The devs value single troops at $80 and upwards, I don’t know if i trust their stance on “meaningful” prizes.
Competing leaderboard-style gets less and less fair the more players there are, even with rubber banding.
The last point has a lot of nuance to it but the least nuanced point is that any non-sigil competition is a function of time, and any sigil-based competition is a function of both time and resources spent. That makes restricting the prizes to a small portion of the top over the course of a day an even further tilt away towards "GoW feels rewarding even if you can’t play 4 or more hours per day.
I think opinions vary on whether that’s a good thing or not, but my opinion’s always been to keep the time investment lower.
Also from a business perspective, there’s still an entire successful industry of games that don’t require massively online play and can deliver sequels more profitable than their originals. It’s not my fault they made a bed and don’t like it. My feedback will always be to get a different bed.
When they make it take more time for me to accomplish things, they are shaving off pieces of my life. When the game is efficient, I don’t mind so much. When I have the extra clicks in explore, I mind. When I know I’m getting so much less gold for the same time spend, I mind.
Here’s my strategy, going forward:
I’m going to stop upgrading kingdoms with deeds past 14 except for magic kingdoms. I will hoard deeds, or upgrade kingdoms no higher than 14 before a new delve. That will give me less stat upgrades.
I kind of have to continue finishing delves, because it’s more painful to finish them in 1 day. I don’t see a way to avoid this.
My guild finished all epic tasks and a number of legendaries this week. I suspect that will be necessary every GW week, but the rest of the time I’m hoping they won’t finish all the epic tasks. I’m considering actively withholding gold to avoid finishing epic tasks during the other weeks to avoid more stat bonuses.
Who else has ideas for avoiding more stat bonuses? Is there a way to optimize around when the stat bonuses expire?
And that’s where the Arena revamp will come into play.
Ranked PvP will become the new Casual PvP (it won’t change from it is now though), while the revamped Arena with its tournaments/seasons/whatever will be the new Ranked PvP equivalent. I’m more than sure players will be heavily incentivized to adopt the Arena as the new PvP standard when it is released.
How did Sirrian phrase it on that Q&A? Something along the lines of making competitions more exciting, I believe. Brackets could be created along the lines of average play time for players, for example. Casuals that play only 20-30 mins a day would be bracketed with others who only play that much per day. On the hand, endgamers who play PvP for 4-6 hours a day may be in for a very tough slog.
Well, that’s the 64 million gold question, now isn’t it. Will the revamped arena use a sigil system for monetization, or will it use a more direct monetization system? That’s going to be a very closely held answer until the system is ready to go.
I hope they don’t equate being an end gamer with activity. Those are two separate things. I’d like to be an end gamer with 1-2 hours a day with a spike for new delves. Having more slogs is the last thing I want. This does not sound like good news. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
I’m already at the limit on how much I play and if anything I need to scale back.
I had no idea about the “Gold Exploit.” For me, it was simply the fastest way to get Class XP (still is – even more so since Explore changed).
My level 240 alt character very rarely sees opponents worth more than 30 PvP points in the middle (second) slot. I think it’s because I have nearly all Kingdoms at level 10. Even though I have very few resources or troops (nothing at Mythic at all), and have only done one Kingdom’s quests (there’s a good reason). I feel like my opponents may be tougher than my account justifies. Of course, I may be wrong.
I guess I can say the reason I don’t think any mode’s ever going to fully satisfy is a set of points I started but didn’t go all the way on:
No-sigil leaderboards are a contest of time spent.
Sigil-based leaderboards with buyable sigils are a contest of time spent and resources spent.
Sigil-based leaderboards without buyable sigils are either a contest of time (lots of sigiils) or luck (very few sigils).
I like your idea of a bracketed leaderboard, but I think I’m starting to see why they like reward tiers with a leaderboard on the side instead of just leaderboards.
We need some kind of change to increase gold in pvp & explores or other game modes.
Perhaps give all defense teams +200 power level and base gold on the power difference.
Unfortunately this penalizes players who are higher VIP level since their cards usually have a higher power level, as well as players who have spent a lot of money to level up and ascend cards to mythic level.
Another way maybe is to just base the gold on the tier level 1/2/3 as well as power, giving a small boost for the more difficult tiers you fight. There seems to be a lot less gold now and a lot more needed.
I feel like im working to make money, but someone broke my tools in half.
They would just have to match players by PvP score and award gold based on PvP score (using a diminishing returns formula). If you keep on fighting during the week your payout gradually gets better. That even solves their perceived exploit of steamrolling easy teams, those automatically lower their PvP score due to losing all the time.
All they had to do to fix the “exploit” was to set a maximum gold payout of xxx for the left hand battle. They could have left everything else the same.
What if Ranked PvP used the matchmaking system that changes difficulty based on how well you’re doing, and Casual PvP used a different system and had lower rewards?
One of the sillier things the devs do is they describe problems in their code as “just the way things work in programs”. I assure you, while they may have made it hard to separate Casual and Ranked from each other, there’s no natural law of C# that says any game with 2 PvP modes has to use the same matchmaking data for both. It’s really just a side effect of making bad decisions because you’re in a hurry, then never making the time to fix them.
It wasn’t my idea, it was Sirrian’s. It’s a way to ensure that players at all levels of the game can earn top rewards, instead of those rewards being locked to the top guilds every week. It’s not a bad idea.
Most here believe that an account’s base team score is the best proxy for an account’s progress. Given that achieving a high team score requires significant play time invested into an account, it’s likely the lowest hanging fruit to make such an evaluation.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it and sooner than everyone thinks. Personally, I think we’re going to get something very much like this, just in a way that most would not expect.
Looking at the usual methods today on approximating the timing of the next update, which has a good chance of being the Arena revamp, it’s due by the end of January. Given the holidays and time needed for console update certification, there may not even be a beta this time around.
What I would really like is a way to “retire” so that I can actually enjoy a dividend from my investments, instead of being required to invest more for less returns.
I’ve re-framed the situation in my head and decided the direction things are heading is good. The less I’m motivated to play, the better. Without the changes to explore to make it an endless grind, I would not have finished reading a lot of books in the last month. I have a lot more books to read as research for my next novel. So, this is in fact a good thing! I hope the devs don’t fix all the extra explore clicks.
Every time I see 1200 gold for an orbweaver team, I play less. I actually did a walk last night with my daughter without playing the game. I woke up in the middle of the night without collecting tribute.
I need to be gearing up to write my next novel. I’ve been thinking about this all wrong. Anything that demotivates me to play or gates my playtime is a good thing towards that goal. So two thumbs up to the devs.
They already admitted by the exploit mechanics it does. The exploit took advantage of that “low PvP rank == easier battles”, but there’s no logical reason Casual PvP has to share exactly that same pool and measurement. It makes more sense Casual PvP would be either “always easy” or “completely random” without letting play influence your results.
Instead, it sounds like we’ve been right all along: the only difference in Casual PvP is rewards. But rewards can’t be changed in Casual PvP without changing them in Ranked PvP, somehow.
I subscribe to a lot of your theories about upcoming game mechanics but something about “be careful what you wish for” irks me. The least cynical way to put it is we both know the path is already chosen and “player feedback” is not the input that is guiding how it will go. It almost has a tone of “don’t provide feedback” to it and I refuse.
I justify a lot of my disappointment in 3 months by pointing to today and saying, “I asked for something completely different”. If we’re “careful what we ask for” then when they say “we did this based on player feedback” we can’t lay out a table of hundreds of “not this” posts to ask, “WHICH players?”
“Be careful what you wish for” is an admission the game is on track to do nothing but improve monetization with only minimal consideration for “fun”. It’s the strongest reason to quit. So I’m sort of ignoring and not using that sentiment.
I’m kind of with PGS. I feel less guilt about the GoW I don’t play now. It’s opened time to play other games. I’ve spent quite a bit on those games, because gasp they’re monetized the ways I describe I like.
The thing we’re not “wishing for” that you describe, and will get instead, is NOT a game that tries to have 5-year veterans. Its goal will be to extract on average X revenue over about 8 months before players move on. Yawn. I can play 10 of those. That GoW wasn’t that way is what made it stand out.
It’s because Casual PvP is an archaic system that is literally a clone of Ranked PvP that was developed an eternity ago (maybe even as far back as launch, someone want to chime in on this?). It’s 99% the same system running on the same set of mechanics. As such, the devs can’t change one without directly affecting the other.
That’s true to a point. When betas occur, the devs are asking for both bug catches (if found) and feedback on whetever is being presented for review/testing. At best, beta players have the potential to influence the presentation of the content being presented. The core systems themselves have literally no chance of not making it to the Live servers. After all, significant time, money, and effort have been expended to get the update to the point where it’s ready for review on the staging (public beta) server. Sometimes we can influence the presentation of those systems with quality feedback. At times, those systems on beta are much harsher than what actually ends up being pushed to the production servers. Still, the mindset has to be when approaching beta is that an update is 98% in stone before the content is ever presented for review.
Outside of beta, once updates go live, well… everyone here knows how the forums operate as well as various social media channels. There’s not much point to rehashing this.
As Salty would say on one of her streams, “Well, you’re not wrong.” On the the other hand, you’re not entirely right either. It’s undeniable that the changes over the last year have all been focused around monetization, and we’re not quite to the finish line yet (albeit close finally, 5.0 should be the last of the major changes; although on the other hand they potentially represent the most radical changes yet to be presented).
It’s hard to give a direct answer to this without spilling the beans, which I’m not quite comfortable with doing yet. Once upon at time in a post long since removed from the forums, shortly before he and Nim permanently removed themselves from posting here as a general rule, Sirrian once publicly disclosed where a significant portion of his source material was coming from regarding these changes. I’m still of the mindset today to respect the devs’ wishes on this not discuss the removed post. Hence, when such content is necessary for me to describe something, I do so in vague terms.
That said, generally knowing one of the likely source materials for inspiration for the changes that have entered the game over the last year and change, I can say that the outcomes could have been so much worse. The devs have done a sound job in translating those concepts into something that most view as fun, while still injecting monetization into those concepts. If that was not the case, the game would still not be growing, despite the obvious headwinds that these changes are inflicting on the game.
For the arena update, how about the metric ton of players on this very forum asking “Why can’t we play Guild Wars every day”, as GW slowly shifted to once a month? Remember those posts? That’s very much what is likely to happen here, until I see something otherwise that points differently (not holding my breath on that). Of course, the catch is that there will be monetization present.
And that’s where my ultimate fear lies with the upcoming changes. Given the potential source material, and how well it would be a very good match with what Sirrian teased on past dev Q&A streams, the intensity of the monetization used in the Arena revamp is going to be critical. On one of my beta longposts, I’ve written that monetization of direct PvP (via the Arena revamp) has the very significant danger of being the straw that breaks the camel’s back for most non-newbie players. I have faith still that there will be a balance in the solution that ultimately comes with the system to balance fun with monetization. We’ll see, though.
I can’t disagree with you on that. It just simply wouldn’t be honest to do so, even if trying to be a devil’s advocate. Yeah, I think I’m going to hit the post button now and stop typing before I dwell on that conclusion much longer and completely ruin my Sunday.
Vet here. Casual/ranked PvP was introduced in 2.0. Prior to that, there was no PvP rank and thus no leaderboard. You were given no choice in opponents (you could skip the choice you were given, but there was no easy/medium/hard battle to choose from). Tiers did exist, each with a corresponding “title” you’d earn back each week, and a glory payout per tier and at end of week like today (though glory was much harder to come by back then).
I don’t believe casual PvP has changed much at all since its introduction in 2.0, though.
Another distinguishing factor between the old and current pvp format; the old format would deduct a trophy from your respective guild for each loss that you incurred. Which this could be circumvented by using Alt+F4 because back then force closing the game did not count as a loss.
Mr. Sammy was the first player on GoW to reach the max level of 1000 (at that time). So after that people started using his likeness to congratulate other players once they reached the milestone. “Congrats on the Sammy.”
And sorry for getting totally off-topic here with my reminiscing.
