Terrible TW match up - must be a bug

[Mighty_Sarlacc]

Product: Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
Platform:Apple iPhone
What type of device are you experiencing the issue with? n/a
OS Version n/a
Ally Code: (Find it here: http://bit.ly/AllyCode ) 274632373
What type of issue do you have? Gameplay
How often does the bug occur? Often (50% - 99%)
Summarize your bug Consistently matching with far superior guilds in TW.
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? My ally code is 274632373. Our guild is called Daft Plague. They are FIRST GUARD ZERO.
Connection Type Mobile
Please select your region Europe
Country UK

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This is happening regularly these days but this last one is absurd and must surely be a bug, or else the matching algorithm needs urgent tweaking. We are a 215m guild; they are 258m. We have 2 GLs; they have 8. We have 0 Ultimates; they have 6. They are 10 players short which means they’re almost certainly sandbagging - asking 10 players to skip the TW so that they come down into our bracket with 40 players who are far more advanced than ours. We were full cleared within 2 hours. If this is a bug, please fix it. If it’s not, then please acknowledge that it’s getting really hard to motivate a guild that used to love TW to keep playing and will have a huge impact on player churn/disengagement if not addressed. If the matching filtered first on guild GP, and then available GP surely that would work better and still create enough matches. Seems an easy fix with a huge impact on the player base. Please help! Thank you. 

[EA_UltraSlide · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mighty_Sarlacc and thanks for reporting this.

It appears that the matchmaking is correct as your guild had more participants than the other guild. There is only a slight difference between GP of the participants from the two guilds.

[GladOS-013]

@Mighty_Sarlacc Hey, thanks for the report! I can’t say whether the matchmaking worked as intended, but every time a skewed battle like this has been checked by the team, it was correct due to the difference in # of players.

I just wanted to point out that the guild may not have “asked 10 players to sit out.” My guild actually just had this happen - despite tagging members with reminders, we only had 38 sign up, and we got paired against a guild that we steamrolled. We didn’t intend for that to happen, but some players were busy and a couple missed the notification.

It’s easy to assume negative intent in your opponent, but that might not be accurate.

[Mighty_Sarlacc]

You might be right @GladOS-013. I’ve seen sandbagging deliberately orchestrated within a guild but I’m sure it also happens very innocently at times as well. As you suggest, it’s very hard to know.

I’ve raised this as a bug (under advise) more in hope I expect because, regardless of the intent from the opposition this time, if the current matchmaking allows this kind of mis-match to happen and allows some guilds to exploit it unfairly... then the matchmaking isn’t good enough. I suggested a simple way to improve it above, although there may be a reason that doesn’t work. 

One things for sure though: this is our 3rd questionable at best match up on the trot and it drives good people away from the game, which is not what any of us want. 

[EA_UltraSlide · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mighty_Sarlacc and thanks for reporting this.

It appears that the matchmaking is correct as your guild had more participants than the other guild. There is only a slight difference between GP of the participants from the two guilds.

[Mighty_Sarlacc]

Hi @EA_UltraSlide - thanks so much for looking into this and confirming. I feared this might be the case. 

By my rough maths, the 40 players from the opposition (if equally divided) would have an average GP of about 5.2m. Our active players had an average GP of about 4.4m. That’s actually a big difference when it’s across 40+ players, in terms of game resources and number of tier 1 or 2 squads available. 

Is there any way you can reclassify this ticket as a feature upgrade rather than a bug @EA_UltraSlide and move it to the right people?  Matching first on total available GP (rather than average player GP, and then total available GP) makes the system very vulnerable to mis-matches such as ours above. Some guilds will be aware of this and will be exploiting it, which threatens to really damage the game mode and motivation/participation (it already is). 

I’d really appreciate this issue getting further consideration. It’s really important to many of us. 

Many thanks!