Improving Guild Wars Rewards

First of all, I don’t care about the gem or gold reward offered by Guild Wars. What I do care about is collecting troops and getting them to mythic level. Gotta catch them all.

Let’s do some math, based on the reward tables posted in the preview:

  • If a guild doesn’t end up in top 100 (which is going to happen to roughly 98% of all players), you get 3 - 12 copies of the weekly exclusive Guild Wars troop. For easier calculation, let’s assume an average reward of 10 copies.
  • It takes 190 troops to get a common to mythic, which requires 19 Guild Wars to reward the same exlusive troop.
  • There’s eventually going to be one exclusive Guild Wars troop for each kingdom, let’s go with 26 for now, so each troops will feature twice per year.

To sum it up, it will take 10 years to get those troops to mythic level.

Now, I like seeing a carrot dangling in front of my face, ready to be chased. This carrot requires a pretty good telescope to see though, I might as well be chasing rainbows. Thoughts:

Each week, every participating player is allowed to fight 5 * 6 = 30 battles. My proposal is to hand out one copy of the weekly exclusive Guild Wars troops for each of these fights won. This will raise the average possible acquisition rate to something close to 40, lowering expected mythic completion to two and a half years. It will also vastly improve Guild Wars participation rate, because next to nobody will want to miss out on an opportunity to improve their collection. If those extra free troops feel too generous, offer them for, say, 5 gems, right after the victory screen, somewhat similar to Arena. Possibly scale the costs (e.g. from 0 gems to 10 gems, going up 1 gem for each 3 troops bought that week) and you’ve got a resource drain that should be fair towards players at any level.

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even if we reduce it to guild wars won (the daily winner thing) from here:

to give +1 unit to all daily winners, we woudl still achieve a +6 units per week for more successful guilds which is a lot especially for the lower ranks

alternatively there could be created a guild war tier reward list based on those guild wars won or personal battles wow

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It might be time to face the very real possibility that this game isn’t designed to “catch them all”. It’s designed to make you think you can and thus keep you playing.

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yet giving a tone of that “uncatchable troop” to a seleced top (while the most of community will have to wait years) is one step towards p2w negativeness

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Your math is based on an assumption that the troops for all the kingdoms are going to run in a schedule together. They’re only releasing 6 troops initially, and we have no idea yet if those will be the rotation for the next 6 weeks or 6 months, and whether additional ways to get them will be added in the future. For example, maybe they run these 6 for 30 weeks (so 5 chances at each), and then they do something like add them to the normal pool, or create a special pack to finish them off. We don’t know yet.

There are enough REAL issues based on what the devs have actually SAID, so I’m not too concerned with “math” based on assumptions that are either purely assumed or which directly contradict those dev statements…

we have some idea actually:

[quote=“Sirrian, post:8, topic:21203”]

We’ll rotate it around - 1 per week.

I’m counting on guild wars having about as much impact on my GoW experience as rank in PVP does.

Namely, 0

Any game based system designed in such a way that the only way for player_a to advance is for player_b to fall behind is, in my opinion, a flawed system. It deepens the divide between the player base and undermines community cohesion.

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I remember those posts, but thanks for digging them up and posting them here for clarity :wink: . However, lots of things not in those posts could fundamentally change what they mean, while still making them technically true. Are they only available from Guild Wars during this original rotation or forever? Is the seventh troop due week 7, or week 30? Is the rotation among all released GW troops, or just a specific batch of 6 (for example, a “second season” rotating a different 6 troops for 6 months)? Once all the troops are released, is it a full rotation, or weighted like the current weekly arcanes (so some would run for frequently)? Are they certain that they won’t change how this works later? There are still lots of unclear details.

I think there’s a very strong counter-argument that it builds cohesion by providing each guild with a common goal to rally around. It’s everyone in a guild working together to accomplish a goal in opposition to other guilds. It’s not every man for himself.

I disagree.

There will be even more incentive to be in a top 20 guild. If you aren’t, you are just going to continue to fall further back as top guilds get more gold/gems/cards in addition to completing more legendary tasks. Which makes jumping ship even more attractive if an opening shows up. If you think turnover is bad in mid-tier guilds now, just wait till this lands.

I’m in a top 10 guild so it really won’t impact me at all. But for 95% of the player base this is a very bad direction.

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Why do we have a ‘feature request’ to improve something that wasn’t even released yet?

I’m getting serious GW speculation fatigue. It’s a huge business move for the devs to do, I’m sure they are doing a LOT of research and trying ideas with their hugely experienced team and commercial insight from a successful publisher.

As someone else said, can we just wait and see? Devs have always been good at responding to feedback. Almost always. Mostly. Often promptly.

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I disagree. Not everyone wants to play the game at a hardcore level and thus not everyone is looking to be in a top 20 guild. There’s a huge ocean of semi-dead guilds. I think creating incentives to consolidate could be very beneficial. If anything, I think it’s a good thing for 95%, a bad thing for the Top 2-5% that try to straddle hardcore vs casual, and a very good thing for the Top 1%.

IMO, most people play this game to get “stuff”. Guilds are a means to an end, not a core functional component of the game.

The more they do stuff like 2.2 and GW, the more they make Guilds the best way to get “stuff” but they’re not making them an integral part of the experience, so to speak.

IMO, there are only two types of guilds in this game - the top 1% and the 2-5% that are struggling between hardcore and casual. The other 95% aren’t really guilds, they’re loose collections of players that really couldn’t care less other than there’s guilds in the game so they should be in one.

Stuff like this crushes that 2-5% in the middle, producing a small group of hardcore guilds reaping huge benefits. The rest of the player base goes on as they were because they don’t really care.

3 Likes

They are doing a pretty poor job of making me think I can obtain every troop, too. Or really, anyone that has analyzed the numbers.

Sadly, it was possible before mythics, and likely when new legendaries were glory pack releases (albiet over a long period of time). Slower guilds would get much less ascensions and fill out a collection much slower, but overall, the “tipping point” could be as low as about 100 gems per week after tributes to build up enough of a gem supply to get new kingdom legendaries with event keys, every glory pack troop release, and still have some left over to attempt old legendaries when the came around in kingdoms. This period of time is when I spent the bulk of the money I’ve spent on the game to date, back when the benefits were both short and long term for me, since I didn’t have to worry about RNG ruining my ability to collect future releases.

The “tipping point” where you can always unlock everything legendary and above (not even counting mythics) is now much higher, requiring an average of about 100 event keys for any new legendary on average 1.5 times a month (including new kingdoms) and a ton of gems, so about 37 event keys per week. Just for new legendaries, you’ll need even more keys if you want to try and get old releases you missed. Attempting a mythic takes more resources than it would to complete an entire collection before they existed. And yet gems remain the same price in the cash shop. This is yet another reason I am apprehensive about gems even being offered as a reward for the mode.

There will come a point in time where I can’t ignore both low level guild wars troops and missing mythics because they will prevent kingdom star progress despite having been sitting at endgame for months. That’s my biggest concern here. I’ve played a long time. I put in my weekly time. I’ve put cash money into the game. I’d at least like access to all the content.

I’ll post a links to my rewards change proposals, since I think they were pretty far down and mixed in with a ton of other stuff. Warning, long posts.

Cliff notes version - remove gem and gold rewards entirely rewards, lower sentinel gem costs, give out troop tokens that can be exchanged for guild wars troops instead of actual troops, troop tokens become something else (like gem keys/gems) when you can’t use them anymore, troop tokens can be purchased in the cash shop in limited quantities, (optional) more brackets so it feels more like an actual competition.

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[quote=“Mithran, post:14, topic:21639, full:true”]There will come a point in time where I can’t ignore both low level guild wars troops and missing mythics because they will prevent kingdom star progress despite having been sitting at endgame for months. That’s my biggest concern here. I’ve played a long time. I put in my weekly time. I’ve put cash money into the game. I’d at least like access to all the content.
[/quote]

Can’t argue with this at all.

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Because it tends to be a lot easier to change something in the design phase than after going live. If somebody had pointed out prior to its release that Bone Dragon scaling is terminally broken in the long run, we might not still be waiting for a nerf. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Also isn’t that what feature requesting is? I thought it is to request a feature that currently isn’t in the game?

That’s what I’ve been using it for anyways…

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However, we do know what the current plans are, the numbers have been disclosed. The troops are only available from Guild Wars. It takes about 19 weeks for a well above average guild to mythic a guild war troop, which would require the same six kingdom reruns for two and a half years, without anything new getting added. And it would lock out just average guilds from ascending those troops to mythic if the schedule were changed afterwards.

Sure, the supposedly exclusive troops could show up in a some kind of glory pack later on. Or they could be handed out as part of redeem codes. Or they could spontaneously multiply like rabbits. I’d rather believe in raw data than in miracles, and that raw data is telling me right now that the currently planned system won’t scale. I’m just pointing out the obvious, and proposing a fundamental change that might improve the situation.

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This is the sort of thing that worries me as a collector… We can be fairly sure that they will ramp up the numbers we can get, after they introduce more than the initial six such troops (since 10 years is freaking ridiculous) but I’m still wary of something that will take 6-12 months to finish too… Guardians have been irritating me. The fact that few people have been ahead of me on those doesn’t help either.

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I remember Sirrian saying they’re rewards for placing in your bracket as well, but I don’t know if we saw what that is.

Could be a few extra copies of said troops.

But more than likely with current design, it isn’t anything significant.