* Rating

*rating should reflect the starting lineup rather than the squad. People are keeping low rated players in their squad to bring their *rating down, but their team is then filled with players over 150*.
It's a tool that players use to try and deceive other players which is fine by me. You should scout the player properly so if you do get caught out by this it is your own fault.
I think you are both right here. I love using star rating for gvg but then do the starting xv. However in map use the full team star when you look at a person. Get more even gvg matchups while also keeping the ability to sneak up on someone in defense.
There is a way to beat quite a lot of these guys on your map that use this strategy as long as the overall team star rating is close to your own or lower. A lot of them make the mistake of having lots of low star rated players and only 3 or 4 high rated. 99% of the time I can beat these teams as long as they are not too much higher than my overall team star rating. 3 high ratings I will take on any time. 4 star ratings it depends on whether they are in key positions or not. If they are not in key positions, again 7/10 times I will beat them. If they are in key positions then I would have to be quite a bit higher overall team rating. If they have 5 or more, I don't even consider playing them, regardless of individual differences as I will not stand a chance.
What they are talking about above are teams with 25 210* (fully maxed) players and then 10 10* players that will never smell the pitch but pull the star rating down. Some people are lazy and just look at team star rating without realizing it's not accurate.
Like qBall said then, if you get caught out by this it is your own fault. I always check all teams including individual players I play against, I look at their recent "activity", I look at their results v other teams and sometimes watch replays of their matches to check how they play, I check how many Strategy Buildings and what levels etc., etc. etc. Why would anyone not do this? Shouldn't matter if you are top 100 or down at 60,000.
I agree, so I think it's great for people to have those 10* players. AND I wish gvg matchups were set up by star level instead of fans, but only the star level of the first XV so that low level teams aren't getting constant matchups vs maxed out guilds with a ton of 10* players on the bench. Make sense?
I agree black monks the way they match up the guild challenges makes no sense, we just had a run of match ups which we way stronger than us, now we have a match up in which we are way stronger so know how they feel and the fan level is way out
We have had 3 quality matchups in the past 3 months. All 3 a bit above us at the time but we have won all but one match for as long as I can remember.
We all seem to be in agreement here. Our last challenge was against a guild that we had no chance against and it turned out to be the case. The previous 2 or 3 were against similarly "properly rated" Guilds and turned out Won 1, Drew 1, Lost 1 which is absolutely fine. The won we lost was actually probably down to inactivity from our guys but no complaints regarding the match-up. Too many though are mismatches. I like the idea of rating on 1st XV only. I wouldn't even count 5, 7 or 10 subs, just the best 15 players in each team.

[EDIT] It would have to count the 15 best players rather than the starting 15, otherwise these same players would circumvent this by having 1-15 all low*, switching them out as soon as the GvG begins.

P.S. I hope the recent server outage doesn't affect our current GvG where last I checked we were 15 v 8 up.