This is the problem currently with PvP, people who have camped in a low age for years, built an Arc and every other Great Building to a high level, have attack and defence bonuses of perhaps 200% (and more) and are matched against someone who has been playing for days or weeks! Not a very level playing field, a bit like matching Manchester United with a local Sunday League pub team!
...and it used to be even
WORSE back in the day, when 'hoods were
EVERYONE, from brand new Bronze Age cities to Future/Artic Future eras, and yes, they would plunder you daily just for the hell of it. (...oh, and to make your life even more miserable, there was
NO 'enable PvP' feature to at least prevent Modern/Future era cities praying on BA/IA cities that hadn't yet researched the Military Tactics tech either.
)
And again yes, this new PvP feature is a giant dumpster fire, where you WILL end up with EMA - Colonial cities being forced to fight nothing but Space Age opponents, while getting your face beaten in by those same Future era - SAAB players.
There is nothing more 'PvP' about this than there currently is in the regular old neighborhood fights... the only players who will have any remote chance of cracking the top 500 are near end game/end game players, while even those filthy, evil-hearted, bullying "campers" who (obviously) have either Visagoth'ed or *cough*cheated*cough* their way to 10-12+ Lv40+ GB's will get their faces beaten in no matter what they try and do.
Just ignore this new feature honestly...
The beta feedback is almost 90 pages now of the player base screaming at the devs about how utterly borked the match-making system still is, and they don't seem to care one flying fart about it.
It's a new feature aimed only at end game players. No one else need apply, unless you enjoy losing - ALOT!