Originally published at: 2026 Jan – June Roadmap – Gems of War
Happy New Year, adventurers! Hope the holiday season treated you all well, and getting your sleeping habits readjusted to return to work life was only mildly difficult, haha. To start off the new year, we wanted to share with you a small top-level overview of the first 6 months of major events. As always, everything…
6 Likes
LR Pan’s Vale… yet another Yellow Kingdom. 
Does this include the upper paths like the Exalted Path? because if so.. oh boy.
1 Like
Kingdom restrictions are still a bad idea for Guild Wars, even if those two kingdoms happen to be decent.. Wild Plains and Silverglade were not.
Should stick to just color restrictions and race restrictions. Leave kingdoms out.
11 Likes
Would we be correct to assume that Astral Spire is some sort of paid pass?
5 Likes
I really hope those massive gems indicate the Guild Wars defence Keep Colour is going to be fixed for each month, and then rotate through the 6 months. Fingers crossed.
1 Like
Is this the third or fourth time they’ve completely redone the introduction to the game to make it easier for new players? Are new players not sticking around? Is there some reason they don’t want to keep playing, perhaps? Hmmmmm, interesting. 
Maybe engage more with the players and you’d know how to keep them, without having to keep redoing the same starting area of the game?
10 Likes
It’s apparent that the developers do not read our feedback. Kingdom restrictions are just…horrible for Guild Wars. Like I suggested numerous times before, just rotate the six color restrictions (and maybe the keeps too just for variety) and stop spinning a wheel to choose restrictions. We hold our breath and then think about how we are going to fight the 
keep META all-the-time before we get utterly annihilated.
You could lucky, sure. But you could also fall behind, and the battle is over before it even starts. Most kingdoms do not have a reliable way to cleanse or bless to fight the Elementalist 4+ gem matches, and it’s probably one of the biggest problems with Guild Wars right now. Zaejin can fight against it, (as long as Orpheus medals cleanse off the snap freeze, and you don’t get hit with a bad cascade or starting board that results in the enemy getting a 4+gem match).
But Guild Wars feel like artificial luck, and the old style of fighting with your empowered troops and fighting against books felt more…strategic, but it’s hard to put into words. It’s a circus out there…
6 Likes
The problem with rotating the 6 colours, without any troop restrictions are.
Stella, Chrys and the new dragon Daemon.
If everyone is gonna use these dragons every GWs , then why have guild wars.
Yes wild plains was the worst yet.
But if rather some bad kingdoms, than no one thinking and just doing the same dragon teams.
It’s just brain-dead 
4 Likes
It’s kinda wild how often it’s changed 
An important part of the game, to be sure, though I too wonder if they’re struggling to retain newbies.
Good news is that Astral Spire (RIP Bastions) seems to be a new and interesting concept for mid-end game players. Excited to see this!
3 Likes
Maybe if they gave em a proper catch up mechanic instead of a fresh coat of paint, they’d have a better chance.
I wonder if anyone has stopped to think how long it’d take to get an account to semi-workable condition from 0 nowadays..
8 Likes
It’s…a complicated process to make this game not brain dead anymore, and my suggestion doesn’t solve all the problems with Guild Wars because let’s face it–there are many issues to fix with my once favorite game mode. Yet, I suffered from very bad randomness from the starting board when I fought x3 Takshakas, and my Orpheus medals not cleansing the snap freeze from Elementalist. It felt like utter luck BS garbage tbh, and I took a deep breath, turned the game off and just forgot about it.
Guild Wars is not really practical in its current state–players need to be able to choose restrictions themselves instead of the developers spinning a wheel to determine our fate. And yeah, it’s going to be “Takshaka Time” for the next 2 Guild Wars, so it’s going to be smooth sailing.
I am just one person, and I don’t think Guild Wars will ever be the strategical chess match that it once was. If the developers listened to the community, we could all work together to make it much, much better, but we all know that’s never going to happen.
4 Likes
What of like giving the option to choose between 3 Kingdom options for attack and then restricting the Defense teams to also a choice amongst 3 Kingdoms? Or something like that??
1 Like
Every time Guild Wars is discussed, a bunch of people chime in wanting easy battles.
If you get easy battles, so do your opponents.
In the Wild Plains restriction, our guild won all 4 days, despite being outnumbered (we had just 25 members). The reason was we had more people who were good at winning tough battles.
One of the guilds we defeated, which had the full roster of 30, trounced us in the previous GW where the restriction was Daemon (i.e. easy 5-0 for everyone on attack). They struggled to defeat our defences with Wild Plains. IMO kingdom restrictions make for a much more skilful contest. Rotating through colour restrictions would turn the event into a joke. What’s the point if all but the unluckiest players win every battle?
Attackers have a big advantage over the defenders if restrictions are equal, defenders need easier restrictions for the battles not to be a pushover for the attackers.
Upcoming restrictions Divine and Blue will be easy wins all round, pretty much guaranteeing the guilds with more active members, rather than skill, will win.
5 Likes
Isn’t it a coincidence tho, that there’s going to be at least one stupid dragon for every kingdom.
So then we have GWs with kingdom restrictions.
We have a dragon for each team .
This game is actually becoming brain-dead .
I like the immortals, but old PvP was better, it was a chill game mode, I could play about with random teams for fun, and still win on the easy level since, Also double class points.
Again I like the concept of the new GWs, but old GWs was awesome for the inter guild battle for paragon.
It doesn’t work in this new GWs.
Ino the new modes, will never change back , but there a lot less fun tbh.
You can’t just chill and have fun in PvP now, it’s a chore. And I haven’t voted in months.
Cos it’s dumb.
Doom is a chore, writing out rooms in chat.
Raid and invasion are chores, because there boring and bad rewards
Monthly kingdom event, is a chore guessing the points system .
Thank god the journey points were revised, it’s actually my fave event now, and best rewards.
I forget, vault weekends are chores to, guessing when the 15 mins are up , playing 24 hours over a weekend. Earning 700 vks and 80 evks. Then getting cedrics. IV even stopped doing vault weekends. I’m saving my keys incase we get something new in VK drops.
And a lot of people use gaps, just to get 1 dragonite gnome and wait till the time runs out, this proves everything what’s wrong with the game.
2 Likes
No one really cares that you won despite the odds if the deciding factor was a lucky board.
You say your wins came from “having more people good at tough battles”, but the moment anyone asks to see the actual teams or strategies behind that claim, the argument falls apart. Calling it a “secret” doesn’t help - from the outside it looks far more like a fluke than skill.
There is very little skill involved when an enemy Takshaka opens with an instant triple wildcard match and deletes one or two troops before you even get to play. That’s not mastery, that’s RNG. And let’s be clear: going first does not give you any advantage if there are no available 4-matches on the board. In that case, the outcome is decided entirely by cascades and pre-turn mana generation, not by player decisions.
I don’t want easy battles. I want manageable battles - ones where my team composition, decision-making, and play actually matter. Not fights decided by whether RNGesus blesses one side with full mana from pre-turn cascades.
I dislike Takshaka just as much as Khafru or Zarg, but pretending these aren’t effectively free-win cards under certain restrictions is dishonest. When something is that dominant, players will use it - and that has nothing to do with skill.
15 Likes
By the way, were there any real problems with the old Guild Wars rules?
I honestly can’t remember any major issues, apart from poor matchmaking where you could get guilds that were way too easy or way too hard. But apparently that wasn’t exciting enough, so we had to go for the “wow-effect”: a new mode with a battle pass and all kinds of so-called “battlefield options”. In reality, those options boil down to pick a green field and equip the most broken cards.
Old GW? Books everywhere.
You could see enemy converters, disrupt the board, deny their casts, and make sure their setup didn’t just go off for free. That’s where the first turn actually mattered - because decisions and board control mattered.
New GW? Do whatever you want. Takshaka will explode the board anyway.
No available 4-matches on the starting board? GGWP, go next.
I believe the difference is obvious. Pretending otherwise is just hypocrisy.
8 Likes
A lot of good feedback in here. I’m sure it will be helpful for it to be saved for the next community survey in May that will of course be ignored just like the last one
4 Likes
When I started playing this game, I used to take my time in battles, carefully choosing which move to make, planning how the board would fall, to avoid mistakes, because I needed to gather mana and block the enemy in order to win. Now, I just spam spells and if I make mistakes I don’t care. My battles are decided by having better stats and more powerful troops, or by RNG. There’s little strategy, other than in a few game modes. And I haven’t changed, the game has. More and more it pushes RNG-based gameplay, rather than strategic tactic moves.
I suspect that might be one of the reasons they’re struggling to get new players to stay. People start match 3 games expecting careful tactical play, not random BS and crossing your fingers hoping you get lucky. If they see how much the game pushes towards that, why would they want to stay?
Same.
6 Likes
Totally agree, with the exception of empowered troops. But if they can’t make a decent move (like an empowered converter doesn’t have the right colour gems in the right places to make matches), it’s all just RNG BS, not player decisions.
2 Likes
Gems of War feels like an old pet. You love them and you want to keep them around as long as possible because of all the good times you had in the past, but it’s clear they’ve been on death’s door for a long time and keeping them alive is just sad for everyone. I think it’s time to put the game out of its misery because there’s no saving it.
8 Likes