My idea to tweak war, and improve matchmaking
I see a lot of complaints about war matchmaking. I think that is usually pretty, good, but I would prefer a close match up, even over one where we have a strong edge.
I would also like to see the ability to schedule war.
My idea is as follows. War can only start at the top of an hour. War can be scheduled up to one week in advance, or a set schedule can be created by the leader.
All clan members can view the schedule and find out when the next war is.
Lets assume a clan wants to war at 7pm, they must click start war before 7pm (they can start at 6pm, or schedule it a week in advance if they want). The system will lock out new users from joining once 7pm hits, and will have 15 minutes to find a match.
Lets say 100 clans that are 25 members choose to be in war at 7pm. The system ranks them from 1 to 100. Clan one will fight clan 2, 3 will fight 4 etc. At 7:15, prep day starts, but prep day is shortened by 15 minutes. The actual war runs from 7pm-7pm.
This should allow a more even matchmaking process as the system can tank everybody, and put them in order, instead of finding a decent match as the clan war starts.
If a clan wants to always be at war, and war every other day at 7pm, they can do so. There will never be any drift of the start time. They can have the leader set it up once, and never touch it again. They will start at the exact same time, and have a better match up. They can choose a new war before the current one ends, but prep day can not overlap. If war ends today at 7pm, I can start a new prep day at 7, 8 or 9pm even before the war is over. I can not choose a 6pm prep day, since prep day and war is not allowed to overlap.
I would assume 15 minutes is plenty of time for the system to rank everybody. Maybe this can be shortened, but since war will still start and end exactly when you want it to I don't see a problem. The code could be written to guarantee 23 hours for prep day, so if there was server maintenance, the war time might be pushed back.
Some might not like the idea of only being able to start a war every hour. This could possibly be changed to every 30 minutes, but then I think the matchmaking will not be quite as good.
Benefits:
Same war time every day.
No war start time drift, where war starts later each time.
I can see ahead of time when next war is if the leader schedules it. Maybe I can squeeze an archer queen upgrade in before war starts.
More even matchmaking, as the software can take hundreds of people, and instead of picking a match one by one, it list them by strength, then makes the decision all at once who will face each other (and there are more people to choose from, since we only choose 24 times a day.
Set up war once, and you don't need to be online do declare war. Want to war MWF, set it up once and be done with it.
The downside is war can only start at the top of the hour. I personally wouldn't mind this, especially if I can have the same start time all the time.
One problem with this. If there is an odd amount of clans at an hour, then one clan will have not matchup. The system could take the weakest clan say 'no match found', push them back one hour, and guarantee them a matchup next hour (and hard code it so it never happens to that clan again)
I'll admit this is not ideal, but there are thousands of clans that start a war every hour, and it could happen to up to 9 clans (one 10v10 clan, one 15 vs 15 clan, etc.), but would usually only happen to 4 or 5. Most clans would never experience this (since the weakest clan is probably made up of all TH3's and 4's), but no clan would ever experience it twice.
Interesting, good, but there are a few issues
I really want to love this idea, but can't. I do however like it.
Here are my issues
A) Uneven numbers: Let's say at the top there are three clans which have mostly maxed out players (or any odd number-5,21,10000987, etc) and the rest of the clans scheduled are lower. This could very well happen
1) What decide which of these clans fights? Do we look at war records? Who gets pushed out and why?
2) What happens to the odd clan out? Do they not get to war and have to wait the hour? Do they get paired up with a lower clan? Isn't that unfair? Couldn't pushing them back an hour negatively hurt them (like say that first hour is when someone who works has their only free time on war day. Of course, there are other examples)
B) Unpopular times: Some slots are going to be vastly more popular than others. With the current system, at least those in the unpopular times have some people still looking when they are good for war. If we were to use this system, some hours could have significantly fewer good match ups than others because the total number of clans is down, so the number of possible fair match ups is down.
1) Couldn't the extremely popular time slots also lead to server problems? With only 24 possible times to start war, and so many clans to match, it could get problematic having 33% of them (made up number, just for example because it sounds reasonable) starting at one time slot?
Overall, this is an interesting idea, and it could work, but I think there are a few issues that might arise. I appreciate you taking the time to think it out and post it here. I love reading ideas like this.
