Guild Wars, Point-Scoring for Battles, and You!

Official News
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Hi everyone,

As promised, I wanted to give you some more insight into how Guild Wars Battles will be scored this week. I say “this week” because we will no doubt tweak the formula as we see it in action (but tweaks to the formula - unless they are obvious bug fixes - will ONLY occur between Guild Wars, NEVER mid-week)

First the longest TL;DR ever:

Guild Wars points depend on 4 things:

  • Whether you win or lose (same as before)
  • How many troops you use of the correct daily color (same as before)
  • How many troops you have alive at the end of battle (similar to before)
  • How many turns it takes you to win (new!)
  • My “Mana Efficiency” i.e. how much better I am at collecting mana than my opponent (new!)
  • My “Damage Efficiency” i.e. how much better I am at dealing damage than my opponent (new!)

Also, points are 300 straight up per battle, to lessen & spread out the effects of RNG in battles as you approach the paragon.

Now let’s dive in and examine each of the new ones in a little more detail.
Note that we have a weighting here of A%, B%, C%, D% on each of the 4 criteria. We’re not telling you exactly what those numbers are, and we likely WILL adjust them next week, but they’ve been chosen to try and make each of the 4 criteria of equal importance given the data we collected from 1000’s of games about the efficiency and speed of players at multiple levels.
I am not sharing those exact numbers for 3 reasons:

  • Things like this generate 100’s of tickets for our support team, with about 99% of them containing incorrect math
  • They will cause any discussion here to degenerate very quickly
  • The numbers we have will NOT be optimal as the game evolves, and we will change them accordingly (with warning, of course! if we de-emphasize or enhance one of the criteria in a future week, we’ll let you know)

1. How many troops you have alive at the end of battle

This is identical to how it behaved before (i.e. you get a bonus for every troop surviving but it has been de-emphasized a bit - about half).

SURVIVAL_BONUS = NumTroopsSurviving * A%

2. How many turns it takes you to win

By “turns” we mean unique actions (so a goblin who casts his spell, then matches 4 gems, then matches some skulls, has performed 3 actions)
You get bonus points for every action less than 30 that you take… So say you get x% bonus per turn - take 20 turns, and you will receive 10*x% as your bonus

SPEED_BONUS = Max(30-MyTurnsTaken,0) * B%

3. Mana Efficiency

We base another bonus on mana collected during play: Max(4, MyTotalMana/EnemyTotalMana)… if enemy mana is 0, it defaults to 4.

MANA_BONUS = Min(4, MyTotalMana/EnemyTotalMana) * C%

4. Damage Efficiency

Very similar to mana efficiency, but looks at damage instead. Some quick notes:

  • Devour & Death Mark (insta-kill skills) do not count as damage
  • AoE damage counts its damage for every troop hit, so 10 damage on all 4 enemies = 40 damage
  • All other damage dealt by spells, traits, & skulls is equivalent point for point.

DAMAGE_BONUS = Min(4, MyTotalDamage/EnemyTotalDamage) * D%

And finally…

FINAL_SCORE = BASE_SCORE + BASE_SCORE * (COLOR_BONUS + SURVIVAL_BONUS + SPEED_BONUS + MANA_BONUS + DAMAGE_BONUS)

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Thank you devs. :sunglasses:

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leo

Yes, yes, I’m meme bombing. I’ll give myself a warning.

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Ok 2 questions. (Of course right?)

Destruction Effects such as Dracos’ spell, Archer trait, and Assassin Trait… Since those are 1 hit kills but show up with a damage number… Will they be treated like damage or like Devour/Death Mark?

Also on the speed bonus… If I take 35 actions… Does that mean no bonus or do I lose score since as it’s written it would come up -5%? Yup… There’s math…

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Thank you, Sirrian. You guys are are awesome and your game is awesome.

A quick question:

Should this be?
“SPEED_BONUS = Max(0, 30-MyTurnsTaken) * B%”

Or am I off base?

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7 things :slight_smile:

There is no weight for the Color bonus?
Is there an additional rule that A+B+C+D=X so the contribution of the sum of these 4 rules has always the same impact on the score?

Even the unused mana? I mean if I received 30 red mana but I have only one troop requiring 15 red mana do the counter is up to 30 or 15 points?

Same than before. If I do 100 damage to one troop with 5 Life remaining should MyTotalDamage be up of 100 points or 5 points?

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I suspect the damage formula uses damage “dealt,” which implies you can’t damage the troop after they are dead. This would limit the bonus to whatever it takes to kill them and the overflow would be lost. However, I would love for this to be confirmed.

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FINAL_SCORE = BASE_SCORE + BASE_SCORE * (COLOR_BONUS + SURVIVAL_BONUS + SPEED_BONUS + MANA_BONUS + DAMAGE_BONUS)

It also appears that surviving troops and color bonuses are now additive, rather than multiplicative. It used to be BASE SCORE * (1+COLOR_BONUS) * (1+SURVIVAL_BONUS), did it not?

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Really not a fan of the speed bonus.
So players relying on armor, healing and barrier (defense and survival approach) are not good players?

Then again, a good defense can be a stalling one, like a Dwarf gate defense.

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Those players will do very well on their DAMAGE_BONUS, as they will probably not take a lot of damage. I suspect (hope) that it is impossible to maximize all the bonuses simultaneously, to reward different play styles roughly equally, as long as they end in a victory.

Edit: I see what you mean about healing. Casting a healing spell means your troops survive, yes, but it also lets you take more damage over the course of the match.

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Yes - that is correct… we bottom out at 0% and don’t apply a negative penalty

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So in this case better than
FINAL_SCORE = BASE_SCORE + BASE_SCORE * (COLOR_BONUS + SURVIVAL_BONUS + SPEED_BONUS + MANA_BONUS + DAMAGE_BONUS)
do
FINAL_SCORE = BASE_SCORE + BASE_SCORE * (COLOR_BONUS + MAX(SURVIVAL_BONUS + SPEED_BONUS + MANA_BONUS + DAMAGE_BONUS))
so we don’t have this feeling to have to maximize all the bonus at the same time…

The formula seems wrong…
DAMAGE_BONUS = Max(4, MyTotalDamage/EnemyTotalDamage) * D%
So if you do the same damage than the enemy you get 4D%.
So you need to do at least more than 4x damage to have a bigger damage bonus.
Or it’s a mistake and it’s Min(4, MyTotalDamage/EnemyTotalDamage) * D%?

Same for mana.

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But isn’t taking more damage exactly what you don’t want to do? Same goes for summoning, allowing you to take more damage and thus get less Bonus for dealing more damage than your enemy.

Another question: Do famines or molochs or smiliar traits count as damage dealt? Just to be sure

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I think one of the best things about the new scoring system is that there is clearly no good way to maximize all the bonuses at the same time. This means there will be trade offs with every potential team. This means more experimentation and variety as we try to find a team that scores consistently well with our play style. This also means several different play styles can be successful. This is fun.

If the formula worked as you suggest, then we will quickly find a single optimal mono-color team for each day that maximizes one bonus. This is very similar to what we had before when guild wars felt a little like a grind of playing the same battles over and over again.

I tink the way Sirrian has laid it out will encourage much more variety and creativity on both offense and defense.

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I think Angry Joe said it best.

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Players will try to figure out the best team to have all the bonus or most of them. And will certainly never success so more frustration. Or they will find the best one but I don’t believe that it will increase the possibility of good teams.

You will have 4 kind of teams able to maximize the points. Of course, one can keep the same than before the hiatus (ie with summoner). But we will not be “force” to take summoners to be sure to maximize the bonus. So we could “scores consistently well with our play style” :wink: .

In my version, you are not penalized if you ignore 3 rules. And I said “the max bonus” but it could “the 2 max bonus”.

Surely. But they just put more constraints to maximize GW points so I don’t see how there will more variety… But who cares about variety of the Invade teams?
About Defense, troll teams (ie troops who slow down your battle, famine says “Hello”) will be the best there.

Maybe they imagine that players like me will get used to the idea that there is no way to maximize the GW points :stuck_out_tongue: .
But I just remind that we are talking about GW, not PVP. If you are a good guild member you cannot say “f*ck up I play with my PVP team and I don’t care how many points I will bring to my guild”.

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I was already making heavy use of a Calculator to play the previous incarnation of Guild Wars. That was to guesstimate total damage generated and max damage per troop, etc, when selecting targets. And now we’ll have to add the A%, B%, C%, D% weighting considerations to the mix.

My brain is going to get sore. There are certain color days… like Yellow and Red, for example… where no matter what you do, the gameplay is still going to be SLOOOOOW if you’re using a full 4 bonus colour team.

Turn efficiency-to-win time makes sense. What I’ve never liked is that there ALSO seems to be a hidden “total gameplay match time” factor in the evaluation, a time factor which I suspect has always been present. I became aware of it when I would be playing a match on console and then leave midway for 45+ minutes in order to do chores or errands. I noticed that I would never receive an Arcane stone if my match had been really drawn out after coming back, even if the number of actual turns had been short. Because of this I guess I’ll have to resign myself to having lower scores…

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I don’t like new ways to gain points, not even a bit.

I have never heard of any game or sport where one team wins based on score gained, but you dont know how to gain that score? What on earth is that???

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What about damage absorbed by barrier? And drained mana?

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Boxing, Gymnastics, Dressage :stuck_out_tongue:

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