Hypothesis - SC Wants Variation in War Fairness

[SuperStorm103]

Thats a really interesting point. Their are a number of ways to encourage gemming/upgrading. Lets take heroes, you could weigh them regressivly, or you could deliberately write code that the higher the hero level, the less chance of getting a mismatch against you in terms of heroes, or you could simply use a large allowance going both ways. If there is a large random allowance, to protect yourself the play would be to uppgrade heroes as fast as possible as high as possible, to be on the advantage of the randomness more often than against.

Maybe why the grand warden is feather weight. They want people to rush to th11 and get him. Spending gems the entire way. If they made him weigh like an eagle, people wouldn't be so apt to unlock him....As it is now you can can use him at any level. Further, he promotes the lack of learning basic attack strategies.....why bother learning to funnel or path or anything like that when you can just spam a troop put a warden behind them and 3 star. That is of course all th's except for 11. But, hey as long as you don't bump your defenses you wont have to worry about that. Just get your easy spam 3 stars and continue to admire yourself on what a great attacker you are....

[Prutser]

This is not intended as a "flame SC" thread, nor advocacy of anything in particular. It's just an idea I've been kicking around lately, as a possibility, have a foil hat ready.

I was thinking about how Clash Royale seems to operate. And correct me if I'm wrong here, didn't like the game much so I deleted it, but there was no direct attempt to match based on deck strength for the regular game. You float up or down in trophies based on wins/losses alone, which makes you rise to a level where you often lose. And often, these losses are to someone who just has a better deck, or paid for that OP card that hasn't dropped for you yet.
The wins are fun, the losses are MOTIVATING. Its the losses (against a better deck) that pressure you to gem, pressure you farm harder, basically get you more engaged.
The random unfairness could also push players into the tournaments, some of which use different rules that enforce deck parity, and of course cost gems.
The strategy failed for me, I felt the pressure to gem too strongly, deleted it when it started feeling like a "pay to win" game. But clearly its a successful game.

Does SC apply the same thinking to clan wars? Thinking about how the player base at large differs from us in the forum here, SC might want substantial variations in clan war fairness. Sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail. A group of kids, casuals that bounce between clans recruiting in global, friends and family clans that are tolerant of missed attacks? They need to see a win here and there to keep them engaged, hand them the hammer (beneficial match).
The better clan will occasionally need to be the nail to motivate them to keep grinding heroes and teching up the TH. When you lose due to an inferno/eagle mismatch, that's pressure to drop them for yourself. This probably seems wrong to most in the war forum, permamax and engineers are overrepresented here, but its probably generally true for clash at large.

Curious if this sounds ridiculous to others. I can't say I'm certain its true, but can't dismiss the possibility either.

I believe the matchmaking should take the war win streak into account and make matches more difficult the higher the war win streak is. In fact, I believe they are all ready doing that. That way, every clan can have a better time in the game. (Win some, loose some for all clans). So yeah, I do believe that in certain cases variation in war fairness is good.

I think that this war fairness should have been done much more rigorously by SC in the past. They had that chance in march 2016, however SC did it the wrong by setting the door wide open for engineering. Now at the moment I believe the number of clans out there warring is getting too thin which in turn causes mismatches and really weird match ups. I think it is too late for SC to do anything about it.

[TankSinatra]

The cynical side of me says you are giving SC way too much credit. The alternative is they didn't realize the effect their mm changes had in previous updates and now have no clue as to how to fix, tweak, or address the mess they created.

That's probably the primary factor as to why we have such a messed up MM, but not mutually exclusive with what I'm getting at. You could break down the various possible reasons that we're short of matchmaking Nirvana (look it up kids, its not just an oldies band) into two broad categories -

1. SC tries and fails to improve things. This would be the March 2016 disaster, an attempt to improve things that somehow made things much worse and wasn't corrected for half a year. I thought of calling this the "incompetence hypothesis" but that would be very unfair, until I bang out several wildly successful games I should hold off on calling them incompetent. No matter how much stupid stuff they pull.

2. SC has thought it through, and doesn't want to "improve" things (from our perspective). Think of ruling out heroes during war - hey, they've got shareholders to please. Or, the above hypothesis.... Basically they look at the game a lot differently than the war forum does. Quality of execution aside, their goals don't even line up with ours. If we don't get into their heads we'll never understand what they do.

[Skrags]

The cynical side of me says you are giving SC way too much credit. The alternative is they didn't realize the effect their mm changes had in previous updates and now have no clue as to how to fix, tweak, or address the mess they created.

I would agree with this. I would also freely admit that I didn't really foresee the upcoming problems either. Back in April/May 2016, I was so happy that my own clan had turned the corner and accumulated a respectful 12 win streak, that I just didn't see the black clouds sitting behind the short term sunshine.
I would also admit, that at the time of the March 2016 update, there was a lot of commentary (forums,Youtube,social media etc) that surely SC have got this wrong, and offensive weight should be predominant as you have two attacks!

As someone who plays Royale a bit, the pressure to spend money on gems is definitely there. (I'm lvl 10, 3000 trophies for anyone else that plays!)
The bottleneck is gold.
I've learnt that there are two opposing pressures on you to spend your meagre availability of gold.
The first is (as Tank described), trying to upgrade your cards to tournament standard, which allows you access to rewards.
The second is upgrading your current deck to be generally more competitive on the "ladder".
The trouble with the second option, is that it limits the cards you can use and experience, as they are too low.

For the record, I'm not particularly good at Royale, but my deck is limited.

Back to Clash of Clans :-

Back in the old days, TH8 was the highest TH level, the highest mountain so to speak. The addition of TH9 was the real money driver.
I'm sure most of us agree, that if you had a blank canvas, and were designing the game from scratch all over again, with up to TH11, then you would probably never put in the game 50 additional Hero levels at TH9, which is just ridiculous if you think about it.

And this is the problem, everything SC do, has potential repercussions later on.

[Clark11308]

I think the OP is spot on with how players and SC look at the game from very diffrent views. Not only are they diffrent but can sometimes be opposing views. Im sure almost every decision SC makes is tied to revenue, its what keeps them motivated to continue. Players just dont have that end goal so ofcourse alot of the decisions they make seem strange to us. The one place we can have a meeting of the minds is a big happy community, its good for players and good for SC. Only problem with this is SC cant make us all happy so they try to just throw everyone a lil bone while truley pleasing only a small percent of the community. What more can they really do to keep such a large player base with such opposing views. As to the "hidden" pushes to spend. I have read a few great articles on the freemium game mindset from a developer POV. From what I have read that is the exact buisness model used, the carrot and the stick. Its what works and it works well so I doubt it will ever change. I wouldnt be suprised at all if they have worked this buisness model into the war MM as im sure its in every part of the game. With a F2P game how else are they supposed to make money. Most wont purchase just because they love the game. Most will leave that for the next guy.

[littledoctor]

My friends in "those clans" have greatly reduced warring due to frustration with the MM and the casualness of their play.

Mild engineering is much more friendly to casual players than maxing is. The offense advantage given by mild engineering can allow casual players to get 3 stars without tons of planning, a scout attack, and multiple prior attempts on a base. It can compensate for low heroes too.

[littledoctor]

I dont know about Royale, but in clash the cost/time to start is prohibitive. If they fix that, many of us will start 4th/5th/10th accounts to quickly have higher level war play on more accounts. I am surprised we havent seen "catch up" events. like walls lvl 8 and under are discounted for a week.month.

They added the new TH gem packs, and the builder packs, which help immensely. Four builders right off the bat is a big deal.

As does engineering. You get to TH9+ way faster when you don't stop to max at each level.

[TankSinatra]

They added the new TH gem packs, and the builder packs, which help immensely. Four builders right off the bat is a big deal.

As does engineering. You get to TH9+ way faster when you don't stop to max at each level.

That's somewhat helpful, but its a trap as well. If you want a heavy th9 or beyond, and you're not going to engineer, lab and heroes are the bottleneck. Extra builders just guarantee you go preemie unless you've got an old hand advising you and a ton of discipline to upgrade evenly.

[Hawker]

ETA but I'm falling into the trap I try to warn about often - max defenseless is the boogyman when we start talking about engineering, maybe everyone else sees them more often than I do, but I just don't see the epidemic. Much more common is heavy .5s, or just going nuts on offense beyond .5. This trend might not bother SC, perhaps they think they're encouraging perma-maxers to continue upgrading (even if not in balance). Basically, keeping them more engaged.

I totally agree here - I see the biggest problem being players completely avoiding building infernos and Eagle Artillery, as my clan does. We see a huge advantage over other clans, and the root of this problem seems to be that the MM system hugely overweight those defenses.

If they adjusted the weights of those particular defenses, wouldn't that go a long way to solve that problem?

[Hawker]

Back to the original point - I think heroes are the main long-term motivation for players to spend gems, and I think that model is good and sustainable. Players who put in the time/work should gain a reasonable advantage over those who do not.

Ideally, SC would want their motivation and the players to align whenever possible so the players play the game more and are willing to spend gems.

It is interesting to think that this motivation is making it harder for them to fix the MM algorithm. I would bet that it slows them down, but it is definitely in their interest to keep most players happy as that will affect their bottom line.