Guild War is pretty much the only part of this game any more where I actually need to think - I can generally autopilot through everything else as it hasn’t been set by another player. Our group chat is far more active during gw week than any other & there are always suggestions & solutions to defence teams that we come up with as a guild - if that gets taken away that will be the end of this game for me, it’s the only mode I genuinely look forward to…
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GW is the best game mode, everything else is irrelevant.
but i agree there should be a revamp that allowed for active GW guilds to move up into the competition, since 99% of people playing GWs are stuck in just nothing. Where the only way as a player to get into it would be to change guilds.
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(Small edit made for nitpickers from my fan club.)
I thought about what I don’t really like about GW today and something I hadn’t thought about struck me. The scoring exacerbates the randomness that most people don’t like.
The rules of PvP are simple: the player who wins wins and the player who loses loses. Kill all their troops by any means necessary and you get your rewards.
But GW is fiddly. A win isn’t just a win.
Three parts of your score are fixed. The first is the points you get for having unique troops on your defense team. The second is the bonus you get for using the right team colors. The third is the “value” of the opponent you’re facing. For the purposes of this post let’s ignore those scores as you have full control over if you get them and nothing can take them away.
A big chunk of your score depends on secret factors the devs keep hidden. We know it has to do with things like turns taken, the ratio of skull to spell damage, and several other factors. We know the devs had some ideas like “teams that loop too much should be penalized” or “if you take a lot more damage than you dish out you should be penalized”. They’re sensible. They’re also somewhat beyond our control.
Pretend I knew the exact ratio of skull-to-spell damage to maximize that score factor. Even if I build a team that lets me groom it, I’m at the RNG’s mercy. I could be in a position to finish a game with a maximal score, but inadvertently cause a cascade that throws all of my ratios off. I’ll lose a few hundred points. Somebody else with the same team against a different board could win in a sloppy way and get the same score by accident. Somebody else in the same scenario will make a slightly-less-optimal move and score better.
I still win, but it bugs me that the score is influenced by things I can’t understand and can’t control. It can matter a lot if two guilds of “similar skill” are facing each other. Let’s say they both go 30-0. One of them could be thousands of points better off than the other. One could have gone 29-1 and still win. That’s kind of strange. The answers why could even come down to “Death Mark RNG” or “the Archer fairy was against me”, etc. There are counters to those, sure, but how many of those choices would mess up your other categories of scoring?
I don’t know how to fix it or even if I want it fixed, but now that I thought about it, it bugs me. GW is like a basketball game where how many points you get for a basket is up to a judge who can award more points if they “think it was cool” and fewer points if they “think it sucked”. Suddenly you start doing things that have nothing to do with basketball, and the people who win aren’t necessarily the people who can sink the most goals. It really changes the definition of “skill”.
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And I really think it’s ridiculous that we don’t know the scoring mechanics.
Because we’d min-max or somehow game the system, right?
…uhh…the entire point of a competition, you mean?
Seriously. Would anyone watch football on the same tenterhooks during, say, the Super Bowl if they didn’t know how many points a field goal vs. a conversion vs. a touchdown was? It would all seem pretty arbitrary at the end—just a bunch of guys hitting one another, and one group declared the “winners” over the others inexplicably.
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Isn’t that “unique defenders on your defense team”?
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2 out of 3 seem to be wrong
Yes, sure. I made a mistake in one sentence so obviously there’s nothing else to read. Sorry I interrupted your Teen Titans Go.
The best part of this is the basketball analogy, as GW makes you jump through a lot of hoops too.
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Changed: The amount of damage and the drop rate of skulls needs to be lowered. A lot.
Removed: Guild Wars.