Medals; a Guide on What They do

How do medals effect you, and why should you care?

Alright, if you take nothing else away from this guide I want it to be this: Medals are your Matchmaker. You are not matchmade based on unit levels, win loss, streaks, or anything else. Purely your medals. No, not your combined NOD + GDI medals, just the medals for the faction you are playing right now. So why should you care? That win streak where you went 5 games in a row and got 120 medals? Feels good. But you just went up in the matchmaker by 120 medals. So is your army really able to handle this leap? Or did you just doom yourself to some hard games?

The Matchmaker sucks! All it does is give me +2 and +3 games! 

This is a pretty common symptom I see popping up within the community. People are upset at losing challenge battle medals, or streak medals in masters, but they don't realize the inherent danger of getting medals faster than their army is progressing. One of the most dangerous things you can do with your account is play too much after the game stops rewarding you. To this end, I only recommend playing your 10 wins and daily bounties if you are at even levels and want to stay playing against mostly even levels. If you continue to play after this point, you will inflate your medal count while your army doesn't grow. This can real to playing against +2 or +3 enemies, which leads to challenge battles which means you no longer lose medals which means you are stuck playing against +2 and +3 armies. See the problem?

Luckily on the first Monday of every month there will be a league reset, throwing you down a few leagues and rewarding you for your progress. So feel free to grind out some leagues just before the reset, see how far you can push yourself. 

If you want to play beyond your bounties and 10 wins, perhaps try alliance battles, or seek out custom games on the C&C Rivals Discord. There are plenty of players always looking for a tournament rules (no levels) game there to try both silly things and serious strategies. 

Well I screwed the pooch by getting too many medals already, what can I do?

1) Purposely lose games over and over until you are at the bottom of your league. You can't drop below the league until the reset, but hopefully this lowers the pain of an underleveled army wedged into a league that is too high for you.

2) Every time you get a 3 game win streak, throw the 4th game. This should roughly shed those extra streak medals and also break your streak. This way you don't artificially raise your medal count by playing against poor players, or just plain old getting lucky. If you are ready to advance to the next league, then feel free to keep them. This is only advice for people who are already facing almost always 1,2 or 3+ players consistently. 

3) Take a break and wait for the league reset. 

So how DOES the matchmaker work exactly?

Below is what a developer has said on the topic:

Got any questions about medals or the matchmaker? Ask away! Want to comment on if this method is good, or sucks? Please do so in another thread. I would like to keep this thread focused on helping players understand medals and how they affect their matchmaking. Thanks!