It is that bully mindset that has you seeing things wrong. There isn't near as much banding together as you believe. There are probably cases of it in Diamond league, but not much in the grand scheme of things. Most alliances end up being unspoken informal things based on more than one guild disliking one of the other guilds for whatever reason, and ganging up on them.
I vehemently disagree. Bullying exists and will show you exactly where and how.
We have worked with and against the top guilds in diamond. The alliances are QUITE well defined with dedicated strategy threads. Of the guilds in a 1000LP matchup you will fall into one of three categories:
1. The Enemy Guild, every guild formally by strategy thread banded against you. You can tell you are the enemy but the massive number of (seemingly but actually corrdinated) softlocks surrunding your base and will spend the season being bullied around by the rest of guilds that are allied, communicating, and strategizing together to back, bully, and keep you in the corner for the season.
2. Top guild, guild with enough strength to plow over almost anyone. With multiple of these guilds, they will ally and setup a thread to coordinate offenseive and defensive strategy and plays.
3. "Weak" Diamond guild, basically the guild that is diamond that is there because of the points system but does not actually have the power to compete for one of the top finish positions. These break into two categories:
3a. Weak Informal Enemy Guild, the top guild alliance is not focusing on blocking with tons of softlocks to block your progress but each night the top guilds take all your sectors and you start from you base each morning.
3b. Weak Ally, you manage to get into the top guild alliance but your guild does not have enough strength to be able to make a stand and put up an arguement as to why you "deserve" a higher finishing position thus you are bullied into doing whatever the alliance says or you get booted into 3a.
The dictionary defines bullied as "To treat in an overbearing or intimidating manner". If you are #1 or #3b you are being bullied.
On any given world there is usually one guild that is flat out better than all the others, and in most cases they will always prevail.
Then there are a couple of more guilds that can almost match them.
Next there are some guilds that can pretty much destroy anyone that isn't in the two above groups, but will consistently lose to those first two groups.
Then there are all the rest. Some better, some worse, and their performance likely varies greatly from week to week. They don't have the power to compete against the top 3 groups, and are going to find themselves locked out and picking up scraps every time they run up against one of the stronger guilds.
Obviously I agree with this, see above.
Two questions for Inno to address:
1. How to stop the alliances from forming in GBG to make it a true open battle ground.
2. How to better define the leagues or the members of the leagues. I suggest first decreasing the points per position so allow the multi-season performance to outweigh the performance of a single season. Further on, it would be good to define a "guild power" number based on their ability to fight, negotiate, and succeed in GBG. Then use this to group the guilds on the map to produce a fair fight, this would also have the effect of remove 3a and 3b type guilds.