I know there has been ongoing discussion on this subject and some “fixes” made. However, we still continue to play in dead brackets with dead guilds. For example, the last GW we were in Bracket 148 there were only 4 guilds that participated and one of those guilds only scored 2k pts for the week. We scored over a million points this GW we only moved ahead 4 brackets. Our current bracket has 2 guilds with more than 20 members aside from ourselves. At this rate of advancement it will take a year for us to break into top 100 brackets. It is obvious that GW Bracketing needs an ongoing purge of dead guilds. I also believe there should be a member minimum to register for Guild Wars. It is remarkably discouraging for all members who really want to compete. I will add screen shots to provide hard examples.
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I agree, something needs done. How would you fairly move guilds around? If they just did it by total guild score, it would be off. With good guilds facing weak opponents in the lower brackets. Do they just purge all the guilds with less than a certain number of players participating in guild wars?
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Another potential cause is that there were a bunch of active guilds within the… call it 10 brackets or so… above you that performed well enough to hold your own guild’s ranking to the +4 Brackets that you gained.
Just a spitball here.
Then let us look at more than 3 brackets in game. So that we’d know if that was the case.
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I think a combination of:
- Registration by at least 5 members of a guild, and
- Harsher penalties for guilds that register but don’t participate (i.e. a reverse bracket jump)
would go a long way towards fixing this.
It’s super disheartening for me that inactive guilds in higher brackets receive better rewards than us (down in 215, but also scoring ~1 mil points) for registering each GW, but then only move down a few brackets.
If these inactive/non-participating (but registering) guilds (as of yet undefined - but I think we can agree that 0 points is inactive) are moving down more quickly, I would love some (broad/general) Dev confirmation on that!
I also have guild members disappointed each month, to whom I have to try explain this all to, as well, and I just don’t have anything good to tell them, despite the amazing efforts they put in. The reality for them is:
- It doesn’t matter how hard you try or how well you perform this week - our rewards will be meagre/mediocre.
- Even though we smash the other guilds, and jump up several brackets, you’re still going to have to wait probably a year - if you’re still playing at that point - before those rewards improve.
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These are all good points that have not been addressed in 2 years, but isn’t it great that we got emojis in chat??
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I second @Jonathan’s points.
The GW bracket system’s been a complaint as long as I played. It’s even worse now that GW is once monthly. I think it doesn’t matter to the vast majority of players, because I’d accept that 90% of players are content to be in a small, inactive guild.
It’s not right that they represent a huge stumbling block to people who want to build a 30-player guild and see how high they can climb. This plays right into the big complaint about the Switch situation, where very active guilds are getting sorted such that they have to fight for months to reach the rewards their scores imply they deserve.
I care about people who aren’t competitive, but I also care about competitive people. I think they should be able to stay out of each others’ way.
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I don’t know how complicated it would be to create Divisions and you move up through your brackets in a division. Divisions could be based on quantity of members, or quantity of registrants, and guild scores (just for an example.) The Division Brackets could then feed into the top 25 Brackets.
Or better yet, how about a total realignment as they had to do when they released the Guild War aspect. Leave the top 10 brackets untouched and have a GW like they did the first time to assign brackets. This might be a solution and it’s something that could be done every 6 months to a year.
If a realignment isn’t done then it really can no longer be called Guild Wars legitimately.
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I like this kind of idea, but perhaps to expand on it (and somewhat referencing an idea about a ‘pool’ put forward by @HugeOgre here: Guild War Improvement for all (?)), perhaps all positions in Brackets 41+ 101+ (Eugh, 41+ sounded so much more appealing - let’s revisit this) could be determined solely on Points earned in the previous war, taking into account Guilds moving down from Bracket 40 100, of course.
(Edits - I believe I may have misinterpreted the below graphic!)
This Bracket was chosen, because this is where the current reward tiers begin to increase, as shown here (10 Guilds per Bracket):
This would give all Guilds a chance each week to fight their way into the Brackets with better rewards; and they don’t get better rewards without proving themselves against other Guilds that have also scored very well the week before.
In addition, I had typically always thought it would be a good idea to give some kind of reward for winning a Bracket, but in all my brainstorming, I think I tended to end up with the same conclusion as Sirrian, here:
Relevant historical note/post:
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This seems like an incredibly good idea. I hope devs have a gander at this post.
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Yeah I like the notion that the lower ranks could have a different bracketing process than the upper ranks.
Once you get past whatever the line is where the last “deadbeat” guilds exist, the bracketing system works. Generally the people above B10 don’t complain about how their brackets are going. So at least we can say it works somewhere.
I don’t have a good feel for how the lower brackets should work but it’s sort of astonishing that one can spend so long facing guilds that have less than 20 or so members and even fewer active members.
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Being in Bracket 175, my Guild’s big frustration is that so many of the Guilds we face barely even bother playing Guild Wars. We’re certainly moving up 10-30 brackets each month since the changes, which is nice. But there’s one more change I’d like to see.
Suggestion: Treat Guilds that sign up for GW but score 0 points the same way as Guilds that don’t sign up at all. That is, anyone moving up skips over them.
I think that would both encourage participation and move active Guilds out of the lowest brackets a little bit faster.
Reward Tiers
On a very different subject, I’d like to share an analogy I read in a top management book (written by a couple of people at McKinsey).
Consider a sales force of 100 people. Suppose you give a special reward to the top 5 sellers each month. Then 80 salesmen won’t even bother trying, because they know they’ll never get the bonus reward. Now turn it around (like IBM did): give (smaller) bonuses to the top 80 sellers each month. Everyone is incentivised to at least try to get some reward.
Moral of the Story: The wider you spread bonus rewards, the more people will be incentivised to try that little bit harder.
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I very much agree with @Starlite, it’s more or less what I suggested.
A guild with a 0 score didn’t participate. It shouldn’t be a burden to the people who are.
I just felt like expanding it further. Losing a match nets about 250 points. If a guild hasn’t made 30 * 6 * 250 = 45,000 points, then they didn’t even average the same as if 30 members played and lost a single full day.
I also agree with revisiting the reward tiers. The game is at least an order of magnitude bigger than when those were set. That means at least 10x as many people are getting no rewards, and have no hope of ever getting them.
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A revamp of this system is much needed to even the playing field, and to give lower level players a chance to grow. It is very frustrating to have very uneven matchups, and to fight against guilds of just one very strong player. Without fixing this system, I doubt new players will spend very long playing GoW before they are moving on.
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Welcome to the forums, thank you for choosing this thread to be your first to comment on!
Welcome to the forums Aarminia! Thanks for choosing this thread to be your first to comment on!
I would advocate for a seasonal revamp of the guilds based on activity. Devs did it once for initial placing. Every time they release a imp purge guilds that we’re inactive for the season.
To be clear I’m not advocating based on score, that is disproportional based on lower tiers. Just clear the dead weight.
I agree with @Slypenslyde . Excluding 0-points Guilds is a good first step, but I agree that additional criteria would be useful. I’m just not sure what they should be. 
I’d like to reconsider this suggestion of mine. One of the concerns often raised in relation to increasing the number of people required to register is causing some portion of the player base to miss out on participating, which I can agree is unfair.
As such, it’s important that any solution allow for everyone to participate, and receive rewards for doing so. I believe the suggestion of a pool or separate divisions, as mentioned above, would address this, though.
As a player who loves guild wars, I’m almost scared to make a comment because it seems to me that they are trying to phase out gw in lieu of other events, gem sinks in particular…but that is a different topic. It is unfair to guilds who maybe haven’t been around as long, but score just as well to remain in brackets that are in the 100s…only to score over a million points and the bottom 5 teams in their bracket score 0. Like, that’s an actual thing. It seems as though a better way to run guild wars would be that going forward you: a)have to have a minimum of 5 people in the guild to cover the five battles; b) cannot have registered but scored 0 in the past two guild wars; and maybe c) a registration fee (??), to encourage (or discourage) participation 
. Please devs, if you are reading this, change bracketing to reflect actual results rather than leaving high scoring guilds stuck in the wasteland of non-participation.
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