I don’t understand what was wrong with the old way 6300 points for using the days colour winning all 5 battles with 4 troops alive at the end of the battle. This new way is just too confusing
On red day I ended 2 battles with 3 troops and 3 battles with all troops and got 9300 points
On blue day I ended 1 battle with 3 troops and 4 battles with 4 troops and got 8900 points
On red day I used Infernus and an exploder and all my battles were really fast but blue day I only cast my exploder once and all my battles took a while. Why am I being punished for not using an exploder on my team?
Because exploders are fast, so you get lots of points for speed and for collecting mana. However, they also risk turning over a nice board full of 4- and 5-matches to your enemy, which can lower your score. They’re high-variance troops. Maybe they work wonderfully and you get a very good score, or maybe they don’t work well and you lose a match. If you want surety, you’ll pay the price of slightly slower matches and slightly lower scores.
But why? GW should not be about doing them as quickly as possible they should be about creating a good team using all 4 of the days colours and winning and not losing any troops even if it takes 10 minutes for each battle.
Note that speed here means “number of actions taken”. You can spend 10 minutes plotting your next move and tracing all the cascades, and the scoring formula doesn’t care until you match gems or cast a spell.
And speed is a part of the formula because “good” players can win a match with fewer actions taken. It’s upping the degree of difficulty to force players to make decisions between things they want.
Barring disastrous luck, Kraken/ Alchemist/ Hellcat/ Kraken can win against any team with any stats currently accessible by players. But Guild Wars decides that winning isn’t enough. You need to win with troops of the right color; if you can, you’re a “better” player than someone who has to rely on the KAHK team above.
Likewise, a “good” player can take four troops of a color, and outpace their opponent in both mana and damage. They can do it losing fewer troops. And they can do it with fewer actions taken.
I cannot possibly express how destructive and frustrating this mechanism of prize/punishment is. And not only for those who gains hundred and thousands of gems for their pains.
Yesterday was Dwarf day. I had the best boards I had ever witnessed in GW ever! Easy 9500-9600 points right?!? Nope. Even with RNG on my side. 3 casts by the AI… With 150 damage each time (my troops didn’t die thanks to over priced Sentinels) yet I still lost 50-100 points per battle because of it.
Everything in this game has been bugged at least once. There could very well be a bug in scoring. I posted about one troop under “support” on the forums 2 weeks ago. Not a single clarification from the devs on it.
My advice…Pretend you’re playing “Who’s line is it anyway” and a fat version of Drew Carrey is scoring your matches. YOU do not determine the scoring. The AI does. Which also decides the boards. It’s gem priorities. And my favorite…“the luck factor”.
You the player probably matter about 40% of the match. Maybe that’s the best balance, maybe it’s not.
Still, it’s hard to improve on anything when you don’t know exactly what you are being graded on. Please don’t waste your time trying to explain fan theories of how the scoring works. I want to see at the end of the match what exactly I lost points on… And what I did well on. If the AI is doing the scoring calculations behind the scenes. Why not make it public?
Sirrian said a year ago the reason for not making the scoring system public is because it would cause too many support tickets. I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe he said “people are bad at math”. Well Mr. Sirrian… People being idiots should never prevent knowledge from being spread to those who want to learn.
An overcomplicated, intentionally obscured, competitive system is…less than good.
I would be thrilled to see GW scoring become simpler and clearer. Ending up with drastically different scores when you believe you did the same thing twice is a real problem. I feel like a lot of the problem is that the GW scoring system is meant to reward “good” players, but “good” is defined by one specific subjective view of gameplay - winning with fewer actions is “good”, but why? The whole thing is arbitrary and frustrating.
GW scoring makes me very happy I’m in a casual guild that’s still dozens of brackets away from caring.
I get the design goal they were going for. They don’t want players to have a way to paint by numbers and get the maximum amount of points every match. That’d just lead to top-tier guilds tying dang near every day.
But it just… confuses me. I have some matches where I’m excited because I feel like I really devoured the other guy, and I get less points than matches where I feel like my game was a sandwich. I get the way you’re “graded” on performance, but there’s so many tensions it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to optimize. Sometimes I feel I get the same number of points for the on-color team? Given that nothing about how points are awarded is transparent, I can’t tell what the heck’s going on.
That also means if there’s any bugs in the algorithm, we have no clue.
It’ll be the highest score I see this week, while others with the same team and play the same get 9600 points to my 9400.
I curse any system that allows me to go Undefeated week to week. But still somehow make me feel like a loser cause I finished 4th highest in scoring. And I have no idea what I did wrong.
I’m even OK if the devs throw in “Special Sauce” for a portion of the score, with metrics securely locked in a vault at I+2 HQ.
I don’t think this is something that would only benefit the top brackets - it would let ANYONE engaged in GW know what sorts of things they need to work on to score higher, if that’s their thing. Like everything else in this game, they’re free to figure it out for themselves or seek feedback for improvement from their guild or the community.
And the Devs could still totally hide the math behind the individual breakdowns, and therefore largely avoid the “bad at math” tickets.
Not completely correct; next month will be the update to the 3-week-rotation during the 3.3. patch. Only afterwards and when everything there has settled down are the devs going to work on the GW QOL update. What they said was that they would give more information next month, not that the scoring change would occur next month.
sandwich. I get the way you’re “graded” on performance, but there’s so many tensions it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to optimize. Sometimes I feel I get the same number of points for the on-color team? Given that nothing about how points are awarded is transparent, I can’t tell what the heck’s going on.
