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 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.
Quoting a Kafka post (number 66 if my header is to be believed. Idk about these forums anymore):
"I’ve believed with every fiber of my being that they were 100000% wrong even if the guild they’re talking about has less than 20 members and not all of them participated the one time.
EDIT: Let me give a specific example for that last comment.
2 month old guild gets mad because they’re pitted against a 4 member guild who didn’t score that guild wars.
I check the 4 member guild and find the guild is 2-3 years old and they’ve participated in EVERY Guild War since their Guild was created. As a Guild that often had less than 10 members, they kicked every 20-30 member Guild’s ass they came up against and earnt their rank - they had 2 bad guild wars in a row - maybe a couple of members were on holiday or got sick unexpectedly.
Damn straight I think a 30 member, 2-6 month old Guild should have to beat them to climb the brackets.
^ This opinion of mine is nothing new though, just the example is new. The next time a thread like this pops up I’m going to have the same opinion. I can’t reply every time :S"
I tried to post a direct link, but it kept jumping to the wrong post. And while context matters, that thread was in May. It is now November.
And while her opinion most likely hasn’t changed because one example can be cited while there are hundreds of zeroes to be found, month after month, the end result is: it is the players who must choose whether to continue the fight, or whether to add another dead guild to this broken system.
I remember that comment. So don’t worry, broken link or not.
While I don’t disagree with wanting to protect a small guild with members on vacation or out sick, I’m not so much talking about them as I am about actual dead guilds getting zero points. How are so many zero point guilds in my bracket? I fought a zero point guild today and yesterday. They consume half my bracket. Are half the guilds that could compete just on vacation or out sick? I doubt it.
I understand 0 point guilds in the absolute beginning brackets. But after a year? I’m not looking to be bracket #1 (obviously, look at the oh so fearful score we got! ), I just want my own bracket, whatever number it is, to have active guilds.
The problem tho, is that the developers are either unwilling or unable to distinguish a guild that is not participating just one time from the vast majority of guilds that never participate.
Because one time, in Guild Wars, Kafka formed an opinion and decided she’d never change it.
Sorry, I’ll stop posting. No need to get another thread locked.
Continue on. I giggled. The whole point of gaming is to have fun, may as well in the forums as well!
Distinguishing between the two should not be too difficult. There has been tons of ideas posted in previous threads so I won’t rehash them.
That said, getting it 100% perfect would be challenging. I wouldn’t expect that. If there is only one or two zero or minimal point guild in my bracket, that would be close enough.
This so much. We’ve gone from having very occasionally ONE Guild that plays/competes in the Bracket (usually none) to maybe 2 days/week usually, sometimes 1.
This is much better than it used to be for us, after 2 years of climbing, but I’d much prefer it if we had 5 days of Guilds that play a similar amount of battles and submit a score, with one one dud guild (for the Bracket) a week – I’d be totally fine with that.
There isn’t a single facet of Guild Wars that doesn’t need a complete overhaul. From the dynamic difficulty adjustment, the fact that RNG is 95% of your score, the “creative” play at the top bracket…
My guild is in bracket 3, last month we had the best score in the bracket, but did not move up because of a scoring bug. Because of sentinels we all took a net loss of gems. No rewards, no point in this game mode existing in its current state.
To get to this lackluster level of play we had to fight dead guilds every month for over a year.
Still, guild wars is the least of this games problems right now.
With 1 hour to reset, we are 4,300 points behind the 3rd place guild in b4 on Xbox. It took us two years to get here, but this is what we wanted all along: meaningful battles in meaningful brackets.
I know it is worse on PC/Mobile, not because the players and guilds are better, but because there are more husks to pass by.
Some games have seasons. This game takes too long to get from Bracket 100 to Bracket 1, but if I remember correctly, GW began in January 2017. Perhaps they could make the seasonal reset every 4 years, like the Olympic games or World Cup. The top guilds would get seeding preference, just like the top athletes or footballer clubs.
I’d rather do something like that then pay an entrance fee. Our guild struggles financially, but we show up once a month for the biggest and bestest fights.
The devs have been on a mission to derail wars for a significant time span. In fact the entire game has become catatonic. Building teams in competitive guilds has been thwarted by the sheer volume of unecessary eventing and the fact that your most creative enterprise can easily be wrecked in a heartbeat by empowerment. I’ve not had a single fight in B2 that didn’t contain at least 1 empowered troop and on green day I got mullered by the same guy 3 times in fight 3. I never had a chance thanks to boards that just make all creavity meaningless. What’s the point of this? And before anyone pipes up that there is a “counter to everything”, I have ample screenshots to prove that that is simply untrue. Empower killed wars…fact. we have all day players waiting to start their fights as soon as an opponent switches medals for a world event so they can take advantage. It’s totally preposterous; there is not one single element of true competition to be found in this game at all. And all that remains is mind numbing grind. Wow…what a game philosophy that is.
Look for a dead guild higher than you in the rankings and move everything into it. With the existing system, you will move for two or three years before an interesting war. Do not repeat other people’s mistakes.
I’m not sure if yours was the screenshot I saw with the “no-moves available” board, but there is a very simple counter that will work 100% of the time. While it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the most available points, it does guarantee that you won’t be screwed by a board that happens to favor your empowered opponent. Here it is: use their team or at least the same empowered troops. Sure, you take a hit in points because you might not be using the day’s color, but that means that whatever the board looks like (assuming only empowered converters here), you can convert first, get the extra turn/fill up your own troops, then punish them.
But back to the topic of this thread: If anyone has an alt that isn’t doing much of anything (or just wants to create one), they can prove once and for all whether the registration for Guild Wars is automatic or not (by automatic, I mean anything that doesn’t involve explicitly clicking on the Register button). Create a guild of 1 and don’t ever register. Don’t even click on the guild war banner. Then, when war rolls around, see if that guild is competing. If it is, then we need to request that Guild Wars require a manual registration, rather than an implied registration due to other actions.
Will keep this brief since this is off-topic. It’s not futile since the point of a defense team is to defeat the attacker, or at the very least chip away at some of the points they could get. If it “forces” you to not use the day’s color, that’s a pretty big defensive win. However, empowered troops are not auto-wins, no matter which side of the equation they’re on. All guilds are trying to obtain the most points while keeping the other team from scoring.
And going back to dead guilds, I remember facing a “dead” guild with 2 members. This meant that we faced the same team 4 times (assuming we won each) and then the paragon. The team was a 15k power team that was particularly annoying to deal with since it started looping very quickly (no empowered, just 50% starting with low cost). However, these 2 people actually played and we only beat them by having many more players on our end, surviving mostly from the defense bonus. This goes back to what @ChunkyMono copied from Kafka: there are “dead” guild with few players that are still playing. But there are also guilds with 30 people that don’t play a single match. I don’t think numbers matter unless there are 0 people.
I am not talking about defence. Colours there are irrelevant. I am talking about ‘pure’ colour of the day attack. Dbl empowered converters are rife on green defence with perhaps queen B and D glaive waiting to hammer an unfortunate starting board. There is no skill in this…merely a lazy design squad who don’t care about whether a game is remotely fair. In fact they clearly show that they prefer that it isn’t.
I think you misunderstood. I know color doesn’t matter on defense. I just meant that the day’s color for attack give you bonus points, but are in no way mandatory. If you want to use an all brown team on red day, there’s nothing stopping you. Sure, you’ll miss out on the possibly 200% bonus points, but a win is better than a loss, no?
empowered converters and doomed books have drastically changed the Meta timeframe. In B1, and to some extent B2, you pretty much know in advance what team you will face on any day. The same core defences have been used this year, and its not going to change in the foreseeable future.
I am sad about this as my favourite part of this game is coming up with new offensive teams in GW. As you never face anything new, this part is mostly gone. Sure, every once in awhile a troop gets released that makes you optimise a team but those troops are far between.
Having said that i don’t buy 95% luck comments generally being yelled out as soon as GW thred comes up.
The top B1 guilds has a loosing percentage of less then 3%. GW after GW after GW. Their are always going to be games you cant win due to Rng, but the absolutely most important factors are team selection and board understanding. If you fail to understand this your not helping yourself. Blaming luck wont make you any better at this game, only the opposite.
I think this topic has been discussed many times already, but I guess it’s good for it to keep coming up with new threads for attention. The simple solution is to make bracket progression much more dynamic the further down the ladder a guild is. A guild should be able to move up as much as half the ladder above them depending on how dominant their victory is.
That changes nothing at the top levels, because for example in bracket 4 half of the ladder would be 2 brackets, and a guild would be very unlikely to win with enough dominance to achieve the maximum climb. So they would just move up one bracket anyway.
However in bracket 200, that would mean a maximum climb potential of 100 brackets if the guild completely dominated (keep in mind there would be some other guilds in brackets between moving up a lot, so it would be unlikely achieve the absolute max jump). Potential to move up in big chunks like that would allow new guilds to climb into appropriate competition levels within a few wars and would quickly sift the dead guilds to the bottom of the list as any active guild would quickly jump them.
That’s how I would handle it anyway. I can’t think of any other ranking system I’ve ever seen that makes it this impossible for a new entrant to move up regardless of how well they perform like the current guild wars bracketing system. It’s not a good look.
^^This is what it all boils down to it seems. Oh well, I’m gad this issue doesn’t affect me personally or my guild, but I can see how it would be extraordinarily frustrating to anyone attempting to build up a new guild.
Just keep at it. We started on PS4 in bracket 161 with 3 players and got to bracket 5 in 27 months, picking up players and getting stronger along the way.
: the core issues – it’s just not going to be sufficiently effective, even if there is some small improvement
