Have a read over Slypenslyde’s post over on Reddit as response to another of the “I’m leaving” posts we’ve seen so often. This is a great post I would have liked to have seen here but hopefully Oz takes a look at it on Reddit and passes some of those very thoughtful and important points back to the team.
I should point out I’m only commenting on the post from Slypenslyde no one else’s comment on the reddit thread.
Cheers
Calvin
Good points and ideas in that post imo.
I’ve updated the link to go directly to the post I’m referring to now. Thanks Oz 
Nice post but the defense does not provide any rewards… it’s only when you revenge that you get rewards… So more revenge, more rewards. And, more loosing defense, more revenge. So normally, if you want more rewards, the worst way to do it, it’s to put a META defense…
The only rewards is some PVP points. So if you don’t care about the leaderboard, it’s peanuts…
It raises great points that while I know I have seen it discussed before, it cannot be stressed enough. The devs have to better balance the in game economy and incentives for players. Take the gold nerf to both earnings and task rewards as a great example. This is a harsh blow to a majority of players and it was due to a “influx of gold generation” across the various guilds for completing tasks. For a console player this frustrates me as I want to grind LESS and by decreasimg rewards I have to grind, and in other areas that would take more time to get back those same rewards. A pc or mobile player could play anywhere and is not restricted to a console so this may not hurt them that much as they still get way more rewards, right? Except, some complain about a phone or pc not running to full compacity and thus can’t even fully appreciate the new features they are seemingly punished for. Why create this negative reinforcement to something a player cannot make use of for one reason or another. Lets also look at other new chores. I for one love doing treasure hunt, but now its a necessity to gain some extra gems, gem keys, and glory keys. You turned something I liked and wanted to do into something I needed to do. That is why players wanted the option, to grind less and do something else either in game or play another game as GOW is less of a daily chore to do. Combine this with what the poster stressed with defense in both GW and pvp, we see a problem with any competitive play which we now have a stronger need in most guilds as we need gold and gems. We did get some gems back in the blue, but with soulforge, assuming a guild can complete it, you barely net gems with the daily gem deals. Features like soulforge and dungeon are very nice, but when it becomes instead of an upgrade to a lateral shift with more daily grinds, well, see where I’m getting at? You have, while unknowingly punished vip players and lower level, less casual players even more. You gave us somethimg allowing us to complete our collections while nerfing our ability to get the new ones moving forward as most people need a vast key and gem stash to get a mythic when its exclusive. This gem demand causes a greater demand for another potential windfall, guild wars. My guild was around bracket 2 before the change to scoring and the extra 200 gems was nice, yea it was challenging, but the rewards were worth it. Now, we have had quite a few members leave the game, at least 6 players boycott it per week and those gems are now needed to truly get ahead. You turned something challenging and fun to some extent and now made it a job to do it for your guild as otherwise you are that much more in the hole. Now, I could join a higher up guild and play in gw with a much more invested guild, however, many want high minimums for trophies and for that I would either have to grind arena, or pvp which oh dear look at this. Players want to get the grinding out of the way so they can play the modes that they have fun in. Between the rewards and meta issues, you are crwating more grinds that have quickly ending rewards with ever diminishing returns. TLDR: you pissed off consumers trying to nerf the economy while you increased incentives to be overly competitive and we would rather a THROUGH beta testing of troops and features or at least try and gather more community feedback as while not always the best, at least you can adjust it beforehand or see how the players feel it would impact the game they love.
Holy wall of text batman. Can we get a tl dr?
Proper use of incentives, less chores, more fun, etc, etc.
I also did add one, but even that was a bit long for a tldr
The Reddit post is brilliant. Lots of excellent ideas in there.
Brings to mind many previous threads about incentivising variety in defence teams…
Or perhaps it’s just time to do away with defence teams entirely… pvp isn’t really pvp after all…
You do get a modicum of rewards for winning on defense. 4 glory, 100 gold. Gems are from 7+ cascades generated from the AI and are independent of wins. You get 1 glory and a small amount of gold for losing.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said pretty much the same thing as this post. The fact that there is a “meta” can’t be changed, but the wrong things are being incentivized when it comes to defense teams, and that can be changed. Variety needs to be directly rewarded.
However, what is not mentioned here is that the player on the defense side needs to still set up something that is at least “threatening”, ie., still has a chance to win (if the player brings the wrong team, makes several mistakes, throws self-defeating RNG at it, etc.). Even if it doesn’t win a lot, it needs to be established that it can win under the right circumstances, because we also don’t want to reward the empty gesture of putting up only teams that cant win, which is just as bad. Tracking kills by the defense team would be a good way to at least establish it as a threat. Once that is established, just using event gem troops and “winning” (or just getting kills) with event gem or underused troops needs to be heavily incentivized (ie., directly rewarded with direct rewards, not temporary stat boosts that ‘might make them win more’). And this calculation needs to be changed daily, depending on the average usage over the last 7 days.
Basically, I’d like a defense system where the role of the defender is someone crafting a piece of content for someone to play and the guildlines for crafting this content (rewards they get) incentivies them to create something that is engaging - not “win by grief”, but not “4x this low usage troop should do it”. Right now the two extremes I’m seeing are “meta grief team”, and “joke event team”, with less than 5% being something someone thought could actually be fun to play against. Even I have a joke event team up this week, because I needed to get into PvP right away for my guild’s seal push. (Side note, it would be really helpful if we knew event gem troops ahead of time so we could prepare accordingly.) Its really hard to care about the content you are crafting for other players, which is the bulk of this gameplay happening at any given moment for this game, when it isn’t recognized at even a basic level within the game.
The idea of awarding goodies for kills (not victories) is good, especially if those rewards are augmented by the rarity of the troops used. We know the developers break players into early-, mid-, and late-game brackets for internal analysis. And that they can look at how often certain troops appear on defense teams for all of those brackets. They have an idea of what the percentiles look like for most and least used troops. All the raw data is there to give players rewards for building dangerous teams out of unique parts, if the developers can spare the person-hours to do it.
Vangor where was the word or discussion of “nerfing” anything in the post I linked to?
Also I’d say we see probably 20 maybe 25 cards in the end level play but that is a small section of the available cards. Wouldn’t be in the best interest of everyone playing if we had more variety? I believe it would be, it gets boring fighting the same old teams day in and day out. It’s not difficult to beat any one of them as long as you don’t get hit with bad luck but still it is not exciting to face a Wisp/Wisp/ Krystenax/ Queen mab or Kraken / Troll / Kraken etc… 400 times out of 500 battles.
Yeah, this strikes me as someone that doesn’t fully understand the game. There’s huge incentive to set up the event team b/c it means more defenses, which means more revenge/rivalry battles. Often they’re usually easier too b/c you get a wider variety of opponents (I.e., not just the best teams can beat you).
The issue is that the average player doesn’t understand this point. What they do understand is that every loss I give to you is a win for me.
I think the best solution is to much more carefully manicure the meta. We need them more proactively addressing the outliers. Second to that would be a system where you’re rewarded on offense for not using a super popular team on defense.
I disagree with much of what that uninformed reddit poster posted.
But if I could select 5 def teams that randomly rotated, I would.
I think this is also a really good idea. In practice, it probably means the same few teams, but even a little more diversity would be welcome.
I usually miss your points I think. The post I linked to was about ways to use incentives to create more dynamic play nothing was said about “nerfing” anything that I can see from the post that is the topic discussion. You have your own thread to discuss your issues with “nerfing” isn’t one enough?
Back on topic we need more threads like the one I linked to that have suggestions about how to correct many of the things people complain about vs just complaining. That was the intent of this thread.
Cheers
Calvin
I’m not “telling” you or anyone else on these forums nothing. It is not my place to tell you what you can and can not do on this forum I’m not a moderator here. I have zero interest in getting this derailed into another drama thread however. I’m suggesting you are Off Topic if you want to discuss nerf’s on this thread and that you already have a thread about that going currently (which you so recently reminded me I was OT in. I was however polite enough to delete my message and stop posting off topic messages afterwards a courtesy you have lacked with your additional post here).
Please PM me if you want to discuss “off topic” issues further or continue to post in this thread on topic on how to improve things in game in the manner of the original post which was constructive and had nothing to do with nor used the word “Nerf”. I’ve re-read the message several times I do not see how anyone can see that correlation unless now any change to the current state of the game is in some way a nerf 
Thanks
Calvin
@Calv1n Very nice thread! Thank you for sharing it.
I’ll try to do my best to share my insight on the problems.
First of all - balance.
Secondly - the pace of the game.
And last but not least - the system.
And there you have it. Solutions are fairly simple - but require attention.
Ha. I actually just spent the last half-hour posting a second draft specifically for these forums. I’ll live with this link here, thanks for boosting it!
I see some criticism in here and I’m going to stubbornly insist the problem isn’t “the meta encourages one team”. That issue DOES affect Guild Wars, but I think that’s a different, more difficult problem to solve. As a level ~130 player, I have no chance of competing in Guild Wars just yet so I don’t have any ideas I trust for fixing it. However, I do play 100+ PvP matches per week and it’s very disappointing that often translates into a 100-0 record with a 20% win rate and maybe 75 total snot gems. I get to rank 1 then I go spam Arena so I can farm souls.
So to be clear, I do understand you may not like my ideas because they don’t really fix Guild Wars. I agree these aren’t good ideas for fixing that, but right now my problem with Guild Wars is “I don’t have fully-trailed teams of powerful cards”. That’s not the devs’ fault, and the problem with Guild Wars is certainly NOT “a month-old character is too weak to play”. When I get there, I promise I’ll think about it and provide an update. 
I do agree that BOTH PvP and Guild Wars need some nudges. I just don’t know what to do about GW. I don’t think my proposed PvP incentives make GW worse. One thing I think: if your PvP and GW defense teams are the same, they shouldn’t be. GW is where people go for competition. PvP should probably be more about “competition within the context of the current event”. I don’t think the same set of rules can make both experiences fun. I think both should be very different from week to week, but it’s much harder to make a “rotating competitive meta” than “rotating for-fun meta”.