Secondary Guilds and Ladder Nerfing

I just spent about 30 minutes searching the forums for this topic and couldn't find anything about this. I'm pretty sure it's been posted before, but if it has it is well hidden.

I was running through the towns today and saw the normal "We're recruiting" spam, but one caught my eye again just like it did a few weeks back. "'xxxxx' Guild is recruiting. Secondary Guild of 'xxxxx' Guild"

Secondary guild? Pardon me? Is this like varsity and junior varisty? Sounds interesting I guess, but what would the benefits be? I thought to myself...

Well it's obvious that if you're a highly desired guild like Sissy Boys or something you're probably hitting max capacity and another guild wouldn't hurt. Also you could treat it like varisty and junior varsity. Who cares what the secondary guild's rank is right? Have the players train there and destroy the rank at their leisure all in the name of GvG experience. You could segregate PvEers from PvPers. The list goes on.

Well then it hit me... If you don't care about the rank of the secondary guild, then wallop the crap out of it in GvG with your primary guild and get your rank up. Then when you really need to, fight a few random matches with the secondary guild, get a better rank so you're not giving minimal rating points when you lose to the primary and maintain a steady stream of mediocre rating points flowing into your primary guild.

It's not like buying a guild hall is completely intangible, especially with a ton of players in your current guild. You can buy one if 35 players give out a measley two platinum. Just have someone in the guild willing to take over leadership of the other. Do some recruiting with help of the the primary guild's name and start stomping away.

As of today August 15th, 2005 here are the standings of the top 10 guilds on the ladder.


1st Team Union - 101 wins 10 losses
2nd Sissy Boys - 238 wins 49 losses
3rd Limit Break War - 113 wins 21 losses
4th 스머프 마을 스머프 - 79 wins 4 losses
5th Zpzg Guild - 143 wins 21 losses
6th War Machine - 164 wins 35 losses
7th Eternum Pariah - 71 wins 5 losses
8th Thunder Catz - 116 wins 18 losses
9th Ward Against Noobz - 101 wins 19 losses
10th Nuclear Launch Detected - 92 wins 14 losses

Now I'm not going to jump conclussions here, but I'm in a decent guild and we GvG often. We're ranked in the 900's on the ladder and our record at the moment is 47 wins - 38 losses. We've had our share of brutal mawlings on both ends. We use everything possible to make our GvG team tightly woven; Teamspeak, guild forums, build research, etc. It just amazes me that in 111 matches you can only lose 10!? I'm not at all sure how that works and I can't wait for observer mode to figure it out.

So what's the protection against this type of ladder nerfing? Quarterly refreshes in the rank so it doesn't become stagnant? Well if a top teams has multiple guilds they'll be right back up there. Where does this leave the honest players and people who want to fight for a spot in the top 1,000?

I don't know if this is actually a problem, but it for sure could be. I care about the ladder. I want to be a top ranked guild, and I want to do it in a fair way. It's as superficial as I get about this game.

I wrote support asking what was in place for this protection and they sent me an automated response saying it was a game suggestion, post it as a suggestion on fansite forums. Well here I am, and for all to see. If you didn't think about this first you know now. Hopefully it doesn't spark the minds of other guilds who say, "Hey, yeah we could do that. Let's go buy another Sigil!"

My suggestion to keep the ladder from getting nerfed is simple. Keep rated matches random only. All specific GvG matches should be unrated. I don't even see why it's neccesary to offer rated matches that specify a guild anyway. It's no more or less fun to do a rated match against a specific guild.

There's my $.02, now add all yours and we'll split an ice cream cone together.

Um... My guild is 120~ and we don't have a secondary guild, nor do most of those guilds (although there are some top guilds that do, all of which I will not name).

Mabey you should try PLAYING against one of these teams to see how good they are before occusing them of having secondaries?

There is no way to fix secondaries. Making all specific guild matches would be horrible. For one, the random match generator is a horrible system as it is. There is something very wrong about a rank 861 guild (or rankless) going up against a rank 132 guild.

If they care about rank, let them. Who cares? Rank does nothing. Almost every famous guild does not win their fame from secondaries. It comes from people saying "Damn, we got our asses handed to us this time... damn you XXXX guild!" or "Wow, there goes XXXX guild winning us favor again! Yay!"

I like random unrated GvG

it might be a problem, but i don't think it's as big a problem as you're making it out to be. I'm in Eternum Pariah [EP] and I can promise you we don't have a 2ndary guild, nor do we use a smurf guild to nerf the ladder or artificially boost our record.

I'm pretty confident that most of the other high guilds with really good records such as War Machine's Korean Guild and Bravo Squad aren't abusing a 2ndary guild to boost their record either.

The fact is that at any one moment, there are only a handful of really good guilds that will be GvGing, so the chances of facing another really good guild are quite low. This means you'll either be waiting a looong time to "find a worthy opponent" when you GvG (those 20 minute waits can really suck, rare as they may be) or you face a much lower ranked guild and rack up more wins.

It's not like the BWE's where all the top guilds were on at the same time, and people's records were balanced out as a result. Here's hoping that after the PvP balance changes more guilds will come back and GvG more often.

I think you guys got me wrong. By no means am I saying top guilds use the secondary guilds to improve their record. I did say I wasn't going to jump to conclussions. We've fought several guilds in the top 100 and they deserve to be there. I didn't mean for it to come off as an insult to guilds there now, just as a warning.

I don't know how much the ladder means to people, but I'm pretty sure Sissy Boys and ZPZG at least appreciates being consistently near or at the top of the ranks. If I were a member I wouldn't like it to have some no name guild come up out of the unranked with 163 wins and 2 losses in a couple of weeks because they use a secondary guild to get there.

No I don't think it's a large-scale problem, but it could be. My belief for the easiest way to solve it is to move all rated matches to random only. If you want to specify a guild to beat the crap out of you can do it unrated. I honestly don't see a problem with it. Like I said, it's no less fun to win an unrated than a rated if you're pairing up against a specific guild.

I do hope that a lot of guilds come back into GvG. I mean honestly, what else is there really to do to pacify the time waiting for the next expansion? It's always disappointing to go against a guild who just doesn't care about it and asks us to beat them or brings 4 henches.

Keep an honest ladder and it will keep honest interest. That's my suggestion.

I'm not taking it as an insult don't worry...just will try to clear your doubts.

When you are at top 10 is really hard to get opponents, sometimes we wait for opponents like for 40 minutes before finding one and sometimes quit of boring.
We play in smurf guilds to get more practice in GvG and because tombs is boring with all that spirit builds, but we don't play each other never.

Xoo is in the 80-90's most of the time and yes we have 2 Guilds.We are in the top 5 in wins.
Reason for a seconds Guild? Our ladder divion [Xoo] is hardcore PvP with regular play times, organized builds, and lots of other stuff.

Xoo Main Division does well with our bring anything. We just have monks and whatever ppl bring. If we have enough characters we might do a certain build. We are in the top 100 by just doing random groups.

Team Union is scary in micro. Someone who speaks korean should make BlackAce vs one of them in Starcraft. It'd be scary.

What you really want to see though is crap like Xtreme Assasinz who can somehow get 35-0 and only peak at 158th place. I fail to see how anyone can win 35 times without earning sufficient points to break top 100. Bravo Squad broke 100 in the 20s I believe. So either they got lucky, or something fishy was going on.

As for those top 10 teams, aside from the koreans which I cannot confirm (4th place and 6th place are the same), all of the rest of the "english" guilds are all different guilds completely. Bravo Squad I believe belongs to sB, but when your waiting over an hour for GvG matches, you seriously don't give a damn about hogging the ladder a bit.

Sorry Furby, but me and Infamous are still going to make E-Peen once the bullshit wait time takes too long. After all, I'm confident we can Wolverine Z-Force our way to top 50.

But the principle is the same. The way the ladder works is the same problem wc3 has had since the dawn of time. High level players either wait very damn long, or they are allowed to play lower level guilds which results in "squashes". Both are problems, and stem from the way the ladder works. The fact is, when there are players that are leagues below the best, yet the playerbase is so small, there has to be sacrifices.

A logical solution (abeit not fullproof) is that there is a unrated randomly matched up option where you basically do the same thing as automatic matchup but you won't lose or gain rating for either side. This would allow any guild to any other guild. Rank 1 vs Rank 1000. Sure. It'd spawn it's own pool of players and would at least provide a place for Guilds who can't find a game after a damn hour to go somewhere. I mean just last night, we had to wait over 2 hours and still got nothing. Eventually we played, but one of our members waited so long he left so he never got to play. This is the kind of stuff that kills top tier.

I'll admit that out of all the utter bullshit gripes I have seen about the game in all of its many varied aspects, and all of the posted waste about crying about character SHADOW length rather than gameplay, this thread was interesting to read, and actually had useful information in it. Most of the shit in this area of the board is just me-too-piss-my-pants and I hate youf or disagreeing with me inanity.

Nice change of pace. I hadn't thought about this issue at all, and now it is at the fore of my thought. Nice.

This may no longer be true, but in the BWE's, after the ladder abuse took place for the Beta Tester contest, a "fix" was implemented that prohibited the same two guilds playing back-to-back matches unless some other matches or a certain period of time had expired.

Heroes Etc... played a friendly match against Beguine Guild, with both of us looking to learn more about GvG. Once we had finished our 'friendly' match, we wanted to do it again, but more competetively. We were not allowed, and received an error message saying something along the lines of: "You have not completed enough matches against other opponents to face this opponent again."

We went through 8 or 9 more random matches and still could not challenegt ehm by the end of the BWE. Even at the beginning of the next BWE, we could not do so until we had played a few more matches.

Like I said, I don't know if this "fix" is still in place, bu if it is, it would completely eliminate the possibility of a 'main' guild repeatedly chalenging their 'secondary' guild just to boost their ladder rank.

Check it out bro...I'm in EP (Eternum Pariah). Yes, we've only lost 5 times. We don't use a smurf guild. The build we use to gvg is just really good. We can counter a lot of builds. If we get countered, we don't just rely on one form of damage. We can keep winning. We don't cheat. It can be done if the build you have is put together well and the people playing know their roles. We've been playing this build for a long time and so we know it perfectly and can change it to fit the circumstances we're in. And, while we have asked others for rated challenges, we have yet to have anyone give us one. All of our matches have been random.