Prologue
On the GW which was near of Cristmas my guild met one strong guild (name them Guild-A). The battle was tense but we won.
Few months later we met another strong guild (name them Guild-B) consists of players from our country so me often talking in the common chat. That battle was also hard but my guild won it too. Discussing results we also mentioned a bracket shifts and one guy from Guild-B said that there is some crap with it, because previous war they won Guild-A but now they are in a higher bracket. Obviously it was double surprising for us because we also won them previously.
Therefore Guild-A losed at least two wars in 4-5 months but resulted higher than guilds which didn’t lose any war. I tried to clear this situation but only received some blah-blah-blah about “they collected more points than you in other wars”. Well, I couldn’t verify it, so calmed down.
Main topic
Last GW my guild won in our (104th) bracket with 1.577.570 points. Best guild (name them Guild-C) of 105th bracket finished with 1.2+ (not higher than 1.3) mil points. This war my guild starts in 100th bracket (shift +4) while Guild-C in the 99th bracket (shift +6).
So, can you explain me distinctly: HOW. IT. IS. POSSIBLE?
They may have won their bracket by a much larger margin than you have won your bracket. It would be interesting to see the final result for both brackets, showing all guilds involved.
I’ve screenshot for only a bracket of my guild. Didn’t thought that others will be necessary too.
But your explanation sounds very fishy. Extrapolating this: if we will fight in the bracket full of abandoned crypt guilds were nobody playing at this moment, then our score (1.5 mil vs 0 / 0 / 0 / …) will results to as high shift as possible?
It would be a perfectly reasonable way to handle it at low brackets, beating the second best guild by 1.5 million points could progress you more than beating it by 50k points. Guilds overqualified for their bracket are supposed to catch up much faster, and magnitude of overperformance might well be a major factor.
There were 2 strong opponents, few half-alive guilds and two completely dead ones. We managed to win in these conditions. You saying that foremetioned Guild-C is now qualified higher because they had bigger gap… i.e. their bracket was full of half-alive and dead guilds.
Is it a fair result?
Technically yes. Within their bracket nobody got treated unfairly, and within your bracket also nobody got treated unfairly. It’s difficult to judge movements between two independent brackets. Note that they might have had to fight much harder for their 1.3 million points in their bracket than you for your 1.5 millions points in your bracket.
We are always discussing speculative assumptions, that’s why I was interested in more data. Most of the times even the devs aren’t aware how GoW works.
It does seem to be true that any War in lower brackets where you meet an actual opponent your ability to rise dramatically falls — both guilds end up hurting the progress of the other to a significant degree.
So, lower than bracket 50, you just have to hope to get lucky and be grouped with the actually-dead guilds so you can rise to the rarified air.
But it can take years. My guild has been unlucky more than once and only moved up a bracket or two because there was another guild within 100k points of us, despite our both getting ~1 million scored points.
That’s why most people interested in fighting in the top brackets just skip the hassle and join a guild that’s already King-of-the-Hill.
As you can see, my guild won in our 85th bracket with 1.356k points over a guild on the 2nd place. ratticlub11 won their 84th bracket with only 12k difference with a guild on the 2nd place.
Withal our total scores are quite equal.
This war we also were placed in neighbour brackets:
So it seems like in this case only total score means while difference with other guilds in your bracket is meaningless. But this will raise back my original topic.
Also I’ve discussion with a friend of mine from another guild and he shown me such result of their winned GW:
I had a look at your Guild Wars ranking and it’s correct.
You won your bracket so you will move up in brackets, however, your Guild Wars Score was good but not great, so you weren’t going to move up many brackets, in addition, other Guilds scored higher than your Guild so moved up several brackets. As your Guild scored lower, those Guilds bumped your guild and other lower scoring Guilds down some ranks.
So this time you’ll only go up 1 rank (and 1 bracket).
If it works as it’s described by Support, then it also raises my origin al topic back. How it’s possible that a guild which lossing GWs appears to be ranked higher than a guild which dind’t lose any?
@Cyrup@Kafka@Sirrian@Saltypatra can you explain exactly how it works actually? Because currently I have no any agrument for my guildmates when they come and ask me what the *** happens with these GW shifts.
The devs are unlikely to ever fully explain this to us, unfortunately. They are worried about people gaming the system. It does sound fishy, but it is a common experience that score disparity within a bracket means more for unusual adjustments to bracket than if you outscore someone in another bracket.
Guild Wars progression has never been fair, and the reason is that no matter what changes are made, someone is going to experience what they believe is unfairness. I’ve been there, and I sympathize with you. Hang in there. If your guild keeps doing extremely well, you’ll climb faster than you think.
It’s a black box. It’s not documented. We can’t tell if it’s a bug because we don’t actually know how it’s supposed to work. It was designed to be hard to figure out. It could be bugged, but there’s no way for us to know or prove it because the only people who can say if it’s working have not revealed how it works.
While it is difficult to judge movements between two independent brackets, to say nobody gets treated unfairly is not necessarily a true statement. It appears that the max a guild can drop is two brackets. So while winners in lower brackets may jump more than one or two brackets by a yet undetermined system, a dead guild can clog up advancement for second and or third place finishers.
By looking at the rankings of guilds in the brackets above and below in the current war, I can see a second place guild that failed to advance into our bracket because there were three bracket winners placed in the same bracket above it. I say “placed” because it seems this is another attempt to impede player progression in another phase of the game.
The previous 2 wars, our guild has also faced two bracket winners, while the brackets above and below had no winners 3 times and only 1 winner the fourth. This could be an attempt by Developers to ensure all guilds get a fair shake at winning every now and again. Or it could just be random mathematical bracketology.
What I find unfair is the fact that dead/dying guilds are able to linger near the top and reap rewards despite having 15, 6, or even sometimes only 3 members. Why should a second place guild ever fail to advance at least one bracket? If need be, drop a dead guild more than two…
As for the rewards of the GW Bracket system, all one need do is look at the following Hypothetical Guild to determine if anything is “unfair”. Thank you for your time:
