This issue is relevant to my interests. Closing in on level 1500 with everything leveled and traited, there’s not really anything I need to farm, so I spend a lot of time in pvp. It is super frustrating to see people with less battles and more losses zoom past your score.
1 Like
Currently 48 on the PVP leaderboard and there are 16 people with higher points and less battles won.
Hell I can pick out some that are also in guilds higher than mine, so forget “lower guild” as a supposed factor… talking 30-40% more points, 90~% of my level, higher guild, less fights. Also seen people with higher level than me with the same nonsense.
Well, there’s a dev stream in 10mins, I guess I’ll vent there and start tagging devs here …
1 Like
Nah, it’s just that FOMO is the new 505 business strategy for driving sales.
FOMO has always been a big part of their strategy to drive up daily (previously, weekly) engagement and retention. However, you can have FOMO without permanently making past things unavailable ever again. This same phenomenon works against them if a prospective new player, before playing, finds out that certain things considered central to the Gems of War experience are unavailable forever because they started playing later, or just that they are power-capped below legacy players no matter how much time and effort they put in - they’ve already missed out, so why bother starting? However, the game doesn’t seem to have an outward rep for this… yet (thus they get around it by getting people into the realm where sunken costs overpowers this). If this continues long enough, it will. I hope they can address these issues before that happens.
Slight derail so I’ll add something on-topic:
The reason I’m harping so much on fixing matchmaking being a viable short term solution to this problem is that they have tweaked or changed matchmaking multiple times in the past, all of which spanned periods about the PvP points (and/or gold payout) issue, and have done so between client patches. Complaints about payout scale approaching endgame are almost as old as the PvP ladder itself, but most times it has semi-self corrected as the middle is shored up to whatever the current caps were, because this was so easy to do that it was basically automatic if you were playing the game on a weekly basis over an extended period of time. They’ve only really started “maybe looking into it” recently… or did they even? Either way, there has been no follow through for literally years of scattered negative feedback on how this works, but this time is the most complaints (and biggest disparity) yet.
Matchmaking has always been fundamentally broken in this regard since it wants to serve up some matches based on all these different factors, including things like PvP ranking, while not giving payouts accordingly like any sensible system that worked like this would (eg., the entire PvP scale would top out at a couple thousand points ever, and you lose or gain more depending on how close you are to your opponent), because it can’t work like this because this fundamentally breaks other aspects of the system. It just isn’t noticeable (and/or people don’t care as much) when everyone in these pools has close to the same points anyways and you coincidentally get consistent payouts, but it becomes really noticeable (and annoying, and people do care) in times where top and middle team scores have a degree of separation and these huge gaps emerge. We just won’t see this semi-self correction this time, because the most important disparity, effort disparity, between the top and middle is too great, meaning we won’t have huge pools of defenses coincidentally strong enough to qualify for good payouts based on what is currently a fairly obtuse (and sometimes seemingly arbitrary) matchmaking system.
So please, fix matchmaking.
4 Likes
I agree with you! However, that doesn’t seem to be how things are currently being handled, and now that there are portraits/emoji packs tied to higher tiers of Event shop purchases, this is becoming a lot more blatant.
Right, and if they don’t come up with some kind of solution to this problem that doesn’t ONLY involve the cash shop the game will effectively be paywalled against newer players and players who missed out on a specific event. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t consider tossing previous weapons in the cash shop - some people would rather spend the $5, but there needs to be an alternative for people to spend resources they can earn in the game as well. It’s the foundation the game has been built on up to this point. (Yes, I know there have been weapons for $5 in the shop before that were otherwise unattainable for new players, and I disagreed with that being the only avenue at the time, as well.)
On topic:
This, which makes the silence and perceived hand-waving even more deafening. I suspect this issue is going to become “Dawnbringer in Arena 2.0” until it gets addressed.
I think a quick solution would be some basic math wizardry.
The algorithm right now seems to assign point values from 1 through 60. It also seems to keep the 3 different matches within a range, with 3t matches being from 30-60, roughly.
I imagine they expected this to mean most players average around 45 points per match at the 3T level. They didn’t take into account that over time, every player will have more people close to or below their level than far above. This is causing a lot of high-level players to average 40 or lower, while low-level players maintain 45 or higher.
So I think past level 1??? (not sure quite where it gets bad) it’d be worth shifting it. If the points to be awarded are under 45, add 10 and clamp to 45. A 30 point match is now worth 40. A 40 point match is now worth 45. A 50 point match is still worth 50; the game judged it as “above average challenge” so you don’t get the boost.
Yes, that means high-level players will technically get more points for easy matches. This is meant to balance that, comparatively, they get fewer matchups worth more than 45 points. We can slide 45 around to other numbers, maybe 50 is a better upper cap (that’d make 40 point matches boosted the furthest.) It would mean that an optimal strategy might be to refresh any match worth < 40 points, but I suspect if the time/gem loss is worth it that’s already being done by people chasing LBs.
It’s an easy solution and doesn’t require retooling much. It notes that the rewards the algorithm puts out are below-average and adjusts the range of scores to compensate. That doesn’t require rebalancing matchmaking or other things.
I do agree that the Ranked PVP point system should be the same for everyone.
1 Like
Not that more examples are needed, but I had some time off work this week and made a run at the leaderboard
That’s me in #2. I thought it was interesting that a 224 level difference and guilded vs unguilded works out this way. #1 is gaining, very roughly as i’m too lazy to do the detailed math and take defense etc into consideration , at about twice the rate as me. Vast majority of wins are 3 trophy fights with the occasional 2 in the mix, no 1s.
Whatcha gonna do tho right? fun times.
2 Likes
35 three-trophy wins to hit Tier 1 this week. It was 27 prior to the nerf. This is a 30% increase in time spent for the SAME rewards.
Please fix.
3 Likes
All in the name of diversity… wink wink wink… Utter FN BS…
Forget about the PVP scoring, the Diversity is so broken… PVP is just a rotation of the following teams:
Rope Dart
Yao Meta
Skeleton Key
Lust + Jar of Eyes
Not to mention the fact all these High level / end game players using the same defence team… It’s pretty sad that you don’t have a mind of you own / A sheep.
3 Likes
I am one of the endest of end game players. I get 31 point for a 3 trophy battle. Why would I even bother? I am at the point of only playing pvp during GW week to test teams. Arena is faster, easier and no meta teams.
Then don’t play it… It’s that simple, the rewards for PVP are horrendous anyway so who actually cares where you finish ??
Thank you for restating my point so eloquently. 
you forgot the new life and death AW meta. the most annoying meta of all.
I always used to run a ‘fair’ defense team without empowered troops, that usually got about 50% wins. But midway through this week I had enough of getting 31 points per 3T win, and decided to switch to one of my B1 GW defenses to get some extra points on defense wins and partially make up for it… Next time you run into it, you can thank the devs
1 Like
Thank you for your honest answer. But, I feel this is a viscous circle…
I’m not going to be naive if I was only getting 31 points I would be slightly annoyed… However, setting a sweaty defence teams in PVP is karma for ruining PVP
1 Like
I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean but let’s talk about what “ruins” PvP.
Used to, we had this:
- Competitive players are punished if they don’t win.
- The only teams that win consistently are troll defense teams.
Now let’s add:
- Honor is part of the game and players want it.
- The only ways to get honor are to set some kind of popular defense team, whatever that is, or beg in global.
So like, there’s always some arbitrary “what would be good” picture that no one paints for defense teams. But the only teams people are encouraged to use are either 4x Fire Bomb (or whatever is deemed ‘easy’) or a troll defense team. The only thing about this honor has changed is apparently someone out there gives honor out if you set some arbitrary team deemed “good”.
It’s impossible to guess what the heck random other players see as “good”. 99% of the teams you could form aren’t anything resembling a challenge. Some high % of the ones that could be challenging are easily toppled with a specific team.
I think from now on nobody should get to complain about “this dumb defense team ruining PvP” if they can’t describe what 10 matches would look like if “PvP was good”.
I have a feeling it’s just some kind of goofy “Well, for the good of the game you should be setting a team that wins sometimes, but not too much” and that’s just so arbitrary and finicky! You’re saying, “Screw you for not giving up some of your points so I can be entertained.”
It’s not the players’ job to fix PvP. It’s the devs’ job to make “doing good things” the best choice. Right now, the best choice is to pick your nastiest GW defense.
3 Likes
I support the above post ^