This actually hasn’t changed. Matchmaking has always been able to do this. I run into situations like this every other week (minus the left two options now being worth half to a quarter as much).
We are skewed right now because we are post patch that instantly adds 980 score points for anybody in a guild until the end of the week so long as they updated. But really, it is both. Every time they balloon score potential forward, people that have the most score bonus (those that push hard in delves, level 10 kingdoms, and now epic tasks, at least starting next week) have way way fewer peers to fight. In addition to this, the criteria for selecting which matches to serve you are exceedingly silly are are not the same criteria for determining payouts. For one, your current PvP score is a major criteria. So is account level, but the account level pulls from a much broader range (and is therefore irrelevant once you hit the low 1000s). Neither is any kind of measure of the team you are fielding, how difficult it will be, or the payouts it will give.
I keep trying to bring this up because this is what I said was the underlying problem with the team score issue. But nope, here we are again.
This old chestnut? Weren’t they supposed to have fixed this? Maybe they just fixed the “absurd amount of defense interactions” half and also “defense losses on casual counting as wins” but not the ability to get on a super low matchmaking pool? Bears repeating, but there is really no reason to be matching players according to how many PvP points they currently have in the first place. It has nothing to do with payouts nor the difficulty of the team and it is leading to these exploitable situations in the first place.
I don’t really see how this is any more of an “exploit” than not playing ranked to manipulate your matchmaking and having your losses drag your score down. You just probably shouldn’t be able to manipulate your matchmaking like this regardless.
Level 1 untraited common troops and no hero on the team are worth significantly less score (and thus give less payout) than level 20 traited troops, a hero with a level 100 champion level (more points for each talent unlocked, weather or not it it set) and a +10 weapon (more points for each weapon level, rarity doesn’t matter). I’m not sure if elite levels affect this since I haven’t personally bothered, but I’m told not. Without, there are a total of 5895 points on the table for team comp to make a team that can be served up in PvP (ie, 4 troops). Of this, the hero alone is worth 935 points above a fully traited mythic ascended troop - a choice everyone can make even if they have everything in the game maxed upgraded.
Note that this only affects your defense team score, which determines the payouts others get by beating it. This is not the score differential that your payouts are determined from. That is entirely based on your personal score bonuses (very likely your “max score potential” but also maybe “sum of all account bonuses plus some number”), the only way of which you can lower it being to change guilds (or go unguilded entirely).
For example, my max score potential and my current defense team is ~14600 (hooray for avoiding raising score potential too much while this issue was ongoing, and some variation of payout jankery has been ongoing as long as the score differential calculation existed, I tried to warn everyone), I get “bad for prepatch” rewards in the low 11k range (as in, near the minimum payout from prepatch) while the 10k score ranges give me punitive payouts (significantly lower than the minimum payout from prepatch). If I set my defense team to sub 10k (still possible to me using my level 10 untraited gnomes or treasures) and then check my offerings, including refreshing a few times, payouts for similar score ranges remain similar. >10k score matches continue to pay out <500 gold, despite my defense team being < 10k score. My current cutoff for gold going from “passable” (mid high 1,000s in gold payouts) to “bad” appears to be about 2k score from my max potential (the mid 12k range, low 12ks and high 11ks are about where the old minimum was, low 11ks and high 10ks are now below old minimum). So “Bad” payouts (or what would have been bad, as in, within a few percentage points of what was the minimum payout) seem to start at about 2k below your max score potential (as has always been the case, really, its just even more score has been injected now for top players, and it may well be worse next week when the artificial bump for lower guilds for auto completed epic tasks wears off) with “punitive” payouts being anything roughly 3.5k below your score threshold (bad news for anybody pushing the higher end of 15k score, as 12k score teams are still frequently served up because the matchmaking doesn’t care that you are so much higher).
The problems remain:
- People at the top have fewer opponents within a given score range that gives passable payouts. It is the same problem highlighted before the “PvP points fix” all over again.
- Matchmaking continues to serve based on criteria that is not relevant for the way PvP works. Your current rank in PvP has nothing to do with your ability to field or beat certain teams or overcome certain levels of stats, yet it is still prominently featured in matchmaking.
- If fighting just “weaker teams” is considered even part of an exploitative behavior that wanted to be curbed, why am I still being served these teams at all? Why are some players being served only these teams for all three choices in ranked PvP half the time?
- If simply the act of fighting weaker teams for optimal gold payouts over a period of time is not considered exploitative behavior but rather the processes of being able to consistently fight much weaker teams is, why is simply the act of fighting weaker teams being punished? Especially when sometimes there isn’t a choice?
- The original exploit was never fixed.
Really, the teams you one shot (the ones I’m sure they are trying to punish) are about 8 to 10k score lower than yourself. If you are at high 15ks, a 10k+ team can easily be one where they hit their win condition from an empowered and you need just as many spell cycles to clear them out as you would a 15k team. 11kish would be “low” regardless of this change (~1k), now, it is punitively low (<500).
I clarified it multiple times. Including in a post she directly referenced.
I think it is a combination of both:
- They wanted to get rid of the “exploit” wherein people were putting themselves in the “easy” matchmaking pool. (They did so by hard de-incentivizing profiting from it)
- They also wanted to curb fighting “weaker teams” as being anywhere close optimal, period, so they also de-incentivized that as part of this. Why they don’t just come out and say this honestly, I’m not sure. Makes it really hard to communicate both ways if the real reason a change is implemented is at least partially obfuscated.
- In doing so, they did not properly consider that matchmaking serves some players weaker teams a lot, sometimes exclusively for a long period of time, and thus this affects their gold payout directly even when they are neither “exploiting” nor even intentionally seeking out weaker teams that they wanted to actively de-incentivize.
- On the player side, this affects us that don’t get frequently served “weaker opponents” (those with lower personal score potentials) significantly less. If this were intended to be a direct nerf on gold, it doesn’t even do that well. It disporportionaley punishes people that have made a lot of progress, and I’ve been very clear in the past of why that is a terrible thing for a game to do, and I believe Sirrian would agree with me based on his disdain for what he referred to on stream as “slow leveling” (the practice of delaying progress so that you can continue to have an optimal interaction with a certain reward structure).
- They very unfortunately “oopsie-daysied” this from the patch notes when they first went up. Whether this was actually an accident or not, this alone destroyed a ton of the good will that was just built by the collaborative communication on the Epic Tasks issue. (And they should have known this is something that the players would definitely want to know about, even if the “intended” part of it was to curb the “exploit” but they also seem to have wanted to curb fighting weak teams in PvP to maximize gold payouts per hour period, a practice that in an of itself has existed for a long enough to be an established part of the game, whether it meets original intent or not)
Basically, it is the PvP points thing all over again. In which they “fixed a bug that was over 2 years old and nobody noticed that was causing point payouts to be higher than intended” and players near the top of the score formula couldn’t get a decent PvP point payout half the time. In this case, they “fixed an ‘exploit’ that was over 2 years old in which people could fight lower score teams really fast for more gold per hour” and now players toward the top end of the score formula can’t get a decent gold payout half the time while still needing to fight a match that is basically the same difficulty and time length for highly reduced rewards. The “fix” needs another pass to not punish players at the top by way of making sure there is always a good consistent minimum payout of gold near the max other players are getting for the same amount of effort, and this fix should come without having to wait months for it. And the underlying matchmaking issue will stay I guess, until hopefully 5.0 puts it to bed for good.
tl;dr: The “fix” for the casual PvP “exploit” needs another pass to not directly punish people who never even thought about using it. This should probably be done sooner rather than later. Matchmaking is still broken, but we can wait for 5.0 for the full fix so long as it doesn’t mean months on a reduced payout structure.