In Clash of Clans, how matchmaking works in Legend league (5000+ trophies) has been reworked. The reason for the rework was that matchmaking was taking a very, very long time (10+ min) to find a base for you to attack, which is far too long to sit around and do nothing with your mobile device.

Here is how it works: Now when you hit Legend league, instead of being able to search for bases to attack, you get assigned 8 bases daily, and you can only hit those 8. You also get attacked up to 8 times by other Legend players, but you no longer lose whatever loot they take. Additionally, loot is no longer determined by how much the other player has, but by the strength of your base (upgrade levels), meaning that every base you attack has at least 300k+ gold/elixir, 5k+ DE to loot. How many trophies you earn is also different, and now scales on how much damage you do vs how many trophies the base you are attacking has.

The result? Legend league has made CoC’s far more fun for me, for a few reasons.

First, removing the option to skip to another base solves the “what if the next base has more loot” dilemma, which is a big thing in the original matchmaking setup. This was especially true when matchmaking was slow; waiting 10 minutes only to find a base with basically no loot was terrible.

Second, staying in Legend league and climbing in trophies is now more about skill than time. With the hard limit of 8 attacks, and getting attacked up to 8 times daily, players can no longer game the system by staying online for long periods of time, or simply having more time per day to attack over and over to slowly climb. Now to climb, you actually have to perform well in your attacks, and build a base that does a good job defending. I do wish they would lower the limit to maybe 5 attacks per day, as 8 is a lot, especially if you have clan war attacks to do as well.

Finally, by removing the link between how much loot you have and how much you lose, this frees up base building a lot more. You don’t need to protect your storage anymore, while at the same time your attackers will still want to hit those storages to gain loot. This means you can set traps and lures around your storages, while when attacking you can be smart and try to bait out those traps. That kind of ‘cat and mouse’ gameplay is fun, and a huge improvement over the previous design/farming meta.

I honestly thing CoC would be a better game overall if this system was used in lower leagues. Maybe not at the absolute lowest, but limiting it just to legends seems almost like a waste. Hopefully if enough of the feedback is positive, SuperCell does expand it into more of the game.