This is bad, and all the announcement text is very questionable.
@Dudettas, I will try to explain to you how the matching system really works from a colonial age point of view, and how it interacts with the global raking of this thing. Use it as you please, this is the behaviour that it has but I am not sure if this was the intended behaviour when this thing was initially made. This should be the case till SAM age.
1st, we all start with 6000 points. We start fighting, and initially we might have 3 real possible fights, and win some 200-point fights. After a while, the system will start to pull the plug, and stall our advances, we start to get impossible fights, initially only the difficult one, evolving with time to 2 impossible fights. Eventually we are prevented to go further, we get 3 impossible fights, and we are forced to lose a fight (or 2) on propose, just to get one possible easy fight (50 points). At this point we reached a staid-state faze, we lose a fight, to win a fight, and we will not pass from there.
The system is sorting the players by age. In my case, Colonial, and in the beta server, this means that I can reach #1500/#1600 position and will not pass this (the actual fighting points are irrelevant). At this point I reach the end of my progression, if I want to go further, I have to jump an age, and reach industrial. Then I would be allowed to go a little further (positions #1400, maybe). And this will be true for all ages, we will be sorted this way. And none of us will be able to progress further without jumping ages.
This behaviour is independent of the server size or composition. Every player will end up in a cluster depending on his age. This happens here, and will happen in EN.