No, this kind of thing is normal. Saw it all the time in WoW. Happened in Planetside 2 as well. And Overwatch. And probably also any team game where manual grouping is allowed to mix with solo queueing. Eternal Crusade's small population and disproportionately large number of pre-existing 'clans' makes it a serious problem, because the problem is not diluted enough among the overall population, and it creates excessive frustration because of each person's higher likelihood of running into a pugstomp group. Theoretically, it could be solved easily if people were interested in a fair fight, but competitions don't favor fair fights, they favor unfair fights.
It is normal, but I believe they actually try to avoid those situations. In Overwatch groups are prioritized against other groups (if you 6-stack you get longer queue and usually end up against another 6-stack), in World of Tanks you only have max 3 people in a platoon (where there are 15 players a side), and so on. I agree though that the small playerbase is probably what limits this effort the most.
Eternal Crusade makes it effective because you can queue with the full 15 players, the 30-player maps are uncommon to see for some reason I don't remember but made sense when it was explained to me, and the low population mandates an extremely unrestrictive matchmaker so it just plunks you in a game in a first-come-first-served system.
True you should try and avoid it however it isn't that simple. Once you add guilds into a game no matter what type of game it is then there will always be some form of imbalance. Because a guild will always be more organized than a random group and in a perfect gaming world making guilds only allowed to fight guilds is a great thought but virtually impossible to accomplish in a game because no matter what the matches held between these guilds would almost always be unbalanced due to each guild having different amounts of active players. To play a game that allows 60 players on a single map at a time and not expect them to have to allow guilds to roll around with ransoms is silly. And they did try to fix this by decreasing the war party size from 30 to 15 which still leaves room for smaller parties to roll around with the large guilds groups and it should allow the guilds to help foster the other players instead of forming a toxic atmosphere. Sadly there is no way to balance guilds in a game such as this or any MMO for that matter. And to address the guy that doesn't think this is an MMO all that means is massively multiplayer 60 player matches qualifies. Mmorpgs have large open world's which is the common mix up of the two.
How about they add an option for solo que then, like we have asked for since inception. So if you are in the special solo que, you only fight other solo players. If you dont care which que you are in, you are put into the general que, with possible groups. Problem solved, and much more fair to those who play solo and are sick of team stomps.
The clan i am a part of with my smurf usally has at least 3-4 players when new patch hits or more a day after the patch hits and we usually go to garrison to test it out and then out in the battle filed to see how things are. We dont always war party up but we usually do as we are already there and testing things and being in a war patry and testing things out and talking to each other about our experiences helps us understand things much better. I assume other active guilds are more or less similar.
Queuing as Ork late night in North America is Eternal Quesade. Browsing the world map, there is a match with an undermanned Ork team (of course) but it won't let players join because it's closed. Why?! ExasperatedJackieChan.jpg
Fun fact..Like 80% (maybe more, maybe less) guild members actually refuse to play outside the guild parties. I mean for real. They refuse to play solo at all and are participating only in guild events/playing sessions. I knew a lot of such people. So if you somehow remove guild play, EC will lose these guys, because they hate playing with pubs. Its not a secret that the guys in the guilds are the most active supporters of the game right? Guild is a factor which may hold a person unto EC if he walks on the edge of leaving and thats good for EC too, right? Anyways, I play solo a lot - I can say that I rarely see full guild parties in battle. Maybe on specific days and prime time (when most guilds having events - and thats good, they can meet each other), but usually its pug vs pug with small parties of 3-4 guild friends. How many matches you play per day? I try to do at least 6-7 on prime EU time, daily, so I think I have a proper view about how is it going on the battle field. I saw newbs crying about "guild stacks" after a lost battle. I mean in the scoreboard were 4-5 separate guild members with various tags and some random pubs. It was just people who are used to teamwork and they did what they do usually, with some minimum coordination in chat. Enemy pubs were stomped. They cried that guild stacks sucks, they are toxic and so on...So remove guilds from the game at all? Because even random veterans with guild tags gives bad emotions to newbs and noobs? What I mean, that a proper guy who likes how the game looks and feels, will stay and play, maybe join the guild. Maybe will just leave and rejoin battle when he sees "guild stack" or guild team. But he will find a way to play and enjoy. A guy who dont like the game, are too lazy or without patience to learn the game - he will cry anyway, he will find reasons and weak spots of the game and will attack. Nothing will satisfy him anyway.
