No, they are not. There is a big gap of competitiveness between bracket 1 and bracket 2, bracket 2 and bracket 3…
Althought many guilds are improving.
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Wow. I didn’t realize the difference was that noticeable that high on the rankings. Thanks @Aelthwyn.
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I want to personally take the time to thank so many guild members, GMs, and active gemmers for their thoughtful replies on this thread. Many of you are from differing perspectives: some are in Brackets 1-3, some in similar positions as my guild, and others who just want to provide contributions and possible solutions for the devs.
One thing IS clear: a change is needed for Guild Wars the bracket advancement system; it was known and acknowledged as a problem before 3.3 and is now an ever worsened problem since the launch of 3.3 and the every-three-week GW cycle.
Tonight prior to/following reset I’ll be uploaded screenshots from exactly what my guild experienced each day of the week during guild wars. I think you’ll all be really surprised if your not in one of the commenters here who’re in guidls like mine: top-level players in the game (as evidenced by those who’ve moved into Bracket 1 and 2 guilds but want to rejoin ours once we’re also appropriately aligned, our rapidly approaching top 80 in PvP trophy counts despite how far we’ve had to climb together since our inception, and the pace at which we’re bypassing all guilds on the pvp trophy leaderboards vs. the horrible pace of advancement in guild wars.
A solution was posted that truly does seem to have consensus, and even our friends and sympathetic top-3 bracket guilds agree with:
I really have to thank @Drock for his perfect football analogy above as well.
I look forward to sharing our experience via screenshots and summaries from the first week back with 3.3 GW, and contributing to the efforts of the development team. @Sirrian, we hope you’re understanding of this situation and that it should be treated as a ‘game breaking’ bug by now. And @Cyrup, as evidenced by this thread, you have more than a handful (40+ posts?) of players chiming in who have offered solutions. As a Community Experience Manager - we’re eager to collaborate with you, and hope you don’t still view this as a trivial issue within the game as was implied from your previous post. You have players and customers here still choosing to spend their time and money to help your team better the experience this game can provide. Rather than viewing us as protesting, whiny objectors or simply frustrated players to be easily written off, I hope you’ll summarize this feedback for a fix and utilize us as the invaluable resources we are for providing a more rewarding game for ALL players, not just those already established and comfortably sitting in the top two (and best-compensating) GW brackets.
Can’t wait to share the images with you all later-they’re pretty mind-blowing when you realize we’ve been putting in the effort week after week up until 3.3 to still only be where we are, and now it’s every 3 weeks. The conference champions who can’t play in March Madness because they’re a new program. Unheard of! Looking forward to fixing it with you all.
- Derek (aka Aurora Borealis, of Ares and Athena)
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Hey everyone, I’m going to try to address some of your concerns:
First of all, just so everyone has context I want to explain our thoughts on climbing the Guild Wars brackets prior to the 3.3 update:
The current Guild Bracket system, as you know, ranks Guilds in a bracket, based on their point score. This point score is tied to a bracket since, as an extreme example, 200,000 points in bracket 1 is a lot harder to attain than 200,000 points in bracket 100. For this reason, we decided to err on the side of caution with movement of guilds through brackets, not allowing a guild to jump up (or down) more than 2 brackets in a single week. We may change that in future, to allow more movement, but at the moment we don’t have anything to announce.
Your guild’s initial placement in the brackets would have taken your guild’s level and current placement in the guild-trophy leaderboard when you first registered for guild wars. As a newer guild, that will certainly mean starting some way from the top, but given the 1-3 years most top guilds took to establish themselves, we feel that 6-10 months to rise up the brackets for a new guild is not unreasonable.
Fast forward to now and we have Guild Wars every 3 weeks and we agree with you, we don’t believe it’s fair that it should take 3 times as long to reach a challenging bracket.
However, as you can see from the great discussion you’ve all been having here, the solution isn’t as simple as tripling the number of brackets a Guild can climb or drop. That’s not to say we won’t do that - however what we do need is more data to come up with a decent solution for every guild, whether you’re one of these fast climbing Guilds, a Guild in bracket 1, or a Guild with 10 players who wants to play Guild Wars anyway.
Basically, it boils down to this:
We’re listening to you, we agree with you and once 3.3 has been running for long enough for us to have more data, we will be making a decision about Guild Wars brackets. I know that you want the solution now, but this sort of change is going to take time to get it right, please know that while things aren’t changing as fast as you might be hoping, we will be doing something about it.
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Guild Wars needs to be at least every other week. The raids, invasions, and bounties are all the same with almost no difference as far as how they are handled.
Many endgame players are leaving now as well because of all these new modes being heavily pay 2 win.
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Speed isn’t as important as getting it right. Thanks for listening.
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That’s 1 opinion. Not one that everyone shares, so needs to be is highly debatable.
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THIS alone is exactly the kind of response we’ve needed and so appreciate. A summary of where the dev’s mindset was before 3.3 and acknowledgment of previous statements, the understanding that it shouldn’t take 3x as long as it used to and that top brackets also shouldn’t be punished, nor the small but active guilds, and that it is of importance to your team–that it hasn’t fallen to the bottom of a very long list of priorities because it wasn’t a “game breaking” problem.
Now, it still gives me, and i’m sure others, pause when I read something vague again like “running long enough for us to have more data,” I think we’re on board to trust that you know not to take longer than say 3-6 months of “collecting data” without any change or updates (6 months would be 8 guild wars cycles). That would seem a more than sufficient data sample.
So, in sum, from the OP: THANK YOU for taking the time to follow through and acknowledge everyone who’s contributed here. To me, it makes sense to keep this thread open for updates and ongoing discussion/updates from the dev team. @Kafka – thank you once again, you’re always so good at conveying a message clearly and really do instill a sense, at least in me and in my guild, that we can trust you’re doing right by us. So, thank you.
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At this point, I envy anybody that finds enjoyment playing Raid, Invasion, AND Bounty. One of the modes sure, but all, I can’t imagine so. Nearly lost my mind playing Bounty farming the same battle over and over for points. Wish I could buy a fast forward button in life for those hours.
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Debatable, yes, but an opinion that many also share. While I see why many dislike gw for one reason or another, I would still rather have that (or at least switch off between invasion and gw).
I asked this in another thread but while I like the idea, the execution bothers me for raid but slightly less so for invasions. Bounties were less fun as they were too grindy for the matches. What do you like best about raid/invasion and also dislike? For me, the invasions are varied and the towers fun to take on provided there are enough troops to make a good team from. The energy system is a real killer for me. Raids I got sick of real quick and it is annoying how barrier doesn’t work against gothboi. Other than that I find raid/invasion time consuming, p2w, unfair difficulty at late levels depending on team choices, etc. While gw is pvp with attack restrictions (for points as the option to ignore it IS there unlike r/i), I would rather that than laughably easy teams like dungeouns, or the other end of fighting foes far stronger than you even at end game with annoying status ailments to boot. Not like meta defences are the best, well, for me it is the way lesser evil at worst.
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We ended up around 1.4 million again this week. Our closest competitor was at 114k. We were at Bracket 23 and position #221, in 3 weeks we’ll move to rank # 201. We have been crushing our competitors for 8 or 9 months I’m not exactly sure how many weeks but I’d estimate it’s been 9 months and 1 week since we started GW so sadly the 10 months Kafka mentions in his e-mail as the “outside” number isn’t even close to what it will be for TAG to get into the “competitive” ranks 
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@D_Houzz Thanks for the feedback and for your patience in this.
Of course, further discussion on this topic is welcome 
I can’t respond every day here due to my own time constraints but I’ll be reading!
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What exactly is this " more data " that you need… You have the facts on how long it’s going to take… what more data is needed? Let the active guilds rise and rise fast, let the top guilds live in fear of an upcoming super guild… why should they get a free ride and be relatively complacent with being at the top
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@Kafka we have coined a term of “milking the Mana” when facing 1 player weak guilds. You have to walk a fine line of not wiping the team too fast or taking too long in winning. I have actually had to take out troops that are too strong on my teams. I used the wrong mono colored team one day in guild wars and still won easily. Last I looked at our guild scores we had 1.2 million points. The closest team in our 3 brackets didn’t have more then 200k. It may be easier but 1.2 million is still 1.2 million. Thanks for keeping us informed and do what you can as quickly as you can.
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I want to speak up here. As a player who actually left from the guild being discussed and wen’t to a bracket 2 guild, I see the error in the developers’ thinking here. IT IS NOT HARDER TO SCORE 50,000 points in bracket 1. It only requires that you have the troops to compete. IT IS HARDER TO SCORE 50,000 points in bracket 80. The opponents have no health and armor to accumulate damage bonus, they fall too fast to collect mana beyond what you can fill taking damage (not to mention that turn 1 wipes give the opponent mana it didn’t earn to cover divide by 0 scenario), number of troops remaining is not weighted as heavily as those two. Speed is the only easy thing, and then RNG decides to step in and give a bad board. Bracket 1 and 2, 42,000 points in GW is a joke, 48k requires no work, and with a decent set of attack teams, 50k is easy.
Please stop relying on this as an excuse. You’ve said you “erred on the side of caution…” Err you did. I have faith you’ll fix this, but in the mean time, stop lying.
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I presume there’s no easy fix for this as many parties are involved… I’m afraid you’ll just have to be patient 
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