Raid Boss + Invasions also have Leaderboards that display the top 100 players based on personal progress for that event, and will give an addition reward to those players at the end of the week.
Raid Bosses + Invasions, like Guild Wars, require tokens (called Sigils) to play each battle. Players will get Sigils each day – Sigils stack, so can be used later in the week.
The Valraven functions much like a Gnome, but only has a chance to appear in Raid Boss, Invasion, and Bounty events.
If defeated, the Valraven will give extra Sigils to continue battling in that event (Sigils given will only apply to the type of given it was encountered in, and will not carry over to the next event if unused).
Assuming that there are a lot of skilled players that all perform well, doesn’t that mean the top 100 players receiving extra rewards will be those that got lucky enough to encounter a Valraven? Because they will be able to score with, say, 35 fights instead of just the 30 most other players get?
Randomly receiving a significant amount of extra points feels very arbitrary, especially if the chance for it to happen is low. Please consider changing the Valraven to drop some goodies instead of guaranteeing a top leaderboard position. I really like the challenge of battling it out against other players, there’s just no point in doing it when you know that the deciding factor is ultimately a lucky dice roll by any other player than you, no matter how well you play.
Valraven is seen rarely enough to not be seen reliably over an extended period of time: RNG slightly skewed by grinding. Placement in an individual week is mostly determined by luck, because luck gives more chances, and more chances gives more score.
Valraven is seen commonly enough to reliably farmed over an extended period of time: grinding slightly skewed by RNG. Placement is determined mostly by time spent, because more time spent gives more chances, and more chances gives more score.
Valraven doesn’t exist or doesn’t give sigils: Individual battles are largely RNG dominated and player “skill” is not something that can be accurately measured over a small number of battles, especially not in a pool of thousands of entrants. Placement is mostly arbitrary.
I really don’t see how you can avoid this in Gems of War, which is why it is ill suited for any kind of direct competition granting significant amounts of rewards under the currently existing mechanics in the first place. I can already hear the accusations of cheating and complaints about how RNG driven it is (despite that being, you know, how the game is).
That kind of invalidates your outcomes, there is NO grinding, Valraven only shows up during the event battles. if you encounter Valraven as part of the battles your are limited to, you get extra battles. If you don’t encounter Valraven, you are stuck with the standard number of battles.
Suppose you get 30 battles, with a chance of 1:1000 to encounter Valraven in each of them. That means roughly 3% of all participating players will have a significant amount of extra battles, the rest won’t. You might as well change the leaderboard to not track scores but instead track the number of Valraven killed, because that’s what’s going to matter in the end.
Know what is going into their game until post-release.
We have to speculate and try to provide feedback ahead of time, in the desperate hopes one of them will say “Ha ha, that’d be stupid, we didn’t do it that way”, double-check the code, find out they did it worse, and fix it before the fated day arrives.
While the Valraven is part of the Gnome kingdom and family, it works a little differently.
The Valraven has a form of counter on it (which Treasure Gnomes do not). It caps the minimum & maximum valravens each player will see at any point in the game. The most anyone will get ahead or behind is by a single valraven encounter.
This means all players should encounter the Valraven within plus/minus one of everyone else.
Which doesn’t change the perceived issue at hand. Those encountering the single Valraven will displace all those in the leaderboard not enountering the single Valraven. Possible solutions:
Make two leaderboards, one for those with the lucky Valraven enounter, one for those without it.
Make the single Valraven encounter guaranteed for all players, just randomize in which battle it appears.
GoW, whether we like it or not, is an RNG Mecca. Just due to the nature of the game.
Because of 1, no leaderboard is going to be determined by any sort of player “skill”.
UNLESS… they introduce a puzzle mode where the board, enemy, and troops are all predetermined so that all players face the exact same situation THEN those that defeat the enemy in the fewest number of turns would show their “skill” over other players and rank higher on a leaderboard.
Disagree, there’s a difference between good RNG and bad RNG. Randomness within a match is okay (and required), randomness within the match framework is icky. Going statistics, the Valraven isn’t part of the match randomness, it’s a single random roll for the whole competition, splitting players into two groups not starting on equal footing. If you happen to get sorted into the “loser” group (which you will almost every week, because Valraven are rare, see Gnomes), you get to cheer along the “winner” group prominently shown on the leaderboard, that’s about it.
I guess the intention is to randomly distribute rewards among all players while still making it appear as if performance had a reasonable impact on the result. I suspect this will cause a lot of unhappiness once players slowly begin to catch on within the next weeks.
