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.