I swear this game is the best at double nerfing that I’ve ever played.
Devs: We think you’re making too much gold.
Here, have a new gold sink epic tasks that walls you out of LTs.
Oh hey, when you do these new epic tasks, you get more stats!
Oh, and you get less gold for having more stats in PvP.
Guess I’m playing Explore for the rest of the Gems of War life cycle 
Has nobody else noticed yet? Okay … this patch didn’t drop during GW week.
Also: I was more-or-less right, everything else in this patch is good/ish. Except now they’ve fixed the epic tasks to be pretty good as well. So… everyone wins?
The new achievement that was added is awful for achievement hunters.
Looks like the bottom cap on the PvP gold formula was dropped. Funny this was completely omitted from the patch notes. Prior to this version, your minimum gold payout for any PvP match, no matter how low the score of the opponent, rose consistently with your own global score bonus. For example, before the patch, my minimum was in the high 900 gold range for normal PvP on my main (20% lower for casual), while my lowest alt gets 800+ payouts still on the old patch, regardless if the opponent team had extremely lower score or not - even 1k score opponents would pay out this much base gold. Teams judged “around my strength” didn’t change much, nor did teams “above my strength”, though temproarily which teams are considered “above my strength” or “about my strength” have changed due to the temporary injection of additional stats from the auto completed epic tasks (people that haven’t patched yet won’t have these score points).
This was very likely an intentional nerf to deincentivize farming the extremely low score teams while still getting “medium” payouts by landing yourself in a “low” matchmaking pool, the matchmaking is still such that it offers you a bunch of low score teams, in some cases (as seen here) only mid-low score teams in the first place (and thus, now extremely low gold payout as well). And when you get stuck in a certain matchmaking pool, expect to stay in it for your entire play session, seeing like 1 or 2 opponents in a given “cycle” high enough to give good payouts and it being the same opponents on the three trophy (or highest score slot, in casual) even if you refresh 45 times. I brought this matchmaking silliness up when the PvP points thing was a hot button issue as again, it is still a huge underlying problem that the PvP score fix kinda bandaided.
So while I see what they were probably going for with this, a few things:
To paraphrase Sirrian from a stream one time “As PvP goes so does Gems of War”. I hope there is some kind of fix to this nonsense before the 5.0 patch, and the 5.0 patch obliterates it for good, because this doesn’t look good for PvP.
With the change to Guild Seal Tasks, we’ve made a small change to Delves that once a player reaches pass Delve Level 60, the lowest of the 3 Delve difficulties will no longer be higher than Delve Level 50.
Thank you, I appreciate this change. The question is - Am I safe to level up the Faction I use for grinding or will you go back on this in the future?
We fixed a Casual PVP exploit - it somehow got dropped from the patch notes, we’re copy pasting it over now and checking to make sure nothing else is missing/out of date in the notes we published.
To address an exploit in Casual PVP, we have changed the Gold calculations so that Players will earn less Gold when fighting against Players whose Team score is much weaker than theirs (2000+ lower).
A lv20 farming delve is still more appealing to me because it’s slightly faster and has a starting multiplier of x1 instead of x.5. Not a huge difference in rewards but over the months adds up.
Heads up team, this was meant to release with the patch notes and didn’t make it to the final post. I’ve added it in now, and am highlighting it for you all.
So to fix something in Casual PvP, you’re destroying the gold value of weaker teams in Ranked PvP as well?
this isn’t “less gold” this is “drastically less gold”
+325 and +449 on 1 and 2 trophy matches.
And didn’t consider that at all when thinking about the gold income ratio.
Noice. 
Btw… This “Exploit” existed for years. Anything that exists for years should probably be openly discussed prior to “fixing”.
You just made Legendary Tasks 200% more difficult to get thanks to Epic Tasks.
And lowered the percentage of farmable gold in PvP by 66%.
It took us years to get PvP gold and scoring fairly balanced. And it only took you months to screw it up again.
But the “fix” extends to ranked as well?:
My main issue, once again, why am I even seeing teams with this low of payouts if I’m not intended to be fighting them? If I’m stuck in a bad matchmaking pool, all of my matches will look like the left two pictured above or lower. Then I can’t even fight the stronger opponents if I want to, and the “low power matches” eat up nearly as much of my time to slog through while just having lower payouts. The “fix” doesn’t solve the problem because the problem is matchmaking.
Evidently it takes 20% of the time to beat a level 10k team than it does a 14k team.
The devs that don’t play the game made it this way because they have no idea what they are doing with PvP and Factions.
But 
to mess with the gold economy. 
I remember pet rescues. They were fun.
Coincidentally they sell them now for $20. 
…disappointing
You aren’t looking forward to spending 6 million souls and a thousand hours clicking through the explore interface?
Yeah, I really don’t know what they were intending here. Lots of cool things in this update, but this seems like a deliberate middle finger.
Also, I don’t think a “whoops, we forgot it in the patch notes” is going to cut it here, considering how much of a hot button issue there just was about rewards that were exchanged from gold and this directly impacts gold gain way beyond the “exploit” (which is following this definition of “exploit”, by the way, as in “people were using the way this works and has always worked to its fullest potential and we don’t like that because its now how we want them to play” rather than what most people think of when they think “exploit” to a game.) The full extent of how much it does is yet to be seen (since now we have alternate gold option - explore, at the cost of potential pet rescues, and score differentials are a bit wonky right now), but this isn’t the kind of thing you just bring up as an afterthought and hope people won’t get pissed.
Much like the PvP score “fix” that broke things at the high end of the formula (and hey, also didn’t make it into its patch notes) where people at top end noticed the precipitous drop in potential points which stayed that way for months until real fix (the one we have currently) was implemented, I think this needs another pass at least. Hopefully sooner instead of “just wait until 5.0”.
We gave you something nice, it was exploited and abused, we took it away.
We didn’t ban anyone or take the Gold or Trophies they exploited, we changed the game so it couldn’t be exploited any more.
I cannot adequately express how annoyed this makes me. At least either give me 3 xp in level 12 explore as well, OR quadruple the gold earnt from the hard matches in casual or ranked PvP. This is not fixing an exploit, this is destroying a legitimate way to farm gold, which you seem intent on destroying on the sly.
