Leagues are here!

Given how heavily billed Leagues has been, this is a huge disappointment. The league rewards serves very little incentive against tanking. Matches themselves need to be worth more in both gold and silver in higher leagues for there to be a clear incentive to move up. As it is, I'm still seeing plenty of quits under Leagues. Also, I don’t think damage ranking is a very good metric. It penalizes players for having teammates that focus only on damage instead of beacons. It penalizes players simply for having teammates that quit, as if they weren't suffering enough already.

The new MM was heavily advertised here by several moderators as being based on the Microsoft’s Bayesian TrueSkill algorithm. This resembles nothing of the sort. Bayesianism is all about comparing what happened to what you expected to happen. If the MM fails badly (which it still does pretty often) and pits your hangar of 8/8s against team of 12/12s, you should NOT be penalized for losing that match because that result is only to be expected. Indeed, you should be rewarded for merely making it close (and rewarded very heavily for pulling off the upset). If a teammate quits, you should NOT be penalized for losing that match either. But you are.

The metric sorely needs to include both beacons and damage, and the beacon algorithm could be improved greatly with features such as: weighting home beacons lower, weighting center beacon and enemy beacons more heavily, giving credit for neutralizing beacons, awarding credit proportional to the amount of impact the beacon had on the beacon meter, etc. Heck, if your team loses on beacons, the players on the losing team with the fewest beacon caps really ought be the ones punished. Instead, this system rewards the players who just give up on winning the match and just try to max damage. As the Superbowl illustrated, big comebacks are by far the most dramatic games, and with this system, there is very little incentive for players to try to come back. There is a huge incentive to avoid being 5th or 6th in damage.

Yeah, combat is more interesting, but that's the thing. For most players, it's already more fun than capping beacons. People play this game to shoot robots and thus will always continue to do so even if there were no damage bonuses. If you want a damage league, make the matches about elimination instead of beacons. As it is, this is a recipe for getting even more bad teammates than we do already.

Ranking is also way too arbitrary to base the system upon. In some matches, the 5th and 6th players contributed greatly, and this contribution should not be treated the same as if the player did absolutely nothing. It would be far better to heavily penalize players for being more than 1 or 2 standard deviations below the team’s mean damage/beacon score (similarly rewarding players for being that far above it), spreading it around more evenly if the team was more even, especially since the MM doesn't apparently follow leagues and will often give a player teammates and enemies from different leagues. A true Bayesian system would, of course, compensate for that by expecting a higher league player to do better with lower-league opponents and teammates, but of course, there's none of that here.

For a game with very sophisticated graphics and sounds, it’s always been rather surprising that the statistics and rewards seem so very rudimentary.

you are lucky it actually gives you something at the end of a match. In clash royale, if you lose, you get nothing but rage.

Why would you think that? EVERYTHING about it on this forum has been that it is hard to make big changes. Yes, your league will eventually settle to meet the bots you chose, but have you been playing them, or did you just dust them off?

Lurker for a few months but thought I would post my experience. I'm a former farmer who got a 5th slot by grinding in the old bronze. I have a complete 7/7 hanger with a Plasma Galahad, Plasma Gary, Trident Carnage, Aphid/Ork Griffin, and Thunder/Plasma Leo. I got placed into Bronze 1 on Android. I've played pretty regularly for near 6 months now: 25-30 matches or so a day. I have rolled with you all in the extremely up/down match-matching with patience in the last 6 weeks.

My son, age 7, plays on an Ipad and has Plasma Patton 3/3, a Thunder/Punisher Vityaz 3/5 and a mixed bag Thunder Golem 3/3.5. He got placed in Gold 2. He plays sporadically but nothing daily.

The obvious discrepancy is somewhat bewildering. Is this an anomaly or anyone else seen this?

I've seen a few people that MM/Leagues have failed. Browsing my tier I've seen some poor souls with levelsw 21, 26, 25 and so (only about 4 of them). Hangars who are so sub par for Bronze level play and vastly inferior to their current peers. Tellingly their current cups and win percentages are far below 40% and under two digit cups...

I'll post them up later