Citizens,
This week we are releasing the new Ranked War matchmaking system. The changes will affect how your RW opponents are chosen, and how rank and division are assigned. The goal of the change is to create fairer RW match ups, while making your faction's rank reflect its ability to win wars.
Faction rating
Every faction now has a hidden rating, made up of two parts:
- Stat strength: based on members' battle stats, using a formula similar to the old Hidden Rank number
- Performance: a measure of how a faction actually fights, updated after every ranked war using a system derived from Elo
When you beat a faction we expected to beat you, your performance rises and future opponents get a little tougher. When you lose to a faction we expected you to beat, it falls. Performance is capped in both directions: there's a limit to how far above or below your stat strength you can drift. It’s also self-correcting: a faction that has climbed higher than it deserves will take a large correction the first time it loses a war it "should" have won.
Your actual rating is hidden, but your division and the opponents you find yourself matched against will reflect it. Ratings are not starting from scratch: your faction's war results from roughly the past year have already been fed in, so we will hopefully bring you plausible matches from day one.
Matches by relative faction strength, before and after
How matches are made
Enlisting works exactly as before. When matches are made, your opponent is drawn from a pool of similarly-rated factions. There's enough natural variance that you shouldn’t see the same handful of opponents on a fixed rotation, and a hard cap keeps fights from being too mismatched.
You are matched on rating, not on division. A fair match can cross multiple division boundaries. The member-count rule still applies: you will only be matched against factions of a broadly similar size. You won't be re-matched against a faction you’ve fought recently.
A handful of factions are so much stronger than everyone else in their size bracket that fair matches for them barely exist. Rather than starve them of wars, the system will occasionally hand them an opponent they outclass — we call this a sacrifice. Sacrifices are designed to be rare for any given faction: after being sacrificed you get a long period of protection before it can happen again, and there's a cap on how far down the rankings we'll reach to find one.
Sometimes there will simply be no valid opponent for you in a given week. Unmatched weeks are designed to be rare, and after one, the system puts you at the front of the queue in the weeks that follow.
You'll also notice the enlistment panel now shows a Faction Rating criterion where Faction Rank used to be. The pool of potential opponents it describes is now based on rating rather than adjacent divisions.
Rank and division
Rank and division are now determined by your rating: line every active faction up from highest-rated to lowest, and your position in that list decides where you sit.
Division sizes are changing as part of this. Each rank will hover around a fixed share of the ranked population: roughly 10% Diamond, 15% Platinum, 20% Gold, and 25% Silver, and 30% Bronze. Each rank is split into four divisions. Because the boundaries have moved, some factions will find themselves in a different division at launch without having played a war.
After every war, we will check where your new rating places you in the ranks and divisions. If you're already there (and most factions will be most of the time) then you'll stay there. If you're below where you belong and you win, you'll move up towards it. If you're above where you belong and you lose, we'll push you down towards it. The system won't demote you after a win or promote you after a loss, so your division can briefly lag behind your rating. If you end up a long way from where you belong — usually after a big roster change — we won't make you grind back one war at a time; we'll simply move you to the right division before your next war.
Diamond keeps its member requirement: you'll need 75+ members to hold a Diamond division, regardless of rating.
Finally, rank decay is gone. In its place: a faction that doesn't participate in ranked warring for around six weeks is unranked outright, with a warning a week beforehand. Re-enlist and you'll be assigned a rank at matchmaking time.
Rank and division by stat strength and performance multiplier, before and after
(stragglers represent recent roster strength changes in small factions. Overlap in plat/diamond is due to member cap)
Matchmaking accuracy and monitoring
It would be very optimistic to think everyone will get a perfect match on day one; there will be easier and harder ranked war matches, and the first few weeks will be more uneven than the steady state as the system settles in and learns. A small percentage of factions every week will be on the receiving end of a sacrifice match. The aim is that any given faction is "sacrificed" less than 5% of the time, although this will depend a little on enlistment patterns. Historic and future terming will continue to have a confounding effect on the numbers. We will be actively monitoring the outcomes of non-termed wars to tune the coefficients used in matchmaking, and we would like to post some data on that in about a month's time.
Terming
We'd like to see a modest reduction in terming as a result of this. Specifically, factions that enjoy real wars should have more opportunities to have them, rather than finding themselves in hopeless situations where a deal is the only sensible outcome.
What hasn't changed
- Enlisting is identical; there's nothing new you need to do
- You'll still only meet factions of a broadly similar member count
- No quick rematches against factions you've recently fought
- Ranked wars themselves (scoring, chaining, etc) are untouched, for at least the next few weeks
Questions and answers
Can this be gamed by terming?
The algorithm assumes all wars are real. You can't meaningfully game the stat-strength side, because changes to your roster genuinely change your fighting ability. Performance can be nudged, but will either give you easier matches for fewer rewards, or harder matches for more rewards. The Elo is self-healing: if you've termed your way to an unrealistic performance, it takes a big correction the first time you lose to a faction your rating said you should easily beat. And performance is capped, so there's a limit to how far you can push it in either direction.
Why did my division change at launch?
Two reasons a division may have moved without a war: the divisions themselves were resized (see above), and factions that were a long way from where their rating places them have been adjusted directly. Everyone else keeps their current division and will converge on their true position through wins and losses, up to two divisions at a time.
Didn't matching consider stats before, and didn't that cause problems?
The pre-"Open Letter to Ched" system did match on stats — and it starved the strongest factions of matches entirely, while the rankings still didn't reflect who could beat who. The sacrifice system and performance tracking are specifically what fix those two problems this time around.
What's next
The next set of changes to Ranked Wars, addressing wider concerns, are with the committee, and feedback has been positive. We'll let this bed in for a few weeks before starting to release follow-ups.
(original discussion of new Ranked War matching)
A huge shout-out to the various players who have discussed these changes with me at length.
Thanks.
Mentions: Ranked War Matching and Ranks · Ranked Warring Request; Open Letter to Ched