The devs have said several times that GW registration has to be done manually, and isn’t automatic. I’d be interested to see what happens if someone was in a guild by themselves and collected Seals, but otherwise I’d probably operate under the assumption that this isn’t the case, as best practice for this discussion with the devs.
That being said, GW registration is very easy, you can pretty much do it accidentally if you’re just looking around seeing what all the buttons do, and you can’t ‘un-register’ if you decide you don’t want to participate – not that there would be much incentive not to.
There’s also a persistent and colourful(, slightly bugged) ‘Register Now’ message on the GW panel for the whole three weeks in-between. I’m really not surprised that guilds register but don’t participate. You see this all the time with other, real-life, free-to-register events, and heck I sign up for webinars that I’m unsure I’ll be able to make, sometimes just to secure the recording in case I want to watch it later. IN CASE (this should hopefully help speak to the psychological aspect of this issue for the devs).
-
Obviously the issue is that these non-commital guilds have started (very unfair) or once been higher up in the rankings due to previous activity (potentially also unfair anyway due to starting higher), but don’t move down very quickly at all.
-
It seems to me like this ‘Register Now’/‘Registered’ message and new, little notifications (has anyone else noticed these?) – “[Guild name] needs your help to win today’s Guild War!” (will have to double-check for exact) – are subtle, little strategies they’ve introduced to try to remind some of these more casual players to play those battles in response to these threads about a lack of activity/competition in some GW brackets
- I probably maintain, though, that with the ease of registration, lack of mobility/consequences, easy rewards –
: the core issues – it’s just not going to be sufficiently effective, even if there is some small improvement
- I probably maintain, though, that with the ease of registration, lack of mobility/consequences, easy rewards –
-
I could have also sworn that a few GWs ago, my guild experienced a once-off, disproportionate Bracket jump. I tend not to be too bothered to look into the records (as action on the GW front is pretty limited), but might have to look into that…
I’m not necessarily against marketing GW as a more ‘conpetitive, optional’ mode now that World Events run concurrently, similarly to what Slypenslyde suggested here:
This could be combined with better rewards for the non-1% – bigger risk, since you’re paying for entry, better rewards.
Otherwise, increasingly larger Bracket sizes, more aggressive Bracket mobility (not just with Guilds that score 0 but also ones that score say 10,000 vs a range of 600,000 to 1,300,000 for the week, but only move down 1-2 Brackets or potentially even stay there), or a combination of the two all seem like pretty good and incremental steps to take.