Q&A: Sandbagging Response

"JDK82;c-2024046" wrote:
I would like to give one example where we faced a much stronger guild and had to play 21 territories (meaning they played with 42 and we missed 2 players (just had 49 in the guild and 1 didnt join)



The outcome:



In probably 4 out of 5 tws we would have lost this one, because we got heavily outmatched and then the even the best strategy would in the best case get you close in score and that's it.

Another option of making sandbagging less attractive would be to keep the 25 squads/territory mandatory regardless of how many join.

Looks like absolutely amazing matchmaking to me. Some folk will grumble about anything.

"BobcatSkywalker;c-2024422" wrote:

"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.

I’m not trying to prove sandbagging. But to appease you guys that don’t like the term, the two screenshots I provided were situations in which one guild was at 50 members and the other was at 48 or fewer. The Discord bot shows the advantage that doing that gives.

The solution to the matchmaking problem is fairly straightforward:

Currently, guilds are matched based on total GP of the participating players from each guild. Then the number of defensive slots is equal to half of the player count from the smaller guild.

The fix would be to have a two step match:

sort guilds by number of participants (could group odds & evens together so 41 & 42 would be in the same bucket)

match based on GP for each bucket


This way, matches would have very similar average GP and very similar total GP both, regardless of how many joined. Therefore it would completely eliminate the incentive (perceived or real) for holding out players to get a more favorable match.

It would also reduce the pool of guilds for a particular join range, so rematches would be more common.

"DarjeloSalas;c-2024050" wrote:
@EventineElessedil - my goodness you were on a roll last night.

No, I was not claiming it took me 5 seconds to go through 13 pages. I said I found evidence of what you have been denying is possible in 5 seconds, solely looking at the 13th page.

Specifically, I mean this post and follow up:


So that’s 46 signed up facing 35 or 36. A difference of at least 10.

I’ll await your skewed interpretation of this and pithy remarks, because it looks unlikely you’ll apologise and admit you were wrong.

I know, right? Far too much time on this topic. Suffice it to say I already conceded that my previous understanding of numbers of TW registered players may not have been correct. See here:

"EventineElessedil;c-2023880" wrote:
So here you go: you are right.

You don't like the level of detail in my post, or the way I write, that's okay neither do I. I do my best. The problem is that it's a complicated subject when you start thinking about it, but you are free to not think about it if that's your preferred approach. There is a difference between having a productive, enlightening discussion and slinging insults, a concept that not many people seem to understand these days. I don't know why this discussion should hurt your feelings and require an apology. Have a nice day.

"BeralCator;c-2024448" wrote:

"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.

Having 40 r7 malaak vs 50 g13 malaak isnt the only way they can match, surely both guilds could have all malaak at r7 and the difference in gp can be elsewhere. But ok I'll go with your example in your case the guild with 40 r7 malaak has much superior teams so they should win, even if they had 10 alts with 200k each just farming coins that joined they would still win with 40 sanbagged or 50 full strength

This is absolute insanity that people have complained about sandbagging for like months or longer and they still dont know what it is? What rock are these people living under?

"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.

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

I get that, but if you end up endlessly debating what sandbagging is eventhough both sides of the argument can actually agree on the sollution, you're just wasting eachothers time. I see that happening in pretty much every thread on this topic.

Just because the solution to a problem is the same whether it is intentional or not doesn't mean the difference is irrelevant. To say in one sentence that guilds that sandbag are underhand and deserve to have people leave, then in another say it doesn't matter why it happens is the same as just insulting every guild with non-mandatory participation in TW, which isn't a reasonable way of going about things. All the maths suggesting the advantage have assumed a drastic increase in success while also saying it happens almost all the time, which are two points that can't both be true, else most sandbagging guilds would just be matched up against other sandbagging guilds, their win rate goes down, they don't get the increase in zetas. It also assumes that if you don't sandbag you win exactly 50% of the time, but if a guild is committed enough to sandbag, it's committed enough to put in the organisation to win more than they lose.

"Nikoms565;c-2024310" wrote:

"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

The hardest thing would be to find an algorithm that makes even matches while maintaining the incentive to develop your roster. I guess it's two mutually exclusive goals.

"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.

In theory, yes, but the members of the 50 participants guild only have 80% roster GP on average, compared to their opponents, and will be less likely to have the same amount of META teams or counters to the newest META teams.