GAC, 2.5 mil difference against opponent

"Waqui;c-2350867" wrote:

"Kathark;c-2350855" wrote:

"Starslayer;c-2350816" wrote:

"Kathark;c-2350725" wrote:

"Starslayer;c-2350707" wrote:

"Kathark;c-2350650" wrote:

"Artumas;c-2349943" wrote:
....So, back here, again, to offer some personal experience and input.

I'm at 6.3M,closing fast on 6.4M.
I have 1 GL, Executor, CAT.
I'm getting close to JMK, and should be able to grab JMK, JKL, JML and Starkiller by the end of the year, pretty easily. So while my GL count currently sucks for my GP, that'll change soon, and honestly, I find the rest of my roster does a lot more anyway.

While I usually lose against the people in the 7.5-9M range that I face, it's usually close and generally largely boils down to a couple point differences, generally caused by me not having my CLS team at high relics yet and thus needing to 2-team certain defenses I otherwise wouldn't.

The notable defensive victories I've had in recent-ish months, are...
Padme + CAT holding against multiple SLKR teams, DR somehow timing out a JML team (Legitimately have no clue what happened in this fight), Geos eating 2 different opponent's entire rosters (No, seriously, I've had 2 different opponents in the past like 4 months spend 5+ teams against my geos. One didn't even clear them.), my fully sub-G12 mon mothma team holding against about 70% of my opponents for at least 1 battle, and my Executor holding for between 3 and 5 battles about 80% of the time.

I have a defense-oriented GL, that I use for offense, because pretty much every single one of my opponents has more GLs than me, but often only set 1 or 2 on defense.

The reasons my opponents lose: Having 4+ GLs vs a 1 GL roster and only setting 0-2 GLs on defense. I legitimately have no clue why this happens as much as it does, but I fairly regularly get people with 7M+ GP and 4+ GLs that set literally zero GLs on defense and then lose to me low-manning their entire defense. If you're doing this, stop doing it. You'll win more.
Treating New!GAC like Old!GAC. Honestly, this is probably why these people are setting zero GLs on defense, but SO many people go offense-heavy against inferior rosters when they really don't need to, because you just need literally 1 banner to win and winning by 1 banner or 1000 doesn't change anything.
Using terrible defenses instead of good defenses.
If you're one of these like 50 people I've faced in GAC that set SEE on defense, THAT is why you're losing.
I can't emphasize how baffling some of the defenses I encounter are. People at 7M GP 4 GLs that set 1 GL on defense and that GL is SEE, the only one you can reliably 2-team without any dedicated counters and a literally standard CLS team at high relics can potentially 1-round.
Setting stuff like BHs, Ewoks, Geos and other various extremely easily countered and low-manned teams on defense when your roster is by far deep enough not to need to.
Set REAL defenses, people. When we're talking massive "unfair" GP mismatches like this we're rarely talking about K1. Defenses matter.

And... not knowing matchups at all.
The biggest reason I beat the majority of my opponents is simply game knowledge.
Those people that had their entire roster eaten by geos? One of them used a full relic Padme team against a G12/relic GBA geo team. Zero kills. Time out.
Because Padme is NOT a good geo counter team.

Learn your matchups, and have dedicated counters for your standard defensive teams that you encounter at your matchmaking range. And have priority. If your main priority for CLS is SEE, then use him against SEE first, then maybe other GLs, then GAS, then other teams you'd use CLS for. Don't throw your CLS at the front wall that has none of the teams you'd use CLS for when you have other dedicated counter teams for the teams that ARE in the front wall.

And lastly...
You will lose.
Accept that.

You're not going to have a 100% win rate.
You're not going to have a 75% win rate.
Most likely, it'll be in the 40-60% range.
And that's perfectly fine.

You won't be able to win every match against every opponent.
But you should still try your best, because you never know, your opponent might just be really really bad and throw the match.
So don't throw them throwing by being bad yourself.

There's a LOT of tools and resources for discovering and learning PVP matchups in this game.
Use them. Improve. Win.

As far as I can tell everything you say above is valid… at high levels. The choices in development and play style between a 4 and 6M player are viable areas to explore and “git good”. Sadly down in carbonite, my 1.2 M 4z, 0r account is coming up against 2-4M multi relic teams. There are no counters, no clever strategies, no superior mod sets that can make me competitive, let alone win. Sometimes I face a close match and that does inspire me to see the holes in my roster (I need a Geo counter for example). But mostly it’s a drag. And I’m not facing these rosters because “I’m so good and they are bad”. It’s cause they don’t play often and I win by default. It’s a mess down at the bottom, and a GP % range enforced on brackets would do wonders to make it fun, and lead to the exact deeper learning and enhancement that you describe.

You'll win and will not face them again. Hopefully they'll stay at the bottom sooner than later and the real fun will begin.

Sadly there’s a hundred like them right behind. It’s a hailstorm of falling accounts that don’t care about GAC but sign up to keep the pittance of crystals flowing. Then every once and a while they play and crush me. This is why a GP based bracket down here would work. Let the high GP accounts be forced to play each other. That way half of they will be forced to win and move up out of the bottom. I’d love to see stats on the GP ranges in every SR bucket in carbonite.

If it’s a big cloud it could take some time, but as they’re inactive, you’ll pass through… eventually. A gp bracket will demotivate players to improve their roster, so i don’t think it’s an option. Hopefully they’ll figure something out if it’s not anecdotal and the journey through mostly inactive players is indeed a long one, because it doesn’t seem a lot of fun.

Since folks asked. Here is my last GAC bracket. GP range was 800K to 4M. The 800K account went 3-0 against ops who never attacked. I went 1-2, the only win against a non attacker. Same guy attacked me who didn’t attack the low acct. GAC before that I went 0-3. Which should give me “easier” matches. Nope. There are about 40k folks in Carbonite4. Surely making competitive matches should be possible.
https://swgoh.gg/p/854738774/gac-bracket/
Ally code 854-738-774

You won 5/12 in the most recent season - and a couple of your losses could have been wins instead. MM is not all bad.

Oh not all bad for sure. There are one or two good matches in that series where we both played and I could have won with a different squad etc. it’s just no fun wading through all of the “unwinnable” matches. I’d love it if every match was competitive and I had to really learn my squads and mods and every win or loss improved my game. It seems like this should be possible given the wealth of data available to CG and the number of players, but the system is “broken” in that it produces all these bad matches as well as good ones. If it happened once a bracket I might let it go. But it’s clearly more. I still blame the tie to crystal income. It means there are a ton of players who don’t like or care about GAC who get in the pool anyway and mess it up for the rest of us. Again, this is particularly bad in carbonite. I can’t even relate to the folks complaining about relative GL counts etc. That might be “broken” too, but clearly we need different algorithms at different tiers. It’s not even the same game down here.