Got it, you and I are talking about two totally different things then. I’m talking about today’s game.
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Yup I figured that. So for me, my trust has been shattered. And I know there’s a lot in similar situations. So you can understand why sone of us aren’t all jumping on the happiness bandwagon now
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FWIW, I’m not on the happiness bandwagon. I’m pretty disillusioned, myself. I just don’t think Kafka is the problem.
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Kafka is 100% not the problem. But as you said she’s possibly the only one who’s making an effort. While that does deserve praise (and I do applaud it) it’s definitely in the “too little too late” category for me. The damage in my case has been done quite badly and one person suddenly doing something nice doesn’t fix it.
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There are a lot of us sitting on the fence, waiting for the guild wars update. If it’s not up to par, there will likely be a second big wave of people leaving.
Lots of people left because they didn’t believe an update was ever going to come, or they got sick of waiting around. So I agree that mutual trust and communication is super important - the lack has led us to where we are now … a little bored and frustrated and missing a lot of friends. Yes, @Kafka, you guys did start communiating super early on this and that is much appreciated. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late for a lot of people.
However, we can only go forward from where we are now. “Don’t shoot the messenger” has been in use since 442 BC (!), with good reason. Just pay attention to what’s released. Does it work for you or not? Are you still having fun playing or are you holding on to an ideal that doesn’t exist? I’m still having enough fun that it feels worth it to wait for the update, but honestly, just barely.
@kafka, I appreciate your openness and what you’re trying to do. Hoping the dev team gives you better information, sooner, and allows you to share it.
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Thanks for updating us on the current state of the new GW! Appreciate it.
I’m trying to be optimistic buuuuuuuut… I can’t even conjure a picture in my head of what a fun, workable, fair and balanced guild wars could look like since the pvp changes. So trying to picture what could be better than what I can’t even picture, is a tough one. haha. Basically, I’m saying that if you guys pull it off, it will be a bona fide miracle. I know I’ll be impressed.
However, its become really clear over the past 6 or 7 years that the team doesn’t actually play the game. Or, I should say, they don’t play the game the way the rest of us play it.
It feels a bit like we, the players, love our motorcycle (our game) and yes… we want to spiff up the bike and make some repairs and improvements. But the team wants to make it a better toaster oven (team’s game). So every update becomes a mess of us: “OMG, can we just get some new tires!!!” and team: “But it’s great, you can air fry too!”
There is just this ever growing chasm between what we players love about GoW and what the team thinks we love about GoW.
Yeah… not optimistic. But rooting for you, none the less!
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I dont see how guild wars won’t be even worse than before as far as frustration goes. Takshaka on 3 days. Stellarix every day. Wand of stars…
It aint gonna work and shouldnt be brought back.
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Under the old system, you could only have a weapon or troop once a week on defense before losing a chunk of points per extra troop. if you’re lower on the defense totem pole, there was no guarantee you’d even have anyone play you. You’re very unlikely to see all of those every single day.
There was a time in Guild Wars where Wand of Stars and Diamantina was available. Those 2 weren’t a boogeyman on defense of any kind.
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I know. But when everyone in a guild has stellarix could they not fill it out so its everywhere?
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They could, but it runs into the issue of not guaranteed to fight the lower ranks + the unknown opponent. So if even a few of your lower ranked members doesn’t own every troop, your opponents might match with them and skip a lot of the other Stellarix defenses.
And even if everyone in one guild used Stellarix on one day, you’d still risk wasting all on one day on an opponent that wasn’t close to you in ranking in Guild Wars, so you’re slowing down someone that doesn’t matter (I.E. 2nd place using it on 10th place).
Then after that, the chance the other 5 opponents for the week manage to strictly pick Stellarix against the same target… It’s not likely.
The actual stalemate prior to Guild Wars being indefinite hiatus was a lot of Zuul’Goth/Ctharrasque vs 2x empowered + Doomed Books. There were variations and other strategies seen on offense and defense. Some people had issues with the old Journey troops on defense too.
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I don’t know if you mean on attack or defense teams
On attack they create too much RNG and they can be frozen, top players in B1 won’t use them
On defense you can easily counter them with Elementalist stun/freeze + Zuul/Cth
I think the defense meta will be Immortals based: many good Invulnerables so probably less Zuul/Cth on attack
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Sure you can easily counter Stella, that’s why it got replaced in pvp because everyone obliterated it reliably.
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There were plenty of ways around Stella. Heck a starting freeze could screw it over. And if you stun it then like a couple hits from takasha ruins its day. I used to love facing those teams as I would win literally 90% of the battles.
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what people forgot about Guild Wars is the scoring system. You must outperform the defence in multiple categories in order to score high. Wand/Stella teams usually outscore defences in all categories except 1. And if you don’t know or understand it, then you are looking at scores of 9400 vs. 9800 per players who outscore defences in all categories.
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I forgot to mention, depending on RNG, sometimes you may get lucky with a Stella team and outscore on that last category, which would definitely boos up your score
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Exactly. I was in Assonance on PS which was #1 in B1 for roughly 2 years. I never had Stellarix (because I have 5 dups of three of the dragons :/) but still routinely managed 9600+ per day in GW. There’s ways around anything, the fun is figuring those ways out. We used to love going up against the guilds who had 30 people all running the same defenders because once we worked out how to best it our entire guild would usually go 5/0 barring catastrophic RNG failures
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Non-Guild Wars related responses
Honestly I always try to include the word “hope” (italics important and sometimes even all caps) because even if I know the plan is to drop something tomorrow, I’m gonna say it’s gonna take a week or “the next few days” just in case something goes wrong, better for us to drop a bug fix or something early than late 
I generally multiply the time I was given by 3 and that is the rough estimate I give the community - do with this information as you will lol. Also an old Project Management trick, work out how long you think it’s going to take you and add at least 30% of the time on to that for your actual project plan.
Definitely don’t want to drop full on updates early though. cough 8.3 cough it’s fine it’s fine we got through it and it gives us more time for a hotfix before Xmas.
I understand this sentiment.
I definitely want to point out that I’m not the only one who cares though, at IP2 I’ve never felt like anyone who’s worked there in my time has just shown up to collect a pay check, everyone really cares. I have great discussions with Nim and Steve about the direction of the game and how important community feedback is. Recently I was chatting with a programmer about the Alliances we’re in and the Alliance balancing - Nim stopped by to join the discussion. I think it’s not just good these discussions happen not just in meetings and on the fly but also the fact that the programmers play the game so have their own opinions too is so great and important.
Us here on CX have definitely been feeling a positive shift in how community feedback is prioritised in development - in some regards, in ways we didn’t even suggest directly to the team - such as the top 5 community priority bugs and monthly talks about important community requests (these talks happen more often this monthly one is just a different format) and while the steps have been very small and probably not noticed by the community yet, we’re feeling good about the direction things are heading internally and hopefully this becomes more apparent to everyone as time goes on. We understand it’s going to take time and actions speak louder than words.
This is why I’m glad I’m not a designer haha I give suggestions based on what I know the community talks about, how you all play and from my own experiences as well but at the end of the day because no one can make everyone happy and there’s so much to even consider when designing, I’m glad it’s someone else’s job and I just get to be the annoying backseat driver of “nah don’t like this bit, or can we tweak this bit over here” 
I expect not everyone will like it because it’s not old guild wars, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing, just different. I hope for the most part you all think it’s cool but we’ll find out soon. Just go into it with the idea that your feedback matters and HOPEFULLY we can tweak things if they’re not feeling right for the community before release.
This is quite difficult to achieve due to needing work/life balance. I game a LOT and GoW along with Plague Inc are the only 2 mobile games I play(and Plague Inc gets old fast) so I tend to play a lot when I’m not at my PC and so my GoW time ends up mirroring a lot of regular GoW players. But I also don’t have kids or other responsibilities pulling me away from my games after work - plus I take public transport, I don’t drive so that’s also where a lot of my GoW time comes from lol. I do sometimes have to take a break from the game, not because I don’t enjoy it but if I’m stressed about work, playing the game is not going to help me lose the stress, it’s going to remind me of it.
For game developers it’s quite difficult to work on a game for 40 hours a week then spend your free time also playing it more than casually. Not just GoW - in general for game devs.
Having said that, I work back late to be around for daily reset, and so do Nim and Steve and after regular business hours those guys are playing over at their desks and having fun with it and having a laugh just like you and your guildies would if you were in voice chat together. So we do play but I think there is quite a hefty expectation of how much we can play. I’ve mentioned before being in bracket 3 for Guild Wars and I think I got some responses that I needed to be in bracket 1 to really get it - DO YOU ALL REMEMBER HOW DIFFICULT IT WAS TO EVEN GET THAT HIGH IN BRACKETS AND STAY THERE? haha
I think what matters most is how much each team member cares and just advocating here for everyone on the team - they all do, more than you could know. Because I know you haven’t all been happy with decisions made or bugs that have occurred. And that’s totally fair and valid. But we are all doing our best, and I wanted you all to know that so you don’t just think that because I’m one of the ones reading all your posts and taking the time to reply that I’m the only one who cares. So believing it or not believing it is a bit moot but I would like for you all to eventually believe in that, even if it’s not right now today.
Copy pasting this into a report thank you for the excellent quote 
We should probably move this other discussion to another thread if we want to continue it though so the team don’t come looking for GW feedback and find a bunch of other stuff they’re not working on at the time
For these 2 points:
You’ll definitely have a chance to explain this after Sirrian and Nimhain share some more details and with more context to form your opinion so please hold this thought - this is an important point re: Stellarix and Wand of Stars/bonus points for using unique troops on defence. I’m going to set myself a reminder so that once more details have been shared we can circle back around to this as a discussion point.
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TL;DR = If you want players to lower their expectations on how much the team can play… start by recognizing that players also want the team to lower their expectations of how much we players can play.
This is a great example of the chasm I mentioned and illustrates how the team doesn’t play the game the way we do. It’s also a bit ironic.
It’s natural for people working on a game to play with it more as a toy than a game. What I mean is to dabble around with it and even get some amusement, but to not have it be a genuine pastime activity. For players, this is a genuine pastime activity. If Gems of War were a mountain, we players are mountain climbers trying to reach the peak. The team are people who show up and look at the mountain, maybe climb a few feet, come down and have a beer.
We players also need work/life/GAME balance. And I think the team has quite a hefty expectation of how much WE can play. The team is likely unconcerned with the ridiculous time commitment needed to achieve things, because they likely don’t care quite as much about achieving the things, as they would in the games they play for their actual downtime.
This (by the way) is one of the reasons why you get met with torches and pitchforks, every time the UI changes add so much as one new click/tap. lol Because, we just don’t have that 1/10th of a second more, to give you guys.
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This. Exactly this. Thank you for writing this out. A vast majority of the recent updates was focused on making us play more. But it’s just no longer possible - playing more (or: as much as you’d like us to play, like, the impossible to win PvP brackets, if you have a life outside GoW) would mean giving up family time, friends time, work time…
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