Hey, I respect your preferences there… But I feel I’m with @joplick in that I’d expect some extra reward for playing on a harder level. It takes longer and also has more risk of losing - so on a simple risk-reward balance (sorry, I’m an accountant) you’d expect better rewards…
…just like how Diablo 3 gives uplifted gold/experience/drops as you go up the Torment levels…
The rewards could just be more minor.
Like the lowest difficulty provides no bonus, while level 2 gives a 5% bonus to all rewards (souls, gold, exp.), and level 3 gives a 10% boost.
So the rewards earned time wise would be better overall with Easy because of the time spent, while the rewards on Hard would feel more juiced, but the time lost is significantly increased.
Minor increased rewards wouldn’t make or break an individuals choice of fun, but would also offer reason to even bother playing on said higher difficulties.
Regarding D3, I do get @Archenassa’s point about the infernal machine and how obsessively hunting a single item or reward made the game not fun… Valid point, but I don’t think that objection rules out getting better rewards for harder play…
I guess every game’s different - not sure GoW has all the depth and detail to expose us to those ‘non-fun’ issues that D3 does - and pretty comfortable that the devs wouldn’t let it go that way…
Don’t get me wrong - I sometimes like a ludicrous challenge too! I play StarCraft 2 campaign on brutal, or play Sentinels Of The Multiverse on advanced sometimes (if anyone reading this hasn’t tried that game, go buy it on Steam or iOS now!) But these are more ‘one off’ games whereas in GoW there’s my cumulative level and gold earnings to think of…
Oops probably shouldn’t use the GoW forum to plug other games too hard 
I think it’s ok, GoW devs are gamers too, we’re not telling people to stop playing GoW, but to broaden their horizons. 
But we can stop if we’re asked, no problem. ^^
I like Zelfore’s compromise though, I think it’s a good idea. Enough to make people feel like they’re not losing anything, but not enough to force people into swapping fun for labor. 
I understand where you’re coming from, though not entirely. I’ve never played Diablo 3. I have seen how online communities interact with each other over various challenges though. I myself have done some dreadfully boring things in a game in order to accomplish something of little value.
Gems of War is fundamentally a single player experience. The multiplayer element that would be most affected by reward adjustments would be trophies. So I don’t think those should be adjusted. While writing this post I have been thinking a lot about the various aspects of the game that would be affected by difficulty.
Challenges wouldn’t need a reward adjustment.
Quests should receive a slight gold reward boost to offset the increased loss ratio.
Invasion would be fascinating because your chance of winning decreases as difficulty goes up. I don’t know how to balance for that. Maybe only match with people on the same difficulty or else everyone would switch to easy to get to rank 1 quickly.
Arena would need adjustments. If the game had a puzzle quest difficulty I would rarely make it through all 8 battles. But I view arena as a chore right now, so I rarely play it because the difficulty is easy enough to win the battles, but the team isn’t custom so the battles are very lengthy. If the difficulty was increased, how you made your team would be more a factor.
In any event, when they add a harder difficulty option, I will play on it, and I will have fun, even if they don’t adjust rewards. I honestly don’t view much of the game needing a reward adjustment in that case. I would probably still not play arena, and all my quests are done.
Archenassa
3d
“I honestly hope they don’t tie rewards to difficulty modes, that would feel bad to me. Maybe new players would play in easy just to level up more quickly, and maybe some players would only play in super hardcore of doom because they find it more enjoyable, but exchanging fun for grind is something that has always upset me in the games industry in general. Just look at any discussion about leaderboards in, well, most games really, and you’ll get what I mean. Maybe.”
Exchanging fun for grind is the quickest way for me to want to stop playing the game. So tired of grinding with games since most games move a such a snail crawl pace anyways that to add the daily grinding just makes it feel too grueling. I agree with a lot of your comments here Archenassa.
Just what exactly is grind/grinding?
Grind is essentially doing the same thing over and over for a reward. This game is “grindy” trying to level all your troops to 15. If you’ve ever played Runescape, that game is a good example of a grind game where you’re continuously chopping down trees or fishing to try to level your skills.
Ah I see. Thanks!
What Maquis said. Basically, grinding is repeating a task you are not actually enjoying just to yield the result you want. A lot of MMOs follow that principle (kill 200 rats, make 200 swords…), but the concept can be applied to all types of games. For instance in my D3 example, it was about players reloading over and over again until they found the keywarden they needed to kill, and then killing him again and again until he dropped the needed key. I’ve seen people do that with goblins too when the Vault was introduced. In any case, whenever players are doing a repetitive task they don’t find enjoyable just to get something specific, that’s grind usually!
So if I understand correctly, your concern is that GoW might become more grinding if these difficulty levels would introduce specific or more rewards.
Yes, in a nutshell, I’m wary players would feel like they “have to” play in difficulty modes they are not enjoying just to get better rewards and not feel “left behind”. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll probably be amongst the people trying harder difficulties since that’s usually how I enjoy playing, but looking at other types of games, people usually start stopping whatever they enjoyed in the first place in order to get these better goodies and not be the slowest levelling one in their guild or group of friends. So instead of being about finding a difficulty setting that makes the game fun for them, the players, people usually end up just doing tasks they find non-enjoyable just to get onboard the goodie train. I think it’s sad and that anyone should just be able to enjoy their game the way they want to, hardcore mode or baby mode! ^^
I think I agree with you, especially if guilds would start to come up with minimum requirements and so on, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the devs come up with.
Oh god, I didn’t even think about guild requirements… that would be so bad for newcomers, especially. 
Well, I definitely can see that happen… I am in Match Masters and we would loose our 11,000 something lead quickly if the guilds below us would start to use bigger rewards by playing higher difficulty. On the other hand, to be honest, if nothing changes they will hardly be able to catch up, there are only so many trophies you can collect (more or less) and if the guilds are full 30/30 each playing up to rank 1 in PVP this means we all collect about the same amount of trophies every week.