Q&A: Sandbagging Response

"BobcatSkywalker;c-2023874" wrote:

"TheRHOMBUS;c-2023862" wrote:

"StarSon;c-2023846" wrote:

"Obi1_son;c-2023802" 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?

My money would be on the guild with 50 players

Chances are they will have more meta toons/teams

Well, then you would be wrong. Because the guild with 40 players has 40 of each meta team with all the appropriate zetas and most at g13. The guild with 50 will have maybe 30-35 of most of the meta teams, without all the zetas, and with worse gear levels.

Why doesn’t the guild with 50 have 40+?

Because it doesn't fit his narrative.

He has to assume the group with 40 has all 40 g13 and the group with 50 have only 30 g13 meta teams.

In reality either group can have 20, 30, 40, or 50 g13 meta teams and the difference in gp can be completely on the bottom ends of the rosters or even in ships.

The only thing we do know for sure is both guilds have roughly the same active gp

It's got nothing to do with "my narrative." Sure, they might have that many, but in my experience they don't.

Here are two examples (one from August and one from September). In the first one, we got sandbagged and lost, in the second we sandbagged and won.

Also, this first one, the character numbers were close enough to not matter, so I didn't include them in the screenshot.


This one the Revans and Malaks were a big difference, so I included those. The rest of the characters DSR tracks were not significantly different.


And these are just two examples from a single guild's matches. For us, anecdotally, 95% of our matches are sandbagged in one direction or the other. I can provide many more matchup screenshots if you want.