First off please don't reply to this thread if you have nothing constructive to say or are just going to flame people and please don't reply if your just going to say "I don't care what is happening to top champion league players they are all ♥♥♥♥♥ers and gemmers anyways!" And please don't claim you know what's going on in high champion's league (3800+) if you've never been there. Thank you. This is an extremely long post, so beware.With the last update (the one with the hero nerfs) matchmaking in upper champion's league was changed by Supercell. They have denied changing anything in email responses to us but they are lying, they changed how matchmaking works in upper champion's league and I will explain.Prior to the update the top player had over 4700 trophies and the lowest player in top 10 had 4600. The top player now is 4494 and the lowest in top 10 is 4362 as of writing this. That is a 200-300 trophy drop off in some cases. Honestly I'm surprised this is the first forum thread about this. You may be wondering if some of this is due to losing on offense because of the hero changes, and your right, some of it is. For the most part though it is an inability to find bases to attack and always being paired up with someone several hundred trophies lower then you on defense. (If your at 4300 and someone at 3800 finds you, they are going to take at least 35 trophies from you if they get two stars).Now stuff like this has always happened in upper champion's league. The higher you go the harder it is to find matches as the pool of available players to attack in your range becomes smaller. The problem is, the pool of available players who can attack you on defense never gets any smaller. It doesn't matter if go up high enough to, say, 4200 trophies and push all the 3200-3500's out of range of attacking you, there is still just as many players in the 3600-3900 range who will all take 30 or more trophies from you if they find you and two star you. The saving grace we had was that matchmaking would always try to find the best available opponent for someone, meaning it always tries to pair you up with someone close to your trophy range first. This meant, for example, that if you were at 4200 trophies, even though there could be hundreds of players in the 3700-4000 range searching for attacks and only 10 players in the 4200-4500 range, there was still an equal or greater chance one of the players in the 4200-4500 range would find you. Half the time that player was from an ally clan and would be kind enough to only take one star (cheap shield), and the other half it was someone from an enemy clan who would two star you if they could. Even then you would only lose 15-20 trophies at most, still a lot, but not nearly as rough as losing 30 or more.So basically what you had was a system where the higher you go in trophies the harder it is to progress. The players at really high trophy rankings (4200+) could never get too far ahead of the player just getting into champion's league for the first time. However, due to the fact that there are far less people willing to spend the type of money and time required to go above 4200 trophies compared to the thousands of players willing or content with just being in champions league, a giant gap started growing. The players who were able to reach something like 4200 trophies wanted to keep pushing higher, but the rest either lacked the money or time. What we ended up with was a top 200 Global Leaderboard that spanned from 4000-4700 trophies at one point. A 700 trophy gap over just 200 players, and all of those 200 are online 12+ hours a day searching for bases to attack. This is why it's so hard to find a base to attack up here and almost every one you do find is worth just 1 trophy, 99% of the time there is no one for the system to pair you with near your range, so it has to look for someone much lower. Despite the enormous gem costs of pushing 1 trophy at a time and the fact that there were many times you couldn't even find enough 1 trophy bases to make up your defense losses, top players were still willing to do it.That was before the update. Immediately after the update it was almost impossible to find a single match for several days. Many of the top players went 3-4 days, searching 12 hours a day, without finding a single base to attack. As if this was not bad enough, the system was now pairing us with players hundreds of trophies lower then us every single time on defense. I can't tell you how many defensive logs I looked at where for 7-8 straight defenses the person lost -39 because they were paired with someone 500+ trophies lower then themselves. This persisted for several days and started getting better right after Supercell's first maintenance break after the hero update. Coincidence, absolutely not. Though things have gotten a little better, there still seems to have been a permanent change in matchmaking. Top players are finding some 1 trophy bases to attack again, though still not as many as before the update, and defense has gotten slightly better, even though we are still being paired with someone lower then us 90% of the time.My theory is Supercell actively changed the matchmaking system, at least in champions league, in order to close the huge trophy gap in champion's league that makes finding matches impossible and prevents people from wanting to push up there at all. I also think they are hoping that these changes in matchmaking as well as the nerfs to heroes, will keep players from ever reaching such high trophy counts again, and therefore keep the gap smaller and more manageable. This is why so many top players could not find a match for several days but were getting attacked by players 400-500 trophies lower then themselves every single time on defense. Supercell changed matchmaking in some way that paired lower players up with higher players far more often then usual. The basic goal I believe was to lower the top most players while raising some of the lower players, so that overall more players would be in the top range of champion's league. For example, instead of having 200 players making up a 700 trophy gap from 4000-4700 we have a thousand or more players making up a 700 trophy gap from 3800-4500. Sure this might help champion's league as a majority, but once again it's done at the expense of the minority, the top players.So what's next? I think Supercell changed matchmaking twice. The first time was with the hero update. I think this was temporary, done to drop the top players and close the gap like I explained above. The second time I think was the first maintenance break after the hero update, and this was a permanent change. Although top players can once again find some matches and defense is slightly better, it's still far worse then before the update. I think this is because the new matchmaking system is skewed towards preventing top players from climbing so high again. On offense it gives them fewer matches then before while giving more matches to the middle-of-the-pack champion's league players, in order to close the gap further, and to encourage more people to push into high champ. On defense, 9/10 times you will be attacked by someone lower then you, where as before the update it was more like 5/10. This is also in part because a 700 trophy span from the top player on global leaderboards down used to cover 200 players and now covers probably thousands, so there are far more lower trophy players in range to attack you then before.Regardless, matchmaking was changed in some way, and it was done at the expense of some of Supercells biggest and most loyal customers. I have seen so many of my friends, all of whom were above 4000 trophies, quit this game in the last few weeks, and not one of them because of the changes to heroes, we've all adjusted and have our new strategies. Don't get me wrong I'm sure the hero nerfs factored into it, but the biggest reason was the incredibly awful matchmaking for them. Who wants to sit in the clouds searching for a base to attack for 2 hours let alone multiple days, and know that as soon as you log off someone will get the joy of attacking you for 30 or more trophies. Who wants to watch all the effort they've put into reaching some obscene trophy count like 4500+ dwindle away to nothing through no fault of their own.We have been waiting forever for Supercell to do something to fix the endless clouds and matchmaking problems top players experience. Supercell says it knows about this problem, they even said as much in an FAQ they did that you can find on reddit, but I doubt they care about it. Their solution to close the trophy gap was done at the expense of hundreds of the top player's trophies. Trophies that represent hundreds of hours of time and thousands of dollars in gems, and still they deny that anything has changed.A lot of top players, many of them friends of mine, have quit recently and I just wanted to clear up why. It was far less the changes to the heroes then the problems with matchmaking. Many of them just don't feel like spending countless hours more trying to get back hundreds of trophies they had only weeks ago. They were hardly having fun before waiting sometimes for hours to find a single base worth 1 trophy, now that it has only gotten worse, the fun is absolutely gone. Coupled with the refunds apple handed out, and many of them just don't feel like continuing. Better to save the refund and quit then to keep spending time/money trying to play a game that won't even let you play it, run by developers/people who have completely lost your trust and who are unconcerned with you because you are just a small minority.I know this was a long rant but if you got this far, congratulations, you are probably not a noob or you would've lost track of what I was saying by the second paragraph. Contrary to my name, I actually do care. I want this game to be good, and I don't want to lose my friends who play it. There haven't been any threads about this or about the huge leaderboard drop, so I wanted to shed some light on what's going on up here. For my friends who did quit, I at least wanted everyone to be aware of why, it wasn't because of the silly hero nerf, it was because the game won't let us play anymore. For everyone still enjoying the game, I'm glad your having fun. Clash on! Clash of clans is a fun game, just not for us anymore.