Read the first two hundred posts or so and gave up trying to read the whole thing. But here are my thoughts on what I did read, as well as my suggestions.
- Allow only counting the top 27 scores. Gives a buffer to everybody for really bad luck, as well as vacations and real life interruptions.
- Allow defenses to continue to be set as they are currently. Do NOT have them set by devs, do NOT prevent duplicate troops (unless that is a game/troop mechanic that is introduced and will also apply to PvP). GW defenses should be controlled by the player, and follow the same rules as PvP.
- Add scoring for defense. Make defense follow constraints similar to the offense in order to get higher scores, and make bonuses for these constraints high enough to make it an option worth choosing. However, these constraints should be different than the offense ones (not red for both sides, maybe red for offense and yellow for defense).
- Make constraints more than just colour, for example a Centaur day, or an Epic day. I actually thought this was the original design, and was disappointed that it’s only colour. This could really open things up.
- Allow battles to be played on any day, including the first day. The current design requires playing the last day, which is sometimes a bit restricting.
- Make the start day match up with PvP. I understand the spike in processing for the end of week and the desire to avoid increasing it, however, since this is cloud based, in general having more parallel processing power should solve most of this and is easily doable with AWS. From a player or guild perspective, being able to switch players on the off day without having to worry about them missing guild task rewards on Monday would be a huge plus.
- Eliminate surviving troops from the scoring. This is too limiting and makes the game all about summoners. Either change it to be based simply on winning, or have the score based partly on speed/efficiency of the win and partly on survivng troops. This would mean a slow game with summoners could still be viable, but a quick kamikaze attack which wins quickly but maybe sacrifices some troops would also receive bonuses. Basically, allow multiple strategies to be able to get top scores, don’t pigeonhole play style.
- Leave sentinel bonuses as is, flowing up to the top performing players. This not only makes the later battles more difficult, but rewards those players who do well (since there is basically no other individual rewards received from GW other then your position).
- Continue to allow kingdom and guild bonuses to apply. This is Guild Wars, so guilds should be able to use the bonuses they built.
- Continue to use the bracketing system, since the level of play is very different between brackets, so straight rankings by win across the entire player base isn’t a fair comparison. However, some acceleration needs to be possible for lower ranked guilds to be able to get into the top brackets. Taking a month or 6 weeks is reasonable, but 6 months is too long, and dis-incentivizes newer guilds.
- Most important, regardless of the changes decided, make sure they are presented clearly and transparently to players. No more secret hidden algorithms that can’t be understood, audited, or planned for.
Overall, I really like GW, and despite the long list I think only a bunch of minor tweaks are needed, not a few major ones. I agree with @Strat that the most pressing issue with the game is not GW but rather overall troop balance, and improving that will fix a lot of the GW issues. Also, the most polarizing issue with GW is simply the fact that it is competitive, which some simply don’t like regardless of how it is implemented (since it’s not casual), and I don’t believe any amount of changes will fix this core problem.