As it stands now, it is. Which trophy tier a team is presented in to you is determined by the team score. Teams that fall within some predetermined range of scores are presented to us from lowest to highest in the three trophy tiers. Hence also why gold is determined by these scores as well.
This is all well & good and logical. Except as you stated the factors that create the score aren’t a good indication of a team’s true difficulty. Although higher guild & kingdom stats, more traits and higher level troops make each troop more difficult than the same troop without those things (in theory), a fully traited & leveled peasant team with max kingdom & guild bonuses is still no match at all for nearly any team out there.
In order to get a more accurate score the devs would have to assign point values to every trait at the very least based on how valuable the trait is in combat, and quite possibly as detailed as doing the same for levels, stats, and even each individual troop and each synergy bonus. Obviously this would get very complicated & subjective to place values on.
How they calculate strength is beyond flawed because you can’t use a simple formula to calculate team strength. 4x fully traited, level 20 Peasants aren’t hard to fight regardless of your level or stats.
Yeah this is the part where I don’t know what to do.
I can lay out a good case for why team power is a bad measure. I can’t lay out a good case for a system for assessing team power algorithmically that makes any kind of sense.
I don’t want to state a case for “devs should manually tweak power ratings” because that’s an awful lot of work and one more point of failure.
I don’t want to argue for a flatter power level of cards so “rarity + traits” becomes a good point system. It’s interesting when some mythics suck, or when a trait is almost good enough. I’ll fight for that belief.
What I’d really like is some kind of PvP structure that gives me more choice, but all of my ideas involve an awful lot of effort or algorithms that pose a serious risk of being gamed.
I’m pretty sure they could tie the ‘rating’ of troops to how often they are used in PvP the more they are used in the top 100 teams / offence and defence they should be rated higher. I think this would be the easiest way to partially balance this without the Dev’s having to “re-invent” the wheel so to speak. You can tell how good a troop is for 90% + of them just by seeing the same 15-20 of them over and over again in the ranked PvP leaderboards IMO.
Cheers
Sirrian has long said that he likes to keep things as simple as possible as long as they work. I hope he is deciding that the current PVP team score formula, while simple, is no longer working well.
But even if the team score formula were adjusted, there is the issue of how team score, player attributes, and guild attributes are used to calculate the gold and point rewards for a given match. I — and many others above level 500 or in top-200 guilds — feel like this is broken as well.
Yep, it sometimes feel unfair. Both me and my wife play this game and on her account she joined a “weaker” guild than me. We tried to make a competition between the two of us (you know, the married couple thing ) but after two days it made no longer any sense bc there was such an obvious difference between our scores per battle. And we used the exact same team, equally traited, on both defense and offense.
I’m guessing part of the reason for the current algorithm being what it is might be the assumption that weaker players are in weaker guilds and will therefore be more likely to face opponents that are “out of their league” on the power scale, so they should be rewarded appropriately for winning. I’m not sure it was foreseen that high-end players would join lower-tier guilds specifically to farm rewards at a high-tier pace. That might be the part of the original concept that is actually “broken”, if you want to call it that.
I think the easiest fix for this would be to set standard reward values for 1T, 2T, and 3T battles. That way, it doesn’t matter if I’m in a top-10 guild or a top-500 guild, winning a 3T battle will always give the same amount of PVP points and base (pre-modifier) gold.
This would mean that opponents would have to be chosen very carefully. It really wouldn’t be fair for beginning/middle players if their 3T match, for the same rewards, were the same player offered to players in Intrim or Anonymous.
) but after two days it made no longer any sense bc there was such an obvious difference between our scores per battle. And we used the exact same team, equally traited, on both defense and offense.