If that was the original post, it is suspect, since the written description does not match the formula. It is not clear which was correct.
Guild Wars, Point-Scoring for Battles, and You!
Yeah the formula was wrong at first (with max) and apparently, devs corrected it only in the formula and forget about the text…
OK, so the post was updated at some point. I can see from citations on other posts this is the case. Your explanation is plausible. But I wonder… was it only the post corrected? Or the code as well. Guess I have to do more reading or just trial and error. But with a good looping team that also silences and webs, it should be relatively easy to see what weights are really in play.
For the first four or so hours, the code appeared to reflect the incorrect formulas in the original version of the first post. This was discovered quickly, and corrected shortly thereafter. So, to the best of my knowledge, the code uses min as it should.
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I’m trying to rack my brain around the formula at the top (if it is still up to date) to understand why me and my guildmates have sometimes a 200 or 300 points gap for fights that SEEM similar (I’m starting to collect data to check if it’s a perception bias we have or an actual thing).
Still, I have some questions about the formula. Hope someone has an idea or I’ll have to try and break it down on my own. If those question were already answered, please tell me.
- How COLOR_BONUS is calculated ? Weighted flat bonus per unit ?
- What is the value BASE_SCORE ?
- Any idea or ballpark guesstimates on the weights A%, B%, C%, D%
- For the damages (resp. collected mana) does the game use Incoming damage (resp. matched mana) or mitigated damages (resp. total mana,as in mana surge and other bonuses included) ?
- For the surviving troops ? do you mean of the original lineup or just having slot 1-4 occupied ?
EDIT : I just read the Q&A with 3.3 coming and the GW scoring overhaul those questions are not so important anymore. But I hope we will have the possibility to have a breakdown of the score to know where I can work to improve it.
Are you counting the unique troop defense bonus too?
As far as I know, these would be the answers to some of your questions:
Yes, the exact value depends on your statue level (up to 50% bonus per color troop at level 100)
This is displayed below each opponent (if I’m not misremembering, goes from 250 points for the first battle to 350 against the paragon)
I would assume the mitigated damage/total mana collected, with all bonuses included, but I’m not aware of whether this has been tested by anyone.
I think it’s been determined that having slots 1-4 occupied is enough, therefore carrying a summoner is still helpful… But the impact of losing a troop is not large, it seems to result in losing ~50 points or so.
I can’t recall reading any reliable estimates on the weighted values of the different modifiers, sorry! Perhaps someone else can offer a bit more detail on this point 
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I didn’t think of the value of the opponent as base value. Seems evident enough
My intuition for damage and mana is that the game counts modified damage and mana too. My intuition as enough been wrong in that game.
I’m gonna try and gather data from my fights in GW to confirm this but creating a log of a battle could be a tedious task, even for a shot fight. So I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me.
If I have anything interesting I’ll post it here, but I could take a bit of time.
Thank you for the answer.
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If you really want to do this (remember that the scoring system will only be in place for a few more weeks), perhaps it would be easier to do by checking @Tacet 's videos in YouTube? Many times he’ll show the score after each opponent, counting damage, mana gathered and movements should be doable (even if a bit hard at 4x). Good luck with the project!
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It would take a lot of digging, but I have 37 weeks worth of GW battles that you can check for data. I believe everything since around week 20 is the current GW system.
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Tried to do it this morning. Recorded my fights to watch and log them later. Stopped after a few tries because keeping track of what happens during combos is disorienting. Add to that the VFX who sometimes hides what happens behind particles and that I was playing in x4 speed. I was quite lost, to say the least.
I used a bad data gathering method. I’ll retry at a slower speed on the next GW day.
Tried to track the variables with a program who watch the memory too (Important note : not editing, just reading 
). But it looks like some structures are freed after each fights. As a consequence the values you want to track keep jumping around in the chunk of memory allocated to the game. Even if I managed to find one of the values on each fight. I have at least 6 values to find and track on each fight. Turns, Mana, Damage for player and opponent.
So i’ll keep looking for a solution for tracking those values in an easier (automated ?) way.
Worst case scenario I’ll get back to figuring things out when the new scoring is release on 3.3 (next month ?). When the rest of the community starts probing the new scoring system.
Sometimes I wish all games show as much data as EU4 and CK2.
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@UKresistance with your permission I would like to “complain” about guild wars scoring and how the devs haven’t shared with us exactly how the scoring works. Despite their reasoning for not revealing it no longer being relevant.
May I proceed kind sir?
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I second this complaint as there are many things that clearly affect score but are not mentioned. Decreasing skill points for example score badly as they don’t count as damage but does make a few troops far worse at scoring. Barrier keeps your guys alive, but will hurt you score wise as a barrier hit still counts as damage. It is also obvious that transform counts as “killing a troop” so even when you win if a few transforms occurred like with dragons eye, well your score was also transformed quite negatively.
Frankly the system has been mostly figured out on the grief side and if this formula has so many weights, I highly doubt that same score scenarios would be a problem. I mean, that was a supposed reason for this change back in the day. However, that is also now untrue as in sigil events, having the same score on the leaderboard yields the same reward currently.
A great deal of troops are either useless or unusable due to the scoring method. The scoring method is unclear about other methods such as lethal damage or destroy so those seem quite fine. While this is kept secret, most of the better teams for offense and defense are known almost making any additional details obsolete except for essentially biased scoring against a good selection of troops.
At this point, I don’t think even they know how it works with the constant bugs and sudden gameplay “adjustments” to fix a delve “problem”.
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I’m not really a fan of necroing a a year dead thread, but go ahead I guess. Don’t be too disappointed when you don’t get the answer you want. Don’t be surprised if the devs don’t have a firm understanding of how it computes anymore.
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@Cyrup when this thread was made guild wars was every week. The hundreds of tickets that could come from scoring is now divided by at least 1/4 given that guild wars is way less frequent.
It’s rather difficult to teach new players how to have success with guild wars cause there isn’t an exact formula to be shown. Like imagine how helpful the in game guide would be if people could see exactly how to score points in guild wars. This remains to be the only guild event where success in it isn’t black and white.
@Sirrian in the 17 months since this was posted. I think it’s safe to assume that there won’t be any more changes to guild wars scoring. As far as I know. Not a single post has been made about guild wars scoring since this one. I’d say at least 60% of the players who currently partake in GW have no idea what they are doing. This should concern you since if people don’t know what they are doing. They tend to get frustrated and quit the game.
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So I know a couple of things for scoring…
- I want to kill all of the enemy as fast as possible, because of the speed bonus.
- I want to collect as much mana as possible while I’m doing this, while also denying the enemy a chance to collect mana.
- I want to do non-lethal and non-true damage to the enemy, so that I maximize damage dealt.
So TINA-9000 would be a great choice because it kills very fast, but it also does true damage, so you lose points for all the damage you aren’t doing to the armor. Empowered troops that convert mana colors seem to be really good because in one move they generate a ton of mana for you and allow you to go straight into damage.
What I want to know, and I think what AW Ryan also is getting at, is just how much emphasis I should place on different factors? Is troops surviving more important? Is avoiding lethal damage troops more important? Should I go for speed over mana collection?
It’d be like a football team being told they’ll be scored based on how many touchdowns, field goals, AND yards thrown, yards gained, turnovers, etc. but when they ask “How is each one calculated? What’s the weight?” they’re told “We’ll just give you your score” instead of how to maximize it…
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I didn’t know that about lethal damage. So Ubastet is not a good GW choice?
I got scores of 9526, 9466 and 9422 today. The 9422 had two rising shadow kills thrown in. GW scoring is like the dead guild bracket advancement: Everybody has a theory.
My guild’s purple bonus is 48%, and I used Secrets of the Crypt and AW on the high and low score, and the purple Doom weapon on the middle. I would say True Dmg kills get credit for Armor dmg.
I think if Ubastet does 70 dmg and kills 1, he would get credit for the dmg to the 2nd troop but not the remaining health. The speed bonus might offset it anyway. What’s a few 100 points gonna do anyway, now that the 3 lowest scores are dismissed?
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So, based on what they’ve said, and the examples they’ve given, the following things will contribute to a lower score (and by lower score I mean, you won’t maximize your score – you don’t lose points, you just don’t gain as many points as you could have).
Death Mark, lethal sources (Scorpius, Megavore, Ubastet, Dullahan, and even weapons such as Serpentine Dagger, Deathdealer, and Drill Shooter), and devour, because these circumvent armor and health.
Then there’s also things that remove armor and deal damage. I don’t believe things that eliminate armor and then deal damage count as dealing damage to the armor anymore (they fixed that because of Reflect).
This also means that killing the enemy team using weapons like Life and Death, Rope Dart, Hope’s Crescent, and troops like Arachnaean Weaver, Gray King, TINA-9000, etc. will give you less points in the Damage Efficiency category.
However… that being said… there are three things working against that: all the other conditions. You get bonus points for how fast (turns/actions) you kill the enemy, and arguably bypassing armor is much quicker. Second, having troops alive at the end is easier the faster the match is. Third, the faster the match, the less mana your enemy collects.
But because no one knows the actual formulas, it’s impossible to say “Well, I can still use true damage and life steal, because I’m gaining more points from doing the match faster” or “I want to concentrate on doing as much damage as possible and collecting as much mana as possible.”
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some of my best scores come from Zuul’Goth teams 
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