Extreme Sandbaggers

[bjquinniii]

So, what's the most extreme version of sandbagging that you've seen? Thought it might be fun to have a place to document them...

For my first entry I'll go with my current war. We're matched up against Danger! (that's the top player's name, I can't read the alliance name).

Danger! is level 292 Cold War Age (that's an age and 81 levels above our highest). His team has a total of 7 CWAs. This is all nicely balanced out by 8 virtually identical, obviously unplayed British Iron Age accounts down at the bottom (photos of the top and bottom of these accounts included).

I think 8 unplayed iron age accounts is the most I've seen in a single alliance, but then again, our wars are mostly in the 25v25 category. Has anyone seen more? I'm guessing the most extreme case would be a 50v50 matchup against an alliance carrying around 25 sandbags.

 

[cclaerbo]

8 irons and 1 medieval in a 30 man. This is by fresh. Serbian Empire using 7 bags in 25 man wars. United Allies using 5 irons in 20 man wars. The most cowardly way to play the game. Nexon you need to do something more than you’ve done because it’s getting worse and causing many to leave and quit spending money

 

[Mcnasty]

So are we supposed to not let new members in war?

 

[KniferX]

Inactive sandbags are actually new players who just haven't logged on for 300+ days?

 

[bjquinniii]

We're not talking about new players here. You're absolutely supposed to let new players in. The example I posted above is pretty obviously not new players. We're talking about 8 nearly identical accounts. They all have the absolute minimum buildings needed to participate in wars. Not a single wall up in any of them. Even though their names are Asian characters, which I can't read, 6 of them had names that were nearly identical (with only a single character in the middle being different). Their war base configurations/levels probably have not changed ever. These are not players in any sense of the word.

 

[Papa10x]

We had five irons and a classical all dead in a 20-20 last week.

 

[Spaceboy]

nah..50% of players is still good to reach maximum score. No pain, no gain !

 

[rgb209]

I guess the real question here is what algorithm would be a better alternative? Alliances will try to figure out a way to gain any advantage, so it isn’t manipulative...more just opportunistic. I personally don’t like sandbagging..perhaps put in a requirement that players have to be active AND show progress?

 

[Niblick]

It seems to me that simply allowing one attack each instead of two would force alliances to field their best teams. If they can win with only 50% or their players active then that’s what they will continue to do.

 

[kosno]

i dont think only 1 attack in WW is the solution as sometimes an unfortunate disconnect might occur during the attack or phone rings or you get distracted by real life. what do you guys think about keeping 2 attacks but only the better of the 2 would count against the score? this would prevent the war being lost by a misfortune as you would still have 2nd attack to use if an unfortunate event mentioned above occur. the fact that only 1 attack would count would force every single person to attack and reach 5* in order to reach perfect score. so in case of 5 bags which aren't able to collect any stars everyone who use them will be short up to 25 stars.


and 1 more idea is to make the 2 option of ranked/unranked war.
ranked war would be in the format mentioned above best of 2 attacks where glory would be gain/lost alliance exp gained

and unranked would be the current format which will not result in glory gain/loss but would still award the alliance exp

 

[kosno]

this way it would completely cut off the players of lower ages from the WW

 

[Radzeer]

Hi guys,
The matchmaking needs to be fine tuned.

If Nexon could have the "definition" of the bag base then. they might battle the bagging by modifying the weight of these bases.

I would call a bag such a base that is not reaching 10-20% of the points (offensive+defensive) of the median member. (for a simplification you can use level for easy comparison)
So in a 25vs25 war the median member is the one ranked #13 - if that player is lvl 200, then any base below level 40 is a bag (used level value for simplification)

Then these bags shall be "interpreted" as that mentioned median member (i.e.#13) bringing his weight instead of their own weight into the power index (sum of all defensive and offensive points of all members in war).


I believe there is an other reason for using bags, namely it increases your glory gain, and AXP (not that the latter matters these days), and are filling up war rosters to the next war size - without really risking anything. So using bags shall not be a problem, the problem is, that these bags are manipulating the matching algorithm (most probably).

Lamenting a mismatch and calling it as a result of the opponent's bags, might not be true all the time... Have seen myself bag free wars with 20+ average level difference, with huge age size differences, etc. The mismatches are tough to digest, but this is partially the result of the developer's policy. Long upgrade times makes it impossible to refill the leaving high level players - thus alliances with many high level players can't really find a match - so the criteria for matching (power index difference) had to be softened.

 

[BeerMan]

I have yet to see a good definition of a "sandbag." Every single competitive alliance manipulates war rank in some manner to gain more favorable matchups. This can be blatant, like padding the bottom of your roster with 8 inactive iron accounts, but often it is more subtle such as low level atomics with GP defense and maxed offense. That keeps their war rank low, but they still have very strong attacks. Are these sandbags? If the low level accounts on your roster are active, are they sandbags? It's not an easy question to answer, and alliances will always find a way to gain a competitive edge...

 

[sileepuppee]

Generally from what I've seen that the most outrageous sand bagging is of course on purpose and filled with someone or people making multiple accounts and in a closed alliance. Really not difficult to make several accounts in the game. If there was a fear that an inactive account would get removed, you could just simply log in so unfortunately I don't think that would help the sandbag issue. That would remove a lot of accounts but more accounts can simply be made to fill the void. Open alliances are less likely (Though it's not for sure) to have a ton of sandbags but that's just going on my war history. Maybe 1-3 is the most we come across in a 15-20 war. In my alliance, our leaders call them sandbags but our lowest in wars is 50-ish g.a. and they actually attack. We win like 75 percent of the time but it's more important for us that everyone attacks just to improve their skills.

There is no formula that will come about to ever change this part of the game. While they could come up with something, it wouldn't be in the games interest to do so. I would really like inactive players and alliances in general to be removed just to free up space in the Dominations universe. Wouldn't it lighten the load/stress on the servers/game and improve the quality (I don't know that I'm not a programmer just sounds correct). I know I will never be in a top ranked alliance ever because frankly we don't pay money/cheat and while you can get far, you can't get to the very top but I'm not interested in that moreso just having fun and the interactions with my members. I don't like seeing the alliance leaderboards that's are filled with alliances that got all the glory than made the alliance inactive just so they could stay at the top while never being taken down. I know that Korea Army for example fought to get the top spot but to move all the players into an another group and not allow people to knock you down stinks to me. I think they should penalize you glory for not being active in war the same way I think very much inactive people in general should be removed. I know this idea in itself will probably present new problems but one thing at a time.

 

[sileepuppee]

I think there's just a general idea but you're right that it's not specific. I think people just care about the more egregious bases like classic and iron age. Rather, a base that's there that has no reason whatsoever to be there other than to tip the scale in their favor. In my alliance we call our gunpowder players the sandbags but they actually attack (Or at least try they're best depending on the matchup) because we make them. We just care that people stay active.

 

[Bootney Lee Fonsworth]

I think just weighting the top half twice as much as the bottom half would go a long way. Even better would be to weight by 40/30/20/10 quartiles. While by no means perfect it would be an improvement over what we've had the last two years. There is no solution that will satisfy everyone in a 2 attacks, 1 defense format. While this scenario would push lower level members out of some middleweight alliances it would also encourage the issue to trickle up instead of the ridiculous trickle down we've had for years. Groups would be encouraged to merge and become as heavy as possible. Instead of lowering their weights through dubious means to avoid the people above them.

 

[Navalis]

Maybe Extreme Sandbagging could be picked up by ESPN2? lol...

 

[Niblick]

I like Kosno’s idea of only the best attack counting. That would solve the problem to a great degree. Another option is to make alliances go to war as an alliance. Every member is included. Don’t give leaders the option of selecting who to put in. Combined with Kosnos suggestion, that would bring it to an end pdq

 

[Niblick]

Would be nice to have a ‘Decline’ option as well, so that if you get a bad match up you haven’t got to wait two days to see if you get a fairer one. It could also effectively see a boycotting of teams that are deliberately sandbagging, as they’d struggle to find legitimate alliances that would war with them

 

[Niblick]

Clearly there are multitude of ways in which this could be done better. The question is why aren’t Nexon interested in doing anything about it? I can only assume that they are concerned about upsetting their high rollers. There was a similar issue with one of Gree’s games some years ago. Everyone got so sick of Gree doing nothing that it eventually got to the point where a boycott of ingame purchases was introduced until the situation was resolved. That seemed to focus their attention on the problem, though I don’t think the company ever fully recovered