Q&A: Sandbagging Response

When you purposefully sit out players to get an advantage, it causes a sandbag.
You get 40 people with mostly relic'd characters playing against 50 with way less gear/resources.

"Kyno;c-2023687" wrote:
Sandbagging is not losing to a stronger opponent. Sandbagging is an intentional act to try and force a favorable match.

What you are talking about is an issue with matchmaking that should be addressed.

What he was asking for is information to look at a guild to see if they did this intentionally.

These are 2 different things.

Disagree here. His response clearly indicates he doesn't think intentionally sandbagging is possible. We know that it is. And we know that it's not always intentional.

I totally agree with @StarSon.. it may be unintentional sometimes, but it happens all the time intentionally.

I can't imagine it's that common an occurrence, why would useful and active guild members agree to sit out to increase the likelihood of the rest of the guild winning? It just means they get no rewards, so I doubt people would volunteer to lose two zetas once in order to win one later regularly.

"StoemKnight;c-2023719" wrote:

"trevyclause;c-2023712" wrote:
sorry for my lack of knowledge, but can someone briefly explain how sandbagging works? It seems likes it’s not possible for it to give you an advantage, but I would assume I just don’t know how it works.

To me it just seems that the matchmaking system just does a not-so-great job at taking into account the varying rosters across the board.

A group of 40 players, with 5.5M GP (mostly relic'd) takes on a guild of 50 players, mostly 4.4M (barely relic'd), both are 220M guilds...
Who do you think wins easily?

If you are 4.4M and barely relic'd, then that is your problem, I'm 3.3-ish mil and I would qualify myself as barely relic'd.

"EventineElessedil;c-2023732" wrote:

"StoemKnight;c-2023719" wrote:

"trevyclause;c-2023712" wrote:
sorry for my lack of knowledge, but can someone briefly explain how sandbagging works? It seems likes it’s not possible for it to give you an advantage, but I would assume I just don’t know how it works.

To me it just seems that the matchmaking system just does a not-so-great job at taking into account the varying rosters across the board.

A group of 40 players, with 5.5M GP (mostly relic'd) takes on a guild of 50 players, mostly 4.4M (barely relic'd), both are 220M guilds...
Who do you think wins easily?

Except this never happens ... because the number of players registered for the TW is part of the matching process. You don't get group of 40 competing against a group of 50.
You have any proof of this? It would interest me. People love to claim this but I've never seen any proof.

We had 49 people sign up last TW. They had no more than 42, which we know because there were 21 D slots per territory.

It happens plenty. Now, that doesn't mean they sandbagged, but the disparity in number of players registered absolutely happens.

"StarSon;c-2023695" wrote:

"Kyno;c-2023687" wrote:
Sandbagging is not losing to a stronger opponent. Sandbagging is an intentional act to try and force a favorable match.

What you are talking about is an issue with matchmaking that should be addressed.

What he was asking for is information to look at a guild to see if they did this intentionally.

These are 2 different things.

Disagree here. His response clearly indicates he doesn't think intentionally sandbagging is possible. We know that it is. And we know that it's not always intentional.

Just to be clear - by definition, there is no such thing as "unintentional sandbagging". If it's unintentional (i.e. players are busy IRL so choose not to sign up, people forgot to sign up, people have left the guild, etc.) that's not sandbagging.

I only make that differentiation because I think guilds are shorthanded unintentionally much more often than they are sandbagging. Think about it. If you were in a 200+ million GP guild and you were asked/forced to sit out of TW and not got any rewards, how long would you stay in that guild?

"EventineElessedil;c-2023732" wrote:

"StoemKnight;c-2023719" wrote:

"trevyclause;c-2023712" wrote:
sorry for my lack of knowledge, but can someone briefly explain how sandbagging works? It seems likes it’s not possible for it to give you an advantage, but I would assume I just don’t know how it works.

To me it just seems that the matchmaking system just does a not-so-great job at taking into account the varying rosters across the board.

A group of 40 players, with 5.5M GP (mostly relic'd) takes on a guild of 50 players, mostly 4.4M (barely relic'd), both are 220M guilds...
Who do you think wins easily?

Except this never happens ... because the number of players registered for the TW is part of the matching process. You don't get group of 40 competing against a group of 50.
You have any proof of this? It would interest me. People love to claim this but I've never seen any proof.

If you register with 50 people and the other guild has 40 million more gp in total
What do you think happens if you get matched with the same active gp? Of course they are less than 50 then
This is by far the easiest point to check

"EventineElessedil;c-2023714" wrote:
I have never seen a TW that matched 40 players against 50. You guys sure you aren't on glue?

I've seen it in my alt's guild. We were a handful of players short (42-43 active players) and made sign up to TW voluntary, since some players disliked the game mode. Back then we often had only about 36-38 sign-ups for TW and most of our matches were VERY easy victories. I assume, we were often matched with full guilds of less average GP than ours. We have since become a full guild of 50 active members, with almost everyone joining TW. Matches are now far more even.

My first question was as the Q&A response.
How do they NOT know this?