Optimized clan war match making in upcoming upgrade

In the coming update 2016, a new iteration of Clan Wars matchmaking will bring a large amount of under-the-hood improvements to raise the quality of war matchups. The Clan Wars matchmaking system has been overhauled with fairness of matching in mind. It aims to provide a more competitive and fun warring experience for all Clans. 

The changes coming to Clan Wars matchmaking are as follows:

1. War sizes 35v35 and 45v45 are being removed in order to boost available matches in other war sizes;
2. Clan Wars matchmaking will place a much greater emphasis on defensive (village) progress, and less emphasis on offensive (army) progress;
3. Powerful, late-game defenses and troops like Inferno Towers, Eagle Artillery and Grand Warden will have much greater matchmaking impact;
4. Clan Wars matchmaking will favor matches between Clans with similar recent win/loss records in their recent wars;
5. Team-versus-team compositional checks have been added to help weed out imbalanced war matchups.

Due to these changes, some Clans might find they have to wait a little longer than the average 5-minute to 20-minute matchmaking time they are used to.

Defenses and War Base Optimization

Defensive progress will be playing a much bigger role in Clan Wars matchmaking after the update. Previously, the system placed equal weight between offensive (army) and defensive (village) progress, allowing for confusing war matchups between players with relatively over-strong or over-weak defenses. Now, war matchmaking will factor defensive progress much more heavily into every calculation to help to keep War Bases better balanced "in lane." After all, when Battle Day comes, all that really matters to YOUR team is how strong the opposing defenses are.

At the same time, matchmaking calculations have been rebalanced with the goal of better representing village progress. Previously, a village could be carefully manicured to hide a powerful defense or troop from matchmaking. For example, a player could intentionally not build X-Bows and under-upgrade other defenses to hide an Inferno Tower from matchmaking, and be treated as a TH9-level defense. Now, Clan Wars matchmaking will make a much sharper distinction between players who have built high-level items and those who haven't. Not only will this prevent higher-level players from preying upon lower-level players with hyper-optimized War Bases, but it will also allow high-level players to upgrade lesser units, like Cannons or Minions, without worry of undue penalty by the matchmaking system.


Win-Streaks and Team Balance

In Clan Wars, some Clans struggle to ever come away with a win, while others seem to win constantly and rarely find a challenging opponent. To help Clans find better matches based on their competitiveness, a Clan's recent war performance will now factor into Clan Wars matchmaking. Clans who have been recently losing a lot will be more likely to be matched with other Clans who are also struggling to find a win, thus helping to break long losing-streaks. Similarly, Clans who have been winning a lot will be more likely to encounter other winning Clans. A new war statistic "War win streak" will also be shown on Clan profiles, which showcases how many wars a Clan has currently won in a row.

Additionally, Clan Wars matchmaking has been fitted with new routines aimed at better balancing entire teams, rather than just individual lanes. It will place greater emphasis on matching the top of the war map, and less emphasis on matching the bottom. Total team defensive strength will also be analyzed to help filter out war matchups that are imbalanced on a map-wide scale.


Looking Ahead

While no matchmaking system can ever guarantee perfect matches 100% of the time, the work on improving Clan Wars matchmaking is never done. There will be continuous small adjustments and tweaks to Clan Wars matchmaking over time even after update, even if system-wide revamps like these come rarely. The supercell is also looking forward to making even more improvements to the Clan Wars experience this year, starting with these changes to help everyone get better war matchups.