Grand Arena matching leaves me flabbergasted

GAC MM is 100% based on Skill Rating. Yours has been going up, which is why you climbed to Bronzium. Your opponent's has been going down, and that's why he fell to Bronzium.

There is no matchmaking. You and everyone else has a GAC skill rating. You get matched with 7 players directly adjacent to you in the skill rating ladder. 

That’s all there is to it. 

Well I think that is just stupid and very unfair…us free to play can hardly find joy anywhere in this game nor have the feeling we can actually accomplish anything….the setup of this game is just wonderful

And when there are than 7 others with the same skill level it is a complete mystery to me how they group you.  Does anyone have any clue how they come up with that order in the same skill #?

You can call it stupid if you like, many agree with you but most agree it’s far better than the previous system. 

But I’m not sure how you can call it unfair. Everyone is treated exactly the same. 

nottenstI’m not sure how the tied SRs are ranked. If I had to guess, I’d say by our player ID (the long one, not the allycode). I remember proving it wasn’t allycode or by historical GAC points a while back by checking with a few guild members on the same rating. 

Yeah, it has nothing to do with anyone's roster - it's 100% about wins and losses - there are no other considerations and no 'matchmaking' in any conventional sense of the term.

Does it matter?

Same here.. The skill rating idea is flawed. If they lost due to not participating in a round, they didn't lose based on skill. An easy way to clean this up is to penalize those who miss a round (or all rounds) by not allowing them in the next GA. That would force those with high GP to play the match or just sit out.  You score a zero ( no attempts) , you sit out the next one. The result of this would remove high GP players in lower tiers. They would be forced to move up to a tier that they belong. Those with lower GP  would compete against lower GP that are closer in skill. That would increase the skill and reduce lopsided matches. Those of you who say "its better than it was,  please stop covering for CG". This is not a good match making experience.

The selection determines the bracket.  It would be nice to know if it is purely random or if there are some factors at work.  

This wouldn't do anything. Players who just do one battle for rewards would still fall, and be met by players climbing. Your system would just reinforce doing the one battle, perhaps making it even worse for the lower player in the lopsided match. Right now a player that is faced with a defence they cannot score more than 10 against has the chance that the other player does nothing at all. If the big player would be punished in any way, they will definitely run a battle, probably a win on auto.

Also, what about when life gets in the way and you don't get to attack? You get punished for that? Broken phone, sick family, injury, work emergency, there are any number of reasons a player may not attack. No punishment needs to be meted out for that.