I think both sides are kind-of talking past each other.
In isolation, the scoreboards posted in this thread aren't a problem. The strongest guild won. Every guild had a shot to do something, whether or not they decided to. System is actually mostly functional in this case. And no amount of better matchmaking would prevent rounds like this entirely as guilds change in strength from time to time (mergers, mass departures, new guilds, etc).
But it is a fair point that the strongest guild in a dominant platinum round being thrust into the pile of 1000-guilds is not even good matchmaking - one season you may have been ranked somewhere around 100th, the next you're deemed a fair match for 1st - that's quite the jump and wholly unrealistic in terms of expectations.
I've personally had less issue with it since the changes - but it's not hard to believe some guilds in some worlds may still be dominated by the yoyo-hell pattern between trivial platinum rounds and hell diamond rounds and rather importantly never getting a "fun" round that's reasonably fair and competitive. It's easier to swallow the bad rounds if regularly there's a fun one and you can justify the unfun rounds as the cost of fun ones.
Now briefly in inno's defense, *great* matchmaking may well be impossible. The parity in guild strength may simply not exist to make good groups consistently on a single world. It probably does exist if it was cross-world, but that's been ruled out as impossible due to technical issues even though they wanted it (stated back when GBG first hit beta and developers actually talked to us).
But I do think they could do better, particularly within the framework of championships they've introduced.
They need to do better with the championship standings as well which have issues. Particularly they should not be counting guilds with platinum and lower victories as the same thing as diamond victories; possibly using "average MMR" over the championship as the primary rank determination and matchmaker, not *current* MMR - so that never leaving 1000 is a prerequisite for being at the top of the standings, and if you don't belong in 1000 you're given a bit of insulation from it. They may also need to fix who/how one gets the trophy building depending on how they change the rankings - perhaps handing out various amounts of fragments to the top 20 guilds in the championship ranking after each round or something.
But once fixed, they really ought to use those standings to make the groups as that would be better than simple MMR - Giving the guilds with a stake in potentially getting the championship win a guarantee to directly face their competition and fight for it. And the guilds that have *never* won a round in diamond or only won 1 round a chance to face their fellow also-rans without the very top guilds involved. A chance to find out who's better amongst the rest rather than just who was left alone the most by the strongest guilds.
