Matchmaking

wickedwitch74

Is anyone else seeing an "improvement" in the AI's matchmaking. My Planeswalkers are now being matched up against opponents of a like level.

Mainloop25

I see the same person twice in Training Grounds. 

julianus

Level matching seems to be fixed, but I have doubts about tier matching. I played a few matches in Emrakul's Corruption, in Platinum, and the opponent decks seemed to be mostly starter cards. I think I saw one rare card in 4 matches. I fought a level 58 Sorin who played nothing but 2 or 3-power common creatures over the entire match.

Conversely, I just joined training grounds on my alt account, which is in Silver. I played 3 matches, all against Bolas (different players each time). Each played mostly rare and mythic cards, and in the last match the AI played an all mythic sequence of Cruel Reality, Baral, Hour of Glory, and Avaricious Dragon. I've never seen anything similar in any match played so far on this account.

Edited to add: As a test, I closed the app, reopened it and went in Training Grounds again. Faced yet another Bolas (also a different player than the others), who played Priest of the Blood Rite (rare), Wharf Infiltrator (rare), Molten Vortex (mythic), Shadows of the Past (rare), Pyramid of the Pantheon (mythic). Now, it's certainly possible to randomly play a succession of players in silver tier, all of whom bought the most recent cash bundle, and all of whom play mostly rare and mythic cards in their decks. But the odds seem rather low.

wereotter

It's not entirely fixed, though I still blame the event deck slot in Training Grounds.

Still had a live 4 planeswalker paired off against a level 27 today

joerginger

This might have been because no closer opponent was around at that time.

Anyway, if this is finally fixed, then hopefully they fix going against PWs up to ten levels higher than your own. Ten is way too much IMO.

wereotter

joerginger said:

This might have been because no closer opponent was around at that time.

Anyway, if this is finally fixed, then hopefully they fix going against PWs up to ten levels higher than your own. Ten is way too much IMO.

Normally I'd say you might be right there, except that I already had done three matches with level appropriate opponents with that same planeswalker before that pairing.

Mainloop25

There are a lot of SWW errors during the matchmaking screens... Coincidence? 

Gilesclone

And even when not erroring out, it takes much longer for the match code to complete 

James13

Some assorted notes because of the general comments I'm seeing here:

It's not a shock that there will be a lot of Bolas decks in TG the day after it's release as people start fooling around with him.

TG like other events does have it's own brackets, it's not one huge single pool.  Depending on when you join into a (invisible) bracket it may affect your ability to find level-matched opponents; particularly if you're intentionally running low levels.

Related to this point, if you don't have access to 60 opponents due to level matching you've restricted the pool of available opponents further and are more likely to see the same opponents repeat.  There have been times when I joined a freshly renewed TG with a low level walker I was playing around with and only had one slightly outside range opponent available, period.

I think +10 is a little excessive.  We originally had up to +5 matching.  But I've never had a particular problem beating +10 opponents and have always viewed it as a minor challenge boost and/or penalty for deciding not to invest in the last grossly expensive levels of my PW.  I have a lot of mine at 48 which seems a natural breakpoint/plateau for levelling gains for most walkers; a few do reward levelling higher more than others.

Kinesia

James13 said:

Some assorted notes because of the general comments I'm seeing here:

It's not a shock that there will be a lot of Bolas decks in TG the day after it's release as people start fooling around with him.

TG like other events does have it's own brackets, it's not one huge single pool.  Depending on when you join into a (invisible) bracket it may affect your ability to find level-matched opponents; particularly if you're intentionally running low levels.

Related to this point, if you don't have access to 60 opponents due to level matching you've restricted the pool of available opponents further and are more likely to see the same opponents repeat.  There have been times when I joined a freshly renewed TG with a low level walker I was playing around with and only had one slightly outside range opponent available, period.

I think +10 is a little excessive.  We originally had up to +5 matching.  But I've never had a particular problem beating +10 opponents and have always viewed it as a minor challenge boost and/or penalty for deciding not to invest in the last grossly expensive levels of my PW.  I have a lot of mine at 48 which seems a natural breakpoint/plateau for levelling gains for most walkers; a few do reward levelling higher more than others.

Nod nod. I actually think Training Grounds should keep all the decks from _yesterday_ to use again as well, especially in the beginning of the day.

Personally I find it's number of mythics and things rather Planeswalker level that matters more.

I just started an alt and it's a _really_ interesting and different experience, games are decided by who gets out the _1_ cool rare they have in that colour far more than anything else. There is almost zero removal for either creatures or supports and what exists is very flawed. In some ways it's actually more fun than high levels but it's a bit _too_ random.

But, yeah, I don't have Bolas yet, I'm leveling the Ajani I got the other day, he's at 18 and played Bolas after Bolas which was quite funny, battle of the shirtless, Lion beats Dragon. Like warring Heraldry!

wereotter

Kinesia said:

Nod nod. I actually think Training Grounds should keep all the decks from _yesterday_ to use again as well, especially in the beginning of the day.

I would extend that to saying that Training Grounds should be able to pull from ANY custom deck on any planeswalker. It gets pretty old seeing matches are are Koth>Koth>Koth>Nahiri>Koth>Kiora>Koth>Koth.... or I guess now  Bolas>Bolas>Bolas>Bolas>Bolas>Koth>Bolas.

Plus it would mean that if you're trying to learn/level a low level planeswalker, you get appropriate opponents. Not matches that are 20+ levels higher than you.

julianus

One potential additional positive aspect to the fixed matching, there may be fewer 20-way perfect score ties for first place in events.