Ok so now we know devs think nothing changed in 4.3. Sigh…
A huge huge part of the problem is the matches that are getting served up.
A lot of people are only looking at this on the surface level, and on the surface level it just looks like a nerf at endgame. In reality, it is a cascade failure of the constituent parts - disparity of player strengths being highlighted by matchmaking that serves by criteria that are largely irrelevant to the player; because matchmaking doesn’t care about potential payouts and instead go by stuff like PvP rank and player level, where scores, and thus payouts, can vary wildly. Meanwhile, payouts are the biggest thing a player would care about (possibly next to avoiding a certain team for some people) and they are even prominently displayed down the interface, making it also seem intentional that this is something the players are designed to notice, so you can’t really blame them for that either.
At first, I thought it was because there weren’t enough max endgame defenses to go around and serve people with near maxed score potential - after all, you can field a team of significantly lower than your max possible score (eg., firebombs with no hero), but much data gathering of payouts approaching max possible score and what kind of battles, as well as testing on lower level accounts where I am semi-frequently (and nonsensically) served with defense team scores in this range, I’m ready to call machmaking the primary culprit at this point as to why things are so different than pre-patch. If maxed score players got consistently matched with defense teams within 500 points of the highest score team they could field with some degree of regularity, payouts would range in the 1600 to 2k+ range with PvP points over 50 and about 95% of these complaints would disappear.
Heres an example.
After a full week of playing PvP and being at T1 on Sunday, I should not still be seeing a matchmaking screen like this:
When I can field a team with this much score:
I’m only getting crappy rewards on my three trophy because I’m getting served crappy score defense teams. And because of the way matchmaking works, this can last an entire play session. Also, the higher I get toward the point where it is nearly impossible to press my score higher (where level is the only thing left that will increase it at all, and only 1 point every few levels). This compounds with the fact that I seem to be in these “bad” matchmaking pools more often on my higher level accounts, while my lower level accounts that cant even muster 10k score are fighting defense teams with 13.5k score semi-frequently. This is made worse by the fact that the lower level accounts payouts(both gold and PvP points) cap out when I face a team in the high 11k score range, meaning I get nothing extra for beating a team another 2,000 points higher and it would have been far better to serve that team to someone else.
Being roughly 400 points below what the max achievable team score is, I get “good” matches when my opponents are within a few hundred points of my max possible score, like so:
Even this one isn’t so bad (for MSP 13.2k, needs to be 400 points higher on average for MSP 13.6k)
But it is a crapshoot to get these kinds of spreads post-patch
The issue is that pre-patch, “close to max” score covered a far more numerous range of people that would get picked by the various matchmaking criteria and serve you up consistent (lukewarm, but at least consistent) rewards. But even through greater rewards are technically possible for everyone because of the score changes, the general reception for endgamers has been overwhelmingly negative. This is because the number of battles where you get served a lower score opponent have dramatically gone up at endgame, because criteria like player level and how far they made it in PvP this week are almost entirely irrelevant for what makes up the score differential at endgame (score from level is within a few points for everyone post 1000, PvP progress doesn’t affect your score at all), and score determines your payout. Basically, mathcmaking criteria have not kept up with the score formula and it is glaringly obvious when you keep getting three trophy battles versus opponents considered “much weaker”, which is very frustrating when it happens over, and over, and over, which is what people are reacting to here. If you want people to have a PvP experience at endgame that doesn’t make them feel like they are consistently getting “lower rewards” or “penalized for progress”, these matchmaking criteria are no longer sufficient.
Sometimes, it is worth addressing something that is clearly broken with the simplest possible fix rather than wait for it to grate on everyone’s nerves while looking into the perfect possible solution. We need look no further than how long it took for the 50 gem class change fee to get dropped for that. If matchmaking is addressed in the short term, we keep a system that is still “mostly fair” and brings max endgamer payouts back to the “10-20% lower than middle of the pack” range like prepatch, while still properly rewarding actually fighting stronger teams. Then work toward that “holistic long term solution” if necessary. I’m sure whatever that solution would be is likely to benefit from having matchmaking more accurately tuned to relative player strength.
11 Likes
less pvp points and rewards … but we got a working chat and emojis …
Never thought I’d miss the busted chat . Can ya roll back the game version… maybe put the 4.3 patch back in the oven for a bit … seems like it needs to cook some more .
2 Likes
Why do anything at all?
The community here thinks the PvP nerf is complete 
.
But evidently GoW is more successful than ever. 
So why do anything to pay fan service to the veteran members that padded your bottom line. Or kept playing despite all the bugs and constant changes (some good, most bad).
- I’m interested to know how many players just log in daily to collect rewards. Compared to those who actually play the game. For instance. I am one person who is active on one account. But I log in daily to my other 4 just to collect rewards in the other accounts. Therefore is that 5 DUA when essentially only 1 is actually playing the game?
- By moving to a new platform you’ll see growth. It’s impossible not to. I have no doubt that the Switch player base is growing faster than ever. While other platforms are having less active accounts than ever before.
- If retention has always been super high. Then the profit has to be increasing from all the gem to win stuff. If it isn’t, then obviously the original formulas were much more lucrative.
Off the list…
If Retention is high, if DUA is high, and the player base is always growing. Then I don’t want to hear any excuses about how busy the devs are. A couple months ago I was told there hasn’t been any new hires to the team since Nov 2017. At least not on the coding or support side.
If all the private data is correct then the work load has not kept up with staffing.
I’ll believe GoW is dying until I see some new staff faces to tell me how wrong I am. 
Or until you fix what 4.3cked with my PvP so I no longer care about these things. I’ll be too busy actually playing the game again.
1 Like
Exactly why bother with veterans when they have already spent money on the game when they were lower level.
There is probably a lot. I do that often when I can get my reqs done by just buying the glory troop and collecting tributes. I’ve had a few people like that in my guilds as well they just stop playing and use their gold stash to do reqs for a while and most of them just leave when they run out of gold.
This I have a problem believing. Last year I had to wait 3 weeks to get my second account in to our sister guild and we almost always had a waiting list and when we didn’t we would get someone in a day 2 at most but these days I’m losing people almost weekly and it can take a week to even get someone.
One thing is for certain, this will all end with a pvp rework most certainly not in our favor regarding rewards. Probably some new currency introduced aswell to apparently offset the less gold we will then be getting etc.
Quite interestingly, I’m getting offered a high reward match most of the times now. The change kicked in sometime during this weekend, so it looks like the Ninja Code Gnomes have been at work again.
@Saltypatra Would it be an option to announce changes that have such a significant impact on gameplay in the future? Or are those actually considered bugs that we should be reporting? It’s really hard to tell with all the information hiding going on.
I started getting opponents from higher ranked guilds around this time as well, although I was operating under the suspicion that my PvP points/Ranking had something to do with it. I think this might have happened in the past when I’ve done lots of PvP as well??? I don’t reach 10k+ points very often, usually max out at ~4.5k.
I want to TL;DR this for anyone who still doesn’t understand, and maybe clarify to @Saltypatra:
The PvP system thinks a player with a meta defense team that I can only beat 80% of the time is the same difficulty as a 4x Fire Bomb team that I’ve maybe lost twice to in my entire career.
(Longer below:)
That makes it really hard to swallow that it’s working anything like intended. I think the players completely understand and support that harder opponents should be more rewarding. But it’s been true for at least two years now that how the game judges “harder opponent” has nothing to do with difficulty. I can put 4x of any mythic on a team and get a huge score. I can swap one out for the hero and it gets bigger. Now I have a theoretical maximum (for me) team that most likely doesn’t function at all.
That’s it. The algorithm has no clothes. It isn’t clever at all. It simply counts stats and assigns a score and hopes that these 4 Drake Riders are actually as coherent a team as they look. They aren’t.
I appreciate the complexity of a smarter assessment of team score, but I don’t really care to hear that a solution is long-coming. I’m really losing my spark for the game. This used to be a game that didn’t punish me if I had a really busy day and could only play for 10 or 15 minutes. For a brief time if I could set aside about 45 minutes of a Monday that was all I needed to reach PvP rank 1. Now it takes at least an hour and a half. that makes Monday chores push into Tuesday, and on event weeks I usually can’t even look at spending raid/invasion sigils until Wednesday or Thursday.
That’s why this hurts particularly for me, and why I think it deserves better than a “we need to take our time” response. The root problem I see in the game is it’s finally asking me for so much time I have to tell it no. This problem with PvP scoring means it takes me twice as long to reach one of the week’s most basic player goals. That hurts my ego. When a video game stops making me feel like I’m doing well, I tend to move on.
GoW is there. I don’t feel like I have enough time to call myself “competitive” anymore. I can either abandon my job and family duties, or I can find a game that fits my schedule. So from my perspective, re-adjusting player goals to reward the amount of play that used to be acceptable is a very high priority.
I’m about 3 weeks from quitting. I’m not sure I’ll maintain my fire through June.
5 Likes
While this is being investigated, would you or another Dev please explain to high-level players what actions we need to take in order to be able to compete with the rate at which lower-level/less-progressed players are able to earn PVP points, and therefore, climb the PVP leaderboard? There have been multiple examples of this disparity posted on the forum over the past few weeks and the main point behind posting them is that there is a point at which it literally becomes impossible to compete, due to time being a finite resource.
Battles can only be shortened so far or made efficient to a certain point. After that, it doesn’t matter how “good” a player is. You simply can’t go faster.
If Player A completes battles in 120 seconds and Player B completes battles in 90 seconds, but Player A gets twice the points per battle…Player B is categorically screwed if he/she wants to compete.
At the extreme high end where Player A might be finishing battles 3 or 4 seconds faster on average than Player B, but both are earning the same average amount of points, people wouldn’t be making a big deal out of things. People who excel at their chosen sport fail to come in first all the time - but the playing field is fair.
A matchmaking system should NEVER block a player from being able to compete if she/she is able to invest the same amount of time as another player.
If a level 1100 player and a level 1200 player are using the same team and completing matches at the same rate, the level 1200 player should not have to play 25-30% or more time to have the same score as the level 1100 player. The level 1200 player should not have to win 33 or 34 battles to hit Tier 1 when the level 1100 player only has to complete 26 or 27.
This is the disturbing part. Not only are there no instructions for how high-tier players are supposed to compete with the rate at which less-progressed players can earn points, but this statement indicates that it might be intended that those players simply cannot compete, and that it might simply not be important enough to fix.
I know that these decisions (about what gets worked on/prioritized) are at least partially decided over the Devs’ heads, and I’ve always been very specific about stating that I do not blame the Devs for the Publisher’s decisions. I understand there is a lot the Devs can’t tell us. I understand that the Devs can’t publicly disagree with anything regarding game direction because it would cause problems with the Publisher. I get it.
The reason that I continue to post about changes like this at all is that I hope that by posting in a calm, logical, reasonable way, that the concerns are able to make their way up the chain of command and hopefully find their way to the folks who make the decisions. For all I know, the Devs find some of these issues as head-scratching as the players do and just can’t express it due to the company line. That’s fine.
I just hope that if enough logic and rationality can be brought to bear, that something will actually change in order to make the game fair for everyone, including maxed-out high-tier endgame players, because we are people too, and we’re just as important as other players.
11 Likes
I’ve basically just been going “How did this happen in the first place? What were they thinking?”
Realistically speaking, late-game players playing the same content as everyone else should have an easier time. That’s what happens when people get to late-game. In any game. When they play harder stuff, sure, make it harder. If this was some kind of attempt at “balance” for the sake of everyone who hasn’t put in as much time and money then I don’t get it.
2 Likes
Here’s my PVP score today.
I’m not end game, I need 7 troops, 2 to craft and 5 Mythics. I’m in a top 10 guild.
My battles to reach T1…
- 31
- 31
- 46
- 31
- 54
- 39
- 31
- 31
- 31
- 31
- 37
- 31
- 43
- 42
- 37
- 40
- 31
- 31
- 43
- 31
- 51
- 33
- 39
- 36
- 34
- 31
- 31
- 42
- 31
- 51
- 31
- 31
- 42
- 31
All T3, 1 refresh for a Guardian Crown, double empowered and summon squad. There would have been 35 but got 2 or 3 def wins at same time as the last battle taking it past 1900.
The thing that people might be forgetting, is that actually endgame players are more valuable than we think. No, they are not the target audience, no they might not spend as they once did, BUT they do pass on their thoughts/comments in chats/discords and will influence players starting out - like this forum will. There will be many anonymous viewers of forums which there will be limited data of. These threads have to be raised because there is imbalance and let’s be kind, relative intransigence from devs on the matter, which has perpetuated for a while tbf. New gamers will read about core issues and maybe reconsider playing enough to invest cash into the game.
As an example I have been visiting a football forum for 10-15 years and still not registered an account.
It’s the same with the weapons thing.
3 Likes
I agree with this to a point. Like with any game, I believe the “official” site only gets a small minority of players, though I do agree there are probably a lot of visitors who never register. Still, as a percentage of the whole, I would wager it’s only a slice of the playerbase rather than the bulk of the pie.
The bigger influence, in my opinion, is going to be stuff like Global Chat, Discord servers, and other social media, where public opinion can spread much more rapidly.
That said, my weekly trek to Tier 1 looks a lot like yours. Since the “change” it has taken me between 32 and 37 3-trophy wins each week to get to Tier 1. Before the change it took 27 wins each week. I am not amused.
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I really don’t feel better after salty answer. She said “IF” they decide to rework pvp… i would prefer a “we will” rework pvp.
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Yep, it’s those chats and discords where the major influence of veterans is felt. I mentioned the anonymity thing as something else, as often we are told we are a minority on this forum in comparison to other media.
Now, I would have thought that the reply we have won’t sit all that well with more than just endgamers, or those nearing that ‘category’ of player as that is the future for the newer players too, eventually. Spend, grind, dedicate to progression and then end up wondering what it is all about.
There has been mention several times that there is likely to be a gem sink cost associated with PvP in the future - not the 1 gem refresh. You can almost see where it is heading… running something down, letting it almost rot and then ‘wham’ a new super shiny will appear - masquerading as what it once was in a pay gem guise as a revamp.
I mean at the end of the day, there are many players unhappy with the situation and we have ‘we will see’. It’s what we get told as kids when we ask for something for Xmas in February…
Well, good or bad the pvp dilemma got an answer, what about the other important question?
How many chincilla Sirrian weight?
Whatever i think i will just retire when BL3 get released
if i don’t use hero i get slightly more points (40) woohoo!
Hurry up dev fix it!!! 40 points is way too much…
Are you sure? When I switch my attacking team nothing changes for me.
For me it’s much worse. Takes me 40 battles to reach tier 1. The more endgame you are the worse it gets. Even though I be willing to bet your battles are just as quick as mine.