Ranking teams in PVP

[Jamairoqui]

Has anyone else noticed that nearly all (46 out of 47 so far) teams you fight in the Arena have a higher ranking than your team? Sometimes it’s close (my birds generally come in around 790 depending on who I use, equipment, the banner, emblems etc.), so that I might get to fight an 810 team or 820, but only once have I gotten a team with a lower ranking (I think it was around 730). It’s still possible to win battles, but it’s really difficult to achieve goals since nearly every battle has to focus on staying alive rather than on more complicated tactics like knocking out three birds at once or whatever.

I figure I can’t be the lowest ranked player in the silver league. But this must also be the way Rovio adjusts things to make sure you have to spend money.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior?

Topic

[hack1ge]

I am not even sure what the rating means? Is it basically just a gear score?

[Mimi27]

@jamairoqui, I’m also in the silver league with a rating of 815, and it seems that the opponents are more difficult than they were before. Even the ones with lower ratings are ones I don’t want to encounter–they all tend to be level 10 with full sets. It also seems to run hot and cold–I’ll get a long line of opponents I have to avoid, and then I’ll get several in a row that are down in the low 700s. I don’t know how they figure out the rating, and I still check actual numbers of each bird before making a decision. I got lucky with my objectives today and basically just had to win. I know I’ll get the tricky ones soon enough, and those will be more of a challenge.

[Josh]

I’ve noticed the same thing jamairoqui.

The score is based on gear, rank, levels, I tried figuring some of it out. For example the same gear for red with any hat rank 7 scores the same, which I Disagree with. My rank 7 red adds 138 at level 45 and level 41 set items. ( 113 chuck, 117 Matilda, 147 bomb, 132 blues) But my red stone guardian rank 4 adds 112. Changing one set item to level 45 adds 3 for red, chuck and Matilda, but 5 for bomb and 4 for blues. Changing to the original equipment for red (never threw it out because it didn’t give you anything) makes red worth 31. Also my best banner is 270, so my best party is only 703.

[MVNLA2]

@jamairoqui — After rejecting 10 or more opponents in a row, none with comparable rating, I started keeping track. Out of the next 21 opponents, 3 had a lower rating than my team. Don’t have more data because I lost 3 battles trying to win the 3rd of “win battles without knocking out opponents bird.” I don’t really understand the rating system, because my team with a rating of 759 beat a team rated 844 with a banner with lower health than mine. I think that team even had a stone guard.
I really wonder how the opponents are picked relative to your rating.
This is what I got for the rating of those 21 opponents. Unfortunately I switched teams after opponent 12 (and 2 lost battles). For the 1st 12, my team was rated 759, and for the next 9 they were rated 778.

Avg	802.5
Med	802.0
Max	906
Min	675

@drobbinsjr — I think you were one of the opponents I rejected today. What league are you in this week? I’m still in stone. You were rated as 828 with banner health of 13709.

[Anonymous]

There’s such an easy way to avoid tough opponents that’s been mentioned a lot a while back.

First choose your weakest FB friend or Piggy Mccool and start a battle with them.

Next when the battle ends RIGHT BEFORE you exit to the Arena home turn off ALL data connections which is Wi-Fi and 4G. Basically any internet connection.

When you get to the Arena home page turn it back on before the game has time to react.

Now you have new computer generated birds to fight. These birds will ALWAYS be weaker than you no matter how strong you are.

Using this method I can win any battle and complete any Arena objective.

[MVNLA2]

@partshade — Thanks for reminding me of your method, but I have some questions:
It sounds like you actually have to finish the battle with your friend?
What device are you playing on? I just tried this on my iPad, and I don’t think it will work. To turn off Wi-Fi, you have to close Epic and go to the Settings. When you go back to Epic, it starts the loading procedure from scratch, and demands that you connect to the internet.
The method I’ve been using is much faster, but does not guarantee a weaker opponent. I’ve been starting a battle with a friend, immediately exiting, and returning to the arena home page. This guarantees that you get a new opponent, but recently the distribution has been skewed to opponents much stronger than me.

[Jamairoqui]

@MVNLA2: Your statistics match mine fairly closely. There are a lot of players in the low 800’s, my average was a bit higher, like 820, and my lowest was a lot higher, like 720, but I don’t think I ever saw someone in the 900’s (I would have run away if I had, anyway).

The ratings also are a function of how you have your banner configured. For example, if your opponent is using the Blessed set, and you have the Rage Inhibit emblem on your banner, they will have a higher ranking than if you have the Healing Inhibit emblem on your banner (because reducing rage attacks doesn’t really do any good if your opponent has enhanced healing (or maybe suppressing their healing is better than suppressing their rage attacks)).

I can’t see how the wi-fi exploit works with the most up-to-date versions of the game. ABE just barks at me if I shut off wi-fi and 4G on my Android (I just reconfirmed this, it simply doesn’t work to disconnect data, ABE just stops), and as mentioned above, there’s no way to set an i-whatever to airplane mode and have ABE retain game information. It would be nice if you could force it to give you easier opponents, but I’m not sure I would want that.

When the game reset and all of a sudden everyone was mixed back together, it was kind of boring. There’s no challenge (if you have a higher-level lineup and higher banner from a higher league) squashing Wood League players (and it was hard to get any separation in the standings because everyone basically just ran up their scores until they ran out of playing time). What I want is a competitive, and fair, game, where you have to have more skill than luck to complete the objectives. The way it is now, where you’re constantly fighting Diamond League players in the Silver League, just plain sucks. It’s not fun because outcomes depend more on luck than anything else (e.g., Did you get to move first? Was his first strike with Skulkers a critical hit that destroyed a bird with one shot?).

What would be great is if there were a few better opponents, mostly evenly matched opponents, and a few weaker opponents. But this constantly fighting people who are well above you is as bad as picking on Wood League people. It was a really bad idea to reclassify everyone when they started the new league.

I’m through grumbling about the stupid game for today.

[HarleyM]

@MVNLA2 I use his method on my droid (phone) and you don’t have to finish the battle. For me, if I touch near the top of the screen, there is a drop-down where I can easily turn on airplane mode (directly disabling wifi/data, depending on what you are using, works just the same). The basic parameters are just not having access to the network when the game is forced to populate an opponent so it generates one on its own. Once the opponent is populated re-enable your network connection. I don’t have an ipad, so no suggestions on how to make it work there.

[Anonymous]

@mvnla2 @harleym explained it very well. Yes this is a Droid phone thing but on your iPad is there ANY way to get to settings from your notification bar?

[MVNLA2]

Has anyone been able to get partshade’s method to work on IOS, especially iPad?
@partshade @harleyM — Thanks for the tips, but it still doesn’t work on iPad.
I knew about the bar that pulls down from the top of the screen on an iPad, but it doesn’t allow you to turn airplane mode on/off. However, there is also a pull up bar from the bottom of the screen, which does have on/off for airplane mode. If I knew about this one, I forgot long ago.
In any case, it still doesn’t help. I had to wait until this afternoon, when I got a new set of arena battles. No matter when I turn airplane mode on, Epic immediately complains, and won’t let me do anything.

[HarleyM]

@MVNLA2 Have you tried turning it on immediately after aborting the Piggy McCool battle, while still on the loading screen?

[laura118b]

Hey @partshade,are you in Stone? Because your birds are. I battled you today…you won. But if I had won the coin toss I would have taken the game, it was that close. Showed a 775 rating for you. Avenger, Wizard, Druid.

[Anonymous]

@laura118b Yes I am in Stone League. One thing doesn’t make sense though. I absolutely NEVER in my LIFE use Avenger so I have no idea why he showed up. I have 2 questions:

1) Was my exact name ABN_Partshade?

2) Was my banner the Blessed Set and Time Jump emblem?

If not something is wrong.

[Anonymous]

Also what items did my birds have?

[laura118b]

Yes to everything except I had the wrong class it was Paladin. I had the right name in my head but typed the other for some reason…long day. Sorry about that.

[Bossk]

My teams rank varies between 872 and 906.
It’s a handy indicator.

Easily spotted a lvl 50 (!) team that way. Still defeated it, but was close..

[Anonymous]

@laura118b Ah ok everything is fine then. You must of gotten a team I messed up on then because usually I use Bard instead of Druid but I used her by mistake in a battle.

[Neomerlinmagic]

I’ve tried that turning on airplane mode trick on my iPad, but could never get it to work. Also the GAPM friend trick never worked for me either. Maybe if you have a wifi only iPad, you could turn off the router at the right time to make it work?

[Josh]

I just tried this successfully yesterday on my iPad Air. After defeating mccool I waited till the piggy fade to black, double tapped the button and tapped settings, turned off wifi and went back to the game. When reconnect popped up I double tapped again and turned it back on. I got set up with a les experienced lower ranked CPU opponent with a crazy good banner. It took a while buy I 3 starred it even though the ranking was over 100 higher than mine. Then I lucked out on a free roll and now have my first arena set item match, sinister (too bad they are both wood).

[FreckledPig147]

Here is a description of what happened a few days ago in the middle of Wood League. (I advanced just today)

I am currently Level 24.

I SAW AN OPPONENT THAT WAS LEVEL 38!!
That person’s banner health was around 8K. Mine is in the 6Ks.
I’ve fought Diamond League banners with 7K with players with a slightly higher power (thank goodness the AI is so stupid :) ). But this?

My reaction:“Ummm…I’ll pass.”

I don’t even know if Rovio intentionally adjusted the PvP like this or set a range for the power for matching rather than level and mastery. Or is this a glitch??? This isn’t the first time since the update that my matches were so extreme…

[mich]

The airplane mode method works reliably on an iPhone 6. In any loading screen that appears before the main arena screen (regardless of whether you’re entering from the map, nest, a lost arena battle or after spinning the wheel for a won arena battle), you have to quickliy pull up Control Center from the bottom of the screen. After the first pull gesture, the screen will only show a little bar, just pull that up again. Once Control Center is open, you have all the time in the world to hit the Airplane Mode button (that was actually a mistake I made when I first tried this – I thought you had to enable airplane mode as quickly as possible, but as soon as Control Center is open, the game is in a paused state).

The game will immediately complain that there is no network connection once the main arena screen has loaded, but by that time the opponent team has already been generated, so you can just switch airplane mode off by the same method and play the battle.

When I tried this today, I found that the generated teams tend to have a higher arena rating than the real teams. They’re still a lot easier to beat because they’re generally not balanced well, and rarely have complete sets.

Please note that the trick does not work when an opponent team has already been selected. So if you enter the arena without airplane mode and see a team you don’t like, you will still have to force-close ABE or play a friendly battle in order to be able to use the airplane mode trick.

[Neomerlinmagic]

@m-ich Thanks, that works. It’s a pain to do it more than a few times, but at least I can get the daily objectives out of the way using this method.

[mich]

@neomerlinmagic I found that when you repeat this trick mutiple times, sometimes the game will stop asking for an internet connection completely, which means that you can play many arena battles without interruption. I would still disable airplane mode from time to time in between, because if there is no internet connection, your scores are only saved locally and may be lost if the game crashes. But if this happens, you can also get cheap set items if you have an unseen GPM notification, i.e. a friend has used your GPM, but you haven’t seen them fill up your bar yet. When the game has stopped asking for an internet connection, you can just visit the GPM (works for the arena GPM as well), see the rainbow bar grow, exit and reenter, and the rainbow bar will grow again. If you repeat this long enough to completely fill the bar, you can pay 3 (or 5) LC for a guaranteed set item, and then repeat until the bar is full again. When the game is in this state, you can even switch off airplane mode. You won’t get generated arena opponents, but the GPM trick will still work until the game is restarted (i.e. you see the title screen).

There seems to be an additional condition for the GPM trick to work reliably though: Something in the game needs to (temporarily) break to make this exploit possible, in addition to not requiring an internet connection anymore. I found the most reliable way to tell if this will work (without wasting your one shot, because if it doesn’t work, your notifications are gone), is to check the dojo or the timer of a running event: If this shows some kind of bogus timer (in the dojo: 12:34:56), AND the game does not ask for an internet connection anymore, you’re good to go.

[Eramaled]

I started silver league today, I must say I am very disappointed with what has been happening. I am at 32 level with all my team at level 10 (spent a lot of coin to get there) and the max power my team can get is at 627 and my banner 9990. All the players in my leader board are at levels of 30 to 37. However in the challenges I am constantly coming up against players that are at levels of over 40, have banners of over 11,000 and team powers of 650 to 750 or more. On top of that the 50 or more challenges I played, I won no more than 5 coin tosses. With just 10% of coin tosses won and competing against someone who is so obviously out powering my team by a county mile, what is the point of playing, I had to buy my way back into the challenge at least 4 times today. This is something that I never do. I could normaly get through a daily challenge with losing one or two battles. Today I had my arse handed to me on a regular occurrence. I felt like I was back at the beginning of epic.
Loosing interest really fast, if things aren’t put back onto a more level playing field, I’m afraid that epic is going to take a long deserving rest.

[Jamairoqui]

@eramaled: I noticed the same thing with the silver league last week. It was insanely hard, which is what started this thread. (My level is higher than yours (45), but I was constantly fighting teams that clearly were from the Diamond levels of the last season.) However, because I got lucky and didn’t get any objectives involving headgear I don’t own, I moved up to gold on Sunday. I thought I would be crushed because if silver was so difficult, gold would get even harder. But it didn’t. It’s easier. Way easier.

I don’t understand it, my birds are the same as before, but instead of constantly seeing opponent teams with level 45 sets, Resurrection/Time Jump emblems, and with banner scores of +14000, it’s more civilized. The battles are still hard, I rarely leave with over half my banner health left, but they are winnable. Last week I spent a lot of time cycling opponents to find ones where I knew I had a reasonable chance of surviving, and of those there were even fewer where I could beat and fulfill the objectives.

So it might be a bug in the silver league in how it assigns opponents. Silver was exceptionally hard compared to Stone, and the silver flag gear you get is little to no help. But if you can grind through it by judiciously choosing your opponents (I’ve found that I just ignore the teams with Time Jump, Resurrection, and with the Mighty Head (the red one) with Seadog or Blues with the Arrows (since that combination can take out one bird with a single attack), my impression is it gets easier.