I completely agree!!
Though I do admit, I think the problem in and of itself is probably a little more complex. While GP is still a major form of matching up opponents, I understand that membership participation is a legitimate issue for some guilds. I find that in cases where guilds may only have, say, 35-40 members participating, generally speaking, they are not guilds that are going to view things through a highly competitive lens. The guilds we face tend to match up somewhat equally with us (we usually see 48-50 participating members) or have a tendency to underperform at our level. That has been my overall experience.
However, in instances where I believed the member participation reduction was intentional, we have been utterly outmatched, as the opponents have a number of teams that we simply cannot compete with.
My guild is 390 million GP, so we are very much in the middle of the pack. In our most recent war, we were matched with an opponent that had 572 million GP (they were missing two members). They entered with 34 members participating. I won’t name this guild publicly, but I will say that they are the top guild within their respective alliance and are a fully competitive guild. So, I don’t believe they “lacked” member participation, with 16 members unavailable for war at all. I believe they are intentionally lowering their GP matchup because they know they have teams in volumes that guilds in our GP range cannot compete with fairly.
So, essentially, the problem isn’t just GP matchmaking. Rather, I would argue that it’s the quality of GP versus quality of GP. You have higher-level competitive guilds reducing their overall GP value in the matchmaking process because they are capable of producing a much higher quality of GP usage at 400 million than they can at 580 million.
The best way I believe this can be addressed is to create a safeguard system within the matchmaking process. I still believe that we cannot penalise the genuine, non-competitive guilds that might legitimately struggle to produce higher levels of member participation.
What needs to be done is to retain the functionality of the current matchmaking system but break it down into brackets. When the matchmaking process takes place, it must occur within a specific bracket.
For example: Our opponents’ hard GP at the matchmaking process was 572 million GP. When entering the matchmaking process, it could match via tiers using TGP (Total Guild GP).
Tier 1: 500 million to 721 million (the highest GP guild) Tier 2: 400 million to 499 million
Tier 3: 300 million to 399 million
Tier 4: 200 million to 299 million
Tier 5: 100 million to 199 million
Tier 6: 50 million to 99 million
Tier 7: 1 GP to 49 million
Those tiers should be the first priority, and guilds cannot matchmake with any other guild whose overall GP falls outside of those bracketed tiers.
Then, create secondary matchmaking parameters that will make GP adjustments within those tiers based on member participation, and match guilds as closely as possible by GP, according to the members who have signed up. This will significantly reduce “sandbagging” and still provide each guild with some GP leeway if they genuinely don’t have full GP numbers.
