Congratulations! I have to say based on the fact that the discussion has moved to talking about cosmetic items and minor reward tweaks. You and your team have apparently mitigated the vast majority of concerns that caused the other theads to get heated. Looks like those “4 days” were very productive.
Well done. Looking forward to seeing GW in action.
Just no hats or insane collections lol please!
A “ME DID IT” gold star or bank of 5 stars to slowly fill would go a loooooooooong way.
In this post: Discussion of obtaining guild wars troops, both for old players to ascend to mythic and for newcomers to obtain, period. Long post. Feel free to skip if you aren’t interested.
First off, plus one to this:
This is probably one of the most important long term issues in the game right now. Whatever guild wars ends up being, the barriers between player and content (collection/troops) were always my primary concern.
Thank you. Although, six months is a bit on the long side to start collecting ascension copies of these troops if it ends up being your primary method of obtaining them, as this is already generally a full cycle of events and another troop in each kingdom.
However, even that does bring up another issue - the first batch of guild wars troops needs as many copies as a guardian would, total, to ascend. With two batches, assuming they are released 6 at a time, twice that. And so on and so on. If you started getting drops from guild chests 6 months after a troop’s release, and you only had a few of each them at the time (lets say, 41 of each which is a decent amount), you still need a total of 900 troops in that first batch. Lets assume a 50% drop rate, like guardians. Maxing out seals every week, you’d need on average another 24 weeks of maxing seals (more likely more, because of everyone experience with guardians). This puts the people in this group of people, also endgame and long term players, around 9 months behind on ascending their GW troops to mythic compared to the people getting them up front. And when there are are 12 guild wars troops in the drop pool, you’d need another 48 weeks, unless they are individually removed from the drop pool as they hit mythic +4. Note that I’m all for long term goals, but once you start going into over six months territory and then after six months it becomes “nope, wait, 12 months”, it starts to feel like “never gonna happen”.
I also second this. Again. Reasonable cash shop purchases to fill in the gaps for guild wars “exclusive” troops if you know your guild is not competitive, you know you are not competitive and don’t want to even consider changing guilds, but you still want access to the troops ascensions at a reasonable pace. As I brought up in my previous thread, I’d prefer these be obtained as a token you could use to exchange for any past GW troop, and the main reward for GW would simply be these tokens. However, if they were a new type of key that could get these troops, I think this can also work. I’d also be much more likely to buy something like this if they were lower priced, capped weekly and everyone in the guild got a tiny bonus (like guild seals). The gems both don’t seem necessary as a reward to draw people into the mode and I still highly doubt you are going to get people to use cash to buy gems to spend gems on sentinels to chase rewards that may or may not get them the gems back, especially when it becomes clear when they have no chance.
Needing Guardians to mythic to start getting old GW troops may be a bit new restrictive to new players just wanting to obtain one copy of the troop. I’d love to see them (after they meet the release criteria) as a 10% global chance in this chest (replacing a “normal” key drop for seals) so everyone can obtain them if they missed their initial run, and a 50% replacing guardians if guardians are finished (bringing the “normal” key drop rates back up to 50%). I’d also support individual removal of any GW troop at mythic +4.
All in all, that would make it so that new players are only ever a few weeks behind on unlocking a guild wars troop if they choose, and high level long term non-competitive players would be no more than 9 months behind on full ascensions as full free to plays but less if they put in some money. I wish it was a bit less than 9 months, but so long as no kingdom stars are bottlenecked during that time, I’d accept it.
And of course, these concerns also disappear if GW troops can simply be reasonably crafted when the time comes. Even if said time is after they are out of the normal reward rotation.
Thanks to the team for reviewing our feedback and applying changes as much as possible while still considering different outcomes and possibilities trying to make it work.
Had a crazy idea regarding Bracket winners…
What if the “Reward” for winning the Guild War, was praise from your IN GAME Kingdoms… meaning TRIBUTE!
At the end of the week winning Guilds receive a special Tribute from their Kingdoms based upon how well they perform, it would just be a one time tribute collected after GW closes based upon this structure:
1st Place- 100% tribute (all kingdoms)
2nd Place- 90%
3rd Place- 80%
4th Place- 70%
5th Place- 60%
6th Place- 50%
7th Place- 40%
8th Place- 30%
9th Place- 20%
10th Place- 10%
This would scale with the game, as Higher bracket winners would get a 26 kingdom tribute, but low level brackets that only have 5 kingdoms would only be guaranteed a 5 kingdom tribute upon winning. Also, the disparity would be bigger at higher levels, where we care more about the shame of the loss anyway, and in lower brackets where players are fighting for resources 1-10 place wouldn’t feel too much of a sting…
Just a thought… 
But I LIKE IT!!! 
How about this?:
the better players of each bracket get some of these tokens at the end of the week (not many, like 2 for 1st place and 1 for 2nd to 3rd or 2nd to 5th) and these tokens can be exchanged at the shop at any time for the current gw troop. That way:
All in all the goal of my suggestion is to encourage competition in lower brackets where guilds are pretty close together in terms of strength anyway, while at the same time not changing too much in high-mid to top tier brackets, where the real competition is for the total ranking prizes.
(above values are purely examples, maybe a simple “one token for best 3 in the bracket” would do it too. In my poinion, at least the second places of each bracket should be awarded too to encourage staying in your own bracket even if you can’t stay on the very top of it, thus reducing the chance of “bracket hopping” guilds)
I don’t know why people are finding this so hard to understand. Any reward you give to first place is going to encourage guilds to underperform so they can get an easy win. Here’s a super simple example:
Why would I fight for Rank 100 to get 110 gems and risk getting 101 in a bunch of tough battles? All I have to do is not try as hard, get rank 120, and get 110 gems…
Any reward is going to incentivize people to not try. It doesn’t matter if it’s gems or cards or tokens or keys or whatever. Even something like an exclusive skin would be of value (I’d take that over 10 more gems!). The bottom line is that it will always create a perverse disincentive to trying your best. The only way I see around this is if they give something that is strictly bragging rights like a “1st Place” ribbon (per my last comment).
Yeah but if the reward has very little worth or any at all, then who cares if people stay in the same bracket. It’s not a material or reward that can be abused, or at least that you would care is being abused.
It’s just a reward you can throw in and say basically have at it. 
Not the gems, keys, etc. But something of cosmetic worth. Not economy breaking. Such as something cosmetic for your hero.
People aren’t going to stay in a certain bracket each week if they all get the cosmetic reward and it’s the only one you can win. Once you win one week, that’s it. The reward isn’t valuable to you anymore. Not to mention if people truly wanted to stay in the same bracket, they already could. With or without any rewards.
So giving anything other than cosmetic rewards would make it too unfair and unbalanced. It’s basically rewarding corruption.
But I feel confident in saying they wouldn’t do a cosmetic reward. Sirrian has stated in the past that someone still has to be paid to do this, and it’s hardly going to matter in the long run. So definitely not worth their time I think. Even if it would make most of us happy.
Just my opinions of course.
As i stated in my last sentence, giving boni not only to the single best guild but to the best couple guilds will reduce if not eliminate the problem as it makes it easier to reach the bonus. (as in: instead of 1 of 10 guilds, 3 of ten get the bonus)
The second point to reduce underperforming guilds, is to make the boni very very minor. Give em a traitstone each, or a common card, it won’t matter compared to the 3, 10, or even 100 cards that the difference between two total ranking places make.
Also, i think that you misunderstood the purpose of the brackets a little:
To cite Sirrian:
The problem is not that people would try to finish less battles to not be categorized into the next bracket, but rather to deliberately try to fall down a bracket every other week in order not to end up in a bracket where they aren’t guaranteed to finish top of the bracket. Giving out prizes to 2nd (and maybe 3rd) places would partially make that problem better, as it encourages guilds to try as hard as they can. even if they can’t make the top of the bracket, they will still get a minor reward, thus taking away the need to deliberately switch down a bracket every other week to reap rewards.
EDIT: OFC @HKdirewolf has a good point too, and I’m very aware that the solution i offered still has the downside that it would be a reward that was in some way desirable (especially if it could be used to get the restricted-drop guild war card) and that there’s still the need to balance that thing out (e.g. give all guilds that participate 1 token and first one 2 or whatever - goes from endless advantage to 100% which still is much - even better would be to go 10 to all and 11 to 1st which means 1st of a bracket would only have a 10% advantage. this in turn could be compensated by the GW troops costing 10 tokens each, so that the economy doesn’t get imbalanced, but at this point we’re slowly getting a bit complicated for a simple forum reply post.)
Also: Rule No 1.: if you wanna advertise something, don’t talk about it’s weaknesses unless asked 
The game already gives 95% of the total player base a perverse incentive to not care about playing their best.
What’s the difference between not trying because the rewards aren’t better or not trying because it isn’t worth their time to compete?
You’re expecting Guild Wars to somehow spark up some kind of great movement of effort when Explore hasn’t, PVP changes haven’t, and the new Event systems haven’t.
People are always going to do just enough to get by. Giving out exclusive rewards isn’t going to incentivize people to try harder, it’s going to incentivize most to just give up and we know this because that’s what they’re already doing.
I understand the whole brackets thing but its nothing like the March Madness bracket where the top seeds are beaten by a lower rank team that no expected to win. All I see is another myriad of PvP overall standings for guilds where the the top 20 dominate week after week. Great for them; not so much for the majority who just look at it and say, “meh”.
Why not simply create leagues based on the size of those guilds instead? That would encourage guilds of all sizes to go for it.
WHAT? You have 3 math guys at your disposal?? Man I am totally on your case now. The single biggest problem in this game (well not counting BD, since he’s getting fixed) is the RNG algorithm, which is about as random as 3rd grade math. We see this in long chains of gems dropping far more frequently than they should, and in unfathomably odd streaks when opening blocks of chests. The question of “how random is random” is PhD-level math. But you don’t need a PhD to find open-source code for algorithms with analyzed properties of randomness best suited for game mechanics. GoW is still missing that.
I’d be totally down for just a blue ribbon next to our guild at this point. But…
I don’t follow your math if say getting tops in your rank got literally one extra card or one extra gem. Why would a team tank for that? The week they tanked, they could have gotten some sort of tiered reward in the regular ranked list that week. They’d be intentionally missing out on more rewards for no reason. Tanking a week would lose you more than a few of the new cards, lots of gems, etc. It would be silly to do. As long as the reward is super super tiny. Even a ribbon. Ill take it.
haha, brilliant.
To add to this: If we assume this is the last Sneak Peek, we can guess it’s probably not more than a couple weeks away. (Since the sneak peeks have been weekly, and if it was more than a few weeks we might get more info / teasers) Also the team has been rushing to implement changes, which suggests a schedule’s deadline is coming up soon.
Big patches are usually released mid to late-week, so while this week is technically possible, it might be a bit too soon. So my guess is end of next week or so.
EDIT: Just realised Suncrest is scheduled for 2 weeks and I believe that requires the 3.0 update for some spell effects, so next week, or this are most likely for GW I think.
######Small caveat: I’m still having my first coffee, so I might be (unintentionally) talking completely out of my arse with this theory.
How dare you? You vile, wicked monster!
About the rewards, speaking of gems only, when i just sketched a little table with three brackets of five ranks each it was clear how it would need extra gems just to make the total redistribution more even. I didn’t even considered the variable of new players and more guilds over time… And even disregarding the growing playerbase if i would try to redistribute and increase the rewards over 1000 brackets i would accomplish just a headache trying to figure it out. And all of it to no avail, as there is no guarantee that this could work or that it would fit the best interests of the game company.
But i’m more than happy to read that three people tried to find out if it could work, it shows how much respect for us the whole team has, also reinforces the point that sometimes they just can’t address us everytime, just because we want it, as there isn’t much to report…
But if someone makes amazing stunts on a wheeled chair in the office you better make a full report with videos you hear me @Sirrian?
This (and the rest of that big paragraph) is still one of my main concerns. It just seems like waaaay too long.
Should be no big deal UNLESS as normal they create a meta changing troop in the group. Imagine something better than BD that only the very top guilds have Ascended to mythic to for almost half a year before the rift raff
/s
Considering this is the wrap up and winter is coming to an end as well, i think we need a song and i know just a one.
