Actually, the adjustment was stated, on a single line buried at the bottom of the post:
However, it was this change that highlighted and exacerbated two parts of the PvP system that have always been broken. Those being max possible payouts nosediving at the top end of score potential, and matchmaking not providing battles with a focus on consistent payouts even when they do exist. With a quick forum search you can see complaints about both these stretching back for almost as long as the current PvP system has existed.
Many of them are concentrated around periods of time just after a team score formula adjustment is made. Neither is them kinda fading into background noise in the past, because both these issues sort of self correct over time as more people reach the top of the score, thus matchmaking coincidentally provides matches with consistent payouts much closer to the middle of the pack. This time, it is further compounded by the fact that the middle and top are so far separated in terms of effort that it is unlikely to self correct, and further compounded by the middle and the top being closer than ever in terms of stats while laving such huge payout disparities, and even further compounded by the fact that we have powercreeped so far that multiple key combinations of troops can stretch the first turn advantage into being able to set up consistent win conditions versus much stronger opponents before you even have five star kingdom stats.
My four accounts have max score potentials ranging from sub 10k to 13300. ALL of them can be match with three trophy battles in the 11ks range and up to and over 13500, with the lower accounts getting a sporadic straggler in the 10k range on the three trophy which I haven’t seen happen on the higher accounts in a while. The difficulty of any given battle versus any given score opponent is practically identical.
So, once again:
The lowest account enters a battle versus a 11k score team in the three trophy slot, gets a payout of 2.2k gold and 69 PvP points, can win on between the first and third turns in a total of about 8 to 12 actions. If this is a meta team and they get their setup before then, I lose. The highest level enters a battle versus a 11k score team, gets a payout of 1.1k gold and 31 PvP points, which can win on between the first and third turn in a total of about, lets say, 7 to 12 actions. If this is a meta team and they get their setup before then, I either lose or am left in such a weak position I could win 3-5 battles in the time it takes me to eek out a “maybe” win, but usually not, so even “not losing” is resource negative. And again (again) this would be less of an issue if my highest level wasn’t matched with the 11k teams as potential three trophies in the first place. If I were matched consistently with 13k+ teams, I’d win on between the first and third turns in a total of about 8 to 12 actions and get a payout of 2k gold and up to 60 PvP points for it, and just lose when I don’t. While still not completely “fair”, that seems much closer to the original intent of the system and closer to the state of things were during the periods when people weren’t actively complaining about this.
Basically, the “difficulty gap” for which the score differential based payout formula was intended to compensate midgame players a bit more to make them able to stay “competitive” versus endgame players (on the already fundamentally broken PvP leaderboard system) is basically non-existent anymore, but they doubled down on the system creating a bigger score gap between midgame and endgame players in 4.3 anyways. And in such away, and it begs repeating, that it will not selfcorrect.
But yeah, they neither have neither acknowledged or addressed this directly. This is the most frustrating part of the issue - they don’t seem to know how baldy is broken, how it was always kind of broken, why it is broken, and why the last patch made it worse. This is the part that has me really really apprehensive over any potential fix, because if you don’t understand the issue in the first place, how can you hope to fix it a satisfactory manner?