Looking good in your latest pic, man! Does it take you long to do your hair?!
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A phenomenally high win rate isnāt inherently a problem - after all, itās a game and winning is fun! - but now itās coupled with Guild Wars, where every point might matter. Guild Wars are deliberately structured so that a single loss means youāre going to be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of points below your potential for the day, and when losses are already unusual to begin with across the entire game experienceā¦well, thatās just a recipe for Instant Ragequit. Or even worse, disinterest: you need to be passionately angry to rage quit, which means youāre at least passionate and may come back. But if a loss in a guild war makes you lose interest and walk away, youāre probably done for good.
if you wait until people quit, then it might be too late.
but iām sensing you are not actually looking for an answer here, rather you were looking to rile up certain people. i donāt know who, i donāt know why. iām gonna stay out of the way now.
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Nah the hair isnt badā¦ The make-up is a bitch tho
Well let me be a dissenting voice.
I see GoW as a collection game, not so much a strategy game. I think that making players lose more matches would be very bad for player satisfaction and retention. I believe many players play for a relaxing fix that builds their resources and collections. These will be the 99% of the player base that donāt appear here on the forum.
Let me please head off any criticism that I canāt figure out tactics or I hate losing. Iāve been here since week 2 of the gameās release. My invade win rate is 98% and the 2% losses will be due to rng crap or more likely not paying attention and running in the wrong team into pvp.
I want to see the game continue to thrive, grow and make good profits for the devs and publisher so we all keep getting new content. I firmly believe thisāll happen best if the game stays a pleasurably simple grind. For every player that wants a challenge I believe there are thousands who do not.
15 Likes
I can help you here, take my hand.
I thought most people that found a game boring and frustrating, leaves and
never looks back?
1 Like
Just sneaking here again 
The one thing I donāt get concerning won, loss and reactions, is the big deal made out of guild wars.
Really, the rewards are so bad. And losing, technically , is good, because if you lose to the same big deck each week, youāll lose rank and face less epic decks.
(Canāt believe i said that)
@Jainus i do enjoy a good challenge but i see your point and agree 100%
I just dont want it to be too easy cuz to me that is the thief of enjoyment
2 Likes
Just dropping by to say that to me, the essence of the gameplay is the puzzle element. Troops that use board mod. Chaining spells together. Rarely using primary 3 gem matches. Moving all troops toward center mass where things like this are not possible and every game consists of slinging spells back and forth with an Arena-like pace would quickly kill my enjoyment of the game.
I wouldnāt mind some extra challenges though. Iād love a mode where you always go second, with appropriate rewards for the extra time spent, but Iād hate a coin flip for who gets the first turn in normal PvP. Iād even crank up the in-game difficulty occasionally and play casual PvP if the rewards werenāt so neutered. It is simply not enjoyable for me to use defensive teams all the time or watch my team get picked apart on turn 1 because I lost a coin flip. I highly prefer glass cannons where one wrong move can cost me the gameā¦ but again, you donāt have all that many moves you can make at any given time, which is why Gems of War will always be a simple game - when using the best teams, the best move for any given situation is usually plainly obvious.
I also think about what, exactly, makes me lose a game - sometimes making a wrong move or being careless, sometimes attempting to force force through with the wrong team, sometimes because Iām just using overall ābadā teams or crapshoot RNG teams, and very very rarely because I had a plan but the board make it simply impossible to enact. In order to have a 60-70% win rate, the situations completely beyond my control would have to increase by a factor of at least 50x, which I think would be horrid for everyone involved. There are other ways to put difficulty in (asymmetric design for defense troops for example) where control would still remain a player thing but the big dumb AI would still be a threat with their overall higher damage output if you do slip up, especially if you are playing for speed.
Pretty much this. The only time it is really a problem is when making good decisions and using the gameās mechanics to your advantage is not a prerequisite for victory in whatever is the games biggest challenge. Mashing the a button on attack to grind in single player turn based RPG games is a problem because it is not engaging, not because you āwin most battlesā.
Your level of engagement in any given battle in Gems of War is in large part decided by which invade team you decide to use. Exploder chains and the like are fairly low engagement, and you can make a number of sub-optimal decisions and still come out with an easy win, but things like Famine can ruin your day. Converter hard loops (seer/spider, alch/hellcat) and spawn loops (valk/justice/mab) are slightly higher engagement and can get wrecked by freeze. Then there are synergistic spell chains that feed each other without hard-looping because you still need a specific color alignment (alchemist/terraxsis for example). This is about where I prefer my gameplay at - just enough where I have to think about every move and have to plan my converts to drop the correct gems into place every bit as much as I do for the colors I eliminate and how much mana I gain from the convert itself. Plus, the ability to bait the AI into doing something so I can plan my converts a couple moves in advance.
Defense team factors in when it prevents you from playing a certain way and only on certain occasions. When its sometimes, thats okay, mix it up a little. Donāt hard loop versus mab. Donāt exploder chain versus famine. Be careful about your matches and mana drain versus Kerberos (or use full impervious). When its over a third of the time, people start to get annoyed, especially when they were otherwise happy with their level of engagement before. This is where most of the complaints about certain troops come from, even if people continue to primarily win against them. I feel if they were just properly rewarded when they came up and came up slightly less (eg., like getting the āopportunityā to fight a ārandom bossā, rather than āhere is another fight worth the same as the one you just wiped in 60 seconds with minimal effort but now you actually have to pay attentionā) they would be a lot more well received.
tl;dr - It is a lot more complicated than just pure win/loss rates, but for what this game is and the number of ways how you could get an endgame veteran player to possibly lose a game versus an equal or lower stat opponent, having them potentially have a 70% win rate would be absolutely devastating for the playerbase, especially for lower stat players fighting higher stat players.
4 Likes
IMHO the real problem here is the blanket features instead of separating things out. I.E. with GW it is completely okay to make a game mode more competitive but it is not okay to lock the new troops behind said game mode.
The have a highly diverse group of players here that want different things. Some just want to relax and have fun, and others want the competition and hardcore team building modes. We need to separate these groups of people through different modes. You need a casual pvp, regular pvp, and a hardcore pvp where the AI can be turned up.
You cannot simply implement new AI code and expect all of your player base to be happy with it. In fact most never asked for it. Separate this out into a different mode for your hardcore audience. Leave the game as enjoyable as it is already to the rest of the people that could give a ratās rump about competition.
When you scale the entire game to suit a certain audience, you risk losing the other part of the audience. This only works when everyone is on board with that direction or thatās the way the game was already in the beginning. It feels as though this game used to be casual and then all of a sudden someone had an epiphany to appeal to a more hardcore audience.
I know Sirrian said they could never change limiting teams to only one copy of a troop overall, but he did say it would be possible through another game mode. Letās have that.
Just an outsider looking in. This ran on too long I think, but separating your player base through different modes and giving the playerās choice and freedom is the way to go. We gotta play how we want to play or itās just not fun anymore.
But more on-topic, yeah win-rate has never really been an issue for anyone, but youāre forgetting that a larger portion of the player-base wants a care-free experience. Nothing wrong with that on either side.
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Has anyone actually lost a match by death mark this week??
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Itās not a question of loosing but how you loose. All these rage/claim topics has one common point: frustration of the player.
Famine? He casts and you have to fill again your troops, making the game last forever because yeah he will certainly fill again before you. For the āoldā players, we had a similar situation with the Silent One when it was horrible to play against him (perma silent your team).
Kerberos/DM? No luck and you loose one troop: RNGā¦ And RNG brings frustration. And players leave the game. And less dollars for devsā¦
For the AI on PC, I am maybe the only one but I donāt think itās that dumb: I saw it waiting before casting Valkyrie to have an extra turn (no stats sorry), same for Famine to deal more damage, etc. Of course, it could be improved (deep learning, yeah) but is there really a huge playerbase who want a difficult AI?
About the āI want to loose moreā, did you try Casual Mode in Warlord 4? Youāre welcome ;-).
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To all of you endgame players that want a bigger challenge: Please remember that there are also new players. How many new players do you think the game would retain if the new players run in to a more difficult game and only win 60-70% of their game instead of 95+% ? Iām guessing that number would go way downā¦
I think making the game (much) more difficult would be a colossal error for the devs, as it would severely limit new player inflow and consequently also less revenue.
6 Likes
to me the whole case is simple:
- easy battles should be winnable, even with ~100% ratio
- medium and hard can have more or much more looses
- ppl should be able to decide āhow easyā they want to play the game (and be rewarded appropriatelly)
i would like to treat:
- the casual pvp 1t / 2t / 3t as: easy / easy / medium battles
- ranked pvp 1t / 2t / 3t as: easy-med / medium-hard / hard battles
as long as there are ninja fake score defenses that destroy(remove) the easy battles option completely i think there is huge problem
i also think that battle ādifficultyā and the reward is determined/calculated not well enough to make it fair and there is room for improvement
1 Like
I think the game indeed needs new content, that scales with the player.
Because if you add content only for the end game player (who need it the most), then you A: make content for only a tiny percentage of your player base, and B: probably piss off a huge part of the player base because they canāt play that content.
The solution, content that scales. It could scale easily enough as on level.
Letās take GW for example. People are having fun with it, as itās something new to do. And the great thing is that everyone can do it. But if we take it back to the fun factor, then it has a huge set back. Namely low level players (that like to participate as well), suddenly have to fight players that have a team score of 9.5k plus. And if thatās not bad enough, those players are buffed by max sentinels.
Losing 2 (or more) out of 5 fights every day, will quickly kill the fun factor.
Iām not talking for myself here, Iām viewing this from a game play angle, across the board.
There is lots of ideas out there, for new modes/challenges and fun stuff to do, that could work for normal as well as end game players. Hopefully weāll start seeing some discussion about those, once the move to unity is complete.
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TL:DR: We need focused, aggressive options to battle high powered troops, not nerfs in most cases, and more parity in troops.
I more hate the extreme difference in power levels of troops of the same rarity.
Just as an exampple, Kerberos used to be terrible, is now a little too good. Yet something like Abhorath is left to rot.
To me, we should be seeing teams with the full gambit of troops that exist. For every 4 Kerberos you see on Defense, you should be seeing at least one team with Abhorath.
We have heard talk about, paraphrasing here, āthe environment adapts when something is over powered,ā yet it never seems to happen in a timely positive manner. So both Kerberos and Famine are over powered Daemons, yet why arenāt we seeing multiple good counters.
With weekly troops releases, we should be able to see a troop every month that can break/hard counter the current meta. Iād make them UR niche troops that do things like āSilence a troop and do [Magic] Damage. If it is a daemon, mana burn it boosted by my magic.ā Something where it doesnāt fit every army, but when youāve had enough of Kerberos or Famine, you can hit it hard, fast, and delay it.
I guess my hope is that with the new BETA team, there can be some stronger balanced adjustments. Places where the Design Team doesnāt have time to get the balance quite right, but where the Beta team and feel the frustrations of the player base, and work to hit the meta with an dynamic adjustment every month.
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I agree! I posted an entire thread on idea the other day, this there wasnāt a ton of interest.
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Lots of posts fall through the cracks, but in my opinion, what happens is people notice after certain issues are brought up multiple times, and in different ways.
I started almost two years ago, and you could tell how small the company was. With their explosive growth, they canāt hit many issues in a timely manner. You can see it the 1 troop defense fix. Until the popularity grew to a certain level, it wasnāt an issue. Once it hit critical mass, people willing to farm it could get almost exponentially more resources than the game is designed around.
So keep trying to provide constructive feedback, and know that it gets seen, and by the time it gets acted on, youāll be wondering why they didnāt listen to you three months ago. 
3 Likes
Iām all for a starting coin toss. I suggested it last week.
I donāt mind losing games at all, if itās down to the skill /deck of the opposition and not a ridiculous cascade of mana filling ending in certain death but letās leave that for now.
Iām also pretty much end game, Iāve hit the soul wall, have almost 290 ascended mythics including the better guardians and some of the better base ones like pharos and gardās.
The biggest problem we have as a pretty top level guild is the amount of time we feel we have to put into the game these days. I know the two kinda go hand in hand but Iām starting to actually worry about the amount of time Iām playing ONE game just to keep up.
I love the game, the community, the devs and my guildies past and present, (apart from one, lol) but this is something I actually donāt have a clue about addressing.
Kerberos IS ridiculous because the devour rate is far too high when you look at the fact you canāt do much about it, (chocolate barrier! ) and the fact he also creates wargs that occasionally create a direwolf. Dragon soul resurrections amounted to a record 8 for me last week in one battle, so thereās a few things that annoy me in pvp currently.
I donāt have a problem with the deathmark, I love using it occasionally and when Iām against it makes me feel nervous and scared, which I love!
Thereās a lot of good ideas floating around, hopefully some will start filtering into the game.
Iād like to see a hardcore pvp mode with more gold available for winning, mythic level troops only and one copy only. That would be great addition if worked into the game. Maybe double gold and 5 trophies and 1 extra guild seal?
Just a few musings after a rather large pub lunch.
Regards
Daniel
1 Like
So much good info in this thread already. And how nice to read nearly 60 posts without any hate mongering and trolling. 
Thatās the community I know and love! 
So to add my much unnecessary two cents,
It is not about win/loss, never has been. To be fair it IS about win/loss when moving from early to mid and even mid to late game. At least it was for me. I had like a 99% win rate and was killing it everywhere. And then I hit late game and met Mr. Meta and suddenly I had to adjust my perception of GoW and accept that losses were out of my control. They ARE going to happen. Once I did that my frustration level dropped immensely.
That being said, of late I have seen my frustration rise as well. And I think there are lots of reasons for it.
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At 1000+ my 3t PVP matches are often only worth 31 points instead of 52. Making my climb to Tier 1 much longer than previously.
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My guild has become an elite guild and though we donāt āpushā for crazy reqs they HAVE increased significantly from when I joined. Requiring the vast majority of my time in GoW spent grinding Guild reqs and not just āplayingā.
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GW is an awesome competitive mode and I am competitor with a true HATRED for loosing. So when I lose the only matches I do lose to RNG luck defenses. I feel cheated. That does not mean the AI cheated just I feel cheated. I fielded the better team, (based on team synergy).I played the smarter game. (Baited the AI, constructed 4+ matches, etc. ) And yet I lost due to Dumb Luck. Which feels, to steal a phrase from the devs, āNOT IN THE SPIRITā of a supposed Strategy game.
Itās not one thing itās manifold but item 3 is the one that hurts the most. People that have been around the longest see a chance in the fabric of the being as it were of the game they love. New mechanics have introduced AI fail safes that remove the element that certain players like and thatās true strategic play.
And before anybody says anything I know counters exist. I have built those decks. But itās not fun to be forced to play a deck style I donāt enjoy because of op mechanic.
Sorry for the word wall! 
Iām done. 
1 Like