Guild Wars - Sneak Peek VI

Official News
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Short version: GW looks really good, and needs a couple small tweaks and not a complete overall, and spending for top tier is not a bad thing.

Full version (buckle up):

Hopefully I don’t alienate too many (including my own guild-mates), but I don’t see all of this as horrible or the end of the world. Further, I actually see this as reasonable and expected, so I’ll try to play devil’s advocate. F2P games are always funded by some whales, so as @Sirrian mentioned, having a way to monetize this is necessary to keep the game going. I’ve played in a few other games competitively, and also developed/published games. There is always this tough balance, and there does end up being a disparity between the very top and a second tier of “competitive free players”. It’s an ugly reality that developers need to eat too.

So when I saw the huge jump between level 4 and 5 costs, I actually think it is a good design. A “gentler” curve/increase would mean that there would be quite a few “tweener” guilds, around the same level but some spend and some don’t. The current system with the big jump almost creates an actual wall, so you’re deciding what level to compete for based on your investment.

Now it’s not all roses though. While I can understand this scaling system for the sentinels, only the top 10 rewards have been given. The majority of us simply won’t compete at that level, so the interesting comparision/decision will be what are the rewards for say guilds 20-50, compared to the costs of either just level 3 or level 4. Assuming those are reasonable, I don’t mind competing in AAA rather than the majors.

And that leads to my second big issue, which others have already highlighted. I think that one big bracket is a mistake and not much fun, because it will both pair guilds that have no business playing each other, and it fails to create the friendly rivalry we currently have between certain similar ranked guilds (and would take away my guilds ability to continue to dominate Mean Machines every week :wink: ). Not being competitive removes the lower guilds, and lack of known opponents removes the higher guilds.

While I understand adding new features this late would be costly and problematic, hopefully there is a “middle” solution that addresses some of these issues. As it is, I think GW looks really great, but it will ostracize the majority of the guilds and simply not be played by the majority. I do have some practical ideas on how to solve this if you’re interested (just not sure if you are, and/or if you’ve figured out legal yet), just message me.

Hopefully you just mean competitively. From previous previews, just for participating (even not spending) will get you some rewards, and I’d like the new cards :wink: So sign us up even if we don’t play…

Also, as far as “gambling on other players”, I’m no gamble :smiley: . Right now guilds already have to do this on new members, and figure out who are the leeches and who are the contributors, and take some risks. I think this just adds another dimension to it, but not one that should be considered truly problematic.

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85

You know i have huge respect for you but i need to correct you here.
Pvp rewards are s###. Not a single person is going top 100 PvP for those rewards. They are a nice extra but are completely ignored otherwise.

Also in PvP you dont need pay anything to stay competitive as anyone else in there, and again rewards are just a bonus.
Based on the rewards for the top 10 guilds i see another bad design of rewards like in PvP ranking system. If only guilds ranked 6 or higher gain enough to cover those 340 gems, in a pool of about 1000 guilds competing, thats lame and bad distributuon. Im not saying rewards are bad, just that they need to be more spreed to lower ranks. The ones you listed should be spreading all the way to rank 50.

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86

I think it would be very helpful if everyone dropped the hysteria/absurdity from their comments. The idea that any guild would not play is silly. At a minimum, you can spend nothing on the sentinels and get free stuff just by participating for the week. You can literally sign up, never play in a single battle, and still get rewards! There’s zero downside to participating. The only real issue is whether it’s worth it to spend on sentinels based on the ranking you think your guild will get.

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87

Yeah…I’m going to disagree with you on the PVP ranking system as well. I’ve been disappointed for months that the reward system hasn’t been altered. The number of players has increased massively since I started about 9 months ago, yet the reward system has remained the same. And getting into the top 100, which is no small feat, gets you next to nothing as a reward. Pretty much any other mobile game I’ve seen spread it based on population. Currently, rewards for 50-100 should be closer to 500-1000. It’s getting more ridiculous as the player base grows.

As for guild wars, if the goal is profit (which every business model generally has in mind) then what is there to convince any guild below the top 100 to purchase these upgrades if they don’t have their own bracket? They certainly won’t win against the top dogs, and will basically put in minimum effort each week for the base rewards. There’s no profit to be made there. How do you involve lower guilds and lower players if they start with no chance? I say this entirely as a player in a higher end guild who is simply looking at this from a business perspective. 75% or more of the guilds in the game don’t even have the full 30 members unlocked. They lose by default to any sort of coordinated effort by any ten guilds.

So either you need to look again at your breadth of rewards for top guilds (top 100? Top 500?) or look again at your bracket system. Or you won’t get back your investment with this idea. I promise.

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88

As always, I appreciate your willingness to both discuss changes and (potentially) to make them. I haven’t fully woken up yet nor had my coffee so the rest of this post may come off gruffer than I intend.

The fact that you don’t see the current PvP bracket as broken is worrisome as, other than maybe a handful of players who compete at an insane level; there’s nothing in the bracket for most players. The top 100 players out of what? 100,000 active players get prizes? That’s insanely low, and on top of that, none of the said prizes are worth the insane amount of time it takes to earn them. But really, that is a conversation for another day.

I do not disagree with this sentiment. Free stuff is awesome, and you guys (devs) are awesome for giving us so many ways to earn free stuff. I think everyone agrees with this. For at least me personally, my complaint isn’t that I want more free stuff or an easier time earning free stuff.

I know some people do have this complaint (or at least did on previous Sneak Peeks), this is not a complaint of mine. I’m all for hard work = better rewards.

There are some downsides that I think you’re either missing or not fully grasping their implications:

  1. To make investing in GW Sentinels worthwhile, a member needs to feel like his guild is going to do well enough to recoup the investment. With one giant bracket, the chances of doing that not only become increasingly harder to figure out but also become increasingly less likely.

  2. Unlike in the PvP bracket where “rewards” (whether that means the actual rewards or just bragging rights) are based solely on an individual’s performance as compared to everyone else’s. There’s also no weekly “buy-in” to help ensure victory. In GW not only is there a weekly buy-in but then the path to victory for any individual is non-existent. They can’t win unless everyone else competes at their level or higher. That means only the most organized of guilds is going to be able to offer any insurance that a member’s weekly GW Sentinel investment is worthwhile.

This will lead to two things: Hardcore guilds requiring max contributions; semi-casual guilds having to decide if they move up to try and compete with hardcore guilds or if they give up on any kind of organized effort in GW and just let individual players decide their participation level. The split between casual and hardcore becomes a gulf and most players never bother to find their sweet spot. That’s bad for them, bad for the game and ultimately bad for everyone else.

But enough about the problems I see, you’ve asked for some alternatives; since this is already a wall of text, I’m going to start a new comment to bring up some potential fixes. :slight_smile:

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The biggest issue I see, and I know it has been mentioned further up in the thread, is that guilds will start requiring their members to max the sentinels.

Scenario:
My guild requires me to max my sentinels, and because I don’t want to be kicked out, I do so. Sadly, this week my guild fails to make top 10, and I get no gem compensation. Now, if this were a personal decision, I wouldn’t feel that bad, but since I HAVE to do it, I feel a bit annoyed, perhaps frustrated. I like my guild. The regular requirements are easy enough to manage, but a gem expenditure requirement is not a healthy way to go…imo of course.

And we all KNOW there are going to be guilds that require it.

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90

So, some alternatives:

  1. HOW TO FIX BRACKETS - Add more brackets! Anything is better than one giant bracket but here are a few ways the guilds could be broken up to help make GW feel worth participating in (and spending money on):

  • By Guild League (trophy count) - Most likely this would need to be a bracket of Guild Leagues X through XX (since some leagues probably don’t have enough guilds in them).

  • Pros: More brackets and a clear way to advance

  • Cons: No easy way to drop down a bracket if you’re in one that is too strong

  • By Trophies (collected over a period of time) - Based on the total amount of trophies a guild produced in X amount of time (could be weekly but that could be easily gamed, so probably more like the total amount of trophies collected in the previous month)

  • Pros: More brackets and a clear way to advance or retreat. Easy to understand. Automatically competitive with guilds putting in similar effort

  • Cons: Would require some rewriting of GoW’s code to collect monthly stats

  • By Choice - Guilds could choose what bracket they want to participate in (and each bracket would have different rewards, tougher brackets = better rewards, easier brackets = less rewards)

  • Pros: More brackets and choice in how competitive a guild wants to be. Easy to understand.

  • Cons: Might be gamed but I think there are easy ways to fix that

  1. HOW TO FIX REWARDS - First add brackets (see #1) and then scale the rewards to the brackets so that harder brackets have higher rewards and lower brackets have lower rewards. Simple :wink:

  2. HOW TO FIX GW SENTINEL COSTS - First do #1 & 2 above and then also scale Sentinel costs to the bracket that a guild is participating in. Once again, higher brackets (with the chance for higher rewards) have more expensive Sentinel costs and lower brackets (with the chance for lower rewards) have less expensive Sentinels.

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91

Why people don’t use common sense you mean?

(Just to be clear: the rest is not directed at you specifically.)

It seems that people are displaying mixing signals, AGAIN, on what they wanted in the game.

  • We want to use gems without gambling with results. → You get a status buff for the whole week when you spend some gems that you can usually get freely with regular gameplay and if enough people in your guild do it, then everyone is getting a little something.
    (If your common sense says that you are better saving those gems go for it.)
  • We want some use for excessive souls. → Pretty much the same as above could apply.

I’m probably sounding very condescending, but simply complaining when the devs come up with the new features without any suggestions doesn’t give some directions to work with. Also, just because we want something it doesn’t means that it fits into the model of each feature/update planned.

I’m looking at an angle where i’m concluding a few disturbing things:

  • People want to max their bonuses in Guild’s War for a whole week. They also wish that their whole guild do the same in order to amass the max possible bonuses. No, not being able to do less than that won’t cut it…

  • They want to do it with the most easy to obtain resources someone can get in the game… Wich means they want to get something like +8 in all status for the whole week and not use an average amount of gems someone can collect for free.

  • Sirrian stated that this is a feature with a competitive model. They invested time and resources on it, probably, with some expectations for returns in the long run, but people can only see the Doomsday scenarios because of the gems you and your guild can CHOOSE TO NOT SPEND for some weekly bonus…

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92

I feel like this is another epic fail to give top rank guilds bonus’ that aren’t obtainable for lower guilds. Lower guilds are not pulling in the amount of gems top guilds are. We need less separation, not more.

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You may have missed this:
Guild Wars - Sneak Peek VI - #90 by ogunther :wink:

Two things:

  • Has @Sirrian confirmed that the Sentinel bonuses carry over into normal play (PvP, Challenge, Explore)? I asked about this but haven’t seen a response as his wording seems to imply this bonus is just for GW battles.

  • I have no problem with a little gambling if the risk and potential reward are easier to calculate. One giant bracket makes this next to impossible.

I don’t feel that way about either so hopefully that’s not directed at anything I’ve said.

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I’m having some doubts here, this feels like comparing oranges to apples. PvP is based on how much time you have at hand, Guild Wars is a fixed number of fights. Which means that top 50 scores are likely going to be very close together, up to a point where losing a single fight due to bad luck may drop your guild enough ranks to incur a huge loss instead of a profit.

This is a kind of gamble I personally don’t like, it feels pretty close to extortion. I’m okay with paying a huge amount of resources to lessen the impact of bad luck on me, I can chose to not travel down that path. Here I’m paying to lessen the impact of bad luck on my whole guild. That miracle 5-match on first turn that took out my front troop? My fault, didn’t pay for the full armor Sentinel upgrade this week, otherwise the front troop would have survived. Too bad the one lost fight dropped the guild from rank 6 to rank 23, voiding most investments of the other guild members.

Sorry to sound so negative about this, but I just can’t imagine these Sentinels not putting a huge pressure on all players in somewhat competitive guilds. It’s pay up or get lost, either because the other members don’t want you to be a risk for them or because you don’t want to be a risk for the other members. Please consider an approach where payments only have an effect on the paying player, e.g. by increasing the personal payout at the end of the week instead of granting bonus stats for fights.

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Seems to be Guild Wars only:

“There are 4 Sentinels in Guild Wars (one for each Skill: Attack, Life, Armor & Magic), and your guild can interact with them to gain some bonuses in Guild War battles (both on offense & defense)”

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96

I don’t understand how brackets solves anything. Aren’t the different ranking tiers the same thing as brackets? You’re fighting against people around the same level as you, getting placed into a tier of rewards based on your performance, then getting rewards for where you place? How are brackets any different? Isn’t that what’s proposed?

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I’m interested to see what kind of internal strife this may cause in guild where, the bonuses give the Paragon a better chance to hold that top guild position from week to week.

At the highest levels of play, I expect the top players inside one guild to be separated by a small margin of Guild War Points every week. So those few bonus skill points could really help the Paragon stay Paragon, and lower ranked players not feel they can advance. I don’t think this will come into play as much with average guilds, because they normally seem to have a couple highly active PvP players with a mix of more casual players.

Hopefully Vn4ever will stay with a good balance of aggressive game play while accepting people have lives outside the game. The rivers and lakes are thawing out here, and I’ll not want to be stressing about GoW.

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I’m not sure you read @Sirrian s proposal then. All guilds are in the same giant bracket. Low level against high level and vice versa, with some fairer matches in between. Your rewards are only if you rank within the top 10 guilds out of anyone. Outside the top 10 and (as of the current information we have) you are SOL on any bonus rewards. Rank 11 gets the same rewards as rank 1000. Again, out of every GoW guild in pc/mobile. @ogunther s suggestions alleviate those problems in varying ways.

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I think @Sirrian just didn’t show us the full table of rewards. I think it’s just like PvP. Here’s how it will work in practice:

The top 10 guilds are battling one another for the Top 10 rankings and then get the rewards based on how they perform. The rank 90-110 guilds will be battling one another to see who drops in or out of the Top 100 and gets the rewards at that cut off.

Etc., on down the list until at some point there’s a cut off where all guilds below that point get the same rewards regardless of rank.

That seems just like brackets to me…

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That’s a great idea, but isn’t what is being proposed by the devs.

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In addition to the points @Sththunder already responded with, human nature tends to drive people to want to say they’re #1. In the current bracket there is only one #1 spot so only one guild each week gets to claim it (and it’ll most likely always be one of a small handful of elite guilds). Breaking the brackets up gives more guilds the chance to claim a #1 spot and to be competitive within their niche.

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No, i’m just composing my answer as you posted it…

THIS RIGHT THERE!
Now this seems as a reasonable solution without removing the costs of premium currency for greater bonuses. People would pay proportionally to what they earn in normal gameplay assuming how they are ranked/worth.

Why it works nicely?

  • As people will progress and join better guilds OR their guild becomes better ranked so does they increase the resources generated, but the higher you climb the higher are the stakes. It’s like buying upgrades in many other games where there are higher costs to “break the ceiling”.

But even being on GW only you don’t think that having an extra bonus in a competitive mode with great rewards should be something expensive? Sure, for the majority of the players it wouldn’t be an option given the amount asked is the same for a member of a Top 10.000 guild or a top 100 guild. That’s why your suggestion of scalating the costs on the ranks sounds perfectly reasonable.

Not at you, specifically, but it does sounds really… cheap… to me that people are basically jumping to the conclusion that literally EVERYONE but their guild will have these bonuses, and that they will lose every battle because of it, and the whole world will be ruined because Aku, the Shogun of Sorrow rules forever!!!

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103

lol I know you’re being comedicly over dramatic but I don’t see the level of hysteria you’re complaining about (but maybe I skimmed over some drama queens?) :stuck_out_tongue:

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