comparisons, we're gonna have bad matchmaking. Garbage in, garbage out.
Its not 500K. I dropped mods from about 70 characters and it only dropped 100K
Then people would just agree with their opponents to tie on purpose so everybody gets max rewards. There’s a reason that in TW a tie is equal to a loss for both guilds.
A fair point actually, how about instead have your opponents based on your highest achieved squad/fleet arena rank (whichever is higher)? Similar to how your GW opponents are based? I've even seen a lot of suggestions to setting it up the same way that E-Sports does it with ladder ranks.
I'll give you an example on why, as of yesterday, I completely gave up on Grand Arena. While I am maxed at 85, I don't have a large amount of squads for both defense and offense. I'm actually looking for a larger guild for that so that I can a, get more guild rewards for shards/gear and b, start doing hardcore raids for legendary characters. At any rate, I set my defenses as best I could while saving all of my zeta and high gear characters to take on my opponent's defenses. When I checked the app last night, all of my defenses were defeated and I was facing squads with G12 characters. Let me mention one thing, I don't have a single G12 character, G11 is the highest I've got.
So with that, I realized I had a 0% chance of a come-back. That's not enjoyable in the slightest. I love playing a close-match until the end but if I start a game knowing that I've not a single inkling of a chance, I'm not going to even bother. That's my issue with Galactic Power being the current measuring stick. It pits you against players that you'll either crush with no resistance or against a player whose worst defensive team with no synergy could wipe you without a second thought.
1) There would still need to be a GP component. Just because I can hit first in my squad arena, which measures the strength of a single squad of mine, doesn't mean I can compete with a 5m gp account that also hits first in squad arena. Additionally, there is always someone in first at all gp levels, once arena unlocks (level 28 I think?). Someone who just unlocked arena a week ago, and is in first, shouldn't be competing against someone who unlocked arena a month ago, let alone someone who unlocked it 3 years ago.Edit: GA doesn't unlock until level 85, so someone who just unlocked arena wouldn't be playing. But the point still stands -- someone who just hit level 85 shouldn't be stuck competing against someone who hit level 85 two+ years ago.
2) If you do that kind of ladder ranks, the expectation is that the people who are higher ranked get better rewards at that level of the competition (both winning and losing rewards). So the people who are already at the top of the arena would get better rewards than someone rank 100 in arena, which would widen the divide between them going forward.