Trophy dropping and its impact

**EDITOR'S NOTE:** This page was written before penalty was removed and the echelon system introduced. This page is in process of being updated with the recent change of dynamics of the game. Some players still will keep their trophies at a range where they can more easily get wins.

This page explains trophy dropping (or diving or management), why it is done and its impact on other players. There are some issues around this which pertain specifically to very high trophy players, described at the end.

# What it is and what it **isn’t**

Trophy dropping (or diving, or trophy management) is a meta-strategy where players intentionally lose games to keep their trophy count in a tight chosen range. It is typically performed by quickly giving up a base kill, and possibly force-closing the game, in order to sit at a lower trophy level than natural. Every trophy dropper **must** lose up to half of their games on purpose in order to use this strategy. If a player is not losing games on purpose, they are not “dropping”.

There are many other reasons why a player in LSWB may find themselves surrounded by players with stronger decks.

1. An above average skilled player which has risen relatively high for your deck strength
2. Plenty of players are relatively poor skill wise given their deck strength, so they will naturally play higher skilled players with lower strength decks
3. Some players may have a very aggressive "all-in" strategy that works half the time at a given level, but does not allow them to move higher as more skilled or even deck players generally defeat it.
4. Players experimenting with new units and decks will naturally lose trophies.
5. Trophy reset at the start of a new season which drops the highest level players down to much lower trophy counts.
6. The game has a relatively high appearance for trophy differences when matching players for battle. Naturally, this will cause deck strength and skill differences to occur when matchmaking.

None of these players are ‘trophy droppers’ – they are higher powered decks that are quite naturally at a lower trophy rank. As seen below, you can accurately estimate what proportion of decks faced are actual droppers.

# Why do people drop trophies intentionally?

Increasing deck strength (card levels) in the game is primarily about opening a lot of scans. It is supported by generating a lot of crystals to buy champion tokens and shop offers. Both are achieved much faster through base kills instead of close tower victories. By dropping to a level where a player is naturally stronger than the opponent, the dropper racks up crystals and five medal wins, offset with very fast losses, to open more scans and obtain more crystals per hour than they would otherwise. Trophy dropping is likely to persist for as long as the primary path to progress in the game is base killing, as opposed to close victories at the highest trophy level possible.

# Estimating how many trophy droppers you face

As noted above, trophy droppers must lose close to half their games on purpose. These losses are entirely unopposed base kills given to other players.  Since half the droppers’ games are unopposed base kills, you can determine the rate of trophy droppers you’re facing by considering a reasonable sample of games, taking the percent of games where you were given a free base kill, and doubling it. If 10% of the games you play are free wins, an offsetting 10% are ‘trophy droppers’ presumably beating you, for a total of 20% of players in your range being ‘trophy droppers’.  If the proportion of players around you with stronger decks is much higher than this rate (2x the rate of free wins), then most of these players are **not** droppers. Rather, they are high level deck players who are at your level for valid reasons. Constantly facing higher level decks can be frustrating and stressful, but ‘trophy droppers’ are only the cause if you are also receiving a huge number of free base kills. Those free base kills are increasing your crystal accumulation and scan opening rate, which benefits you just as much as each loss to a trophy dropper.

# Trophy management and season reset

At the end of a season, the game resets every high trophy player’s trophies to a maximum level. This takes away thousands of trophies from the top players. Many (if not most) trophy droppers are using the end of season reset to establish a trophy range they will operate in. Later they push high at the end of the season. Due to this, the presence of droppers is highest early in the season and tails off towards the end, as many take their now improved decks and put them to the test to improve their global ranking before repeating the trophy reset cycle.

# Impact on other players

Trophy droppers effectively force their payoffs onto the players they face. If you are at your ‘natural’ trophy level, half the games against droppers are likely quick losses, while the other half are easy base kills. For the proportion of games played against trophy droppers, you get the same accelerated base kill rate and benefits that they do. However, it is true that this is not your choice. In any case, trophy droppers accelerate other players’ deck levelling progress and crystal accumulation rates.

A corollary of this is that the more players there are trophy dropping into your range, the less reason there is for you to consider dropping, as you gain the benefits of dropping from those who’ve dropped into your range.

# Criticisms of trophy dropping

As discussed above, complaints that trophy droppers slow other players down or make it harder to progress are, in fact, not true. That said, there are some reasons to complain about trophy dropping.

First is that ultimately the goal of the game is to have fun, competitive matches. Trophy droppers accept uncompetitive matches for stretches of time in order to move their deck levels up more quickly.  Players who are not dropping have generally uncompetitive matches with droppers. They might reasonably have preferred to have only competitive matches, even with a slower progress rate, and the trophy dropper denies them that opportunity in some matches.

A second complaint linked to the first is ‘what if everyone did this?’  Droppers assume that at some point they will use their stronger deck and return to competitive levels, but what if everyone dropped all the time? This is a theoretically valid point, and one reason why even vocal droppers would like to see incentives in the game changed.  However, there are several reasons to think ‘everyone dropping’ won’t happen. For one, as noted above, as more players drop, there’s less need for the remaining players to drop, as the presence of a significant minority of droppers may boost their base kill rate to acceptable levels. Second, a large number of droppers time their drop cycle to seasons. They start the season ‘dropped’ and then push competitively at the end of the season, allowing the season trophy reset to move them back.  This provides plenty of competitive matches in the later parts of the season.

Third, deck strength is not the only requirement for victory. By being exposed to higher deck strength and/or skill players, there is an opportunity to learn from losses to trophy droppers. Putting together strong pushes and learning to counter them are a valuable skills to be learned from trophy droppers.

# Trophy dropping and top 100 players

## Additional reasons for dropping

Top 100 (roughly) players have an additional significant reason for trophy management – the difficulty in finding opponents.  At high trophy levels, the game can often not match an opponent, so after 60 seconds of searching, matches to an AI opponent in tournament mode.  While this generally allows for a high base kill rate for the player, it is slower than sitting low enough to regularly play other top 1% players, and provides less interesting competition as well. Because of this, there’s extra incentive for top players to somewhat manage trophies, at least until a late season push.  Given their strength, they typically will not need to ‘manage’ to a fixed level all season, rather they will climb slowly, trying to stay with the top 1% of players, rather than pulling away from them till the second half or last quarter of the season.

## Lack of benefit for non droppers & pressure to drop

Unlike lower players, who may benefit from trophy droppers coming into their range (which may frustrate them), there are no higher players dropping down to benefit a 7k trophy player.  So, in this case, there may be additional pressure on them to manage trophies to maintain a grind rate that allows them to stay competitive with other top players.

## 5k/6k league

Finally, while there are extra reasons for top players to manage trophies, there’s also another legitimate complaint against it – it spreads out the already thin top tier playerbase, so they match each other less.  Some top players attempt to mitigate this by trying to manage their trophies to stay close to one another – arranging to have many top players floating around a given trophy range, allowing them to have competitive matches with one another mixed in with playing other top 1% players, as opposed to playing as high as possible, and having similarly infrequent matches with each other, but mixed with AI bots instead.