TW Sandbagging...needs to be regulated..

"Gonzolo;c-1861816" wrote:
You’re also forgetting about alliances who could easily shuffle players around for mutual advantage.

this

"Ikky2win;c-1862095" wrote:
There is a difference between sandbagging and a few people sitting out because of real life or because they don’t like tw. I feel like they need to implement penalties based on your gp and how many people participate.

I understand a guild only bringing 46/50. That to me is not sandbagging. The guild could be down a few people and have alts in the guild while they try to recruit. They could have a couple people on vacation and a couple people who don’t like TW. Lots of reasons to be done 1-4 people. More than that though and I do think it’s sandbagging. Bringing 40 people instead of 50 just to get an easier opponent should somehow be penalized, like making it so you get one less zeta for a win.

It was 38...I couldn't agree with you more and needs to be addressed, which is why we wanted to bring this up.

The simple solution is to add additional GP tiers above 120.
If there was a 200 GP tier and a 220 tier for example, there would be less incentive to drop below them.

The discussion of this 'problem' (which, I'm not sure that it is) should be more about the problems of using GP as a metric to balance players and guilds. GP is fundamentally flawed as it doesn't scale well with the actual power level of the characters.

Look at Farmboy Luke and Commander Luke. Max GP is 23364 vs 27129. But is Farmboy Luke really worth ~75% 86% of CLS? I don't think so.

As for the issue of bringing less than your whole guild into a TW - participation has to be optional, simply because carrying people who don't or won't play is 100x worse than playing a top guild who is 'sand bagging' as the OP puts it (although I don't 100% agree with that interpretation, and welcome the better competition at lower levels). 26 players in a mid-level guild who all want to play is a way better gaming experience than 50/50 and 24 ppl just don't show up.

Edited because I did the actual math in my comparison above

"jonnydeathstar;c-1862344" wrote:
The discussion of this 'problem' (which, I'm not sure that it is) should be more about the problems of using GP as a metric to balance players and guilds. GP is fundamentally flawed as it doesn't scale well with the actual power level of the characters.

Look at Farmboy Luke and Commander Luke. Max GP is 23364 vs 27129. But is Farmboy Luke really worth ~75% 86% of CLS? I don't think so.

As for the issue of bringing less than your whole guild into a TW - participation has to be optional, simply because carrying people who don't or won't play is 100x worse than playing a top guild who is 'sand bagging' as the OP puts it (although I don't 100% agree with that interpretation, and welcome the better competition at lower levels). 26 players in a mid-level guild who all want to play is a way better gaming experience than 50/50 and 24 ppl just don't show up.

Edited because I did the actual math in my comparison above

But are you suggesting that Your guild has 50 maxed farmboy luke’s?

Or is your example suggesting that your guild has 50 mid-gear farmboy luke’s Inflating your GP while the opposing guild has none?

Most players have similar roster bloat if they have been around for awhile. And TW has been around long enough that a guild who is playing it competitively has had a chance to reduce the impact of bloat (if you stopped gearing worthless toons 6 months ago and focused on strong pvp toons instead, then an increasingly larger portion of your GP is “usable”).

"Intrapidoo;c-1862365" wrote:
Would be an easy fix. Punish guilds that leave people out by having to fill defense based on the guild with the higher number of participants. So for example usual opponent of my guild leaves out 8-10 people so we fill on average with 21 teams at 162mil gp and go up against 180-185mil gp guilds.

We join with 50 members so make them fill defense with 25/territory. That would even out their obvious cheating. OR give some balls to the people in charge because they have none whatsoever, and let the person who actually have the courage to ban entire guilds and not an **** of either 1 of the most popular guilds where gamechangers, beta testers, developers are.

It would be hard to call this a punishable offense since:

a) there is nothing saying that they can’t do it
b) you have no way of knowing why members aren’t joining (despite your strong suspicion)

That’s why the option of creating additional tiers makes the most sense, so that these guilds don’t have any incentive to drop GP.

If you are in a 160M guild, do you really care if TI and TI battle it out at 260M for better rewards?

Probably not - what you want is for the 180M guild to have incentive to stay up there and battle each other for slightly scaled rewards instead right?

Oh, and the first part of your idea creates the same problem: punishing guilds who are legitimately short on players. Any solution needs to be above board and not require anyone to jump to any conclusions about why players aren’t registering.

"Ikky2win;c-1862095" wrote:
I understand a guild only bringing 46/50. That to me is not sandbagging. The guild could be down a few people and have alts in the guild while they try to recruit. They could have a couple people on vacation and a couple people who don’t like TW. Lots of reasons to be done 1-4 people. More than that though and I do think it’s sandbagging. Bringing 40 people instead of 50 just to get an easier opponent should somehow be penalized, like making it so you get one less zeta for a win.

The issue with setting arbitrary limits for a problem like this is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. We are around 66m GP, active but casual and generally 0-2 players short of full and our TW participation is consistently around 38-42 which I actually consider pretty good given our casual nature. We aren't sandbagging, we just don't require our members to join (though we certainly encourage them to).

"TVF;c-1861659" wrote:

"BobcatSkywalker;c-1861606" wrote:
We have been doing this since tw started. Ideally you have just over 120M gp then u fight vs guilds that barely have any trayas but still get 3 zeta rewards.

It's not cheating it's called strategy, sandbagging GP is a valid strategy.

Wow, it must be great fun to be in your guild and miss out on rewards because of sandbagging, or alternatively win without trying.

It's fun to clear the board and have the enemy stuck on our front wall yes.

Also your assuming people are missing out on rewards but no one misses anything they participate in there are ways around this.

5 or 10 guys can clear a whole guild at the lower end of the top TW tier because defenses in 120 130m guilds are so poor. 10 guys with 10 good 5 man teams clears 100 battles easily. Plus some teams just can't be beat by a lesser guild like a great Revan team. TW favors top heavy guilds with a few whales and the rest just low level farmers. This is known, you guys call it sandbagging.

It works because the whole other guild can try but if they can't clear the elite teams we win automatically. they get stuck on front lines vs our top teams. usually they won't be able to beat our elite teams since they are 50/50 with much less GP per member and we are 35/50 but our GP from our 35 is equal to their 50. Translation = they don't have super elite teams, we do...they also have more mid level junk teams.

Sandbagging GP is a valid strategy for GA & TW. get with the program or stop complaining.

"Intrapidoo;c-1862365" wrote:
Would be an easy fix. Punish guilds that leave people out by having to fill defense based on the guild with the higher number of participants. So for example usual opponent of my guild leaves out 8-10 people so we fill on average with 21 teams at 162mil gp and go up against 180-185mil gp guilds.

We join with 50 members so make them fill defense with 25/territory. That would even out their obvious cheating. OR give some balls to the people in charge because they have none whatsoever, and let the person who actually have the courage to ban entire guilds and not an **** of either 1 of the most popular guilds where gamechangers, beta testers, developers are.

Rather than punish you could find guilds with the same average GP per player. This would force thise to play against similar rosters. Rather than just using overall GP. A guild of 30 with 5mg gp, is still outclassing a guild of 50 at 3mgp.

So many wauys to fix the problem and yet the players who call out for what is obviously a strategy to exploit the system are the ones getting shafted.

@BobcatSkywalker Sounds like a lot of work for a zeta. And do you factor in lost tickets / lost raids or are your two guilds spending so much time coordinating the moves that you leave nothing on the table?

I'm just amazed you found two entire guilds full of like-minded yet insecure individuals that are more interested in taking the easy path to marginally better rewards than measuring themselves against actual competition.