Matchmake Clan Wars based on individual ratings
This proposal would make Clan Wars matches more enjoyable, Clan Wars more inclusive, and clans more robust.
Clan Wars' performance is simply (# of matches played) * (win rate). This means an elevated win rate (>50%) has the same effect as a (win rate/50%) participation boost: a 30-member clan with a 75% win rate is as good as a 45-member 50% win rate clan.
The problem Clan Wars' CW rating matchmaking causes here stems from a single rating not capturing a clan's skill well. Clans vary in skill: players significantly better or worse than their median clanmate get lopsided matches. Through their effect on rating, high-skill players in non-high-skill clans don't boost their clan's win rate significantly- their wins become their teammates' losses.
At the aggregate, this means a very non-smooth distribution of win rates across clans: overall-high-skill clans break the matchmaking, while everyone else converges near 50%. This reduces parity: it's why the results have been so repetitive (with long dynasties). Only some clans benefit from high-skill players.
This creates bad incentives for clans, which have historically invested in player development. High-skill players benefit from flocking together (like in Myth Busters or M'Hunters or the exodus from PKU58ers to MASTER) for CW rewards because in their own clans their high-skill means nothing: it's all-or-nothing, a step-function reward curve.
Matchmaking based on individual ratings would make the return-on-skill curve more continuous, smoothen the win rate distribution across clans, consequently increase CW parity, and make individual CW matches less lopsided & more enjoyable. Some players join slots daily just to mostly lose or mostly win, because their clan's rating is far from their own skill level and they can't keep up with their opponents- where's the fun in that? FCC, a clan which declined sharply in skill, has also had its CW participation drop sharply because most of us just join games to get destroyed by opponents based on the clan's old rating.
Clan Wars is meant to be an exciting competition for players regardless of their skill. The current discontinuity in clan win rates & return on skill, creating a few contender clans each season which are guaranteed to win if they can sustain high participation (while everyone else fights for lower spots because it takes a lot of effort to jump the chasm from 50% win rate to 60%+ when you can't climb incrementally, thanks to how CW rating-based-matchmaking works). This goes against the guiding principle of CW being fun for everyone, especially casual players who should be facing their peers instead of their much better clanmates'.
Please, please, please use individual ratings for matchmaking so the competition become more fun for more people.
-
l4v.r0v commented
oh, thought of a pithy way to explain this:
Clan Wars today is not *a* participation contest. It's two participation contests, differentiated sharply by skill!
A small-by-design pool of relatively high-skill clans (Myth Busters, M'Hunters, MASTERs, Python, ONE!) competes on participation; by design, only a clan from this pool can win- if the top-skill clans stop participating, the next relatively high-skill clan will become the new top contender in the Skilled Tier (this happened with MASTER & M'Hunters). Everyone else competes on participation.
Individual matchmaking would turn Clan Wars into a single-tier contest without a destined-winner caste of high-skill clans. This would remain casual-inclusive & preserve the nature of Clan Wars while making the contest much more dynamic & fun.
-
l4v.r0v commented
To wit, the rationale given for clan-level rating & matchmaking is that CW is a clan competition. To steelman that rationale, clan-level matches mean clans clash (as groups) against their peers and compete to win. The issue is that the competition in CW is based on win count, not rating.
In a ladder- ranked on rating- clan vs. clan clash would just be part of the match (akin to a team game), where clans would try to win against their peers to climb up in rating & improve their position on the ladder. There'd be stakes & smoothness, because you can climb gradually like on any ladder.
For Clan Wars, there's the unusual, idiosyncratic decision to have ladder-style matchmaking but rank based on win count. The design space for most such systems has a very narrow workable band. So having a single clan rating _while ranking on win count_ gets rid of the stakes of the clash- wins today just become teammates' losses tomorrow, unless you're a top-skill clan- & introduces competitive discontinuities where clans can't gradually improve on the win rate side of the CW performance equation: they either break the matchmaker or they don't.
I think understanding this issue might require a good understanding of how ladder rating & matchmaking work, and it's hard to communicate it all in simplistic terms, but please think about what the consequences would be if the 1v1 ladder ranked players based on win count rather than rating- so for anyone that doesn't break the matchmaking, it'd just be a participation contest, and then there'd be a class of superplayers who break the matchmaker and can secure the top ranks if they can just muster participation. Then compound that with the complexity of trying to do so at a clan level, and you can derive from first principles all the design problems of the CW matchmaker.
Individual matchmaking is the most impactful single small improvement that could be made to CW today.