Clan War Matchmaking – Less Mismatches

Have you ever asked yourself why your Clan is being matched up against much stronger Clans in Clan Wars? I want to explain how the Clan War Matchmaking works, and also bust some myths and common misunderstandings that are out there. With all the recent changes and developments, I have been reworking this guide here from the ground for 2018.

How Clan War Matchmaking Works

Basically, you and your clan members get points for everything you have – you get defensive points depending on the Levels of each of your Defenses, you get attacking points for your Troop Levels and Spell Levels, your Heroes levels, and what you, theoretically, could create to attack someone.

These points are called war weight.

These numbers are added up and are used to match against another Clan with the most similar attacking and defending scores. There is no individual weight counted at any point in the game as of the state of January 2018, so only your whole clan’s weight is counted (along with many other factors, like Town Hall structure, streak and much more that Supercell won’t tell us)

You can learn more about war weight here:

When now thinking about it, the system itself sounds quite solid and should create a fair clan war match when clans with similar Town Hall structures and similar offensive & defensive weights are matched, at least in theory!

In reality, it will generate hours of waiting times because you have to wait until such a clan is searching for a Clan War at the same time as your clan does. Mathematically, if you have a clan with 50 members going to war with TH7 to TH11 accounts, there are millions of different possibilities how your Town Hall Levels are and now you add the factor that a matching clan needs the same weight in offense & defense.

This is the reason why the matchmaking does create problems right now. The algorithm simply takes far too long to make a perfect Clan War match, so with the time going by the algorithms starts to also check for clans that are not a perfect match, but a close match – so you might war against a clan that will be slightly stronger or slightly weaker than your clan. This helps not searching for days to find a matching clan but in return created unfair wars.

This was the status quo for a long time, but then suddenly engineering got more and more popular. Engineering means that one is not upgrading the defenses with high weight but focus on upgrading offense stuff like troops & heroes.

This will make the base look weaker for the algorithm, but the person is able to perform with maxed troops 2 full attacks and might get 6 Stars for only offering easier 3 Stars from his base on defense.

Attention! Supercell has made several bigger changes to the war matchmaking algorithm during the past months and I want to show them and what could be the reason why you get mismatches, but first I would like to define what a war mismatch is

State after 2020! Engineering not really works anymore and the best way is to run a solid war base that is as strong as possible without overthinking things. Rushed bases are also not that much of a thing anymore, so I recommend using a strong war base as the best strategy. You can find my Pro War Bases for TH16 here, TH15 here, TH14 here, TH13 here, TH12 here, TH11 here, TH10 here and TH9 here (also custom bases available!).

What’s a Clan War Mismatch?

Here’s where I see most of the mistake being made – identifying a clear mismatch. One of the most frequent false mismatch identifiers is the “I am matched against a higher Town Hall on the map…”
war matchmaking in clash of clans
Your location in the map has absolutely NOTHING to do with your opponent, it’s just your defensive weight compared to your clanmates – so you see those with higher upgraded defenses above you and those with lower below you. If your position is, let’s say, number 4 it doesn’t mean that you’re exactly as heavily weighted as the number 4 of your war opponent clan.
At a side note, attacking the mirror is the worst war strategy out there but still performed by so many clans – I got a better one for you here:

But I think you now understand why many think they are mismatched, but they simply don’t know that the number on the map has nothing to do with matching.
A clear mismatch is when your top five Town Halls are, as an example, TH10 and you’re facing maxed TH11 bases on your opponent’s side.
Or like this example here 16 TH10 on top versus 28 TH10 on top
clan war matchmaking mismatch 2018

Preventing Clan War Mismatches

In the second half of 2017, Supercell reworked a huge part of the war matchmaking algorithm to make it work for the broad player field.
Simply spoken, they worked on matching clans with engineered bases more often with clans that have engineered bases and maxed clans with other maxed clans.
This is still not working 100% perfect, but the results are now a lot better than they have been a couple months ago. Of course, there will never ever be a matchmaking algorithm that will prevent you from getting one single mismatch, but the path is the right although still in need of more tweaking.
So, if you get constant mismatches with your clan, you’re very likely having something in your clan that triggers the signal in the matchmaking algorithm to mark your clan as an engineering clan and even through your clan is not an engineering clan it will get matched preferably against other engineering clans.
The algorithm, as in the state of today, will compare your defensive and offensive weights and identify if there is an imbalance.
Here are the most common things you should check:

  • Do you have any very low Town Halls in your war lineup? A long time ago this helped to lower your weight but, as being said above, will now trigger the “engineering flag”
  • Do you have ANY engineered 8.5, 9.5, 10.5 bases in your lineup? Even one single engineered base can mess up your matchmaking!

I’ve been talking with a ton of people about that, also checked out a lot of clans that wrote me that they still get constant mismatches against engineering clans and bottom line all of them had several .5 bases in their clan and after removing the results got a lot better for them.
You might not believe me, but doing a proper research on your clan members bases you take to war can be worth it when you get mismatches not 1 in 10 times but like 5 or more in 10 times!
Examples like that here are countless:
clan war matchmaking improvement 2018

Check Your Clan For Engineering Score!

So checking every single member can be tough and you can take a simple first step when checking your clan using the website cocp.it – where you can enter your clan tag and it will show you an “Engineering Score”
Attention! Sometimes some rushed bases are also identified as engineering, but you’ll get a good idea and know if you need to check bases.
Here’s one example of how it can look like:
check your clan for engineering
This clan has an engineering score of 13.9% which means that 14% of all bases are lopsided and either engineered or rushed.
Still, this is not a 100% final result that this is an engineering clan, but you get a good first impression how many bases could cause the trouble and very helpful to start with.
Click here to go to CoCPIT and check your clan. On some mobile devices the search for your clan tag doesn’t work there, so you will need to search for your clans’ name 🙂

Time Matter

There are many myths around when it comes to time, so I also want to briefly cover this here as it has an influence.
As explained in the beginning, mismatches only occur (or at least get more likely to happen), when there’s no perfect matching clan searching for a Clan War at the same time – so by logic you would like to search when most clans are searching so the likelihood of getting a matching clan is a lot higher.
According to cocp.it, not the day of the week matter (as you can see in the stats below) but when it comes to the time of the day there is a huge difference.
best time for clan war matchmaking
The most popular times are GMT 11:00 to 18:00 which means daytime in Europe & evening in Asia, where most players by numbers play.

Still Mismatching?

Help Supercell improve the algorithm! There is a thread in the official forum where you can report your mismatch and this will get closer analyzed by Supercell.
You will not get a response there, but your data is being processed if you believe you got outmatched.
Click here to go to the thread.

  1. Now, because of Supercell’s over tightened war matching algorithm, what used to take hours became days then weeks and now MONTHS! (Yes MONTHS!) And only because out of a 20×20 lineup one might have 2 or 3 low THs and 2 or 3 that might fall under what Supercell defines as engineered, which in most cases are actually rushed.

    So, CWL out of whack matching is fine. Versus matching is “perfectly acceptable”, but the war matching algorithm is tighter than a frog’s ass because THAT has to be perfect. And therefore another exodus of players leave Clash of Clans because the game has turned to shit.

    Over the years there has been enough middle fingers pointed at Supercell to cause a 15 minute wave in a packed stadium. Yet Supercell continues to ignore players and work on projects nobody requested.

    Kids! This is why you shouldn’t do drugs.

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