Perhaps the system looks at how many battles you did and groups you to some extent based on that to make you play more. Then if you don’t grind for a week you get a less active bracket and you can win with less.
1st in my bracket had more than 500.000 VP last week. I’m quite active in PvP, but nowhere near that. 
Ehhh dont know about that
nope, no dependencies at all. You can skip all the battles and yet be in the same bubble with 1000+ battles players.
2 Likes
Not really… I mean, one-person’s track record is not enough to draw any real conclusions, but I haven’t seen any of this. Even if I finished in 15th spot in the bubble with 20k VPs, I could still get a crazy active bubble the following week. But last week, I was 3rd with 80k+ VPs - and this week seems to be much calmer right now - at least nobody is at 50k+ by now. No rule / trend / whatever you call it that I could see.
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500,000. They had five hundred THOUSAND VP!?
Either they are botting or they did nothing else that week
My words were really predicting. Update 8.0 confirmed that your devs are on the same level or even worse as them. Always finding a new way to get even lower than rock bottom with each update.
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The developers are clearly trying to incentivize us to play PvP more. If you could receive all the rewards from “finishing the race”, there isn’t much of a reason to keep playing hour after hour trying to “win the race” and squeeze out a couple of additional spots in the standings for bonus GMs.
We as players want as much stuff as we can get for as little cost/effort as possible. Them as developers want us spending as much money as possible or at least spending a lot of time playing the game as opposed to devoting our marginal entertainment time/money to other pursuits and their competitors.
That might be what they want, but their actions will have the opposite effect. Recruiting already sucks and I worry about more people leaving due to being burned out.
2 Likes
And now if im not mistaken gold marks mean less
This doesn’t surprise me… are you with the game long enough to remember how we moaned and complained about cursed runes and how scarce they are? Everyone wanted them, we even had a GAP strategy to hunt for them faster, because with the runes - we got the gnome. But then the devs introduced dragonite, and everyone forgot about cursed runes (or managed to get enough by then to unlock soulforge to full, get the mythic and pet, and any runes we have are gathering dust) and started to hunt dragonite. A year and a half has passed - and we got silver and gold marks. By now, I guess the majority of end-gamers have all the silver mark pets, and possibly all gold mark pets, and are now using GMs for doomed books (with the exception of those poor souls still using dragonite for dragon eggs because they got the bad end of the RNG-stick and still need that one last dragon). So, it was high time for a new currency to dangle in front of our eyes - burning souls & immortal souls, and icons. So that we have a new thing to hunt, while there’s a certain portion of players who care a bit less about the last “new and shiny” currency.
I, personally, still need so many books of deeds for kingdom power levels that GMs are still very valuable, tho. But not at all costs, definitely not at the cost of my personal offline time.
I am not on the book rat race. I have a massive stockpile of GM rigth now, near 3000. I would like somethign worthwhile to spend it on
I spend mine on books as soon as I have 100 
And I’d rather NOT have a new thing to spend GMs on, I still need the books in large numbers. With 25 kingdoms asking for “kingdom at level 18” for power levels that CAN go up a power level (and two asking for “kingdom at level 20”)… while I know that getting enough books is a project for many years, if I can accelerate it with GMs and books from PvP shop - I’d like to be able to do it without slowing down again. If there’s anything that motivates me to keep on grinding and playing, it’s the power level progression. And for this to happen - I need books 
5 Likes
Neither am I. Most of my Kingdom Power progression is bottlenecked by needing (a) a Kingdom Mythic, (b) a Lv.20 Pet*, or (c) more Troops fully leveled**. I’ve got all Kingdoms leveled to 10 (except Dragon’s Claw at Lv.15 because … dragon statue), with higher levels on an “as needed” basis only.
(* Note that because I don’t play PVP generally, I am behind on Pet Gnome encounters and thus tend to have fewer pets than others.)
(** I’ve adopted a strategy of not leveling any Troops until they get fully traited. Once a Troop has 2 of its 3 traits, I’ll level it to 5 (not max) to make them easier to spot when I get an Orb of Wisdom to use)