Ultimately though, that’s you as a player introducing competition as opposed the game itself truly being competitive. All of the “goals” in this game are quantitative rather than qualitative, so it’s hard to say that it’s objectively a competition.
So you wouldn’t say getting the most rewards possible as a guild, and the pvp leaderboard, are competitive?
You need to get the most gems, keys, etc. possible to have a better chance at getting the troops you need. That sets the stage for competition.
Competition is not the focus of the game, its something you can do, if you want to. You don’t “win” Gems of War by climbing to the top of the leaderboard, earning a bunch of trophies, etc. The closest you get to “winning” is getting all troops, ascending them, leveling them, and traiting them. Nobody else is forced to not obtain troops, ascend, level or trait them just because you did. Competing is, by in large, not the objective of gems of war. Again, at least now.
Many single player games have scores and leaderboards, and that does not make them competitive games. Tic-Tac-Toe you are in direct competition with another player - that is the whole point. Chess, yes, competitive, the direct objective is to win a game. Mario Party 8… yeah, debatable on how actually “competitive” it may be, but most modes are what would be a “competitive” game. Jumping rope… is an odd example, as you may or may not be actually comparing scores with another person. But take something like Pac-Man, you could just want to clear as many level as you can without dying, or you could be going for the highest score, but it is not a competitive game.
We make them competitive. The focus of the game is on accumulation, though and you can accumulate stuff without ever participating in the “competition”.
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As soon as they added the pvp leaderboard, it made it an competitive game. 
There’s no denying that.
Obviously that shows exactly what the motive is.
Let me put it this way.
Professional sports are a competition.
Betting on said sports is competitive but it’s ultimately a 1-person endeavor in which you accumulate resources based on the outcome of something you have little control over.
GoW is much more like betting and much less like professional sports.
No you can say that the focus of the entire game is not competitive, but you can’t say that there isn’t an element of the game that focuses on competition. Pvp is all about competition. You’re playing against other player’s teams.
But you’re not actually playing against other players.
Plus when almost everybody wins 95% of their invades and loses 75% of their defenses, it kind of shows that there’s a veneer of competition but not an actual competitive game going on.
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This is actually hilarious.
You’re playing their team, it’s essentially the same thing.
Those teams don’t look (or perform) radically different than the randomly generated Explore teams for the most part. The same AI makes the same moves over and over again.
Every invade is pretty much a guaranteed win. There’s no competition in that unless you’re fooling yourself into thinking there is. Instead, we’ve built competitions around how fast we can get those guaranteed wins or who can get the most in a certain time period. Those are player-concocted competitions, primarily because the game itself doesn’t provide any real competition.
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You are missing the entire point. The minute that I or any players knows that this is a real person’s team you are playing, that makes it competitive. A competitive wants to beat that team for the sake of competition. We all know the AI controls it, and the devs have set that up. That has nothing to do with it at all.
Invade is not a guaranteed win, take a look at your actual win rate. Mine is 70%.
com·pe·ti·tion
ˌkämpəˈtiSH(ə)n/
noun
the activity or condition of competing.
synonyms: rivalry, competitiveness, vying; More
an event or contest in which people compete.
synonyms: contest, tournament, match, game, heat, fixture, event
the person or people with whom one is competing, especially in a commercial or sporting arena; the opposition.
“I walked around to check out the competition”
synonyms: opposition, other side, field; More
Yeah there’s competition here.
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AND YET… devs have chosen to tie rewards to those competitions? Do you see the problem?
I agree with you @htismaqe this is a single player game with a leaderboard, so if ANY guild racks up 30 GW victories in a week, they have just as much claim to EPIC rewards as ANY OTHER guild, regardless of rank on a leaderboard that mean bupkiss.
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Except you’re ascribing competition as something other than a motivation, and a personal motivation at that (although I’m sure many others feel just like you).
I don’t want to beat that team for the sake of competition, I want to beat that team because it will give me 1500 gold, 3 trophies, and 6 glory. I couldn’t actually care less about wins and losses because they’re completely meaningless in terms of quality.
It’s all about resource gathering. And in the end, that’s all GoW is about too. The “competition” is a facade.
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You do, you’re not a very competitive player. I however want as many wins as possible. Rewards don’t even factor into that.
There’s stats galore in this game, that measure precisely that.
But that doesn’t make the GAME competitive, that makes YOU competitive.
That is the crux of the issue.
If this truly were a competitive multiplayer game, several people here probably wouldn’t be here right now. They’ve been playing a single-player casual game for a couple of years now, because that’s what it was and for the most part, still is.
So you can imagine the angst some have over all of the sudden saying “we’re going to change how the game works at a fundamental level”.
For me, I don’t care one way or another. I’ll find a way to keep playing or I’ll go play something else. But I can totally see why this Guild Wars stuff is generating so much discussion. It’s taking the game in a completely new direction, one that is 180 degrees really from where the game started.
No simply facing other people’s team makes it a competition. As that is exactly what competition is.
Whether you want to call it a facade or whatever word you want to use, it still applies.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
You say that because a real person assembled the team, that makes it a competition.
I say that until someone other than the simplistic GoW AI is controlling that team, it will never truly be a competition. This game has more in common with a 1000-piece puzzle than it does Monopoly.
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Not to mention that it already is a multiplayer game. 30 people in a guild work together to achieve a common goal. Now if that goal is to get as high on the leaderboard as possible, that’s a competition. If it’s to just get rewards, then no that doesn’t qualify.
Like I said the game as a whole isn’t competitive(yet) but it’s definitely there.
and GW is obviously another step in that direction.
That’s also part of the problem. There’s not separate places for those that value competition to go. Putting all those people into a single space.
Maybe real-time pvp could have done that, but there’s way too much that can go wrong with that.
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At this point I’d just be grateful to see sneak peek VII
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another question, for guild wars, do we use our own troop at our own ascension, level and traits to fight others or do we use arena like approach (same stats, traits) to level the playing field?
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