Ranked War Matching and Ranks

Can you perhaps tell us, without rackets could you achieve this?

Because one of the reasons RWs so broken is the racket distribution and map stalemate. 

One of my faction members accidentally came up with the idea to have a faction vs faction 100 lap race pre war to determine winner/loser for termed wars. I don't hate the idea 🤣

Like they already basically extort the weaker faction for their caches

Unless and until the value of real wars exceed the value of terming wars, quality of matchmaking is a moot point (not saying it's an awful change, it's just irrelevant in the current RW system).

Torn citizens want to fight, and they want to grind (both money and stats). Today, those are in direct conflict with one another, because the resource for fighting (energy) is the same one used to grind stats, and because real warring $ costs can often exceed the reward value(!)

Each time I choose a real war for my faction, we fall behind the growth pace of every other faction who chooses to term, because all other things being equal the terming factions:

1. Receive the same rewards (or MORE rewards, if we get stomped into oblivion and can't get full participation score)
2. Spend less energy to obtain those rewards and train that energy in the gym that Real Warriors lose out on due to not needing to stack to 1,000 energy (natural E regeneration, possibly point refills, booster CD and a few xanax cycles), and because real wars take many more hits to complete vs. termed wars.
3. Spend less money to obtain those rewards (spies, mercs, revives, boosters, needles, temps are all avoided in termed wars)

This is the most prominent deterrent to real warring today. Make real warring the more attractive option for battle stat and income growth and people will naturally opt for it over termed wars with a much greater frequency.

How yall gonna be racing with the Stock Trident

[image: media1.tenor.com]

This is such a misconception about imbalanced matchups. Even if you can't hit a single person in the oppo one on one, you can still coordinate an effective multi day turtle and threaten matchup. Even with a larger faction. That's why the "heavier stat faction controls terms" line from Pedro is absolute bullshit.

Guarentee you the low metals factions filled with heavies can't war worth shit which is why they're farming low metals. Y'all making me wanna write up a war guide but I don't want to give away all my secrets 😶‍🌫️

Now, the highest ranked Plat 3 ultra-heavy factions are a different story. We really need another tier just to house the factions who don't have a big enough roster for diamond but should be otherwise kept away from the plebs.

The new rating system might have trouble letting new factions into Diamond if they have to skip 50 ultra heavy factions just to get matched with a diamond faction. That's one hesitation I have for keeping Diamond capacity-locked when switching to the rating system, even to start.

Open up diamond to all capacity factions, remove capacity as a matchup indicator, and just make the entire division system ratings based.

Im in Legitimate Business, what most of yall would call a "middle" faction. 

As far as I can tell, all of these updates are irrelevant to a faction like mine. 

Im considered a heavy hitter here, but anywhere else I might be not worth recruiting. 

What do you do when most of the stats in a faction are in the Top end. Activity is what wins wars. 

Yes, rackets are never guaranteed, even on the best territories. We invested in companies, and their income will cover our RW losses even if our rackets dry up.

Three type of wars and their extra costs (additional to xanax/points):

1. Against a stronger opponent, 

Revives, needles, perhaps flight delays, BCT, I'd say about 1b.

In Diamond, loser gets about 3b loot, it kind of covers and pays.

-> we like fighting those, not much to lose, good banter, great way to measure who can self hosp, who shows up for pushes.

Since we can't gain control, no merc costs. We reach participation and mostly push for fun after that.

2.  Against a weaker opponent:

Since these can be won, usually without many revives and needles aren't needed much, maybe some mercs overnight, expenses are about 500m-700m, easily covered by loot (6-7b). 

3. Against a close opponent:

These can go on for days. The costs shoot up the roof. I remember over 2-3b with mercs, revives, needles over a few days.

If you lose, you can barely pay the bills. Winner is left with little profit.

We almost always fight 1 and 2, and 3, we fought a good amount of them but it leads to a lot of member burnout, costs etc.

So we fight 3 only once a while. Usually these wars we term to get races so it can be finished sooner. 

It is infeasible to fight them. How many companies do you have to cover multi billion losses?

Or better ask what is your strategy, I think you prefer shorter wars?

I am really alarmed it is being discussed to give us that "infeasible" type of wars every second week. I can't believe they think this will lead to more real wars because i know type 3 is definitely more termed than type 1 and 2 from experience.

How many companies do you have to cover multi billion losses?

Or better ask what is your strategy, I think you prefer shorter wars?

We have four mining corps. Our average and median war times so far this year are both ~15 hours. As for strategy, every war is different. We don't have unlimited funds, so we spend what we can afford depending on the war. For example, we wouldn't hire mercs unless it's highly likely we win with them and highly likely we lose without them. If they eat up all our profits, there's not much point hiring them either way. And we ask our members not to use needles unless they can get a few attacks in with them. That sorta thing.

Ranked wars started as a money printer, but it's had diminishing returns for a while now. We planned for that and kept ourselves ahead of the curve. If factions have been treating RWs as a well that's never going to run dry, that was a bit shortsighted. It's not too late to alter course, though. But using words like "impossible" and "infeasible" sets the wrong tone, in my opinion. Every good game has obstacles to overcome, and overcoming those obstacles is part of the fun.

If the rw is getting too expensive to a faction then dont enlist... It is not mandatory. Why is it so hard to understand.

Getting to term for too long got most factions too used to least effort and max reward. The diminishing rewards will be gone as less factions enlist( as costs outweigh the reward) but as less factions enlist - then cache prices will go up again. Supply and demand will set the reward value.

Suggestions on how to do this? Make real warring the more attractive option for battle stat and income growth. We're trying to solve multiple problems here...

Dear Ched,

Please make all wars determined by 100 lap races from now on 

Thank you,

A concerned citizen 

There are obstacles no one can over come unless the game mechanics are changed.

Rackets/Map are a very good example of it (map deadlock). We haven't had any rackets for over 3 years and currently what we have is about 20% of your racket income.

We managed to buy one mining corp, another block is being invested on stocks, about the same income like mining. It took us years to make this money to make money with it. Have we had any racket income, we could have had money to invest much before. 

We are however blessed with rich leadership who doesn't want to be paid for wars and some selflessly running companies for free, so we can provide xanax/points to our members.

I know though many factions with rackets don't invest like you do, Stompers are definitely run well, i could see it during our recent match as well. I understand all of the points you had written and doesn't surprise me you wrote exactly the same thing, with different words:

IF you have a shot at winning, you invest more -> close matches are more expensive to fight. Can we agree on this?

One needs to have some income to get fight close matches properly. 

If a faction keeps on getting close matches without a solid financial foundation, either one fights them for pride and go bankrupt or one throws in the towel too early and lose the spirit/members etc. That is what i mean by infeasible, financially and otherwise risky.

Either that or one has to term more. 

Now i am missing how close matches mean less terms and why anyone would desire them every week.

For the other half, close matches means more terms, or wars that look termed, not less. No one is going to be fighting for the thrill of supremacy for long, it's simply not sustainable financially. Fight to a certain score and one side will concede, with or without terms, because we don't have rackets or faction investments to fund whatever insanity y'all up at the top can afford.

Flight delays, needles, bct, mercs, revives, faction provided RW gear are simply not in the budget.

We've got standard flights (on purpose), abroad bounties, med cd management, xanax and energy refills. Maybe a few people have some RW gear, but I would say well under 1/5 of faction members on either side will have anything besides a warlord, if that. Self-mercs and self-revives might be on the table if someone has spare e that they can't otherwise use.

There's literally nothing better than a well-timed Xanax overdose.

It's a fair call out. I don't have all the answers, but to brainstorm some ideas to the public for pressure testing:

On Battle Stats:

• Allow members to set their preferred gym stat on the settings page. When a war ends, 100% of energy spent attacking the enemy faction (regardless of individual attack or war result) gets trained in their current gym for that stat. If a special gym is selected and their selected stat is not available to train, default to the highest stat.
• To push this one step further, stop forcing people to stack energy in advance of a war. Everyone gets bumped to 1k energy when the war begins. Losing out on natural regen and point refills sucks, and winning or losing advantage because of Xanax OD random variance also sucks. However much energy you get to start the war gets reduced at the end (e.g. you were at 110 energy when the war began, you'd get filled by 890 to start, and reduced by up to 890 at the end) and would not be trained in the gym via the previous recommendation.

On Income:

• The only thing that makes sense to me as a solution is to deprive factions who do not fight for their rewards, and handsomely reward those who try harder.
• Explore options to make rewards less transferable (temporary faction-bound perk boosts - free rehab for a week? +X% steadfast? Free busts? +X% Crime XP? So many options here that feel good and don't break the Torn economy), more opaque (temporarily increase OC or TT rewards instead of caches), or less centralized (give a portion of rewards directly to contributing members instead of to the faction itself) to deter termed wars further.

On Competitiveness:

• Not sure I agree that a 50/50 matchmaking model should be the ideal design. If two factions are identical in everything except for warring skill, shouldn't the superior warring faction get rewarded for being good at the game? This model seems to promote participation over skill, which is anti-competitive. A 50/50 model could perhaps be acceptable if the rewards between ranks are meaningful enough, but it also kinda feels like better teams deserve to win more.
• The RW structure seems to want to be a pseudo tug of war style game, but it's missing one critical aspect that tug of war fundamentally has: continuous pressure. If you let go of the rope in tug of war (stop pulling), you almost always lose. If you let go of the rope in a ranked war in Torn (stop attacking), you can just chill in hospital until you have a better window to pull again. I would prefer factions incentivized to apply continual offensive pressure when they have the resources to get out of hospital and attack (this is a bit messy to define, but not impossible). Let the target score decay rate accelerate meaningfully (ticks more often, or bigger ticks every hour, start sooner than 24 hours, etc.) when a faction turtles when they could otherwise be pushing (not out of E or max hosp time + revive chance across the board of online members).

Alright, I stream of consciousness-ed this and not sure how much I really believe in, but you asked, so I attempted an answer :D pick it apart!

The idea with stacks is so awesome. 

One could get a full stack and basically lose whatever isn't used to attack at the end of war

This together with disabling all gyms during the war might really be nice to get rid of endlessly timing out wars.

Also glad to see someone else finds 50/50 situation very uncompetitive.

I was told i am the only one thinking like this so I stopped writing about it. I seriously have lower motivation to grow my stats now that i know we won't be winning more wars. Why would anyone get stronger or recruit better members if win/loss ratio is fixed?

For the second part, there is always lost score when one waits, no faction can perfectly turtle. 

Self hosping being an important part of the war that members have to learn and practice makes it interesting i think.

That said, I think 17k lead needed for Diamond is very high. (and on other tiers surely the same)

This week for instance we have a good match, we agreed to set lead to 8k to win. I think 8-10k lead should be better than this never ending score, especially for even matches.

All in all really nice ideas from you :-) 

Here is a suggestion i had a few months ago, which was based on your tug of war statement. I discussed this with a fair few people. This has had some more thought into how it works rather than the numbers, IE the rewards, etc.

The "War Front" Mechanic

TL;DR: Introduce a swinging "Tug-of-War" bar shared between factions. Sustained activity pushes the bar into the enemy's territory. Dominating the bar grants Score Multipliers, forcing turtles to fight back or lose the war rapidly.

The War Front 

We propose a dynamic, zero-sum momentum bar called the War Front. It functions like a Tug-of-War.

• The Swing: If Faction A has 75% momentum, Faction B naturally has 25%. 
• The Decay: The bar is elastic. If both factions stop hitting (inactivity), the bar slowly drifts back to 50/50 (Neutral). This forces sustained aggression to maintain bonuses.

How it works

Pushing the Line

The bar starts at 50/50. Every offensive action (hit, mug, hosp) pushes the bar toward the enemy side. 

• If you are out-hitting the enemy, you push the line. 
• If the enemy turtles (zero hits), you can push the line to 100% domination very quickly.

Domination Zones (The Reward)

The goal is to push the bar past specific thresholds to unlock Score Multipliers. This accelerates the war, preventing stalemates.

• Neutral Zone (40% - 60%) 
  • Bonus: None (Standard warfare).
•  Pressure Zone (60% - 80%) 
  • Bonus: 1.2x War Score. *
  • Effect:*The active faction starts earning points slightly faster. The enemy must come out and fight to push the bar back to neutral to stop the bleeding.
• Domination Zone (80%+) 
  • Bonus: 1.5x (or 2.0x) War Score.
  • Effect: If a faction is being completely overrun or is refusing to fight (turtling), the active faction earns massive points. This allows the active team to hit the target score rapidly and end the war.

Strategic Implications: Does this kill Turtling?

No, but it evolves it from a "stalling" tactic to a "Rope-a-Dope" strategy.

Turtling remains a valid playstyle, but it now functions as a Resource Drain

1. The Trap: A faction can intentionally turtle to let the enemy burn energy and cooldowns pushing the bar to 80%.
2. The Counter: Once the enemy is exhausted, the turtling faction comes out with full energy. Because the bar is zero-sum, their fresh hits will swing the momentum back rapidly.
3. The Risk: You can no longer drag the war out just to reach minimum participation. If you turtle too long, the enemy activates the score multiplier and ends the war rapidly and potentially before you have secured enough hits to qualify for the rewards.

Why this creates better wars

• Kills Passive Play: You cannot sit on a lead. If you stop hitting, the enemy pushes the bar to 80% and starts earning double points, overtaking your lead quickly.
• Mercy Rule: If a match is clearly lopsided, the dominant team reaches the score limit much faster, saving both factions from a 48-hour beatdown that should have ended in 12 hours.
• Comeback Mechanics: It gives active teams a way to claw back a score deficit by out-working the enemy.

Why would anyone get stronger or recruit better members if win/loss ratio is fixed?

Correct me but I think that was never said? It is going towards 50% (as in every competitive game I know) once you reach your true ELO and you can get an edge with outstanding performance/activity and reach like 55% if you can do that multiple times. Every other PVP game considers winrates >55% broken and either changes your matchmaking to balance that or nerfes whatever strategy you're using. Why should torn be different just because the matchmaking was shit for years?

I dont play any other games so cant really tell. Can you give examples? 

I think an ELO system might be excellent if for a very strategic game when each timeyou match your opponent there are a bunch of different tactics you can try. Like chess. 

Torn ranked warring isn’t like that. If you match an opponent and you lose today with doing your best it is very unlikely you can match them in a few months and win. We match opponents and always do our best. But overcome the sheer numbers game, grind is needed. This game is slow. If you keep on matching the same factions over and over it gets only more boring (not more interesting). So I don’t understand why anyone would restrict matches.