I’m level 400+. I do see my share of Maws, but not as much as you so. I definitely see more Goblins and True Damage teams.
Currently I am skipping Maws team, but that’s just because of bugs preventing the use of my usual team (ghost troop bug, and defense team being default). As soon as these are fixed, I will have no problem with Maw whatsoever.
Sorry about my English.
I mean I don’t want to see all Maw/Mercy around. So, I don’t want to see Nerf of War, I do really want to see Skill of War.
You know what I’m talking about, will the Maw that the first position place, you’re so worrying about Maw will eat your first troop when skull matching.
Well, I mean, if the game is a luck base game, that’s sad.
Sorry, ignore what I said on live pvp.
Just want to say current ranking system is quite annoying and a waste of time.
I mean I can’t find anything skillful now in ranking.
I thought ranking pvp is matched limited before 2.0 released. But I’m wrong.
I think if a ranked arena, that would be nice…
Too bad the focus is on nerfing a troop again, instead of developing the PvP system.
I wonder which troop is next after the inevitable nerf of the Great Maw. 
Honestly, Devour is a dangerous mechanic, as when it procs:
I feel like Maw was a bit of a mistake. At the very least, his third trait should be redone, but a 100% chance to shift power so drastically feels like it’s not right at any mana cost.
Yeah, I hate Maw’s 3rd trait.
And for me, if Maw’s mana is 15 or even 12, that will not make me angry like its 3rd trait.
I just want to make an example, there will be 2 pairs of skulls on board.
And you have to leave a pair of skulls for the enemy to do skull damage.
If it’s the ememy’s turn, Maw do skull damage, and eat your first troop.
What you will think?
I BELIEVE MOST OF YOU WILL FEEL MAD!
This could be fixed to make a rule that no troops can devour in their first turn.
I’ve sometimes felt that, but mostly I think it can be manageable… but it’s far too easy to power up to 24 mana at high level, especially with good yellow generators and high mana surges… And with Mercy you might cast it on the first or second turn, or the AI might do that to you… I suggest pushing the mana cost up a bit, say to 27 or 28, and see where it gets us for a bit…
The third trait is nuts though - with no combo breaker, 15% chance to instantly toss the game is too much too terrifying… especially as Maw can also cast it’s spell… maybe change the Maw as follows:
Or milder is to change the trait to only a 5% or 10% chance…
Mercy is a decent troop but Empowered is just going too far, the combo potential is too much too soon at the start of the game… I’ve long suggested she get Fast as a trait instead, which will slow her down a bit, and maybe dissuade people from using the broken combo… or feeling that they have to for having a discouraging defence team…
Amen. Empowered should be limited to spells with no board effect: Dust devil, Lamia are perfect valid examples.
As for Maw, well, I think the problem is more with devour and the insta kill. I think devour giving just life and armor would be a good start. Or rather than insta death, dmg done = heal amount for the troop.
This being said, my most epic (and fun!) battles have been against a maw which ate one my team. Quite often the problem is that many teams cannot handle the death of 1 character
Another option could be to change the 3rd trait into the one the Archer hero class has (Bullseye):
Without the Great Maw gaining the enemy troops stats, it is much easier to get rid of even if it gets lucky and kills a troop.
I have played a similar build, but with the Archer instead. And while it is powerful, its not nearly as powerful as the Great Maw for this exact reason. There is way more risk of getting your 1st troop killed if it doesn’t gain as much stats to tank.
Another benefit is that it would mean the bug of devouring multiple enemies on skull dmg is finally fixed! (Archer is working correctly) 
It does take away a bit of the monster fantasy though (killing instead of devouring), but the theme is still there because of the Monster’s Spell.
Unfortunately ELO would probably be one of the worst possible systems for this game. ELO is a pure performance metric and there have been questions of the appropriateness of it’s use in games that have luck as a factor.
At it’s core ELO says that two players of the same ranking should be able to win against the other 50% of the time. However, most PVP invades in this game have a win percentage of closer to 75% (or possibly higher), regardless of the skill level of the players involved.
Two of the main concerns ELO would bring would be in activity vs protecting rating, and selective pairing.
With ELO you can’t lose points if you don’t play (in theory at least), so it can discourage people from playing after they achieve a certain rank. In fact it can in theory punish those who play more, and reward people who go on short quick hot streaks as a result. Now I know you suggested having people lose points in failing to defend… however as we’ve already mention, the win ratio for invades is around 75% or higher. So people would be losing those A LOT, and would be forcing people to play a lot. So, as you said, this isn’t really a very casual friendly system.
The other issue is with selective pairing. The PVP system in this game allows you to choose your opponents, and as such people can focus on “safer” wins to maximize their rating gain. Now there are some ways to account for this, but in the end people will still likely be able to game the system, and it will reward people who can play more, rather than those who are more skillful (assuming that everyone takes the best rating maximizing matches the can, those who play more will get more points).
It’s also worth noting that games such as Magic: The Gathering and the Pokemon TCG have used ELO in the past. MTG have abandoned it completely and Pokemon TCG do still use it, but there seems to be a mix with Championship Points as well. Online games such as World of Warcraft, and League of Legends have used ELO in the past, but both have abandoned it for their own in house systems.
So while the idea of ELO is nice, we’d more likely be better off with a system devised by InfinityPlus2 for their own game than actually using ELO.
More info on ELO here if anyone is interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Sorry for the double post, I just didn’t want to get the two replies mixed up.
First off I do want to agree that I think currently it’s harder for higher level players to get to the top than it should be, and that it’s easier for lower players. And I agree this shouldn’t be the case.
However I don’t think low level players should be discounted purely because they are lower level players. If we assume a level playing field (ie everyone has the same chance and difficulty slope to get to the top of the leader board) then it should come down to the player who can field the better team. Now in general this WILL be high level players as they have been playing longer and will have accumulated a wider variety of knowledge and resources, and therefor can field stronger teams, and adapt to changes in metas more easily and quickly. However say a lower level player manage to get the right cards, and put together a strong team and focused all their traitstones into those 4 cards alone, then I feel that they have as much right as a higher level player to be in the top 50-100 players in the game.
Now this idea actually agrees with your final statement, since while the player is a lower level, they are still fielding a strong team, and not taking advantage of their low level as a means to leverage the gap on difference in strength. But I don’t think it’s fair to discount lower level players just because they are lower level.
Most of the high level players looooooooove to talk about how if everyone else just put the time in we’d have the same rewards & now a high level player is complaining because… enough time could potentially net a low-level player the best rewards?
Really?
Is that actually the argument?
Or is the argument here that these low level nobodies must be… I dunno… ranking up on cheap easy matches? In which case: I am about level 200 and I beat your team, dude.
I do not have The Great Maw, I have zero mythics, my team isn’t fully traited, but I manage slightly better than 50/50 against souped up Maw teams.
Frankly, I’ve been enjoying PVP so much more since the update. I can pick more challenging matches which net much, much higher rewards. More fun, more stuff at the end. I don’t really enjoy being told I should be sent back to the kiddie pool because… why?
Another (related) question is how PVP point rewards are calculated. If a level 100 player can earn 40 points for defeating a higher-level player, but I (level 350) can only earn 28 for my hard matchup, it will be easier for the lower ranked player to accumulate PVP points and climb the ranking.
indeed, im level80-90 and its knights - goblins - or a combo team with one or more legendaries who usually arent traited so doable. What i do want to remark is that i encounter many players of that level who seem to have many kingdoms at level 10 seeing their magic, shield, life values. I only just got one kingdom to 10 and i didnt feel like i was lagging behind. I guess i need to go and beg some more 
From the way I read the part of @Jainus’ post that you are referring to, that is not what he meant.
What he’s saying is that it is easier to get to high ranks in the PVP leaderboard for lower level players than high level players because high level players appear to be getting fewer PVP points for each match they win.
He’s stating (and I agree with that statement) that no matter what level you are (or what team you use to fight the battle), winning a match against a specific player’s defense team (identical team!) should result in an equal amount of PVP points no matter what level you are.
So if I (level 804) beat @Jainus’ team of Gorgotha, Psion, Venoxia and Crimson Bat with my Maw, Mercy, IK, Sheggra team, I should get exactly the same amount of PVP points that you (level 200ish) would get with your invade team for beating @Jainus’ defend team.
Maybe I should lose more points if I lose the match than you would for losing the match (to put in some consideration for difference in levels), but if people get different “rewards” for exactly the same achievement (winning a battle) in PVP, then the leaderboard isn’t a level playing field, IMHO.
@Jainus: Please correct me if I am wrong, but that is how I interpreted that part of your post.
If that was true, you would not see a single high level player in the leaderboards. There are simply too many low level players, and if all of them had it easier entering the leaderboards, then the top 100 of the low levels would be so far off that any high level player would never be able to enter.
In reality, though, that is not the case. The number of wins needed for a low level player to be in top 50 is not much different than for high level. The low level players in the leaderboards simply play a lot, that’s why they are there. You can easily see that, the numbers are right there.
Then how do you explain the current number 2 and 3 on the leaderboard?
2 = Tsunakun (level 121), 7181 PVP points, with 157 invade wins
3 - techn9neee (level 1000) 7127 PVP points, with 268 invade wins
Or number 5 and 6 on the current leaderboard?
5 = Udachnic (level 158), 6256 PVP points, with 153 invade wins
6 = Ozornoi Veterok (level 1000), 5357 points, with 175 invade wins
So higher level player winning more battles have lower numbers of PVP points.
So either higher level players get fewer PVP points for winning a match (seems illogical, but possible, IMHO) or those high level players lose far more points on defense (also possible I guess, but as it is the AI playing the defense battles this has nothing to do with the human player, and IMHO has no point being relevant for the leaderboard)…
I am… well complaining isn’t quite the word… puzzled, and asking what the devs are hoping to achieve with this… I am not criticising low level players (and rather resent the suggestion, sorry)… I’ve seen leaderboards work in various different ways, and this one strikes me as a bit odd… I agree that hard work and perseverance (read, obsessive levels of play, perhaps) should be part of what gets rewarded, but so far it seems that’s all that matters, and there’s no recognition of skill (not saying that lower tier players don’t have that!) or the time and effort (or possibly cash, but that’s a different and worrying part of the conversation, let’s not go there in this thread) that long-standing players have put in…
Don’t get me wrong, my aim isn’t to whinge that un-deserving lowbies might compete for my rewards - I don’t need the rewards and think there could be better ways to share such things around… and maybe more enticing rewards for the highest level fraction of a percent of the players…
I play a lot but not enough to be sure of being right at the top, I am fine with that… but that top 100 leaderboard when I looked at it seemed very odd, as per my OP…
I didn’t say ‘low level nobodies’ and that certainly wasn’t the tone I meant, sorry if you felt that way… and don’t add that level of spite into this please, it’s an unhelpful distraction… as for beating my team, well done, you and dozens of others do it regularly, which I am fairly powerless to stop, as the AI is rubbish, so any skill or better resources of mine are wasted and like almost everyone else (that can) I have stuck out the cheap Maw team to present people with at least a risk of the coin toss going against them… With skill and perseverance, it’s good that lower level players can beat higher ones, and some troops like Rakshanin and Shadow Hunter seem well-suited to it…
I would not be happy with that win rate, given my resources, and my commitments to contribute to my guild… part of the problem is my win rate against those broken teams sometimes isn’t much better than yours, in spite of having maxed out stats and traits and any counters I could want to choose from…
@darkness yeah that was mostly right… though it’s not just the points given so much as the tier of player and strength of opponents that I (read other high level players) face…
@yonizaf well that’s what I asked to debate… a low level player can earn tons of points for beating a team that I don’t actually get to even invade, or for me it’s the ‘easy’ option and worth far less…
There’s some truth in this, though that player would lack options to counter other teams, and have to play a hell of a lot of games… and that player would have much lower stats than the high level competition… with skill they could still be up there, yes, but right now my sense is the balance is off…
Look at this another way… I look at the leaderboard now and see I am in a respectable 45th place… of those above me, there’s maybe five players I’d be cautious of invading (mostly familiar level 800+ names with familiar Mercy and/or Maw teams)… and the rest that I could cream to a fine paste in about a minute… But I have no way of attacking those players that are ‘better’ than me, and even if I do, I get very few points… yes I can earn 30+ points a match, but only by facing @dhjl or @en9nhcet or @Korbit or @RiverSong or some other high tier player that hasn’t scraped into the top 100… the matchmaking never offers me an opponent below level 500…
I should get offered a hard match against players at the top of the board, surely they are the best players? so I should get my 50 points for fighting @LittleMontana or @tsunakun who are first and second currently… and well done to those guys btw for their hard work and success to get there btw, I am really not intending any personal attack here…
Or look at this:
No insult meant to ChroniKing but how can that the 8th place record possibly be better than the 9th place one? (so there are bugs in the numbers too, so the comparison may make little sense, but still…)
EDIT: and as @darkness post just flashed up as I was finishing my wall of text… yes, agree with that very much!
