How is this healthy?

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I’m looking at the top two guilds by trophy count, and it is staggering. There is no actual benefit to getting a guild rank higher than “God” league (which is 1 million trophies). It’s just bragging rights, I suppose. What I question though is how healthy this is. I know players are free to invest as much time as they want into a game, but here are some numbers. Last week the top two guilds pulled in 286k and 225k trophies. That’s 1363 trophies per, day per player for the first and 1071 for the second. If they’re all using Phoenicia teams to do 30 second battles for 2 trophies, that’s 681 battles, which is 5-6 hours every day of nothing but spamming explore. And all 30 players need to do this, or half of them need to be doing even more make up for the others.

Now I can understand some players doing colossal grind fests for new factions, or for leaderboards or something, because they want to obtain something in a limited amount of time. But Guild Ranking isn’t a limited time thing, it’s never ending. There is no “end goal” here.

Is this really how 505 wants guilds to be ranked? They want guilds to recruit players who can dump this many hours into a pointless chase for… well, nothing, there is no prize.

It was interesting when the first guild hit 10 million trophies, but that guild is doing 3-4x LESS trophies per week than the top two guilds now. They were never trying to encourage their players to play to death. I got the impression from them that they just had very active players and their trophy count reflected a “when it happens, it happens” attitude toward “milestones”

And this isn’t a “one week” type of thing either. The week before, they did 250k and 238k trophies. Before that, they did 238k and 231k. Before that it was 224k and 197k. And the week before that it was a ridiculous 286k and 279k.

So that 5-6 hours per day (per player – 60 players total across both guilds) isn’t for one day, or one week, it’s been going on for the last few months. In December, there was a week of 315k trophies. Jesus christ.

It’s just a game. You don’t have to put this much time into it.

Edit: In case this came across the wrong way, I’d like to add that I am in no way trying to tell other people how to spend their time. I play 4-5 hours of games a day too. The issue I am addressing is how 505 and the developers of Gems of War have “encouraged” this sort of mindless gameplay, from Tuesday delves, to Arena events with “infinite” rewards. The difference is that Tuesday delves are usually centered around players trying to reach 2500 renown. It’s a “one time” thing. Unless you really like farming delves and want to spent a ton of gems on it, there’s no reason to repeatedly spend every Tuesday grinding to 500.

The same is true of Arena events. Eventually, the rewards reach a point where it’s not feasible to continue playing the event, because you’ll never reach the next reward in the time remaining.

The same is NOT true for Trophies and the coveted #1 Guild Rank spot. There is no time limit. There is no reward. There is no “We did it, we can stop now” mentality. It’s the opposite – you can never stop, because you’ll fall behind and it will be too hard to catch up.

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It’s not and the devs know it. It’s about money and and if those guilds are driving some to pursue the top where they spend money…then this is the result.

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Hey, that’s the price if you want your guild to be in the top spot, I guess…

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Trophies are completely meaningless, I really don’t understand the desire to farm them. Maybe in the past when you could only acquire them in pvp maybe they had some prestige attached to them but now your get them in explore and everywhere they mean nothing.

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Thankfully my guild does not encourage such silliness, let alone require it.

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I probably agree that Trophies aren’t necessarily the best way to ‘rank’ a Guild, but given that

i.e. that 505/IP2 doesn’t provide much incentive to continue to farm Trophies, I don’t think this part is that true:

I agree that the specific examples you mentioned are pretty bad, though:

I’m just not seeing a huge causal link. I do think there’s room for their Guild ranking (or whatever) system to go from underwhelming (current, agreed) to amazing, though.

So for me, the meat of the topic is this part:

I’d actually be very interested to hear alternate proposals on how to rank (or not!), including from 505/IP2 (obvs not likely, but just saying I’d welcome it).

I know there are a couple that have previously jumped in with, “Guild Level is the only way!”, and I also think it’s a useful indicator, but (imo) let’s get creative :sweat_smile:.

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We could just let me decide. Probably a better system than current … swear I won’t pick MM every week …

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If there is leaderboard/ranking, ppl/guilds will go for the top

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I kinda stopped reading after this line. A Phoenicia team does not need 30 seconds to do a battle for 2 trophies. It adjusts the numbers by a lot.

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Two important points.

  1. Battles take much less time than you have suggested. I’d say 500 trophies per hour is closer to what these runners are doing on average. That’s about half the time you have posted.

  2. Why is Phoenicia the only option? I can one shot kill almost everytime with a shield/gaard team in explore 9. Im sure a true damage team around venoxia or something could do the same. That cuts the time even more.

Bonus point 3. Who really cares. Let the crazy trophy runners do their thing. If they burn out so be it. To each their own. I could care less about their health as long as it doesn’t affect the health of the 99.99% of the rest of the guilds not spending countless hours grinding trophies. You do you trophy hunters.

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I completely understand your point of view on this. But I would disagree with the idea that it’s a game issue. It’s a player issue. It’s a player issue that exists in some for in any game with any kind of leader board.

What I mean is this… unless they based the guild rank on something static (like oldest guild is number 1 etc) there are always going to be people killing themselves doing “whatever the thing is.” It would be a crazy grind no matter what they base it on, because there will always be people obsessed with those top spots.

The good news is that the vast majority of players just don’t care about being in the top spot guilds. So their game isn’t impacted by it at all. The ones that find their fun being at the top are probably happy they can grind their explores. It’s weird and doesn’t really reflect any sort of superior play. But leader boards almost never do. They are almost always more a measure of time or money spent.

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The current top two guilds are less than 100k apart. The reason they’re doing it is because they both want the #1 spot and they also want to keep it. Face it - Anonymous was #1 for so long (about 5 years, give or take a few months) that even the idea that someone else could be #1 is a relatively new thing under the Krystara sun.

However, I do not think this is the game’s responsibility. It is solely the choice of the player. If they’re having fun, let them grind away.

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At first I thought this was a Tuesday Faction Delve issue. Personally, I had so much ‘fun’ last week finishing Werewoods I tried to finish Lyrasza’s yesterday.

Back to back Tuesdays can be exhausting, so I tried to make a game of it. My standard team was Runepriest (I finally unlocked Banishment yesterday), Thrall, Alderfather and Child of Summer. So Child would cast a make a Firestorm, Lyrasza would change it to a Chaos Storm, Runepriest would cast Doom Crossbow to make it a Firestorm again, and then get a kill which would make it a Duststorm. I tried to see how often I could change storms…

That got old by the time I reached 300 and made a Pure Faction run that was so fun, I took a nap, and woke up 6 hours later. Naps aren’t supposed to last 6 hours. Anyway, returning to the game (but still off-topic, sorry, not sorry), my new task was to see how high I could increase my Runepriest’s attack score (Base: 125 from 7 potions). I got it to 167 three times, but still I was quite bored.

And with an hour and a half until reset, I noticed this thread. And also this score on the leaderboards…

90 min to reset

So, some players enjoyed the game 10x as much as I did. I don’t judge, it’s their time and gems. Spend it how they like. Is it healthy? I don’t feel healthy. Personally, I’d rather be ambushed by a Graug than chase number 1 leaderboards.

(One of my alts, betrayed by a Lvl 23 Tracker, and then ambushed by a Lvl 33 Beastmaster when the alt tried to summon his bodyguard instead. Gravewalker difficulty. And definitely and defiantly off-topic).

I was able to finish the overall task of 2500 renown, tho only after spending 1 million gold getting Hoard to 167 and 200 gems on an 8th potion. And while getting the Hoard to 167, I questioned why it wasn’t giving me 50% bonus to skill, only 25%. Oh yeah, because I don’t have enough deeds to get all Delve kingdoms to 14 yet, let alone 15.

Divinion Fields is 12 (fairly easy tho), Adana is 13 (also easy), so it’s not like I wasted Yellow (Air) deeds on those…well, maybe I did, but they aren’t 14, and neither is Shentang, because I only had it to 12, and used some to get it to 13 yesterday for the extra health and armor. g r r r.

Anyway, I wanted to vent, and didn’t feel like making my own topic. Sorry to hijack this one. These pancakes made me too Salty.

For the Horde :axe::rage::shield:

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It’s no different than anything else people do to the extreme, except less actual rewards(physical, mental, monetary etc)
A few do it purely for the enjoyment, most people seek recognition and attention.
You see it every day in different chats/forums. Example: every new mythic release in the forums leads to several people saying they got it.
We live in an age of self importance where people now have the ability to share every moment of their lives online. :man_shrugging:

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With you here, I quit all social media about 3 years back for this reason. I even had to use social media as part of my job and I was getting people I didn’t know asking me why I was in such and such a town etc, why am I sleeping in a hotel, or that they had just bought a latte with a cherry on…

I’m missing out on cats getting new catfood and all sorts now… :wink:

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Here I am, happy with 1000 trophy a week, even that is almost 1 hour of playing a day

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I will not speak for anyone else in my guild, solely myself. But I generally play 4-6 hours a day, maybe a little more on weekends if my time isn’t consumed with familial obligations. To be honest, ever since I’ve started to work from home due to COVID shutdowns in my state, I’ve been able to play about twice as much as I normally would have. I won’t get into exact numbers, but 1362 trophies per day is an insanely low estimate for anyone with an efficient method of farming over 4+ hours. You state you play games for 4-5 hours a day, so why is our playing the same amount of time on this game unhealthy? It all comes back to people really not understanding the most effective ways to do something, in this case farming trophies.

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I’m not talking about your use of game time. I’m talking about the game’s use of “goals” for players by creating an atmosphere that encourages this type of game time. I really don’t care if you want to spend five, ten, sixteen, whatever hours playing whatever games you want in any manner. More power to you. If you can do it, that’s no problem of mine (and if it’s not a problem for you, awesome, but addiction to anything is very real, and that includes video games).

I’m not asking “Is it healthy for players to do this?” I have my own answers for that, and that’s a matter of personal opinion, like I mentioned above. I am asking “Is it healthy for game developers to encourage it?”

It seems like there is wildly split opinions on the answer to that one, based on the replies. Some people seem to agree with me. Others say mind your own business. Others say it’s not for the game developers to care.

They’re all good points worth talking about.

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Personally I don’t think it’s for the game developers to care. I think that they have to put a ranking system in. That’s actually why a lot of players play games. I think there would be much less of a player base if there were no ranking system. I think people are competitive by nature and if there was no sense of beating another person at something then half of the fun is gone. Is everyone like this? No. I personally don’t care about this stuff in gems of war but I do like playing fighting games and first person shooters and if I didn’t play against other people I would find those games boring.

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Being a top 3 B1 Guild War guild is far more important but the Guild family I’m in does both so we good. I can enjoy my stress free existence in one of our other guilds cheering folks on and helping in wars if needed. :sunglasses: