Hey Everyone,
So by now you’ve seen all the various parts of Guild Wars, and more-or-less how they fit together.
So for this final Guild Wars Sneak Peek, we’re going to wrap everything up by just going over a few changes we’ve made in the last month, mostly based around community feedback, because you’ve seen the ORIGINAL screens in the threads here, but not how we’ve modified them based on suggestions and testing.
So let’s step through this one by one…
Sneak Peek I - Registration & Overview
We didn’t change anything here, but we had a GREAT discussion about the difficulty of completing collections, which has moved the design & implementation of a crafting system WAY up in our priority list.
Sneak Peek II - Schedule Tab
Turns out that limiting attacks to 5 per day - use 'em or lose 'em - wasn’t a great solution for everybody. We’ve altered the system so that you can catch up all your old attacks on any day you like
Also we received feedback that only having a single defense team for each day was a BAD idea, because some folks wanted to set up special color-based defense teams. That was something we’d been thinking about too, and your feedback really confirmed that.
What we have now is:
You can see here we’ve altered to first column from DAY to WAR, and also added a button at the end to access a specific defense team for that day. When guild wars first starts, all of these teams will be defaulted to your current defense team. If you win a War on the DAY IT SCHEDULED, you’ll still receive a minor reward of 50% XP for the next 24 hours, plus 50 Guild Seals (which do count against your cap)… it’s not much, but we wanted to keep something for the Guilds who ARE organized and DO play every day.
This is the screen that allows you to pick a defense team. Due to some technical limitations, we couldn’t put a full fledged team-picker in here, but this will do the job for now until we can address the technical issues later in the year (more news on that AFTER Guild Wars releases though)
Sneak Peek III - Attack Tab
The controversy-free update! There was quite a bit of testing and a few tweaks done here to stop issues like people quitting mid-match to avoid a loss, etc… But no real changes to the design. Oh if only ALL weeks were this easy! 
Sneak Peek IV - Results Tab
We all got distracted here by my horrific story of QANTAS air travel… sorry about that.
But a minor issue did present itself in a future update. Guilds wanted to see - on this screen - who had been contributing to the guild sentinels, so we made a minor change to show that:
Sneak Peek V - Rankings Tab & Sneak Peek VI - Sentinels
Lots of great feedback here.
And I’m lumping them together, since a lot of discussion continued, specifically about rewards & rankings.
So… The issue of the how long it would take to trait the Guild-Wars-specific troops was raised. We’re addressing that in a couple of ways. Firstly we drastically increased the amounts given out as rewards (up to 100 for first place, but also more to lower places). Secondly we’re also looking at adding old Guild Wars troops to the Guild chests whenever we release NEW Guild Wars troops (which will be every 3-6 months). So if you’re not getting enough from the Guild Wars, we’ll be devising a way that you can still get your hands on them at a reasonable rate.
And… the issue was raised here, and subsequently the following week about how generally unfair having everybody in a gigantic table would be. We agree with that it’s not much fun to be in the lower ranks with no achievable goal, so we’ve implemented a bracketing system - of sorts (incidentally THAT was why you haven’t seen much of me lately… there was a huge amount of this to address last week)
So let’s look at a bracket:
As you can tell, brackets are groups of 10.
We’ll sort teams into groups of 10 initially (and, no we’re NOT going to tell you exactly how, or we know some of you will try to game the system!!). It’s as fair as we can manage… If you look at the trophy rankings, it’s going to be roughly like that, I believe. It’s not based ONLY on trophies though!
Every week, you’ll be matched with 6 other teams in your bracket at random. You won’t be able to finish any higher than the TOP of your bracket, and any lower than the BOTTOM. So in the example above, Sparkle Ponies won’t be able to finish higher than 21st, or lower than 30th. If you finish near the top, it’s LIKELY (but not 100% certain) you will move up the following week, perhaps even more than one bracket. Similarly if you finish near the bottom you may move down… this all depends on how well you do during the week.
The rewards are still based on your global ranking however… Why did we do this? Because otherwise it becomes advantageous to lose badly every second week, and win in the between weeks, so you can leapfrog up and down brackets and maximize your earning.
And why didn’t we just put 7 guilds in each bracket so it’s a fair round robin? Well if you put 7 guilds in, somebody has a bye each day which means you need 7 days to run event, and that just doesn’t work with the current system. Other options included 6 guilds (play one twice), or 8 guilds (miss one out). In the end we opted for 10 Guilds, because it’s not only a nice round number, but it also means every misses 3 guilds in their bracket, which means you’re a little more unlikely to have LARGE advantages due to RNG.
That’s it!
The update isn’t far away now.
One final word… there was enough trolling in previous thread to actually have it auto-close. My suggestion is this:
- Keep a level head about the features! We WANT to work with you guys to make the game systems better. We’re already listening, so there’s no need to yell at us! And if the trolls go fishing, don’t bite, please!
- It’s the internet… just as Zaejin has Goblins, WE have trolls. When it inevitably happens, please keep the trolling good-natured and light! Every time I ban someone, a Unicorn cries… think of the Unicorns!
defences they can… permanent Wraith/BD/Courage or equivalent ahead…
But at least we got brackets. 
