Mad idea: Turn Guild Wars into Arena mode

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

This idea certainly will be divisive and earn at least as much negative as positive feedback. Wanted to type it down nonetheless (the essential part is marked, for those who don’t have the time to wade through my ramblings).

I mentioned before, that over the last years, I am liking Guild Wars less and less. Overoptimised teams, that put down counterstrategies to counterstrategies, empowered troops and Elementalists whereever you look (unless it’s a goblin or orbweaver team, but those are headaches in their own right), and if you don’t keep up with the latest meta trend and sport a last season fashion, you’re rightfully losing.

A game mode, I have, surprisingly, started to like a lot more over the last years, is Arena. Being forced to make unusual and constantly changing setups work every day feels like a fresh breath.

Maybe there would be a chance in making the former more like the latter.
→ Full stats, semi-random picks of top three rarities and one weapon (free weapon choice as it used to be is an overkill in that mode) instead of the bottom four rarities, no traits or skills… ←

Sure, it would be luck based like crazy, and you would have your daily share of guild members, who end up on a horrible lineup and complain about it with good reason. But would that be worse than the current form of luck based, that means, do you have the starting board to kill your enemy in turn one, or will they kill you in their firsts move instead?

I’m not saying, the current form of fights with single colour versus 4x6 troops should completely disappear from the game. Just maybe… get moved somewhere, where there is less competitive pressure about it.

Enough wall of text. Feel free to pick me apart for it.

2

GW has two problems…

1: Higher than average luck based combat (empower books can be instant fail no matter what your team)

2: Rewards that are not worth your time and investment

The second one is why more and more guilds are making GW optional.

to solve this

1: Defend teams already have the incentive to use one of each troop for the full week…they should look at making an incentive for also only using one troop role on each team. There are 9 troop roles to chose from, but this would make using double empower possible but only if you want to earn less points. Maybe less thought out but, they could make it so that on each day of color attacking teams only need to use 2 troops of that color to get max bonus. This would counter book teams a bit.

2: Make the effort and time worth it for the player. Doing well in GW should be a reward for the guild but also for the player trying hard.

4 Likes
3

Empowered troops killed Guild Wars for many players and thats why many guilds have it as optional nowadays. Trying hard and being creative is barely worth the time and effort when a dodgy board can mean instant defeat. Players feel bad losing instantly and feel as if they have let the guild down (they didn’t, that was down to idiotic dev empower overload) and lose their appetite for the mode. Its only a couple of brackets that really take it seriously anymore; most see it for the ballache that it is and take it or leave it, sentinels also optional.

4

Any time I run an Empowered team, it is usually the same troop every time: Spirit Fox. Then I just look at the defense team and think “Empowered? Aw, that’s cute.”

But seriously, I would kinda like to see some kind of point bonus based on the maximum and average (base) rarity used in each team’s composition.

5

You use spirit fox on yellow…brown…red…blue days?

6

One of the things I’ve experienced since jumping to a Bracket 1 Guild is the prevalence of GW defenses with an Elementalist Hero wielding a Doomed Tome plus Empowered Converters and (usually) a Mythic with a 3rd trait that can make you miserable. But it’s also something that’s probably confined to the top handful of brackets on each platform; I spent years in a lower-tier guild – PS4, a Guild that started around Bracket 7 and has gradually descended since, being around Bracket 13 when I departed – and never saw one of those defenses.

Side note: I also had a completely miserable day today in Guild Wars, going 0/5 against five copies of the exact same defense in spite of five different opponents because the starting positions were so completely miserable such that I came out of the opponent’s first turn completely broken. Combined with Snap Freeze seeing to it that I was going to have great difficulty repairing the opening position on account of the difficulty to loop on the first turn.

All this after never having done worse than 2/3 on any single day in five years of GW, after seldom having lost 5 matches in any single GW week! So, yeah, I’m a little irritable on the topic right now. Not just the cascade of losses, but the feeling that I’ve let my guild down somewhat through a terrible performance today.

(Yes, I probably should have been less stubborn about the team I was using and maybe subbed in Beetrix for her 3rd trait to try and cleanse my team on the 1st turn. As opposed to stubbornly refusing to budge from a Green paradigm that hadn’t lost a GW match in close to a year. So that’s on me. I probably still would have lost some of those matches quickly; the opening boards were that bad. But I would have given myself something of a fighting chance.)

I’d like to see the developers provide us with a viable counter to the whole Empowered thing. If it’s a troop, it needs to be replicated in enough different colors to be available for Guild Wars.

(I’d still like to see an inverse of the Medal of Anu that would drain mana from enemy troops at the start of battle. With two caveats: First, it applies last of all Medals; Second, one anti-Anu Medal can be cancelled by one Anu Medal.)

I’d also like to see the developers provide us with viable counters to Elementalist. Recalling the whole kerfuffle that erupted when the developers (temporarily) removed the “Firestorm every turn” trait from Sunspear, I won’t advocate for changing Elementalist’s 3rd trait and spark another hullaballoo. But perhaps it could work if the Stone talent tree were removed from that class (Rock Solid, Fortitude) and replaced by the Fire tree? Thus opening up an Elementalist to being on the receiving end of his own 3rd trait and thus providing a potential counter that way?

7

No, just in general if I suspect an empowered troop will be a problem. Today was a Brown day (aside: I’m in Bracket 21), so I threw together some of my favorites (Clockwork Sphinx, Emperor Korvash, etc) and took down the opposition. The roughest battle by far was against a Cedric, Egg Thief, Greed, and a Skeleton Key Thief Hero, a righty nasty combination I’ve lost to before, but Korvash and Sphinx managed to pull through for a win despite losing the Hero. (Maybe I should have added Street Thief)

I can agree that Rock Solid seems too good in combination with Elementalist’s other properties. Also, the “Storms” talent tree WTF? Air is not one of the four Nexian elements (Fire, Water, Nature, Earth). Replacing Stone with Fire (and maybe Storms with Forest) definitely sounds like a better idea.

Idea: For various troops, replace “Empowered” with “Swift” or “Fast” or whatever. There’s a HUGE difference between being able to cast on turn 1 vs. turn 2, like how an Empowered troop doesn’t have to worry (as much) about getting mana-locked.

Spirit Fox definitely should keep Empowered (it’s literally the only Empowered mana drainer, and thus well suited to checking Empowered defenders) but a lot of other troops with this trait really should be waiting another turn before casting.

8

Forest, Fire and Water? Sounds familiar… :thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

9

Ah, right, Sunspear already has that combination.

Anyway, as long as we’re on the subject of mad ideas for Guild Wars: I have noticed very specifically how the scoring system is weighted in favor of larger Guilds. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but as a “guild of one” so to speak that puts me at a clear scoring disadvantage any time I’m paired with a larger Guild (aside: I only do GW for the exclusive troop rewards, which my bracket position is decent enough to guarantee anyway, so it’s not an actual problem as much as a criticism of principle). There’s also the occasional incident where if you had a bad GW day (or, alternatively, missed/skipped a day) then you’ve literally let down your guild due to the missed opportunity to add your points to the score.

So what if: Guilds instead get ranked by their highest score each day? (Lower scores ignored.) This would place small and large Guilds on more equal footing, with the larger Guild simply getting more opportunities for a higher score, instead of getting a higher score outright.

10

Heck No!!!

11

This makes everyone except the Paragon irrelevant to the outcome. What would be the point in anyone but the guild’s strongest member playing GW here?

I do feel the frustration; I run a casual guild in which only a handful of us participate in GW, so our total scores are fairly low. Although in our brackets we’re typically up against other casual guilds with similarly spotty participation so it kinda levels out anyway.

What might work here is: use the average of only the participating players’ scores to determine the GW result for each day.

That said, not sure that works either; it would help put casual guilds with variable participation on a more even footing, but it would be gameable by competitive guilds tactically deciding to have only a subset of their members participate. And it disincentivises weaker players from participating at all: in the current system even a weak player can contribute to the total score.

12

I don’t believe this would work any better than the notion that only the top score should count. In fact, it might serve as a disincentive for lesser members to fight, lest their poor performance drag the entire guild down with them even more than it would at present.

I mentioned a little higher up in this thread how I went 0/5 yesterday and feel like I’ve let my guild down a little through my ineptitude. But being in a full guild with everybody participating in Guild Wars, the current scoring paradigm made it so that my score simply was one of the few that “didn’t count” as opposed to the great mass of players whose scores did finish in the top 90% of the guild for the day. And having had a bounceback day today – 5/0, just like Monday – I’ve gone back to contributing my score to my guild’s efforts.

The solution to an inequality in guild sizes could be to re-write the matching rules so that guilds are bracketed against opponents with a similar number of players. Even then, that’s not a perfect solution. Set aside the possibility of “gaming the system” by figuring out the algorithm and taking advantage of it. Set aside how it might bar certain guilds from the top brackets even more effectively than the current model. But it also would not account for how much GW participation is within a particular guild; casual guilds where a lot of people skip the event would get matched against guilds that don’t have that hindrance and would probably lead to results every bit as lopsided.

1 Like
13

the worst thing about this is that dragons mean shit when Europe is at war with a fkn tyrant

14

Good point, nothing is exploit-proof here. Perhaps each player could earn daily rewards based on their score against their opponents only, while the highest score per Guild is used for the brackets?

So far most of my GW experience has been against more-casual guilds who often don’t participate in the GW battles at all, so I effectively win just by default.