When GoW first started, the only ranking system was trophies for guilds. People on these forums begged for an individual leaderboard, which was introduced with the change to ranked pvp. Pretty much every new event since has included a leaderboard because the players wanted it. It wasn’t originally included in the game.
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Exactly my point. Games need leaderboards. They made the mistake of not having it when it first came out but everyone wanted it so they implemented it. At least they listened.
Gems of War is a game made for everyone adults and kids so they added ways to get more rewards so it be easier for everyone with out having to spend alot of time playing and burning up their game systems. Zuul Goth is the best troop out there having 3 Zuul Goths and Champion of Gaard is a good team when you want to grind. People spend money to buy Zuul Goth and once they have alot of Zuul Goth troops in a team to get everything like trophies and gold to use on guardian task. When your in a guild team work is everything and finding the best players that have every troop, armor, weapons, pets all hero classes and talents maxed EVERYTHING maxed and having 30 of them is not impossible and the top guilds show they may have players like that. The devs know who cheats and will ban anyone that shows up on their radar and any bug or glitch they find they fix. The max level is 10,000 i sure some of them are close to that level and who knows mabye all 30 members of that guild live close by to one another and are millionaires? But one thing is for sure they must have every kingdom maxed, faction maxed, all troops unlocked and maxed or just the best troops maxed out and have lots of money to by gems to et top spot in the events to get power orbs or buy them when Christmas comes around. If you are lazy and do not try your best then some one better then you will pass you. I think they love the game and love to try to be the best because they born that way. 
If the question is it healthy for the game then yes. The devs want to entice players to spend time on the game as much as possible. The longer you are on, greater the chance of you making an in game purchase.
I would disagree that developers are encouraging it. It’s more a case of players encouraging each other to do such stuff.
personally i dont care at all about trophies… i just gain them, as a side effect of other things i do in-game…
I don’t think it’s about minding your own business, more like “this mechanic is for players that are different from you” with attempted explanations. I also don’t think it’s about being not for the developers to care, more like “the players are choosing this and not being forced.”
There are different kinds of gaming personalities. The guild leaderboard is an appeal to a specific gamer type. If you could come up with a mechanic to rank the guilds that didn’t involve any grind, those people would most likely exit the game for something else. There fun is tied to doing what other people are unwilling or unable to do. They don’t care if what they are doing is “not fun.” They are getting their fun in a completely different way from players that have a different gaming personality.
One of my favorite things about GoW is that it has a lot of room for all different player personalities and no matter what your game focus is, you are not really disadvantaged by it. For example: the various leaderboards do not matter to me at all. I rarely even look at them, and I’m never on them. Meanwhile, I have a great time playing. Leaderboards are not my circus and not my monkeys. They exist for for the players that get their primary game pleasure from climbing and/or topping them. I think that’s great! They can do their thing and get their enjoyment, and it has zero effect on my ability to enjoy the game.
To me that’s about as perfect a design as you can get in a game. When you can get leaderboard focused people to chase those spots but the spots are actually meaningless (other people can just blow it off without penalty) that’s a good thing, IMHO.
I do not think you are wrong… for you, or for me. But there is a type of player who really does love the grind for status thing. And if it didn’t exist here they would lose their fun. Why not just let everyone have their type of fun?
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It’s not healthy and there’s no point to it, especially since this game is dying, but they’re adults and that’s how they wanna spend their time. So they can do their thing. 
Just do what you enjoy. Have fun and don’t play out of obligation.
I think the devs have already shown that they don’t really care about the people who play this game, so don’t expect them to care about this, either.
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I haven’t read the whole thread tbh - just picked up some posts at random, but:
How about just ignore the trophy-thing and have fun?
They have no meaning in this game. Just see it as a grind-o-meter. Where’s the problem?
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The problem is peer pressure.
People who want to be in top guilds often feel that they have to grind to merit their spots.
And there are many who would rather not play at all if they can’t play while also getting all the available resources and perks…
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I think it’s more of a player problem than a dev problem. I have no problem if you as a player want to play your butt off because you enjoy it but if you’re playing your butt off because you’re scared you’ll fall behind then you’re the problem. People like that need to knuckle up and figure it out.
I think this whole thread comes down to this question:
Would removing the trophy-based leaderboard reduce the incentive to grind?
Which brings 2 possible situations:
- Would trophies be replaced with some other metric? If so, is there any metric that isn’t grind-y but is also fair (i.e. a guild’s age should not be a metric)?
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any non-grind-y metric. You could argue guild wars ranking, but there’s already a leaderboard for that. Then there’s guild level, which is influenced by gold spent in tasks, which is grind-y or purchasable, and also greatly impacted/limited by guild age. Combined guild member levels, troops, etc is also grind-y, but also luck-based/purchasable. So what metric is there which requires a guild to be active and can’t be purchased? Well, trophies.
- Would the leaderboard be completely removed?
Technically, this would remove the incentive to grind for trophies, full-stop (which I believe is what the OP suggested). Yet, some people like to have some ranking, something to brag about, something to aim for. If the guild ranking is removed, many would not be motivated to play/grind like they do. OR, they might keep grinding because it still gives them gold/medals/resources. Maybe they would start grinding PvP instead in search of pets, which would seem equally unhealthy.
To echo what many have said: it’s ultimately the player’s choice. The fact that there’s a metric might motivate some but ultimately people play the way they do because they do, and the metric is just an external tracker. I went from 0-1000 in under 2 months. Some would not consider that healthy. Heck, even I don’t particularly consider that healthy. But at the time, I had a lot of fun doing it.
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As with most things in life, anything in large quantities can be unhealthy. It is up to us to choose how we spend our time. I won’t get into whether companies should or shouldn’t try to grab your attention and time as much as they can, but I will say this: you choose how much you play this game. You choose whether or not maxing a new Faction the day it comes out is worth your time. You choose whether FOMO is more important to you than your enjoyment or well-being.
If you don’t feel like you have a choice, that, friends, is called addiction, and that’s a serious concern.
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