Would like to see a feature where players can battle, send challenges, or live training battles against guild mates with headset chat supported. This would allow real time team build advice. Players could enter an area where random matches, or search for players to battle. Awards based on levels. Brackets for win loss ratio. Weekly reset. Quitters or disconnects would receive loss. Will hopefully stop rage quitters. Thanks for reading.
1 Like
It’s a common request and it’s also, effectively, a different game. Here’s how a game of GoW would work if we had real-time head-to-head PvP.
- Game begins. I go first. My team is Flammifer / Yao Guai / Queen Titania / Tai-Pan.
- You wait. And wait. And wait. The game has a 30-second timer before it forces a move. 10 seconds remain.
- I activate Tai-Pan, which fills Flammifer and Yao Guai, giving me a free move. Your first troop get Faerie Fire from Queen Titania.
- You wait. And wait. And wait. 10 seconds remain.
- I activate Yao Guai. Your first troop dies, and the purple I converted gives me a free turn. Cascades have filled Yao Guai and Tai-Pan again.
- 20 seconds later, I activate Flammifer. Your troop #2 dies. Queen Titania is filled.
- 20 seconds later, I activate Queen Titania. There was enough red I get a free turn.
- 20 seconds later, I activate Tai-Pan. I get a free turn from the conversion. Flammifer is full again.
- 20 seconds later, I activate Yao Guai. Your third troop dies.
- I didn’t make a 4-match because the board was clogged. You make a 3-match with your one remaining, severely weakened troop.
- I wait 25 seconds, activate Flammifer, and kill your last troop.
So the match took about 3 and a half minutes of elapsed time and you got to make one move. Then you lost. But technically you lost the game before you even made a move. That’s the kind of game GoW is: there are teams that win on turn 1 even if they yield a few turns in the process.
This was a friendly looping team. There are others that loop more reliably and don’t do a lot of damage. That means the game could easily take 5-10 minutes per. You could win them, but it’s going to be an awful lot of work.
This is just one of many reasons a game exactly like GoW would be terrible for head-to-head PvP. The game needs to be much more fair to support it. That means removing a lot of features like free turns. I can’t even think of a head-to-head match 3 out there. It’s possible they’re so rage-inducing by design only the CPU can stand going second.
6 Likes
Ember Strike tried to do that. It’s more of an action game, both players try to match gems simultaneously, the one with lower latency tends to win. It’s technically Early Access but it got abandoned as lost cause within a few months.
1 Like
That sounds interesting.
Or have a slider before the game starts, whoever sets the game up can choose from 3 seconds to 15 seconds per move. If you don’t move before time runs out, the ai moves for you. If you choose 15 seconds and always take 15 seconds, you might find your guidmates won’t play with you.
Even a fast game where you have zero control and are simply handed a loss — or a decimated team as @Slypenslyde mentioned above — would be no fun at all. The core game rules would need revisiting, and what would emerge would be a completely different game in the end. (Not to mention the extra server load and requirement for network connectivity the game currently does not have.)
I’m not saying a fun networked head-to-head game couldn’t be made, it just wouldn’t be Gems of War as we know it.
4 Likes