I did 6xtier7 this last weekend faction event and ended up on the PC/mobile leaderboard, and that’s consistently been the case for every weekend faction event… You don’t need to spend 50k gems, just do full clears instead of skipping to the boss room (which yes, takes more time).
That being said, it’s true that events seem to be piling on since 5.0 was released, I expect players will eventually need to specialise instead of completing everything… We’ll see
Switch to a guild with no demands on GW or events, many just chill and chat.
There is a subset of serious players that love Guild Wars and invest a significant amount of their time and energy towards it. This is an important part of our playerbase, but it is also by no means our largest. Many of these players spend several hours in game weekly as well, regardless of whether it is Guild Wars week.
I’m collating feedback in this thread, so please keep discussing the things @Starlite has mentioned. I do not know if anything can be changed, and we won’t be able to run Guild Wars and World Events seperately, but I’ll gather opinions from here for the devs just in case.
The things @Starlite mentioned are not that crucial, as the mechanics of the game dictates that if you want to compete - invest more time, that’s all games do. So running GW alongside with WE is fine. Lemme share some calculations:
So, basically, based on my personal experience , GW+WE is 1.5 hours. Yesterday, for example, everything, along Delving the faction (one-day event) up to last tier reward, Adventure board + farming in my low-level faction + PvP to tier 1 took approximately 3.5 hours to complete.
To sum-up I seriously doubt that devs will respond differently on that matter, but I would agree with them: “wanna hit the leaderboard - be ready to invest time”
Time spent dedicated to GW is more than just the battles tho. New troops have joined since the last war.
Some of the topics under discussion in our Guild include but are not limited to: Is the Hive Mind worth using? Which team is giving us problems today, and how do we counter it? What issues do our newer players have? We are a bracket 5 guild. I am certain the discussions are more involved in the top bracket.
But with all that said, my guild mostly wonders why medals can’t be linked to teams. Mostly.
We are one with the Horde, and the Horde is with us. May the Horde be with you as well. 
Maybe I’m in the minority
But GW takes me 5-10 minutes a day, plus a couple practice battles, don’t need to change much planning and teamwise as time goes on
World event even less than 5 mins after initial day
I don’t know if I can just scan boards n make decisions more quickly than most or what, but nothing takes me long outside new faction releases
For most brackets, the time invested in GW is better spent doing something else such as Treasure Maps. The return on time is not worth it; unless you are in bracket 1.
Thanks, @Saltypatra.
My estimate that World Event and Guild Wars both take roughly the same time on average is very much based on the idea that people do try to at least do the events, of course. But I hope I’ve tried to capture the reality of different levels of seriousness about doing well in them.
I think there’s a rule of thumb there you should keep in mind.
I’m a little disappointed that there seems no room to adjust the World Event schedule based on feedback. Calendars should never be completely fixed (as you were forced to discover when Stonesong Eyrie had to be delayed, for example).
@Lorien1973, you raise an excellent point, which all game designers would do well to be aware of.
My granddad was CFO of Hoover, Australia. He gave me a fascinating book that I didn’t read until years later.
In the book, a couple of researchers at McKinsey & Co. surveyed and interviewed a large number of successful businesses to try and determine why they were so successful.
One of their key observations was related to rewarding salespeople – and this very much applies to game leaderboards, as well.
I believe the company involved was IBM, but I may have misremembered. In any case, allow me to switch from a narrative to just making the point:
If, at the end of every month (event), you give a special reward to just the top 5 people (out of 100 salespeople, for example), then you will get a strong sales effort from perhaps 20 people. The other 80 know that they have no chance of getting a bonus, so they’ll just phone it in.
If, instead, you spread the rewards more evenly, you will get a lot more keen salespeople doing their best, because they all know they have something extra to work for.
In the Gems of War context, the first scenario is strongly reflected by the Guilds who register for Guild Wars but don’t play any of their matches. They just get the minimum reward for participation.
Adding the possibility of a bonus from topping your bracket is an excellent incentive (a change that I strongly applaud), but it still leaves you with half a bracket of non-participation.
The basic principle is, the more you flatten the reward structure, the more effort and participation you will see from players (or salespeople). Of course, there has to be a sweet spot, but GoW hasn’t hit it.
My basic suggestions are:
For example, everyone who reaches Level 500 in a Faction Event might get a bonus, not just the top 100.
I would like Guild Wars to be its own week, with no other events. Time constraints are the reason — I don’t know how some of y’all are completing all of your Wars battles in an hour or two, but it seems crazy to this mush-brained orc for whom it takes that much time a day, for a total of (at least) 15 hours a week on Wars. FOR THE HORDE, of course — and as Chunky mentions, some of that time is spent adjusting defenses, writing notes for guild mates, etc…
What I do NOT want — PLEASE don’t make Wars happen only once every 11 weeks UNLESS the rewards across the board are three times as high.
Guild Wars rewards have already been nerfed by making the event run a quarter as often as it used to. It doesn’t need to be pared down further — especially considering I wasn’t at the top in the Golden Age, and only just started to enjoy in the bounty.
Also—at the risk of being off-topic (sorry)—make rewards more worth it for all involved. Everyone in Bracket 1 should at least be able to buy maxed Sentinels without running a gem deficit. The easiest solution is to multiply every reward by 4, to account for the reduction in event frequency, but I would rather see a more refined tweak designed to make rewards for all brackets much more enticing — and not just a “I get the same thing regardless of performance” participation-trophy like the game has now.
I know the ship’s probably sailed, but I wanted to try; if people get the same reward regardless of effort, they are being incentivized to invest as little effort (and caring) as possible—hence dead guilds clogging the brackets, players as far as Bracket 10-5 still not knowing the basics of the game mode (though, can you blame them, when the game never gives a comprehensive “How-To”?!), etc…
I agree. Wars investment time wise can be significant if you are competitive. It is the only genre where creative team building is necessary; potions etc have made everything else far too easy. I only really build and test teams generally with wars in mind so that is in itself additional (but indirect) wars time in my view.
I’ve said this before. But I’ll say it again.
Yes those who take Guild Wars super seriously will always be in the minority. I allege that the same minority provides a majority of your revenue though.
They may not be in bracket 1 every month. I think it’s deductive reasoning that they have been in bracket 1 at least once.
Only one patch out of the 10-20 patches since it’s inception has improved guild wars in anyway. Y’all consistently treat it like the freckled red head step kid. Put it out of it’s misery already. I’m not even mad about it anymore. Just feel sorry to see an abandoned guild mode hang around like a fart after eating potato salad on a hot summer day.
It was great at the beginning… but now it’s just smelly shit.
No way we could even have a full guild if wars were less often. The world event can be done on Monday except for the daily sigils. If anything make world event daily sigils happen all at once on Monday for those that want to spend all their time the rest of the week on wars if that’s even possible. The big thing is don’t get behind on the world event or you will have to likely rush Wars which leads to disaster. I guess guilds can choose to skip the world event on Wars week since there will be another the following week as another option. Nothing says you have to do everything every week right.
What about campaign? Oh, oh, and what about bounty?
The title to this is missing 2 other things for a total of 4 things going on in the same week.
This is all a total joke. Guild wars should have an entire week designated to it. It should cost more to play and the prizes should be much more intense. You should get both individual and guild rewards. It should be more transparent and have more information on what’s going on.
This game is turning into a competitive joke. It is feeding the grinders only. So what’s the future? Play all day every day and do nothing with the stuff because there is no goal other than getting more stuff.
And of course you might end up spending 10 hours plus on Tuesday faction if you can’t afford the gems to shortcut from the start.
Not on guild wars/campaign/world event/ bounty week. Lol
Don’t forget we had a faction weekend last weekend and two days later another faction on top of other stuff. Which I need to do as choosing not to complete with potions.
I did all my sigils in world event Monday so I didn’t screw my GW defence and tbh I wish I didn’t even do world event.
I think for me world event has to give as Monday was a complete and utter chore.
If you are indeed at the top of the GW pile, the time investment is expected. You don’t get to the top by steamrolling your battles and not caring about losses the way those of us in lower brackets do.
I’m not saying I’d mind having GW as the only event in a given week again because I could certainly find a more enjoyable use for the time. All I’m saying is “I have to spend more effort to stay on top” isn’t really a justification for why it should change. Being the best at anything always requires effort above and beyond the rank-and-file.
You can buy level 5 Sentinels without running at a deficit. You get enough from the blue statue each week to cover the cost. (Level 5 Sents cost 340 Gems total and the blue guardian statue gives 390.) Resource management is a big deal, especially in F2P games, because it’s a revenue stream for the company.
Yes, lower brackets have more of an option on whether or not they purchase Sentinel levels because the further down the brackets you go, the less likely their opponents will have Sentinel stats, but that doesn’t mean they should be penalized for buying them while some extra allowance is made to essentially give B1 players free Sentinels. B1 players already have a chance to win 1500 Gems. That’s reward enough.
In order to justify 4x rewards, it would need to require 4x the effort. I personally have no desire to do 120 GW battles in a week, but that’s me. “I want more goodies because I have to wait longer to receive them in the first place” is not a justification. We still get one week worth of rewards for one week worth of effort.
I’m sorry it probably sounds like I’m being rather hostile in my response because that isn’t my intention. I am glad Salty jumped in to say they are keeping an eye on this because at the end of the day it still affects all of us.
I suppose this shows how large a disconnect can exist between “B1” and “the rest” in terms of mindset.
TL;DR if you want to play in B1 you should be prepared to invest the time and resources necessary to be competitive. If you want to buy Sentinels you are accepting the Gems cost, which is still less than we are given for free in a week, let alone given for free in a month since GW is only once a month.
The point I’ll agree on, but only to a degree, is the time investment side. GoW isn’t a casual match-3 game anymore. The layering of events of all types is making the game progressively more grindy, and I believe this to be by design, which also means I doubt it will change. If anything, it’ll get worse.
I like this description and am proud to be in this subset. I still hold out hope that the devs will someday help Guild Wars to love me back. 
↑This would be absolutely lovely, but don’t get me wrong…
I very much appreciate that Campaign Tasks were set up to be doable in one day. Also the spell damage/scoring boosts in this week’s World Event has allowed me to still contribute to my guild’s Reward Tiers while leaving enough time for Guild Wars.
I am indeed 
I consider all people in Bracket 1 “the top.” It’s only 300 people out of thousands.
But even if that’s too generous, for about a year or so (6 months at least — I can’t remember when I actually joined U1 and I don’t feel like looking it up) I’ve been in the top 100; the top 3 guilds in Bracket 1 are the top 100, and The Unforgiven’s always there. And sometimes I’m Paragon for my guild, so.
emphasis mine
This isn’t what I’m saying, either, and I thought it was clear: there are others in the thread claiming their Bracket 1 efforts are won with less than half my time investment.
That either means they’re twice as good as I am (improbable), or they’re exaggerating (possible), or I am misreading (probable).
No. You can’t.
You can spend fewer gems on the event than you can earn through other means (available to you every week, by the way), but you cannot make a profit from the event itself if you buy all your sentinels and fail to be in the top 3(?) spots in Bracket 1.
That encourages anti-competitive behavior. That makes guilds in slots 5-10 think, “Well, I can either pay a gem tax to try being on par and maybe wiggle my way into the top half of the bracket, or I can not bother, get beaten, and get my participation trophy.”
You can make the argument the mode isn’t meant to be profitable in the way no other event week is because gems aren’t the primary reward, but I call foul on that argument because — if that is the case — what, exactly, is the reward for the event? Copies of the Guild Guardian? Please. That’s not the carrot people are chasing — not at all.
At least for other events there are orb carrots, token carrots, forge scroll carrots, etc…
Rewarding the people at the top with a mode where all can compete on an even playing field is hardly “punishing” those in the lower brackets.
And — in my opinion — basically no one should buy Sentinels before Bracket 1. It’s never worth it. It’s not cost effective, and it shouldn’t impede progress — this I know because, for a year or two before I was in U1 I led the slog of U3 (now Bracket 5-6, where it was when I left it) from the bottom bracket to where it is now. When people mis-spent resources, I was sure to point it out so it wouldn’t happen again.
If Bracket 1 no longer had a reward lower than the 300-odd gems the Sentinels cost, then at-worst #10 would have a wash —no net change— and Sentinels are then only unprofitable for people Bracket 2 (at which point it might be worth it, but basically not because it’s just shifting the problem downward, which is fine to me if the problem must exist and only those who earn their way out of it are immune) and below.
No. It wouldn’t. It didn’t in the past. That’s my point: the frequency of the event was decreased, and we never had a commensurate increase in the reward payouts.
That’s a nerf. That consolidates buying-power on those who were at the top at a certain time, what I called the “Golden Age.” Such people as these will always be richer than those who weren’t around short of thousands of real dollars.
I get that the same thing has been true many times over: statues used to give unlimited gems, LTs used to give unlimited gems… these things are removed and nerfed and that is to be expected but that doesn’t mean it is any less wrong, and not in some absolute, moralistic way, but because each of these changes is negatively received by the community before becoming the “new normal” people are too tired to rail against.
I guess the tl;dr is…
…that “one week worth of rewards” used to be a lot more simply because I do not agree orbs, tokens, etc… on off-weeks are commensurate with 1500 gems. For guilds not taking these amounts of gems home, these rewards are, of course, better, but that’s why I argued all brackets should have upward-adjusted rewards to make the event more worth taking seriously.
I’ll end by saying in response to this:
that “free” isn’t “free” when it’s bought with gold-grind, or even (the more tenuous argument) the willingness to return to the Xbox every hour to collect tribute and potentially be roped in to playing “just one more battle…”
TL;DR
I disagree with you disagreeing with me on almost every point, but that is okay because I don’t harbor any ill-will toward you, either, and I’m actually glad we don’t just echo one another in every thread 