Guild Wars Going Forward

[Nimhain]

Hello Adventurers,

We know you have been waiting for information on Guild Wars. Fear not, Guild Wars is not being canceled or removed. We have more details of what is exactly going on with Guild Wars below, as well as what’s happening in the immediate future.

When it was discovered during 7.3 development, that there was an issue with running Guild Wars, we had to delay any future Guild Wars events. Every time we update the Gems of War servers, we have a series of tests that check for errors. Unfortunately we have a few tests that like to misbehave if there are no future Guild Wars events. This is why you may have noticed the time of the upcoming Guild Wars event changing in-game.

Guild Wars was the very first event we ever implemented back in the 3.0 Update (March 2017). As many players may know, Guild Wars has a few legacy issues that we haven’t been able to solve, such as Bracket Promotion and Demotion issues, Loss of Score issues, and Loss of Defence Team issues. These are all intrinsic to the way Guild Wars interacts with our database, MongoDB. They would require us to completely rewrite big chunks of the guild wars event. The more recent issue is that Guild Wars doesn’t play nicely with the new PvP system.

This caused a discussion with the team about Guild Wars, and how we could address all of these issues, as well as integrate the Guild Wars system into new PvP, while implementing some of the feedback we’ve previously received. The only real answer is to rewrite Guild Wars from the ground up.

With that in mind, we plan to take Guild Wars, and rework the event into a new updated system. This new version of the event will be designed to work with the new PvP system, while also resolving the problems the current version has (mentioned above).

We have several new features coming in the next Update which expand the PvP System, including a new event that has some similarities to Guild Wars, and which players will be able to participate in, and compete against other groups of players.

We want to hear players’ thoughts about Guild Wars so we can include that feedback as we design the new Guild Wars.

• What did you love about Guild Wars?
• What new features would you like to see?
• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?

Our hope is to release the new Guild Wars later this year for you to enjoy. But we don’t have an official date to share with you yet.

[RootsSeed]

It wasn’t fair to me, having to be restricted by a color while the opponent isn’t, oh, it’s about what you love.

[EternalDark]

from my 3 years experience, everyone hates em and we LOVE this postponing!!! take your time!!

[Darkborne]

Thank you for letting the player base know about the issues that you guys are having with guild wars. It is a game mode that was first introduced with the game, so naturally, over time, it has persisting issues that cannot be resolved easily.

However, many guilds take guild wars seriously (especially in bracket 1). If you guys are planning to build this game mode from the ground up, there has to be serious consideration and time taken into account for a beta test(s) before it goes live.

The way many of us understood guild wars was a complex art that rewarded careful play and patience to determine the best possible decision based off of the starting board.

I will be honest–I am fearful of how you guys are changing guild wars. If it’s going to be anything like the current pvp, it’s not going to age well, and you guys are going to have to take feedback from your dedicated player base much more seriously.

There are so many things we had to consider:
take as few turns as possible to defeat the enemy team, get more mana than the enemy team, prevent the enemy from getting 4-5 matches with empowered troops or gem cascades, deal skull damage to get more points…

Guild wars is and should be the most pure competition that this game has to offer. Please listen to your players. We are passionate for a reason. Don’t let our passion burn out. From the ashes of pvp, let us make something that can burn bright again!

[Anam_Cara]

Thank you kindly for the update on this topic and going into details about what the issue is with Guild Wars interacting with the new PvP system.

I appreciate the transparency on this and communication. Thank you

As for feedback and a possible idea:
Guild Wars is a popular mode of play and it would be nice for guilds to be able to enjoy it even if they don’t have full members. It doesn’t seem fair for one guild of 30 members going up against a guild of 1 or 2.

Perhaps if there was a registration day on Monday where members of the guild would sign up for the Guild Wars week to participate with the option of ‘auto signing up’ in the future events that would be a nice feature. Then the game could match up guilds of the same members together.

This way even guilds with only a few members could enjoy the mode against other guilds on a more equal basis.

Having ways to enjoy the game more for everyone is surely a benefit.

[Darkborne]

I would also like these questions answered by a developer if possible:

•How will the new guild war score be calculated? (In the previous iteration of guild wars, 9800 was the maximum daily score, for up to 58000 total for all 6 colored days)

•Will guild wars always have color restrictions, or will we have other troop restrictions that you guys are planning? (For example, like how pvp regions are set up to only include giants in winters reach on a given week)

•Will guild war brackets and rewards be restructured so that everyone can feel a sense of accomplishment? (As it was previously set up, spending 85×4 =340 gems on sentinels did not reward you back unless you got 1st or 2nd in bracket 1).

[Willow]

What I would like is for the Guild War to be played in a championship with a two-way match and not taking place over one, but over several weeks with better rewards, such as acts, books of acts, Dragonites etc… Because Gems, in Bracket 1 we are no longer short of them!

[TheIdleOne]

@Nimhain

• What did you love about Guild Wars?
• What new features would you like to see?
• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?

• What did you love about Guild Wars?

Min-maxing point strategies in a competitive environment where the difference in placement is a few battles and there’s encouragement from guilds to try new team compositions to beat defensive problems.
Creating unique defensive teams that stopped opponents from winning

Current Guild Wars misses both of those points as almost everyone runs doomed books with empowered troops on defense, thereby reducing the mode to both starting board luck and repetition with solved offensive teams.

• What new features would you like to see?

Removed empowered troops, some sort of repetition deterrent where I don’t get stuck playing doomed books 6 days of the week.

After battle detailed scoring would be nice. Scoring shouldnt be some weird secret society thing where most people have no idea how the game works and some people sound like conspiracy theorist but in actuality might be on to something. (I.E: most people don’t know taking a skull hit on a barrier reduces your score total, even if you take no damage)

• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?

Depends on the quality of the mode and the rewards. Right now, I really don’t care to play book defenses again. But, if something could be creatively done to freshen up the mode, I’d be more receptive to do it more often.

[Cooookie]

• What did you love about Guild Wars?
  Almost everything about it. Except when issues with scoring bugs.

• What new features would you like to see?
  Maybe something similar to pvp but not as restrictive

• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?
  As often as it did before what was that once a month.

[Phillip]

I appreciate the solid info.

I liked guild wars in general but I thought once a month was too much. Maybe every other month.

And as far as “new features” you really need to address the “winners” always being a guild where 2 or 3 people play 25+ accounts on Saturday or Sunday. I know it’s happening, you know it’s happening, everyone reading this knows it’s happening. Awarding enough bonus points for playing on the day where it would affect the overall outcome is a decent idea i’ve seen floated around. But obviously that’s a whole different debate in itself. I’m not a person who realistically expected or wanted to hit #1 anyways, but knowing that you can’t before you even try is kinda sad in general. Obviously the game mode wasn’t designed to turn guilds into that in the first place, so it needs to be addressed in some way.

Also, ZERO pay for advantages with gems bonuses outside of sentinels. Buy ins for regular events have increased and you’re killing the people who are more guild wars focused with the multi event weeks (although yes I know we haven’t had one in a while). I know a lot of people who are struggling to keep a gem stack big enough to participate weekly, and they’re not buying gems with RL money under any circumstances. So hopefully new GW doesn’t increase that load any more than it already was.

I also don’t want to have to grind any pets for guild wars stat bonuses.

And no empowered troops, at least no empowered converters. Leprechaun and Astral Spirit type troops aren’t anywhere near as bad as the color converters are (IMO anyways). Guild wars has become a shell of what it used to be since the expansion of these troops. It wasn’t so bad when all we had was Mercy and Gimlet but now it’s obviously way out of hand since there’s 3 or 4 options to convert to a single color in some cases. This made the game more about winning the starting board lottery than it did any real strategy or thought based on your team or the defending team. Yes, good players can chip their way out of these situations but from a design standpoint it’s about as toxic as it can get for the other 99% of the playerbase.

I’m sure i’ll think of more later.

[Justplainrachel]

My own two cents for whatever its worth:

What I liked about GW: The day it ended.

What i disliked about GW:
1-several occasions the defense teams were set but not saved
2- utilizing resources on sentinels (if thats what they were called. Its been too glorious of a break for me to remember)
3- there has been multiple occasions where frozen troops were allowed to continuously collect their own mana for multiple loops and ignored the status effect.

Overall the aggravation the event caused never outweighed the rewards received. It’s a waste of a week unless your guild is in a top bracket. Half of global chats with recruitment messages even state that these guilds dont even participate, or dont require participation.

TL:DR= Just trash it and build something to renew our burnt out events. Don’t recreate the broken wheel.

Sometimes you just need to kick some dirt on it and move on. The player base is already doing so. Long term players are retiring at a record pace and fresh installs/players are dwindling.

[Lucien]

1. make GW scoring more transparent.
2. give more sought after rewards, deed, books or dragonite for example
3. make the defence teams have the same coloured restrictions as attack
4. impose a limit to number of extra turns - limit this only to GW
5. dupe troops in attack team cost points
6. get penalised for using an attack troop/weapon more than once a week - this is to combat stella wand teams.
7. need to use a different class for each day
8. make GW only appear between campaign
9. whole guild gets that days coloured book for winning that day, (yes just 1 i know they are rare and i dont like being handed the win)

a few ideas i can think of

[CLARE]

5 battles a day was the ideal solution. As before, a total of 30 battles

[redmist]

@Phillip

I appreciate the solid info.

All I read from that info is that they willfully went ahead with the deployment of the current ‘PvP’ without any care or regard for Guild Wars. There’s no hint that the process of rebuilding has even started and the fact they’re asking for player’s thoughts and hopes (which they’ll use to keep themselves warm in the northern winter of '24 as they toss them on the fire to burn) confirms that. Guild Wars won’t be around any time soon. And when it does arrive there will be no-one left to play it.

[KOLOB]

• What did you love about Guild Wars?
  Competition both against other guilds in my bracket as well as friendly competition within my guild alliance.
• What new features would you like to see? (In no particular order)

1. Ability to assign medals to defense teams that won’t update when medals are changed for offensive stats.
2. Better point scoring transparency
3. Better rewards - when comparing to other guild events, the rewards of some common troops and x number of gems was underwhelming. (Pvp currency, books, deeds, dragonite, etc.)
4. I see potential for randomly assigning the current pvp restrictions randomly for the 6 days (not just limiting it to colors: Stryx, mystic, construct, etc. to keep every guild wars fresh in regards to team builds for both offenses and defenses)
5. Please DO NOT implement scoring based on Player level as was done in the new PVP.

• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?
  Similar to before, around once a month. I’ve seen suggestions for once a campaign/season and that sounds good to me as well.

[KeiFlox]

Guild Wars is optional in my guild, honestly, because I hate it. My guild, my rules, I made it 100% optional. I hate everything about Guild Wars, hate the restrictions and clambering for points and perfection.

Things that would improve it:

Detailed scoring information instead of just spitting out a nebulous amount of points without explaining why some points were earned or lost.

Rewards for being promoted/top of your bracket are absolutely awful. Nothing useful, certainly nothing worth spending time on.

ETA: While it’s no skin off my back to not have Guild Wars exist for however many months, I feel awful right now for the players that enjoy the game mode and take it seriously.

[Stratelier]

@RootsSeed

It wasn’t fair to me, having to be restricted by a color while the opponent isn’t, oh, it’s about what you love.

To be fair, it’s not technically a “restriction” so much as an incentive to use a specific color-of-the-day. But if you are in a super competitive bracket and need to squeeze out EVERY advantage you can get …

Anyway.

Speaking as someone who created their own Guild just to participate in this mode (for the exclusive Troop rewards), I’m not exactly “competitive”, so what I like best about it is:

• You aren’t (necessarily) forced to play teams scaled to your “level” (by which I mean whatever metric is used in the normal PVP matchmaking). Of course, this is very bracket-dependent, but there’s just a feeling of more variety in GW defense teams than regular PVP.

As for new features? Well…

• Is there some way to avoid/limit fighting vs. a “guild of one” ? Again, this is very bracket-dependent, but I’ve definitely had some weeks where I had a poor matchup against the defending team (or whatever) and decided to NOT play any more GW battles for that day simply out of spite.

[JHM]

I’d like to join in with thanking you for the update and asking for feedback.
My take on Guild Wars:

• What did you love about Guild Wars?
  Not a lot. I’m not a huge fan of the mode. However, I liked being able to take the first day and set up my defenses, plan things out and work within the restrictions. Try to find the best counter to what I expect the enemy team will be. I also liked that it was very limited in scope - just 5 battles a day per player, meaning it didn’t take away from time spent in the rest of the game if you weren’t overly keen, unlike some other modes which can take way longer if you feel a need to play them.
  I also loved the exclusive troops, like penguin, but overall rewards were lacking and could do with a boost.
• What did you hate about Guild Wars?
  You didn’t ask, but I’m adding this. I hated the complete lack of transparency regarding scoring and the fact that many players have no idea how to score better than they have been - for example it seems like instant kill effects give lower scores, but using them often ends the match with higher scores and it’s not clear why. I also hate that you only get defense points by attacking - you are supposed to get points each day for having different troops in defense, but you don’t actually get them until you do your first attack, which adds them to your attack points, which is confusing. I hate the fact that the sentinel bonuses are unclear - half the time the totals didn’t add up and I wasn’t sure what bonuses I was supposed to be getting or what I actually was getting.
• What new features would you like to see?
  The post battle screen should give a detailed points breakdown on what you did that gained/lost you points and how many, including what your overall total was. And after exiting you should be able to open a menu in the guild wars interface that details your daily and weekly points earned for the event, and a breakdown of how you gained/lost points. Full transparency and ease of access to information is crucial, and it’s something this game is often terrible at.
  I’d love to see some sort of scaling where the points a guild scores are divided by the number of players in the guild (or by a percentage of this value), so that smaller guilds that struggle to recruit can still engage with the mode. It’s OK if they get a disadvantage for having less players, but not so much that they shouldn’t bother trying.
  I’d love some inta-guild competition as well. There’s already a system whereby the best performing players in a guild are given better ranks in the next guild war, but they don’t get anything for it, other than getting attacked more. It’d be great for the higher ranked players to get SMALL rewards (let’s not create jealousy) for their achievement, like some extra gems or something, as well as the rewards for everyone in the guild, at the end of the week.
  I’d also like certain modifiers to apply to the mode overall, to make it a better and fairer way to play, such as one that reduces starting mana for all troops on both teams - say half, so that empowered troops start with 50%, fast troops start with 25% and teams with medals of Anu get 10% per medal. Nothing over the top, but just something to make the mode more skill based, rather than relying on having the perfect starting board for an empowered troop to abuse.
• What new features would you hate to see?
  Again, you didn’t ask, but I’m adding this. I’d hate to see anything like the current PvP, with heavy monetisation and pushing of bufffs and pay to win mechanics, and mistakes like attack teams becoming defense teams. Anything like talismans that allows players to start with certain benefits on their defense teams would also be terrible.
  I’d also hate for the mode to descend into a spam of incredibly powerful limited access troops (the gem/cosmic dragons, for example), but I don’t think they need to be restricted from the mode. Players work hard to earn those troops (or throw cash at it that they want to feel was well spent) and want to use them in the most competitive mode, so any kind of troop restrictions would be a bad idea.
  EDIT: Giving bonus points for varying the troops and weapons/classes used each day would be a good idea, instead of locking certain options out, but there’s enough different gem/cosmic dragons for this not to be enough, so potentially a system where you also get bonus points for varying the troop types used each day, as well. So, if you use any of the dragons on one day, using any of them on another day will reduce the bonuses gained. Just don’t lock them out if they’ve been used.
• How often would you like Guild Wars to run?
  Once a month at most. Twice a year at least. I think anywhere between those two would feel fairly reasonable.
  Thanks.

[Ash3nShad3]

@RootsSeed

It wasn’t fair to me, having to be restricted by a color while the opponent isn’t,

That is what I hated. To get a good score you absolutely need to play with a one-color team, but the opponent is not restricted to one color too. Not fair.

To get a good score you need to practice by putting the opponent team into Defence, takes way too much time. Yes I know no one forces you to do this, but most people do not want to look bad with their score, and some guilds have a min 50 000 score requirement, which is easy if you are around bracket 25, but not around bracket 1 - 10.

If you get one bad starting board you are toast…a lot of it is not skill but RNG rubbish.

And you only get one chance at a match, so one bad start board and you lose, and that is depressing.

Then after all of that the rewards are not worth it.

I deliberately moved out of a GW guild. Now in a large family and the two guilds that never struggle to get members and even have waiting lists are the GW-free ones.

[m4g1cg1rl]

As a member of a bracket 1 guild wars guild I just want to say I have read and heard what a lot of the community is saying. However to blanket say guild wars is terrible and you hate it … all I have to say to you is then ignore that part of the game. Bracket 1 guilds players spend 30+ hours on guild wars week streaming and figuring out how to bring the best team in to the board. We have teams that build our defense sets and give us the best attack teams to attack the current meta. This speaks to the true history of this game which started from puzzle quest.
To answer the devs questions
What did you love about guild wars?
It is the reason I have played the for 5 years. I love getting to stream with my guild mates and figure out the the truest part of this game. Just give us the rules and let us play just make it fair.
What did you hate about guild wars?
We all hate the fact that te debs are secretive on scoring…ok…
Better rewards would definitely be a thing because it should reward any guild that moves up or places higher in their bracket
How often?
I believe once a month is fair and helps balance RL and play for people that want to actually go all in for guild wars

Last thoughts
Community seems to believe that it is unfair that B1 B2 teams dominate
Ok…. So if the devs want to restart… Let’s do that … full even playing field
But bring the best. I know my guild will. Happy hunting