Q&A: Sandbagging Response

"maraexibil;c-2024297" wrote:

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

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.

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

No. If you see my above comments, I do not differentiate between forcing people to sit out and people just not joining.

We ask only that if you join, you set your assigned defense and participate on offense. Because we know going in light will benefit us, we do not try very hard to get everyone to sign up.

"StarSon;c-2024317" wrote:

"maraexibil;c-2024297" wrote:

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

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.

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

No. If you see my above comments, I do not differentiate between forcing people to sit out and people just not joining.

We ask only that if you join, you set your assigned defense and participate on offense. Because we know going in light will benefit us, we do not try very hard to get everyone to sign up.

Then it's NOT sandbagging. Many of us have responsibilities in real life and can not participate during the attack and defense phase.

If you call missing a TW "sandbagging", then every guild with signups less than the total number of members is "sandbagging." That's nearly every casual, semi-casual, active guild out there.

I don't remember if my guild ever had a 100% signup for TW.

"maraexibil;c-2024343" wrote:

"StarSon;c-2024317" wrote:

"maraexibil;c-2024297" wrote:

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

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.

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

No. If you see my above comments, I do not differentiate between forcing people to sit out and people just not joining.

We ask only that if you join, you set your assigned defense and participate on offense. Because we know going in light will benefit us, we do not try very hard to get everyone to sign up.

Then it's NOT sandbagging. Many of us have responsibilities in real life and can not participate during the attack and defense phase.

If you call missing a TW "sandbagging", then every guild with signups less than the total number of members is "sandbagging." That's nearly every casual, semi-casual, active guild out there.

I don't remember if my guild ever had a 100% signup for TW.

Whether you do it on purpose or not, the end result is the same. This is why I use the term regardless. Not sure why everyone gets so hung up on the terminology, when the issue is not whether a guild does it on purpose, but that the system works that way to begin with.

"StarSon;c-2024258" wrote:

"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.

You can provide all the screen shots you want they won't prove anything other than your using a discord bot.

44 vs 48 revans as evidence of sandbagging? Lol that's just ridiculous

@JDK82 for your pic...

Seriously your evidence if sandbagging was where both guilds full cleared and the difference in score was just 50 points between the two guilds that less than 0.01% of the total score. 18880 vs 18833

So let's try describing that scenario with and without the word sandbagging to see how this works.

A ) the match was extremely close and could have gone either way but one guild narrowly won a hard fought and fun matchup.

B ) one guild sandbagged to beat another guild.

B can be applied as an excuse for a win or loss in every war based on your use of it.

If the devs can make matchmaking between guilds so close it comes down to less than 50 points I think that matchmaking is very good regardless of if you use the word sandbag or not.

That's a fact. ^^^^^^ indisputable.

All this sandbagged rhetoric is ridiculous we have like 35 sign up for tw in a 200m plus gp guild if we had to fight other 200m plus gp guilds with 50/50 players we would get crushed every war because we would be down by 15 players and like 50 to 80 million gp. That's not making better matches it's making matchmaking way more imbalanced and if you cant see it then I'm sorry.

Were a day 1 guild half the guild gets 600 and that's it... ya some people have 4.8m gp but they are bored and dont have time to play tw.

Plus all 5his cheating or sandbagging for what zetas lol wow. I find it amusing that so many people think so many other guilds actually go through the trouble to sit players out intentionally just to sandbag to get 1 or 2 extra zeta parts over a 2 and a half month period. If you even make this argument it shows a low level understanding for the game zetas dont even matter. I have 400 plus zeta parts and counting. I purposely dont use them because it makes GAC much harder. Any semicompetitive player that's knowledgable knows that zetas were once important but now they are just adding "fluff stats" to your roster that most day 1 account dont need anymore. My point is cheaters aren't going to cheat by getting favorable matchups just to get zeta rewards they dont need and that will make their future matchups less favorable to them. This is just counterintuitive.

I have almost 200k in zeta currency I can buy 100 more from the shop at anytime but why I have 400 in inventory ready to go with no one to put them on. Theres no reason to go through all the effort to sandbag forcing people to sit out so the guild can average 1 or 2 extra zeta parts every few MONTHS.

"Disruptor92;c-2024100" wrote:
@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.

Everything? Shirley you jest.

I think the question was perhaps not phrased as well as it could be, as it does imply intention to the mismatches.

The following might have been more effective:
"The community has noticed that TW matches with a large delta in active guild members are very noncompetitive and have only grown more so as GP scales while the map size remains static.

With only n*5 spots available on defense (where n is the smaller guild size), a 40-person guild that has an average GP of 5 million has a massive advantage over a 50-person guild with an average GP of 4 million, as their top 160 squads and 40 fleets will be significantly more developed.

Has any thought been put into either a) limiting match-ups to guilds with near-identical active players or b) expanding the map size so that n is the size of the larger guild (or larger)?"

"BeralCator;c-2024426" wrote:
I think the question was perhaps not phrased as well as it could be, as it does imply intention to the mismatches.

The following might have been more effective:
"The community has noticed that TW matches with a large delta in active guild members are very noncompetitive and have only grown more so as GP scales while the map size remains static.

With only n*5 spots available on defense (where n is the smaller guild size), a 40-person guild that has an average GP of 5 million has a massive advantage over a 50-person guild with an average GP of 4 million, as their top 160 squads and 40 fleets will be significantly more developed.

Has any thought been put into either a) limiting match-ups to guilds with near-identical active players or b) expanding the map size so that n is the size of the larger guild (or larger)?"

The guild with 50 can have 50 meta malaak, 50trayas, 50 of everything,
Guild with 40 has only 40 meta malaak, 40 trayas, 40 of everything.

There are advantages to both sides

"BobcatSkywalker;c-2024430" wrote:

"BeralCator;c-2024426" wrote:
I think the question was perhaps not phrased as well as it could be, as it does imply intention to the mismatches.

The following might have been more effective:
"The community has noticed that TW matches with a large delta in active guild members are very noncompetitive and have only grown more so as GP scales while the map size remains static.

With only n*5 spots available on defense (where n is the smaller guild size), a 40-person guild that has an average GP of 5 million has a massive advantage over a 50-person guild with an average GP of 4 million, as their top 160 squads and 40 fleets will be significantly more developed.

Has any thought been put into either a) limiting match-ups to guilds with near-identical active players or b) expanding the map size so that n is the size of the larger guild (or larger)?"

The guild with 50 can have 50 meta malaak, 50trayas, 50 of everything,
Guild with 40 has only 40 meta malaak, 40 trayas, 40 of everything.

There are advantages to both sides

With the regards to the Q&A, I don’t think it matters whether it’s always an advantage or not. I don’t think it matters if it’s intentional or not. My concern is that despite numerous complaints and discussions on the topic across various outlets since TW was implemented they seem to have no clue about what’s even going on.

If they had said they understand the potential advantage but don’t have an alternative they like better or don’t see it as a priority to work on or something like that I wouldn’t have cared. But not even understanding how an advantage could possibly be created is very concerning to me. It’s just another example of where CG seems to relate more to the casual players and doesn’t seem to understand what goes on with the more dedicated player base.

"BobcatSkywalker;c-2024430" wrote:

"BeralCator;c-2024426" wrote:
I think the question was perhaps not phrased as well as it could be, as it does imply intention to the mismatches.

The following might have been more effective:
"The community has noticed that TW matches with a large delta in active guild members are very noncompetitive and have only grown more so as GP scales while the map size remains static.

With only n*5 spots available on defense (where n is the smaller guild size), a 40-person guild that has an average GP of 5 million has a massive advantage over a 50-person guild with an average GP of 4 million, as their top 160 squads and 40 fleets will be significantly more developed.

Has any thought been put into either a) limiting match-ups to guilds with near-identical active players or b) expanding the map size so that n is the size of the larger guild (or larger)?"

The guild with 50 can have 50 meta malaak, 50trayas, 50 of everything,
Guild with 40 has only 40 meta malaak, 40 trayas, 40 of everything.

There are advantages to both sides

For the GP to match, the guild with 40 players will have 40 Relic 7 Malaks while the guild with 50 players will have 50 G12+3 Malaks, etc.

In a game mode where winning on the first attempt grants additional points, there is no advantage to having more teams that are all slightly worse unless the map is so large that full clears aren't certain. Currently the map is so small that both sides inevitably get full clears, but the smaller guild gets more points because their teams are so much better.

When TW started we had significantly less characters and ships than we do now. We used to stock the back rows with trash like Rogue One and Maul as we didn't have enough teams available for both offense and defense. Currently, the worst teams we are putting on defense are Relic KRUs or insanely fast Jango/Bossks, often with Nest or Wat Tambor.

If you think 40v50 match-ups are a good idea (which I personally don't agree with), the map needs to be a lot bigger so that the 50-person team can actually make use of their extra squads in an attempt to offset the 40-person team's better squads.

Food for thought, but the map for GAC involves nearly 2x the teams per person as TW. If TW had twice as many spots on defense as it currently does, I can see 50v40 matches being a lot more balanced.