An honest note to Muet

[Horsepower]

Muet, I have an idea. Since you can’t or won’t fix the war matchmaking, how about devising a system where we pick our own opponents. Alliances can communicate and agree among themselves to war against each other.
As is, the matching system is completely broken among higher level alliances. I know you said you had one of you developers working on it. My question is, have you personally Tried fixing it yourself. As the lead developer it seems to me no one is better qualified then you. If not, then bring someone in from the outside to fix it. It is fixable.
After seeing your new recent event, which was complex and had to take a while to develop, I wonder why you can’t or won’t fix some simple things. Like the map problem which invites crash bases. What’s the deal? Why does BHG spend so much time and manpower to create new content, which you can sell, but you can’t fix the main component of the game, war matching. At lease give us a war cancel button to end wars before they even start. It’s really boring getting so many unfair match’s not to mention very time consuming. I personally have been in one fair war out of the last 12 which I’ve been in. I’m sure others are in the same boat. Hell, today I went to the App Store looking for new games to play because I’m bored.

Believe me, if you continue to let the poor matchmaking system to go on you will lose players and revenues. I get the feeling that Dominations is no longer a priority for BHG except for developing new money making stuff. If that’s the case fine, let us pick our own match’s. Allow us to Challenge each other in war. Give us the control because right now your system is not working.

Please, put everything aside and work on this stuff yourself. Hands on. Without wars we don’t need cards. If we don’t need cards then we don’t need events. Please consider these things. Thank you

 

[Dracula3811]

I concur. Fairly matched wars are really rare. So eager to bring out new stuff to bring money in but won’t fix simple things.

War matches
alliance perk 3
bastions buggy in map editor
added forest sections contributing to crashes

I’m sure there’s more

 

[Scots Guards No 1]

I agree it is poor as it has ever been if not worse, and more cheaters than ever before with hacked APK's being used, my alliance are reporting cheaters multiple times daily

 

[Perdu Collu]

"At lease give us a war cancel button to end wars before they even start. "

I agree.

At this point it is the only way to avoid unbalanced matches or against ally of cheaters.

 

[Persia]

"At lease give us a war cancel button to end wars before they even start. "

I agree.

At this point it is the only way to avoid unbalanced matches or against ally of cheaters.

Have you guys not considered the immense abuse that is almost certainly going to happen if this is implemented? It seems like this forum will complain about anything, so imagine the uproar when someone gets a match they want and the opposing alliance cancels the war. That, by the way, won’t be a very rare scenario, so it’ll be more than just one whiny thread...

 

[SomeRandomPlayer]

Fully agreed; it would not end well. A cancel option idea deserves a lot of thought and foresight; my gut says it'd cause more grief than relief.

The obvious answer is to facing cheaters is to put cheating alliances in their own pool; let them cheat against each other. Allow extra long wait (match) times in that pool. Sure they'd keep creating new alliances but a smart system could handle that (i.e. members of cheating alliances who cheat in the past will cheat in the future).

 

[Chadwicke]

Or they could just ban cheaters but it had to be actual cheating non of this the replay showed stuff .. because replay is a simulation of the attack not a recording of it. What you see is device dependant, platform dependant and museum dependant. So planes over 8 what you are seeing is the number of times planes were flown in the battle so planes were pressed 12 times they didn't have 12 planes. And also those who report cheating on 1-3* attacks just stop because cheating will ALWAYS get 5* it will be fast and it will be the same time in most cases to other attacks by the same person.
for this war matching it's terrible , most alliance can barley cover the amount of higher bases to attack this is stretching the teams ....they attack knowing that the whole war either continues or if they fail is not worth the rest of the team wasting card on as one miss and war is over .so games are for stress relief...how is having 30-50 peoples enjoyment in your hands when you press attack . Used to play and real life problems would fade away..

 

[Perdu Collu]

Of course the cheaters will complain a lot, and the very strong allies will complain too. No one will give easy victories to Ares or other - strange - alliances and the strongest ally will have to fight with each other. This will revolutionize the leaderboard. Good thing.

 

[Theoneandonly]

As expected - no answer from Nexon

 

[Theoneandonly]

Still no response, well not surprising, but showing the quality of communications and community management.

 

[Cannibals]

Someone previously posted a thought about having matchmaking only at predetermined times. Everyone waits in the queue until the designated time, and then there are lots of teams so fair matches would be more likely. I think this would be better than the abuse that would happen with other options.

 

[Theoneandonly]

Still no response

 

[Stormicus]

There are (at least) two obvious reasons why Nexon have not responded to this. 1) It’s basically a polite version of the standard rant we see almost every day “waaah I lost a couple of wars war-matching doesn’t work everyone will leave and stop spending money the game is dead why don’t the devs drop everything and do what I want right now” - really, what do you expect them to say to that? And 2), the devs don’t work for Nexon directly, they work for Big Huge Games, which is why the lead designer’s handle has BHG in it.

As someone already pointed out, the cancel button is a stupid idea which would result in most wars getting cancelled by the weaker team.

Allowing people to arrange wars privately has a number of implications you haven’t thought of. It would require a whole new war matching system, and it would be very easy to set up a deliberately bad alliance, fight them every two days, and boost your glory to the skies.

I’m sure if they could reliably reproduce the bugs you mention they would fix them. But these are intermittent problems, which are very difficult to get a handle on.

It’s simply not true that the war-matching is “as bad as it’s ever been if not worse”. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was. Perhaps it’s worse if you have a lot of space age players, but there are far fewer huge mismatches than there were for most of us.

People often complain that Nexon/BHG don’t do anything about cheaters, but it’s not as straightforward as you seem to think. They have done some anti-cheat stuff successfully, as most of the cheater alliances are no longer at the top of the leaderboard afaics. But if you are cracking down on cheating, you have to get it 100% correct, or you get more abuse. In the last event they tried to be super pro-active against cheats, banned lots of people for cheating, and then found that actually most of the “cheats” had found a legal exploit that they simply hadn’t thought of.

The trend I see recently for putting Muet’s nickname in the title of every rant is quite likely to cause him to stop reading them at all, IMO.

 

[Chadwicke]

So you think in 20 war 16 space age with 11 300s vs 4 space age 2 300s is a fair war .....war was not this bad with sandbags. At least then you had some control over war this is broken plain and simple and to your point is way bigger than losing a war is losing before it starts. Also Stormicus the way cheating is handled is q joke used to be cheat and lose your account now it's a 3-7 day ban then get right back too it . The matrix is not legal nor is emulators that do attacks for you , garbage like this is why big spending stopped and the reason the game.is dying

 

[Persia]

Not sure why the strawman here — his complaint isn’t baseless whining like you seem to be satirising it as, it’s a legitimate grievance that has been a problem for literal years. Likewise, BHG actually *does* create new stuff all the time if they can sell it. That’s why there’s always a new offer, and hell, even new, never-before-seen troop tactics for sale sometimes. War matchups? Well, let’s just say that if they put in as much effort into fixing those as they did into selling stuff, they’d probably be the best ever in the game’s history right now.

Another fallacy in your argument about BHG banning the cheaters in the last false-positive wave. That isn’t the kind of cheating people are talking about. War matchups have nothing to do with people exploiting an event. When people use blatant cheats and *unequivocal* proof is sent to CS, which clearly and unquestionably shows them cheating and which has been done COUNTLESS times by MANY players, nothing happens. It’s very intellectually dishonest to claim that said phenomenon is equal to the recent banwave, and just plain incorrect, frankly.

Muet is mentioned in most of these threads because he’s the head or lead designer, which is understandable. His decisions are unpopular, and that’s why he gets mentioned so often. But I’d wager that he never really read them to any depth before, or if he did, he just didn’t care. Those are both equal, basically, because we’ve gotten the same effect out of complaining to him; more mismanagement and poor decisions. The WWII event was a one-week thing that nobody cares about anymore, but cheaters in WW? A problem for years, with no solution in sight.

 

[Stormicus]

Perhaps I was a little harsh with the satire, but read the OP again and pretend you are Muet. Seriously, what do you expect him to say in response? “Darn it, you got us, we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you darn kids”?

 

[Stormicus]

But as far as I can see, the game isn’t dying. There are lots of people playing, thousands of active alliances, new players coming in, at least some people are spending money. I’ve played games that really are dying : their most obvious feature is that hardly anyone is playing. You are issuing a death certificate when the patient is still running around playing football.

 

[Stormicus]

I can’t comment on war matching for teams with lots of space age players because we are not at that level, but for a team like ours with 1 CWA and a few atomics, the war matching is way better than it was before. Only rarely do we get a war where we can’t compete at all.

 

[Cannibals]

Mostly agree, except that there’s more to your characterization of the problems than that they are intermittent. Indeed the real cheats available through matrix are readily repeatable as evidenced by their widespread use.

The game seems to be implemented with an event-response design and the matrix is an exploit of the interaction between two supposed-to-be-unrelated events. There’s no ready mechanism to hard exclude the interaction - that would require a foundational change and there’s no payback for that given where the game is in its maturity. The other cheats like magical 5* attacks and auto-attacking are based on intercepting, fabricating, and/or corrupting battle results between your device and the game servers. These are easier to fix but would require adding some security (#checksum) to detect (requiring some added functionality to determine in real-time what to do with a bogus result) or even prevent (requiring a not-insignificant overhaul of the backend interface). Again not enough payback for that.

I understand why these cheats are allowed to persist and why cheaters aren’t pursued (too many, too easy). These problems should have been addressed while the revenue stream could support the effort. Now it is too late, and their best strategy is to try to keep the revenue high enough to justify adding incremental content to extend the life of the revenue stream. It is a business after all.

 

[Theoneandonly]

Let’s conclude the easy and simple way: they just don’t want to give the community an answer.