Matchmaking Suggestion

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

Something a lot of peeps have noted is how they fight the same cookie cutter teams over and over again. I was thinking about solutions that don’t involve making those teams less viable and hopefully would be relatively straightforward to implement. The conclusion I came to was an additional matchmaking filter.

What if the matchmaking routine noted the cards you played against last and tried to find opponents without those cards? Don’t give it a super long memory to avoid too many resource issues, just the cards played against in the last battle. That way when you make your way through that goblin team you will get something other than goblins on the next run. It might also encourage people to try new and imaginiative teams knowing that they would have a higher chance of being chosen since the bulk of cookie cutter teams would be inelligible for the next run after someone fights one.

As an example, lets make a pool of 4 teams.
Team A: Goblin, Goblin Shaman, Boar Rider, Goblin King
Team B: Hobgoblin, Goblin Shaman, Boar Rider, Goblin Rocket
Team C: Dwarven Miner, Keghammer, Bombardier, Dwarf Lord
Team D: Blast Cannon, Goblin Rocket, Dwarf Lord, Deep Borer

If you invade and get Team A then the next run would only have Teams C and D available. This is because Team A and Team B both have cards in common with Team A. If that run gave you team C then Teams A and B would be available. Obviously with such a small sample set as 4 you end up looping into the same teams over and over, but I think it is safe to say that GoW has more than 4 people playing it.

All current standard matchmaking practices would be in play that keep you from getting the same person over and over, etc. Obviously if for some reason no match could be found (everyone otherwise avaialble has a card in common with the team you just finished) then it would remove the rule and just find you someone to fight. Frankly though I find it hard to believe it wouldn’t find someone with a completely different team. After all there is always the person with one Fortress Gate as their defense deck!

-Razlath

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2

I’m pretty sure that’s what the scouting option has been implemented. Since you now have a pretty easy and cheap way to skim through opponents you don’t want to battle, I don’t really see the point of adding yet another feature.

3

Hmm I guess I took the scouting more as a look at what is coming and pick the appropriate team. The 50g cost is pretty light when you plan on fighting and winning with your super custom kill your opponents combo team. If you have to pay the 50g and then still hunt down a new opponent, I think that can add up pretty quick for new players who don’t have an answer yet to certain teams. Especially if the matchmaking just turns around and gives them the exact same opponent with a different name. I have fought nearly identical teams 3 times in a row. Can a newer player really have afforded 150g to dodge those fights? Especially when net wins (wins minus invade cost) might only be giving them 200 to 300 gold?

-Razlath

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4

I agree here. Scouting was meant to be an endgame option from the very start. New players probably have enough struggle with their gold economy.

Like I said before it would be best to just go back to the old system where you would fight only opponents around your level. Make it optional so that new players could turn it on and fight other new players and veterans could turn it off and use the current system. The ressources for both ways should be already in the devs database so the only thing to do would be to implement the option to choose between those two.

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5

I actually strongly disagree here. As a new player, I was doing invades all the time because that’s where the money was. Even without an armour (it took me a little while to get one, and even then I first bought a soul costume), I would get between 300 and 900 gold on average from each fight. So no, 50 gold doesn’t seem that much, 150 either - if I can make at least 300 gold, I’m still winning.

6

I like this idea simply for the time saved of scouting and waiting and scouting and waiting.

7

Interesting idea but sounds rather hard to code - would mean storing a frack-load of extra data - and I suspect the devs have a long list of more important things…

Whilst the match-making is patchy at times (Kitteh88, who the hell are you and why do I meet you every day?), I’d much rather see the development effort go into new troops, kingdoms, features… the upcoming passive traits… new end-game modes like daily challenges, survival mode, super-uber-bosses…

The PVP would be less contentious for us all to qq about if there were more interesting things to do than PVP each other all the time…

8

Scouting takes 2 seconds. And the wait would actually be longer since the game would have to skim players for you.

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9

Either numbers have significantly changed or we aren’t talking apples to apples here. I still don’t get 900 from fights regularly. I often get 900 in the closing screen when I win and hit accept. But I paid around 300 to 400 just for the priviledge of fighting. I have had a few fights were I apparently hit someone who hadn’t collected in a bit I guess because I would only “ante” around 300 but get around 800 to 1k in the closing screen. Since getting my gold pump armor that has gotten better, but the base still seems to be you pay half of what it lists as a reward (revenges are an exception) which doesn’t seem to include gold steal. So those big payouts people see often aren’t. They just forget about the ante you lost in the beginning and see the big number at the end. As noted right now 50g would be about about 10% of my net. And that is playing on Warlord I with Viking armor on.

I have never skipped an opponent or scouted one. I don’t have custom anti-flavor of the month teams, and my base team holds a 95% win rate (I don’t retreat from fights). I am not afraid of the challenge of tough teams. I simply would like to see some variety while I play and it seems like others would like to as well based on the posts I am seeing. Asking for me to spend my time and gold to make that happen seems kind of silly when it is something the game should just do to promote a more enjoyable experience.

-Razlath

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10

It shouldn’t be a frack-load of extra data. It is four Card IDs. Probably INTs based on the number of cards currently in the game. So 16 extra bytes. It could be implemented as either an after the find filter against the opponent normal matchmaking returns (this would certainly slow down matchmaking) or instead as a base filter on the “where clause” of the initial opponent pool selection (chance it would slow down matchmaking incredibly minimally if at all).

As to more important things I won’t disagree with you there. They are working on all kinds of cool stuff and I am very excited about all of it. But it isn’t for me to decide what they can squeeze in where. Who knows, maybe they already have someone ripping apart the matchmaking code to fix some of the glitches it has today. Maybe that person could implement an extra feature or two while there. That is part of their project management flow, and for them to decide if the suggestion is worth it or not.

As I am sure you are aware based on your previous posts and the insights they have into development, design of new troops and kingdoms is probably avery different set of people from those coding hardcore internal systems like matchmaking. People often make the mistake of assuming every person in a dev company is involved on working on every aspect of everything. In reality you have different people with different specialties. Thus suggestions that don’t coincide with one person’s chosen focus don’t always divert attention away from that focus. I do gather that the GoW team may be smaller than “most” (sorry for the generalization for discussion purposes). But still, I am sure they have peeps who are better at art / game balance design and others who are better are nitty-gritty hardcore communication / searching coding.

-Razlath

11

Unless people start taking over my brilliant idea! :stuck_out_tongue:

12

LOL! Either they have or I ran into you last night. I thought it was funny as you had just mentioned it in a thread earlier (or at least that I read earlier).

-Razlath

13

I had no revenges today, so it must be a copycat! :smile:

14

Hey, there. Your double-post is a bit tl;dr, honestly, but I see your point. We clearly have very different experiences, though. I also strongly disagree with your suggestion. Scouting is more than enough and I wouldn’t be interested in the game having to make extra calculations in order to give me different opponents each time. It would unavoidably make the matchmaking process longer and more difficult, and for no gain at all in my opinion.

Scouting is absolutely fine if you really want to avoid certain line-ups. And as Arch has pointed out, it’s dirt cheap. Even more so, “Try Another” is also a good feature to get more variety, and it’s so cheap that it might as well be free.

I used to have the Viking Armor for a long time; it’s not all that great of a bonus gold wise, only 50%, but I still made a LOT of gold from Invades (and that was before the current difficulty bonuses, too). If you play on Warlord 1, that’s another 25% gold bonus. I’m not sure how it adds up, but I think it’s multiplied, not flat out added. If I’m correct, your initial reward gets a +50% bonus, and then the result gets a 25% bonus (or the other way around). If it simply adds up and you actually get +75% on the base amount, then it’s a little less, well, rewarding. ^^ But still a pretty good deal.

The potential reward you see displayed before confirming a fight is the bare reward, without any bonus applied. Then, after you click on “Fight” but before you click on “To Battle!”, the fee you pay to enter is shown as well. But there’s no multiplier applied to the fee, you just pay it once, and it’s not withdrawn from the base reward, either. So it’s only correct to take the fee away from the final amount you get after the fight, with all bonuses applied. Also, don’t forget that you gain extra gold for 4-gem matches, cascades etc. (and specific troop bonuses if you have someone like Tyri, Alch etc). All this also adds up and you also get a bonus on the extra gold.

For instance, right now I’m offered a fight worth 414 gold, and the fee to enter it is 207 gold. Let me do the fight real quick… Alright, I’ve received 920 gold at the end. FYI, I have the Dragon Armor, but I play on Normal difficulty. So I simply receive a +100% bonus. 920 -207 = 713 gold. That’s a hell of a lot of gold for one quick fight, imho. By no means would spending 50 more gold to scout beforehand make any significant difference to that. And this is a pretty basic fight. If I click “Try Another” a few times, I can easily find a fight twice as valuable gold wise, if not more.

If you feel like you don’t gain enough gold with your current set-up, then you might want to try either of these suggestions:

—> Buy a better Armor.

—> Play on a lower Difficulty setting. Warlord 1 makes many fights longer and/or tougher than they need to be, and I seriously doubt the +25% gold bonus alone is anywhere near worth it if your main goal is to farm gold.

—> Change your line-up to include a troop or two that gives you extra gold each fight, if that’s not already the case.

Cheers,
LM

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15

It actually wasn’t a double post, two people replied with points of discussion, and I replied to each in turn. The two posts answer different points to different people.

To be clear again since it seems to have gotten lost in the non-read sections. I don’t have a problem with the fights or with specific teams existing or beating them. I don’t have a problem with gold because of the dififculty I easily play on and the armor I have (would I love better armor, sure, but who wouldn’t?). I simply suggested a solution to a problem many are having that doesn’t involve using up my time or my winnings and doesn’t call for a nerf of every powerful card in existence. I find it very amusing that peeps are so against an extra feature which would actually provide more interest in everyone’s play sessions and probably decrease the nerf everything calls.

I also have the ability to sympathize with newer players who don’t have gold coming out of their ears, don’t have 250 gem armor (or any armor), and can’t play above hard yet. Those people are the new blood that comes into a game and keeps it alive. Every person who gets the same team 3 times in a row and puts the game down out of boredom is a player that is lost and never contributes past that point.

The really simple version. I don’t need to scout the team for any reason (and I don’t). I shouldn’t have to scout the team just to get some variety in a play session and neither should anyone else.

At the end of the day, if the devs choose to never implement my suggestion I am not going to run around crying and quit, it really isn’t that important to me from a “must have” feature standpoint. I still think it is an elegant solution to a problem the community is having and would love to see it implemented. There are probably even better solutions out there. Scouting is absolutely not the solution to a team variety problem however. It is a solution to teams you can’t beat (or can’t beat without special prep) problem, but that isn’t what this thread is about.

-Razlath

16

Not to digress too much, but you posted twice in a row without anyone else posting in between. That’s a double post. You know you’re very welcome to use paragraphs and address several points in the same post, right? You can also edit your post to add to it instead of making a second one. But never mind, to each their own (as with signatures). :slight_smile:

On the main topic (see what I did there? ^^):
You have repeated and somewhat clarified your standpoint, and made a few additional points, but you didn’t address the counterpoint we’ve made to it. The feature you’re suggesting would be a waste of time for some of us (in spirit), and it would inevitably take longer to find a match for all (in form). So calling it hmm “an extra feature which would actually provide more interest in everyone’s play sessions and probably decrease the nerf everything calls.” is quite a stretch. At least in this light.

The “Scout” feature is but one option available to you if you want to make extra sure you’re not going to face the same (type of) line-up twice in a row. As I’ve pointed out, the surefire way to get more varied opponents is the “Try Another” feature. And it only costs 10 gold, which is peanuts (I’m emphasizing this because you seemed to be arguing that the 50 gold fee to scout was an issue in your eyes).

Additionally, if you think for a second that any feature will ever make the nerf brigade stop whining, I’m afraid you’re being overly optimistic. They’ll never ever stop. :smiley:

17

I prefer to use replies directly to posts so they stack better for those who choose to read them that way (such as myself). Each of those posts is tied directly to the person who made the original post and stacks nicely underneath it (it also repeats at the bottom which is a feataure I haven’t dug into the possiblity of turning off yet). Not something possible with your suggestion of just making a post and quoting multiple people. As you noted, it comes down to personal preference. Replying to two points from the same person in the same post isn’t really the same thing.

I actually feel I have acknowledged and rebuffed every point made against the idea. If people choose to disagree (or not read it) that is their choice. Timing has been addressed. Failures in requiring time and money from players have been addressed. A plethora of money in the hands of the game’s “elite” has been addressed. Dev time has been addressed. Personal level of priority has been addressed. As noted, you don’t have to agree with my assessment, but those points have been addressed and as far as I am concerned my position stands.

You have mentioned the “find another” feature a couple times now, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. How does making the match maker roll a new opponent without even knowing if it is a duplicate team help? So now I roll the same team blindly three times in a row and take the third? Or maybe I throw away the actual team I haven’t seen in a bit blindly re-rolling matches? How many times do I click the find another option to ensure a team I didn’t just fight? I have to be missing something with that feature because you seem sure it is a solution when as near as I can tell it is a worse solution (and I use the word loosely) than scouting. Unless I am missing something all I get to see is level, gold reward, and trophies. None of those things will help to force team diversity in matches, so I have to be missing something.

You are correct, it wouldn’t stop the calls for nerfs, you are also correct it never would. I can however tell you something I saw in quite a few (if not most) of the nerf call posts was a variation on the phrase “all I see is X and it can’t be beaten” or “fought X Y times in a row and lost every match”. Clearly the wounds would be a little less raw if they didn’t have to die to the same overpowered team 3 times in a row, so saying some of them might not have been made at all I don’t think is a huge stretch. And I never claimed elimination, only lessening.

Just in case text is miscommunicating tone and such, I am enjoying the conversation with you, and I consider it just that a conversation, not an argument. :smiley: I disagree with some of your points so far, but I disagree with a lot of peeps, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy chatting with them.

-Razlath

18

No worries, I’m not in fighting you either, just debating as we disagree on several points. But it’s always nice to check, as some people can be a bit touchy on the Internet. =)

Okay, so you feel you have addressed the fact that your suggestion would make the matchmaking much longer, and sure, you did reply to it, the problem is that I completely disagree with your reply as well. ^^ Let me clarify.

It’s not at all the size of the few additional lines of required code or the time it would take to load them that would make the process considerably longer. And the process WOULD be considerably longer, every single time, for every single match of every single player, please understand this.

Why do you think we’re getting the same (types of) opponents fairly often in the first place? In the same breath, because this is exactly for the same reason and can be a bigger issue for many of us, why do you think the matchmaking system fairly often offers us matches that aren’t quite a match (pun intended)? I believe it’s because there isn’t as vast a pool of potential opponents as you seem to assume.

I don’t think the code is at fault. It likely wouldn’t offer you the same guy three times in a row, or two wildly overpowered or underpowered opponents in a row, if there were many better matches at hand.

Also, please keep in mind that, besides the choices you actually get, the matchmaker by itself regularly re-rolls once, sometimes twice or even thrice and you get those funny haha pop-ups to let you know that the opponent it found would NOT be a suitable match for you according to its criteria… That is to say that a system which finds it acceptable to offer you the exact same person multiple times, as well as regularly pitting you against someone four times your level, or three times weaker than you are… fairly regularly has to discard potential matches that would be even less okay. And this is with the current list of criteria it rolls the dice with.

Now imagine that the system ALSO had to discard a suitable match (per its current criteria) every time it so happens that this is the same line-up, or a similar line-up, or whatever specific extra criterion you would have the developers add to the matchmaking process, as the game you’ve just played, or the ____ games you’ve just played… It WOULD have to re-roll many more times, and it WOULD take much longer to get an Invade started.

Another thing. There is also POPULARITY to take into account. The player base of this game is every bit as trend-oriented as with most online games, and THERE IS A “META GAME”. You don’t end up facing 12 Venoxia line-ups because you were unlucky or because the matchmaker sucks so much as you end up facing 12 Venoxia line-ups because 50% of all line-ups in existence include Venoxia, because she’s popular as balls. Same thing with Jarl, and WebSpinner, and Goblins etc. etc. You can’t “fix” community trends with code, unless you find a way to code “please be more creative and less sheep-like in your gaming style” directly into players’ brains. So, going back to your suggestion, if you have just fought a very popular line-up and the new, “improved” matchmaker is now required to find you a different line-up to fight, then you’ve just halved its options. So it’s going to take even longer to find your next match.

With my suggestion to use “Try Another” more, I didn’t mean in any way, shape of form to guarantee you a different line-up, but at least a different player. One crucial bit of information available to you in this case, which you didn’t mention, is the player’s name. You face Whatshisname once, and you can see that he has a line-up you dislike facing, then you roll again a little bit later and the matchmaking offers you the same guy again. Hit “Try Another”, and you at least get a chance to face a different line-up. That’s all I’m saying with this. But it’s already a lot, I think.

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19

I think this sums it up pretty nicely. I also wouldnt want the devs taking valuable programming time from OTHER features (cough guild enhancements cough) to implement this idea.

Im not a big fan of running into the same teams over and over either, but It’s something I just deal with and use the tools that exist to face other things if I need to.