Q&A: Sandbagging Response

"Obi1_son;c-2023813" wrote:

"Nikoms565;c-2023739" wrote:

"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?

Bingo!!!!

But it does happen, and it can make sense.

Start with the extreme end, as it makes for easy math.

(Assume a perfect world here, where you are in a uniform guild of 50 players at 5M GP each for 250M GP)

You sit out 10 players in rotation every TW for 200M active GP and 20 defensive slots.

You get matched against a guild with 200M active GP (if they are a full 50, that means they have an average GP of only 4M - you can bring roster bloat into it all you want, but by the time you are hitting 5M GP, your roster bloat isn’t going to be much more than 500K), leaving you at least another 500k (or the equivalent of 4 fully relic 7 teams to 5 g12+ teams or some combination there of) PER PLAYER of high end teams.

Your team is the one setting the ‘pace’, as the number of available slots is based on your guild only having to set and defeat the ‘normal’ 4 squads and 1 fleet per player (but each player has 500K or better worth of quality toons to do so with). This makes it extremely more likely that you (as a guild) are going to get high efficiency first round wins, and lowers the opposing guilds chance to do so - it doesn’t matter if the other guild has ‘more meta’ teams if they are overall weaker from squad to squad and don’t get to bring them all to bear because of the size of the battlefield.

But why do this?
Sitting out 10 players means you still get to participate in 8 out 10 TW.
(And this does presume a 100% Win rate here, but really, the worst case scenario is that you draw another sandbagging guild - which the math is against, because there are a whole lot more 200M guilds than 250M guilds - so you have to play a mirror match, it seems a pretty fair gamble)

Winning 5 out of 10 at near equivalent GP and you take home 25 Zeta Mats (3 x 5 for wins, 2 x 5 for losses) and 35 Omegas.
Winning 10 of 10 TW’s (that any given player participates in 8 of 10 of) and you take home 24 zeta mats and 32 Omegas in the same time frame.

Which doesn’t make sense from a rewards standpoint and is why you don’t typically see that large of a gap any more (and if you do, it is almost certainly not intentional). But if you drop it to 5 members sitting out, (participating in 9 out of 10) the math changes.
You now have a 600K per player advantage (and again, assuming half of that is ‘bloat’), leaving a per player advantage of around 3 high quality teams. The reward structure looks a bit different too, as now you are sitting on a very probable 27 zeta mats and 36 Omegas, as well as about 10% higher quantity of salvage rewards.

Now, if your guild is a lean mean PVP focused fighting machine, it doesn’t make much sense, as you are likely already winning higher than 50% of your TW.

But if you are an ‘Everyman’ guild with a mix of collectors, raid specialists, PVP kings and everything in between, it can actually be a pretty easy method of squeaking out slightly better rewards with a whole lot less work.
Do I agree with it? Absolutely not, it is gaming the system in the worst possible way... but it is out there.

EDIT: Dog decided to jump in my lap and I accidentally posted original with about 70% of text and incorrect reward numbers posted...