*UPDATED*A few suggestions regarding the EE war system.

Here are a few proposed changes that I believe would vastly improve the EE war system without forcing players to alter their builds or rosters. These changes are aimed at tackling the biggest issues with EE wars: LBers, GH/SH, mids/hansels & no match/mismatches. Most of these changes compliment each other & to see the full effect of any single change all changes would have to be implemented.

1)- Remove the mechanic that causes the enemy to gain more plunder if they attack you while you are using full attack defense potions.
This would help mids/hansels defend themselves vs shadow hansels/guild hansels without worrying about leaking even more plunder. This would also help correct the issue with gh/sh removing equipment before wars (see below) since it would be much harder for them to even hit other gh/sh without their equipment.

2)- Add a 1% success chance to ALL war equipment.
This "success chance" would be a flat out chance at success in which ignores enemy stats. Perhaps have this additional flat rate success scale with player stats & be less useful to smaller builds (so shadow hansels/guild hansels do not benefit as much from it). An example would be 0.25% success chance per piece if under 5mil combined stats, 0.5% success chance if between 5-10mil cs, & full 1% per piece if over 10mil cs. This would help correct the issue with LB players being completely out of reach of normal players.

3)- Factor bonus from allies in to the amount of plunder the player loses when attacked.
To make this VERY simple when attacking an enemy you could simply add an additional 1m plunder per hit for every 1tril (coin amount) in bonus from allies that the enemy has. A gh/sh with 15tril in bfa would pay 15m more per hit then a gh/sh with no bfa to ANYONE that lands a successful attack on them (same would go for any build but I thought it important to emphasis on gh/sh since they generally pay very low when attacked by mids/bigs). This would help even out the gaps between players who spend a lot of money on the "pay to win" aspects of the game or players who been playing for years & amassed fortunes vs the rest of the community/newer players. LBers may be harder to hit due to their BFA but they would pay more when they are hit to make up for this. Shadow hansels with massive hit ranges due to their BFA may earn much more plundering larger builds but they would lose much more when attacked. It would also give people more reasons to hide their allies & allow for more strategy in picking which targets you want to plunder. As an additional side effect, this would help the ally market as well & perhaps cause some more OSW with people having more reason to try to fight over the allies with good stats for their price.

4)- When matching clans for EE wars factor in the combined stats of the highest stat piece of equipment the player currently has per slot & NOT the stats of the equipment the player is currently wearing.
This would help fix the issue with clans having their shadow hansel/guild hansels intentionally remove some of their equipment before war in order to get an easier match.

5)- Cause the target of a successful steal to lose 10% of the amount of gold the enemy gained on the steal from their plunder score.
Similar to how you lose a portion of your plunder score when you are ko'd by an enemy, you would lose a modest amount of gold deducted from your total plunder score every time an enemy lands a successful steal on you. If an enemy stole from you & gained 20mil gold, you would lose 2mil from your total plunder score. This would make hansels more useful & give stealing in EE wars more purpose then simply being used when turtling or trying to sko.

*Regarding no match/mismatches.
I believe if the 5 changes above were implemented the issue with no match/mismatches would resolve itself. Hit ratio issues would not really be a problem because rosters could be EFFECTIVELY built with more mids & less SH. More hansels & mids would be warring which would result in more clans to match against. Clans would have a better chance if they get matched against LBers while having no LB. The list goes on...

There are my thoughts (unbiased to my build). Let me know what you think.

 

Re: A few suggestions regarding the EE war system.

Sure.

#3 Come up with a system to integrate the combined stats of your bonus from allies into how much the enemy gets when they attack you. I have not even begun to think of how this could work out but an example would be something like... for every 10mil cs bonus from allies you have you lose 1% more then you normally would when attacked. Something like that. The goal to my suggestions are for everyone to continue to play the game how they want to but for things to be more fair for everyone. This was my alternative to the suggestions people make such as "cap bonus from allies" etc. 2 of the major problems right now are leaderboard players having so much bonus from allies that it's difficult to even hit them as well as shadow/guild hansels with a ton of bonus from allies being able to plunder builds that are much larger then them however when they are hit back they pay very low. I believe this would help correct both issues. You fail alot trying to hit a large leaderboard player but when you actually hit them they pay more. You lose alot of plunder having a small gh/sh hit you (you being a mid/large hansel etc) but when you hit them back they actually pay decent too. As it currently stands any SH with decent equip/bfa can hit larger builds for 60mil+ a hit but when the larger build hits them back they make 10mil. Of course that is just an example but you get the point.

#4 Say a lvl 10 fully upgraded scorpion shield is your best item that you own for your off-hand slot. It gives 22mil atk, 10mil spy atk, 6mil defense, 3mil spy defense for a total of 41mil combined stats. As kaw_community stated when pairing clans your bonus from equipment, combined stats, and bonus from allies are factored in. Some clans have their shadow/guild hansels remove some or all of thier equipment before they sign up. This causes their clan to appear to have lower combined bfe/bfa/cs then they do & causes the clan to be matched against a lower bfe/bfa/cs clan. Now this might sound fair to you right? They removed their equipment so they are at a disadvantage? No. The reason is they stack a bunch of gh/sh with large (most of the time leaderboard) attack builds & the other team while playing fair usually cannot even touch the big guys on the team that manipulated the system by removing their equipment. The sh/gh can still do well without all of their equip & due to the mis-match the the large (mostly lb) attack builds crush the smaller cs/bfa/bfe team. My suggestion was to still count their equipment in when matching clans even if their equipment is removed in order to prevent clans from manipulating the system in this way. So if you removed the scorpion shield mentioned above to try to trick the system into getting you an easier match (by knocking off 41mil cs from your clan's total bfe), you'd still have it counted in regardless. Think about how much weaker it makes your clan appear if 10 people remove 150-250million bfe in equipment before a match. That's 1.5 to 2.5trillion bfe.

 

Re: A few suggestions regarding the EE war system.

At the beginning of the explanations for each war under announcements you see this message...

"All clans that got no match are shown in red in the list below. The list is sorted by relative strength ranking, BFA, BFE as well as CS. It's a rough estimate of where your clan's roster is in strength compared to other rosters that signed up. The best way to get a match is to look at clans within 3 to 5 ranks above or below you. Look at their roster and try to build a roster that will be able to hit them."

I guess they didn't flat out say it but since the list is organized by BFA, BFE, and CS & they are asking you to try to match those closest to you one can only assume that BFA, BFE, and CS are factored in.

You said "First of all, if they don't have the equipment equipped, they are not feeling any benefit or advantage from owning it but not using it." because you are not understanding the problem at hand. GH/SH don't really NEED bfe unless they want to try to plunder bigs/bigger mids. In the LB/SH scenario the LBers take care of enemy big/mids easily & the SH do not need BFE to hit people in their range because people in their range do not use attack defense potions so any SH basically has over 200mil attack by using full attack pots & can hit anyone anyway. While their clan is missing so much BFE the system puts them against a clan with smaller bigs and the LBers just crush them.

When you see this before signup, you know something needs to be done...

 

Re: A few suggestions regarding the EE war system.

I'm not saying players should not be able to choose what equipment they want to war in. I'm saying players should not be able to REMOVE equipment to manipulate the matching system. SH usually only unequip equipment with low offensive stats and high defensive stats such as legs and armor. That knocks off a lot of cs while only reducing their atk by a small portion. Tanks remove the opposite. No one should be able to remove equipment to exploit the matching system & you cannot justify them doing this by claiming it should be their choice.

Yes I'm sure people could try to get around the proposed changes by making all new accounts and only hunting for certain equipment but for tanks to do this it would take a year+ to rebuild their account & for SH to do this it would still take considerable time. I agree that something bigger needs to be done to address this issue but for now I believe this would be very useful. Also note if #1 went into affect everyone could use full ADP & removing equipment would not be very effective since the new naked sh you speak of with 200mil attack pots would be facing full adp(145mil)+equip+bfa.