Ranked War Matching and Ranks

Will it create fairer match ups, yea maybe. Will it reduce terming.. no, not unless you are going to revise how rewards are determined and take active steps to disincentivize cache farms.

I think the main issue is still that RW costs money, so needs to be rewarded or there is no point in doing it. But rewarding it creates an incentive to term the wars. Because of this, it seems to me that the payouts need to be detached from singular wars. Anything short of that and we still kinda have the same issue wearing a different costume.

Replacing the "how many territories you can hold" perk track with a "passive stat buff while defending your own territory" track, and determining how much territory a faction can hold by their rank would incentivize real fights. If you lose the war and rank down, you could lose a territory. This would also make the map a lot livelier as claimable territories would pop up almost daily.

In addition, I would reduce the max territories you can hold to 10, allowing more factions on the map.

Folding the RW payouts value into the racket system, and then giving every tert a racket (so it all adds up to the same thing economically speaking) would then both make RW a real ranking system and make the map an actual warzone again.

(There is probably glaring issues with this I can't see, and I haven't really thought about it too much, but removing direct payouts for RW and linking RW to map control is kinda the idea)

What about Stats? If I guest a player with over billion stats in my bronze faction and he leaves after war,will I be getting matched against a team with big player or not?

Just curious 

Linking RW rewards to territory would exclude most factions from getting payout at all unless the map was expanded drastically.

I have to give you credit, it takes balls for a Dev to come into GD.

These changes sound promising though, I might come out of retirement for a while!

From my perspective, the current war system is already functional because matchmaking is based on faction rank and size. That creates a larger pool of opponents and allows more factions to actually participate in wars instead of sitting on standby waiting for a “perfect” match.

From my own experience:

• Bronze factions usually fight Bronze factions.
• Silver factions usually fight Silver factions.

If another faction is in the same rank and around the same size as ours, that already feels acceptable to me.

War was never meant to be fair or comfortable. Most factions do not enjoy being at a disadvantage, but we fight for the rewards, respect, cache, and progression. Even difficult wars can still be enjoyable because overcoming hardship is part of competition.

My concern with a stricter stat-based matchmaking system is this: What happens if there are not enough factions with similar stats available at our rank and size? Would factions simply remain unmatched and unable to participate? That could hurt activity more than the current system does.

The current system is harsh at times, yes, but it consistently produces wars and participation. If the developers can improve fairness without reducing activity, then that is great. But if not, I honestly believe the current system is better left as it is.

At the end of the day, no matter how much the war system changes, the community will probably never be fully satisfied. Some players want fair fights, others want faster matchmaking, others want easier rewards.

Personally, I believe everyone should earn their keep. War is not supposed to be perfectly fair. Strong factions and weak factions will always exist, and that is part of warfare itself.

Thanks for the transparency.

A few questions:

1.) Could you define "stat score" for us? Is it the square root of all 4 battlestats summed? Or something different?

2.) Do you feel the system indirectly penalizes a player for taking an SE, by making their faction's match-up more difficult? (The reason behind grinding for SEs is boosting stats to subsequently make fights easier)  If so, how do you feel about that in terms of long term sustainable game play?

3.) Is there any plan to address player movement when a faction reaches a certain ELO? Would the ELO change if top stat players shift to a different faction? Would that ELO move with them?

4.) Do you feel there are enough factions for meaningful competition for the top ~750 battlestat players?

5.) Is equipment being included in the matchup calculations? Ie. Many older-richer factions not only tend to have higher battlestats, but also have access to over a dozen EOD suits, Red meta rifles, virtually unlimited special ammo, players in warring companies vs money companies, established revivers, internal mercs, fully-unlocked faction war branches, etc.  All aspects that massively sway a war when it looks close on the outside from stats alone.

6.) Has there been thought to simply slashing the score requirement by like ~40% to shorten wars?

I'm a big fan of this direction — stat disparities in matchmaking are a huge de-motivator in the current RW scene. It shouldn't be the case that the outcome of a war can be largely determined from the moment you get matched, regardless of activity levels, and this seems to go a long way toward addressing that.

Two suggestions:

• Please give the top end of stats a heavier weight in a faction's Stat Score than lower end. Having a stronger top-end is a huge advantage strategically, and this would also hopefully mitigate the skewing of Stat Scores in cache farms with 1-3 stat monsters and then a bunch of green leafs.

• As others have mentioned, a ladder system with monthly rewards for a faction's placement on the ladder would complement this idea really well. If one of your goals is reducing the frequency of terming, then making the rewards of Ranked Wars less singularly dependent on the outcome of a single war would help. Consider reducing the payouts from individual wars, but make up the difference by providing value at the end of the month based on the faction's performance and rank.

Thanks for being transparent about the idea and inviting feedback!

I agree with this. I don’t think the matchmaking system is the main issue -  it’s more the RW mechanic itself.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of suggesting faction “missions” or “operations” as an alternative weekly activity that teams could choose instead of participating in an RW.

These missions could involve completing a mix of tracked objectives such as:

• Attacks

• Busts

• Travel

• Mugs

• Bounties

• Other faction-based activities
  
  
  

Completing objectives would reward the usual payouts - money, respect, caches, etc. - while giving factions more variety in how they participate each week.

RW participation every single week starts to feel repetitive and monotonous. Giving factions a choice between RWs and alternative operations would add flexibility, keep things fresh, and allow different playstyles to contribute in meaningful ways.

RW-style matchups could include:

• Race to X amount of score

• Control points - bonus score during certain time periods

• Best-of-3 mini matchups

• “King of the hill” scoring where sustained activity is rewarded
  
  
  
  

But I guess this would require a pretty significant overhaul of the current system.

Just throwing ideas around at this point - not overly amazed by this “update”.

I think we can all shout hallelujah! 

We have been waiting patiently for ranked wars to be given some attention. 

It is really not in the spirit of the game for every war to be termed and match ups to be so unfair at times. 

JB

Finally we're talking about wars, I still stand by what I said with money being the reason terming wars even happens. Because I only want terms rn because I need money to fund training, training to make me stronger, more energy for gym use, and a fat check every time I put in my portion of work. You want to stop terms completely you'll swap out the oversaturated weapon caches for something else that players in leadership will find valuable, but, has to be untradable from a faction vault and it can't be transferred into a players inventory either. This is where I developed the idea for RW tokens, get a powerful temporary boon that lasts a for a few days, up to a week max. The time frame is dictated by how high your faction rank is, the random benefit also gradually scales based on rank. This attracts the better stronger players to the top end where the benefits for winning last longer and have better ROI and for crimes, gym gains, etc. you want ROI and this would help other areas of the game by forcing people to play other sections. Because if I can get a 25% or like 50% income boost from crimes for a week if I win a war I still have to play other parts of torn to absorb the benefits from wars.

 Expand the experience away from weapon caches, as I stated these are oversaturated anyway. You can replace a few of those weapon caches with say care packages that includes things inside that are frequently utilized in wars, Xanax, empty blood bags, tears, smokes, etc. but you want to fix the torn economy it starts with choking wars off with a financial bottleneck, you allow less money to enter the system but exchange that bottlenecking for something that factions will still find useful. 10% boost to gym gains, 25% to crimes ROI, 15e attacking for 5 days. But make the benefits stored into a single use item that has to be activated by leadership from the vault. This was from a forum post I did a year ago or more where I said the system needed to be bottlenecked, not fully cut off.

Tactics can counter stats. The number of times a higher TBS faction has begged mid war for max loser caches in my faction leader circle is non-zero, and growing.