Guild Wars - Sneak Peek III

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Guild Wars Sneak Peek 1
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Guild Wars Sneak Peek 5

Time for the next installment in our Guild Wars preview!

ATTACK!

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This is where you go to fight!
We’ll examine the parts of the screen one by one

Number of Battles

Up in the top left is a number next to a shield & lightning bolt
This is the number of guild war battles you have remaining

In this case, I have 7 battles remaining, 2 from yesterday, and 5 more from today.
Based on community feedback from last week, we’ve changed the way this operates to accommodate players who don’t play every day… the rule now is as follows:

  • Each day (starting on day 2) you get 5 more battles you can fight
  • Points aren’t lost if you don’t use them… so you could wait until the final day and play all 30 battles in a row if you like!
  • Each set of 5 battles MUST be spent on the “next” guild in your schedule… so you play 5 battles from WAR 1, then 5 battles from WAR 2, etc… you can’t jump back and forth
  • There is a small bonus for the winning Guild each day, so guilds who participate every day will get a small acknowledgement of their dedication, but it’s nothing unique or overly powerful.

NOTE: In case anybody is wondering, you cannot purchase more battles… we’re not that kind of game! :stuck_out_tongue:

The Guilds

Moving down the screen, we see the two guilds and their progress in the current WAR (note we’re switching to “war” instead of “day” since these battles can be played on later days now). In fact in this example, I’m still playing WAR 3 on DAY 4!

The background of the shield here is not final by the way… we’ll be adding something there to remind you of the BONUS COLOR for this particular war!

The Opponents

Here you can see your 5 opponents for the war, and this is going to require a little explanation:


First - take note of those symbols over the enemy icons - they are “Guild War Ranks”

  • Each week, based on the previous week’s results, all guild members are split into 5 ranks for the guild war (this is separate to the ranks of Guild Master, Lieutenant, etc… that we already have). On week 1 we’ll base this on a combination of Guild Rank, Level & Team Score. After that, it will be based on points earned during the Guild War.
  • The ranks are: Paragon, Champion, Herald, Vanguard, Soldier
  • There is 1 Paragon, up to 2 Champions, up to 4 Heralds, up to 8 Vanguard, and the rest are Soldiers. In smaller guilds this is split up differently, and some ranks may not be present, but will be filled in as required by players from other higher or lower ranks.

Now… How do we fight them?

  • Your first battle will be against a random Soldier. If you win, you progress to fight the Vanguard. If not, you fight a different random Soldier.
  • Each time you win and progress, the next battle is worth more points!
  • Of course you can score bonus points of top these amounts too (remember… using the correct color in the correct WAR will give you some bonus score)
  • This continues until you have used all 5 battles in this WAR
  • As you can, in order to get to all those juicy points available on the Paragon, you need to get a perfect win streak.
  • There are a few other factors involved to make your journey to be Paragon-Slayer a little more challenging, but we’ll discuss those when we look at the Sentinel Screen!

Progress

Down in the bottom left/center, you can see the progress of this particular war. In this case, players in MY guild still have 8 fights left (20 members with 5 fights each). And personally, I have 2 battles left.

Skipping Guilds

Finally, in the bottom right, you can see the SKIP button

If you want to concede all your matches against the current Guild and simply progress to the next one, then you can do so here. If I did that now, I would lose my 2 remaining battles here, and my available battles will be set to 5.
You can’t change your mind about this, so you will prompted & warned!

That’s it!

I’m out of the office next week, so the NEXT Sneak Peek might be a little delayed… I’ll try and keep it on track though!

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First! … I actually don’t have anything to say about this. Carry on.

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Yeah I don’t see anything here to debate about, so i’m leaving. Good day Sirrian!

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But you can play those 30 battles at the first day, hence the ±sign next to the lightning icon?

That is in contradiction what you said in a previous post:

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I’m noticing that the “Guild Progress” bar only has 92/100, not the 92/150 I would expect from a full guild. Does this mean that Sparkle Ponies only has 20 members, or that only the top battles are counted?

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It will probably just show info on when/where the number increases, similar to how it currently works with glory:

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Yes, it says so in the post:

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Hooray for reading. Even after you pointed this out to me it took me two readthroughs to notice the section on Progress.

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Where is the Team Score taken from? The current defending team? If so does this mean people could change their teams just before reset to affect who would get which rank? (Assuming all other factors being equal) Will there be a separate defense team for Guild Wars? Or will it use the normal PVP one?

Not overly worried, just curious ^^

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Will we be able to see individual guild members’ progress so Guild Master can monitor guild contribution?

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With a good portion of us settings our defense teams to help people out in the events, I’m hoping that this team score is coming from someplace else. Because frankly, my current defense team sucks canal water on purpose. What else can you do with Nagas?

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Good point, I’d forgotten about the helping people with events (despite doing it myself). I’m just not sure where else they’d get a static team score number from. Other than maybe counting up the score for ALL your current troops and aggregating the total score. But then again, they could then also do that for PVP matchmaking. shrugs I’m sure they’ll have something up their sleeves.

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Looks… good… so far…

Personally I felt the 5 a day should be on that day… whilst I don’t manage that with my recommended vegetable intake, I certainly could with gems matches… But ho hum…

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Two things I would like to know a bit more about:

  1. how is defense team set? Is there only one team? Can it be changed once set?
  2. how is paragon decided precisely? Can guilds have some control over which player is chosen as paragon by manipulating last week’s result?

One thing worries me a bit is that the defense teams of paragon (and champions) are going to have a huge impact on guild performance. This may lead to some unforseen consequences.

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This all looks great! It’s good to see some depth to the mechanics that show how different it is to PvP.

Having said that I DO feel bamboozled by the fact that sneak peaks I & II showed the first two tabs and now you’ve just straight up SKIPPED the Sentinels tab as though doing things in the right order doesn’t matter!

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What made you think it did? :wink:

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i can’t wait to get that

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Look River, just because you jump around in time, experience events non-sequentially and have non-chronological romantic relationships doesn’t mean the rest of us do!

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As I mentioned in one of the bullet points (it;s okay there WAS a wall of text there, sorry for the confusion):

“Each day (starting on day 2) you get +5 more battles you can fight”

So day 2 you have 5 points, and on day 3 you earn another 5 points, so if you haven’t played on day 2, you’ll now have 10 points, etc…
So you won’t have 30 points until day 7. A guild could do a last minute rush, but they’ll be EXACTLY the same battles as if they spread it out, AND risk somebody not turning up… so when we thought about this, it actually seemed we’d tweaked enough stuff to make that behavior fairly meaningless.

Of course if lots of guilds find it’s optimal to do the last minute rush, we’ll adjust the system accordingly later (maybe with an expiry time on points earned for battles). We could do that now, but I’d rather try this current system for clarity.

EDIT: Oh, and the plus sign next to the icon is just a standard part of our UI (like Glory on the main menu). Tapping/Clicking that will simply bring up some more info about how the points work!

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So with this system you still have only one day for the last War :slight_smile: . Why not giving the 30 attacks so every players manage to do these battles when they want?

I think this counter (top-left) could be misunderstood between number of availables attacks against the guild of the day versus the one against all the guilds. Moreover, you have already the information with “My Progress”. So don’t see the relevancy of the number of attacks.

It’s a little unfair to release these informations without talking about the Sentinels. So much questions… :stuck_out_tongue:

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Not really - “My Progress” is your progress on the five battles in the current war, whereas the number in the top left shows how many battles you’re eligible to fight IN TOTAL at the moment, and may be greater than “my progress” if you’ve missed a couple of days.

Because then the Guild War will be over for a lot of the mid & hardcore folks about 1-2 hours after day 2 begins, and that’s not the kind of play pattern we wanted to create with Guild Wars.

If we find that having the last 5 points only available on Day 7 is a huge issue, we can always award 10 points on Day 6 (or Day 1 for that matter) to allow folks to play 1 day ahead on the final day. But I’m really not inclined to commit to that kind of thing yet, because I think it muddies things just a bit too much.

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