Forum Discussion

mj4pzod24qlx's avatar
mj4pzod24qlx
Seasoned Newcomer
2 months ago

TW matchmaking is horrible

TW matchmaking is horrible.  As a guild event we have everyone join and look forward to a fair fight and creative strategy.   Instead we get matched to a sandbagging guild and have no chance to win.  So basically strategy needs to be lose 2 so you can get an easy matchup or sandbag like everyone else.  We as a guild don’t believe in sandbagging…..why can’t you match with same size guilds, same amount of players or something?   Why is it so bad?   It really doesn’t make sense the way it is now, rewarding guilds who force players not to join.  What is that all about?   It is getting worse as these guilds sandbag to work the system. 

  • JinxZod's avatar
    JinxZod
    Rising Newcomer

    There is no point in engaging in TW majority of the time. It’s the time to take off before TB and have a mini game break I guess.  The rewards doesn’t matter, it’s the match making, you either try or don’t. 

  • norril's avatar
    norril
    Seasoned Novice

    Its sad to see the community come up with various solutions and suggestions just to watch CG ignore them over and over again. Matchmaking purely based on GP, joined GP alone will never be balanced with the inclusion of datacrons and different squad compositions. The release of greatmother into TW is proof of that. A 40 member guild with 30 greatmothers is going to derail a 50 member guild with the same GP (yeah its an extreme comparison) with no greatmothers. Its not all about GP. Its about whether CG bothers to add some balancing elements or not. In this case we all know they want money so its never going to go your way. The design is to increase Frustration so you spend. So continue spending with all the bugs you'll never get fixes. 

  • 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.

  • DarthJobbie's avatar
    DarthJobbie
    Seasoned Traveler

    I agree it needs a whole reshaping alongside gac/pvp events. The new pc mode allows people to forfeit instead of TM loading, that will be a major change in battles

  • TW itself is old and lame and hasn't been updated in 3-4 years.  Low priority for CG to worry about, similar to GAC.  Realize though that generally, you'll get two challenging matches, then two easier matches.  If you get beat up enough, you'll get easier opponents.

  • DarthJobbie's avatar
    DarthJobbie
    Seasoned Traveler

    Ive no idea what sandbagging is. We mostly win, i get the gp involved bracket but darjelp suggests it no longer is so what is the detrimental effect on home or away? We win because we defend as well as we can and dogged in getting by walls. Sandbagging surely isnt foolproof?

  • Luxray0's avatar
    Luxray0
    Rising Novice

    Agreed, sandbagging is totally stupid and should be disincentivized not encouraged. Currently matchmaking is based on total gp of participating members but I think an easy way to fix this would be to just base matchmaking on average gp of participating members instead. If your guild is not active enough for TW then yes, you should be losing matches. Or otherwise split guilds into brackets so that you cannot be matched up with a guild that has more than a 5 member difference in participation. Can't believe that sandbagging has been allowed for so long. My guild 330M is being matched against a 440M guild and for whatever reason the fact that our guild is active means that we get to lose this TW. 

    • DarjeloSalas's avatar
      DarjeloSalas
      New Vanguard

      The problem is, matchmaking used to be based on the total gp of participating members, but it isn’t any more, as there’s an element of a guild’s recent TW results also being considered. 

      I’ve seen horrendous matchups in both directions, where our opponent had fewer members sign up than we did but we had a huge gp advantage, and the same with us being short handed but matched with a much bigger guild who were at 50/50. 

      I’m all for improvements to TW matchmaking, but we need to know what problem we are solving first. 

      • Luxray0's avatar
        Luxray0
        Rising Novice

        Maybe you are right, although I have not seen any evidence of this in all my time playing TW. Total gp of participating members is clearly the main matchmaking factor. 99% of the time when insurmountable guild mismatches happen it is because the larger guild has low participation. And as I'm sure most would agree, the number 1 factor in determining guild TW strength is the average roster size of a guild.

        The problem that needs solving is bad TW matchups, which is almost exclusively caused by participation. Maybe some bad matchups could still happen, I know that some guilds will force everyone to sign up for TW but not care about participation on offense, which generally leads to a free win for the opponent, but usually nobody has an issue with this. The issue is when guilds are trying their best to win and are being given no chance by the matchmaking system. Forcing guilds to only compete with others that have a similar amount of participating members seems like it would solve this issue immediately, no?