Quote Originally Posted by sister morphine View Post
It doesn't necessarily have to be like that. If some of the suggestions I made below were taken up, the rivals list changes could be an improvement. The important thing would be to not include the value of defence buildings in the normal stats profile, so they would only come into play when someone tries to rob you. Repeated failures woud give an incentive to improve attack stats, while the high iph players would have the same incentive to improve defence stats and defence buildings.
Yes, that may be a (partial) solution. Unfortunately, believing in that solution would require me to put faith in Gree managing a delicate balance between attack and defense stats and having defense buildings stats compatible with stats inflation. Given my past experiences with changes and the tendency of attack growing over defense I am lacking that faith.

On a second thought I am not really convinced your solution would work for the incentive of improving your attack (or to improve your defense by equipment), as any of those stat increase would only give you stronger rivals. IMO pairing by stats does not make sense when you want to have a competition over stats.