Nintendo Switch Bracket System is Broken

When Guild Wars was 1st added to Gems of War ages back, initial brackets were based on the amount of trophies a guild had. In the Nintendo Switch version, it seems to be based on nothing.

Currently, the #1 and #5 trophy earning guilds on the Switch version are in bracket 23, a distance of 1 year away from bracket 1. Around 9 of the 10 guilds currently in bracket 1 are essentially inactive despite many of the most active guilds in the game being nowhere near the top brackets.

Many of the most active guilds in the game are losing 1,000s of gems across their guild per month due to this mix up. The most active guild on Nintendo Switch will lose upwards of 400,000 gems over the course of a year guild wide, with many other extremely active guilds losing over 100,000 gems per year guild wide.

Are there any plans to fix this? The 1st guild wars starts in 1 day.

At minimum, the top 30 most active guilds should be moved to bracket 1, 2, and 3 based on trophy amount, guild level, or some kind of factor based on activity.

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Why is the Switch on a different schedule then ALL the other platforms? :thinking:

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Maybe playing with 30 members against other top guilds that have 5 members would pump too many gems into the early game. Bracket 1 rewards are not really scaled for beginners.
I guess they put 20 brackets of placeholder guilds to make sure that by the time you reach bracket 1 you have some actual competition and a healthy player base.

There is a 30 member top 10 trophy earning guild in bracket 1. That is the only one of those 10 that is active at all. There is a 100% chance that their entire guild will be getting 1500 gems a month. That isn’t a bad thing, but most other top guilds are nowhere even remotely close to bracket 1.

CONSPIRACY CONFIRMED :smiley: DAMN YOU SIRRIAN! :crazy_face:
Are they actually playing? Is their trophy amount going up?
If so, then me trying to make a logical explanation is even more illogical :smiley:

Well, there is a chance the bracket system isn’t based on nothing.

From what I can tell, the bracket system seems to be based on when the guilds signed up for guild wars. Places like Australia and Japan had access to the game for around 12 hours prior to places like the United States.

If that is the case, you are right. This could be a conspiracy by @Sirrian to ensure all Australian players have an advantage by showering them with guild war gems, lol. XD (joking of course… or AM I.)

The biggest issue is that most of the guilds with the highest amount of activity are from the United States and Europe area, of which the game released 6-12 hours later. This means nearly every most active guild is nowhere near bracket 1 simply because of time zones.

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Yeah, GW brackets make me cry inside. (On a slightly more serious note, it does seem unfair to have to wait ~1 year due to 6-12 hours difference in release time/guild creation.)

I don’t think it’s unique to the Switch that the system is broken, but this is messed up.

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@Tacet, did you take into account bracket jumping for your calculation of 1 year? It could be somewhere in the realm of 4-6 months, instead - still awful and unfair, though.

Regardless, I agree with Slypenslyde in that

I think this situation on the Switch just really highlights the unfairness of current Bracket mobility (even in its improved form) with respect to initial Bracket placements based on Guild creation time in a vastly more popular GoW.


I could agree with this to determine initial Brackets after Week 1 on the Switch! A nice way to reward the players who really jumped onto the new platform (and the method most likely to create reasonable/fair competition in Round 1).

Yeah I mean here’s the core problem this is exposing, and I’ve yelled about this for a long time.

Being in the first bracket week 1 establishes your guild in a very powerful way. These players are going to get gem prizes that represent weeks of effort at early game levels. This is a serious advantage considering every guild had to start fresh, nobody has fully-maxed kingdoms, nobody has fully-maxed statues, etc. People aren’t getting as many LTs and many other rewards overall.

Being outside of bracket 1 at all punishes the heck out of whichever guilds aren’t blessed. Every bracket downward represents at least one month of waiting for a shot at the top. And since the players in the guild will get fewer gems, they have to work harder to catch up.

That’s what I’ve complained about re: the bracket system from the start. It doesn’t matter if the #50 guild is making 25% more points against harder teams than the #1 guild: they aren’t going to catch up any faster than if they barely won their matches. The only people who can challenge the top 10 are the top 10, and what, 2 of the next 10 get a small chance of usurping one? The system is designed to insulate the people at the top from new challengers.

I don’t think there’s a “fair” way to distribute the brackets, given this. Even if it sorted by trophy count, that’s just doling out the wealth to the players who can play the most rather than the players who fight the hardest.

A much better way to sort the brackets would be to have one month of mock GW with the trophy-sorted brackets and no rewards, tally up the total scores, then sort by that. Then at least the brackets would be sorted by GW performance.

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I do not know what it’s based on because A Guild started 2 days ago and is B 5. It seems they want to punish the active guilds that probably are spending the most real money. This is a train wreck if not fixed. No competition if you are in B1 for months. On Xbox it first went by guild rank. Most of those top guilds are still in B1 guild War. They should want a competitive Bracket 1.

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See the problem here…

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Don’t worry, when cross-platform happens all your new accounts and guilds will be meaningless anyway. :man_shrugging:

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I could say same to you but why bother. I am pretty sure if people can go anywhere they want they will opt for elsewhere SINCE NO ONE IS UNDER CONTRACT. :slight_smile:

Maybe your guild will do it but WE got lot of loyal players here :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m playing both my accounts on Switch if PC/Mobile ever becomes cross platform with it.

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I guess U1 still hasn’t found a way to get 1st in GW.

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I guess what you said can be considered a callout so tread lightly my friend.