Q&A: Sandbagging Response

"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+?

The guild with 50 participants has an average GP of 80% of the average GP of their 40 competitors. Less developed rosters often (not always) have fewer geared META teams/characters. But yes, at 4.4 million in theory you could have each and every META team g12+.

@EventineElessedil Everything you've said in this thread was just plain wrong. It's possible to have a difference of even more than 10 players between matched-up guilds. My guild has been on both sides of this multiple times. It's a lot more common than you think. There were times when we had like 49 people sign up and faced guilds of 38-39; and times where we had 35-37 signed up and faced guilds of 49-50 registered players (that was a pretty long time ago but the enemy guild sent us screenshots of this because we were curious and asked). MM simply goes by reigstered GP so the difference in registered players could potentially be even greater. Just because you have not experienced/seen something before, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You only talk about the question of the number of players active in a TW but a sandbagging guild could be the result of the sandbagging of each player.

Remember how players sandbagged GA by only developping 80 to 100 toons.
The new GAC matchmaking has stopped that but the TW matchmaking is still using full roster GP. so if all members were GA sandbaggers, you just have no chance against them.

Hopefully i didnt meet such an optimized guild but basically if you just compare the average GP of TOP 80 roster of each member of two guild, you will know the winner of the TW.

@Kazeb

I don't agree, that optimizing your roster to perform better is sandbagging, and it's certainly not the type of sandbagging, that CG_Cyanides addresses.

I wish people would just stop arguing about unintentional and intentional sandbagging, the end result is the same regardless. The sollution (fixing matchmaking) is also the same for intentional ánd unintentional sandbagging.
As for the dev inquiring about sandbagging, they're the ones with all the data. Just check all the matches between guilds that have a 3 or more player difference in participation and check if the guild with less players signed up wins more often. Should be easy enough, they could even check different GP regions and/or participant differences, check the w/l ratio of guilds with full participation etc. etc. to see if there's anything there.
Speaking for my guild only, our w/l ratio with full participation is lower than our w/l ratio without full participation. This could be a coincidence ofcourse.
Even if guilds with a lower number of participants win more often it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem with matchmaking. It could also be caused by something simple like guilds that sign up with less players have less players that actually don't participate eventhough they did sign up which would hurt the chances of their guild winning.
I'm no data analyst, but i'm sure someone who gets paid to do that job can figure it out.

"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.

"leef;c-2024189" wrote:
I wish people would just stop arguing about unintentional and intentional sandbagging, the end result is the same regardless. The sollution (fixing matchmaking) is also the same for intentional ánd unintentional sandbagging.
As for the dev inquiring about sandbagging, they're the ones with all the data. Just check all the matches between guilds that have a 3 or more player difference in participation and check if the guild with less players signed up wins more often. Should be easy enough, they could even check different GP regions and/or participant differences, check the w/l ratio of guilds with full participation etc. etc. to see if there's anything there.
Speaking for my guild only, our w/l ratio with full participation is lower than our w/l ratio without full participation. This could be a coincidence ofcourse.
Even if guilds with a lower number of participants win more often it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem with matchmaking. It could also be caused by something simple like guilds that sign up with less players have less players that actually don't participate eventhough they did sign up which would hurt the chances of their guild winning.
I'm no data analyst, but i'm sure someone who gets paid to do that job can figure it out.

The only reason I make the distinction is that the solution (better matchmaking) needs to be fair and not "punitive" against the smaller guild or guild with less participants than normal. In other words, it shouldn't "presume" sandbagging.

But I do agree - better matchmaking is the goal and the solution to addresses either "variant" of sandbagging.

"Nikoms565;c-2024273" wrote:

"leef;c-2024189" wrote:
I wish people would just stop arguing about unintentional and intentional sandbagging, the end result is the same regardless. The sollution (fixing matchmaking) is also the same for intentional ánd unintentional sandbagging.
As for the dev inquiring about sandbagging, they're the ones with all the data. Just check all the matches between guilds that have a 3 or more player difference in participation and check if the guild with less players signed up wins more often. Should be easy enough, they could even check different GP regions and/or participant differences, check the w/l ratio of guilds with full participation etc. etc. to see if there's anything there.
Speaking for my guild only, our w/l ratio with full participation is lower than our w/l ratio without full participation. This could be a coincidence ofcourse.
Even if guilds with a lower number of participants win more often it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem with matchmaking. It could also be caused by something simple like guilds that sign up with less players have less players that actually don't participate eventhough they did sign up which would hurt the chances of their guild winning.
I'm no data analyst, but i'm sure someone who gets paid to do that job can figure it out.

The only reason I make the distinction is that the solution (better matchmaking) needs to be fair and not "punitive" against the smaller guild or guild with less participants than normal. In other words, it shouldn't "presume" sandbagging.

The solution will not be punitive to anyone, if all matches are even (50/50 chance to win when considering the active rosters) disregarding how many players enter on either side.

It's got nothing to do with "my narrative." Sure, they might have that many, but in 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.

Your guild asks its weakest members to sit out on a TW and miss rewards because the leadership expects to be matched with a fluffier guild? What if the gambit doesn't pay off and you get matched with an equally lean guild?

Even if 10 member disparities exist in TW MM, they should occur much more infrequently than 0-4 member disparities. Rare enough that it would be quite foolish to bet on it every TW.

If a guild is organized enough to run such a complicated and risky rotation scheme, one would think they'd be organized enough to win without asking players to sit out on a TW.

1) Guilds with leadership that require players to sit out on TWs on rotation are nonexistent or rare.
2) Even if they do, it does not violate existing rules.
3) Even if you classify that as cheating (I don't think it is), the only way to prove it happened is by accessing private internal communication of the accused guilds.
4) If you lose to a leaner guild on TW, it is more likely that you were bested by your opponent than them running an elaborate rotation scheme.

I think the devs can always improve on MM algorithms, but they also shouldn't waste effort chasing phantom menaces.

"Waqui;c-2024284" wrote:

"Nikoms565;c-2024273" wrote:

"leef;c-2024189" wrote:
I wish people would just stop arguing about unintentional and intentional sandbagging, the end result is the same regardless. The sollution (fixing matchmaking) is also the same for intentional ánd unintentional sandbagging.
As for the dev inquiring about sandbagging, they're the ones with all the data. Just check all the matches between guilds that have a 3 or more player difference in participation and check if the guild with less players signed up wins more often. Should be easy enough, they could even check different GP regions and/or participant differences, check the w/l ratio of guilds with full participation etc. etc. to see if there's anything there.
Speaking for my guild only, our w/l ratio with full participation is lower than our w/l ratio without full participation. This could be a coincidence ofcourse.
Even if guilds with a lower number of participants win more often it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem with matchmaking. It could also be caused by something simple like guilds that sign up with less players have less players that actually don't participate eventhough they did sign up which would hurt the chances of their guild winning.
I'm no data analyst, but i'm sure someone who gets paid to do that job can figure it out.

The only reason I make the distinction is that the solution (better matchmaking) needs to be fair and not "punitive" against the smaller guild or guild with less participants than normal. In other words, it shouldn't "presume" sandbagging.

The solution will not be punitive to anyone, if all matches are even (50/50 chance to win when considering the active rosters) disregarding how many players enter on either side.

100% agree that that should be the goal. Of course, the devil is in the details. As with all matchmaking, finding an algorithm that actually makes even matchups is the issue