Even in this scenario it would require a lot of paper to print enough Zuul’Goths to hold down the papers you don’t have anymore because you used them all printing Zuul’Goths to make a paper weight.
It’s the same principle of OP’s claim that people using tons of gems are getting richer by being well placed in the leaderboard that will never give them enough gems in return.
They are getting richer by owning something (95% of players don’t own) via their six figure gem wealth they been sitting on for being top guild. So yes they might be getting poorer in gems but richer in this new resource ORB OF POWER ironic it is indeed not called orb of skill, but power. Hint received loud and clear
And by this game general rule of RNG, any claim of skill can be a fallacy because cascades and such idiotic random effects like 0,00001% chance of devour can happen ANYTIME… Honestly, even in your “closed enviroment request” things would still look unfair to some and not to others.
Want something entirely built around skill and not luck? Try chess.
An Orb of Power does nothing that any player can’t do through normal gameplay. You are giving it too much credit/value, but that’s up to you.
Well you are right. There is luck involved. I played magic the gathering since alpha and it is about 80/20 skill/luck (similar to gems but maybe gems had more luck) and magic is a worldwide competive game with pros even with luck present
All I am asking is for devs to stop letting events be like EBAY
Even MTG involves “riches getting richer” when you look at it from the power level perspective and the prices of the cards…
Anyway, your present idea would give the devs much more trouble handling the economic aspects of the game. You claimed for instance that other FTP games you played wouldn’t dare to make such features by fearing the backlash of the community.
But on my experience of FTP every single one has the same concepts on leaderboards being favored by people who are able to spend more premium currency to acquire some advantage, plus some TITANIC barriers on acquiring said premium currency unless you throw some money into their accounts, something GoW isn’t so hardcore…
In a few minutes from now i’ll just log into the game and collect my tributes, and obtain 3~12 gems, if i decide to play some treasure maps i can get more or less two gems per map spent and i can even farm maps, which is the same as farming gems.
So well, good luck with your request.
@Rogu3 you said you were new so even if sigils were limited you don’t stand a chance to be #1 on the LB since you don’t have the kingdom power and troops to be able to stay competitive
Lol I’m not new. Forum new
Top six d and three d most events
Problem is position 1 the thieves commonly dump 10k gems (educated close guess) to clinch it. Funny thing is they always overkill by doubling position 2 as if to rub our noses in their power and wealth
Level 1157 I believe so not new
Bounty event for example emperor khorvash (thieves) 1.3m and second 550k
Now this was when I left on my trip on Sunday so not sure what final was. To me this just reeks of “hey let me rub entire server’s noses in my wealth”
I like to think that at least half the players are like: “lol what a waste of gems”. 
Well, if they want to do all that for a silly orb, they’re welcome to it. The issue you’re facing here is most people don’t care about being #1 on the board. The reward isn’t worth it and the ultimate goal of Zuul’Goth really only has one practical purpose (for now); leveling the Karakoth kingdom past Power Level 7.
Personally, I don’t even care about buying sigils; they’re just a bonus that come with the other things I actually buy the shop tiers for.
Rogu3, You’re saying like there is no skill involved getting reward from rank 1-100. There is, it’s just you can use gems to buy more sigils to substitute if you don’t play well, and that’s fine to me.
I never buy higher than Tier 6, as there is no more exclusive stuffs (Troops/Ingots/diamonds) beyond that. Yet I’m able to get to top 100s many times by those few sigils. I’m sure there are many people who are buying Tiers more than me and still falling behind. So in this system, you can spend less gems by using more skill.
Sure, top 50s are populated by huge spending players, but if they want to spend so much to chase those orbs, then good for them. Why would you want to stop them? If you have skill, you can spend the same amount as them and get higher.
Auction system is always a funny thing. In theory, everyone could refuse to buy a single Tier, and best players would easily be the winner. Yet in real life, they just keep one-up each other for being a leader, so the point is skyrocketed way too high.
So in my opinion, there is no point to participate in leaderboard if you’re not willing to waste a huge load of gems. Just play the best as you could and get your reward, that’s the best value you’ll get from this event. Orb of Power is just time-acceleration thing, if people want to spend more gems to get Zuul’Goth faster, then good luck to them.
Get a huge lead on second is not stupid it discourage people from trying to reach them
If it is close, the 2nd will be tempted to buy more sigils to reach and and can result in #1 losing his position cause the 2nd decided to play 24h straight
Edit: also people seem to forget the top guild player were able to bank lot of gems (more than 100k) cause of the unlimited daily task and guild task so they are not throwing away real money
I get it, but this is the dark side of F2P. Someone’s got to pay to keep the servers running and the devs working. The people who chase the leaderboards are those people. I like your analogy to an auction house. It’s less scandalous than my “loserboard” quip. But, like an auction, the “winner” is the person who thinks the prize is worth more than everyone else who bid. That’s synonymous with “paid too much”.
I’ve played games where it was more skill based and it is not compatible with GoW. That game worked by rigging the RNG for the competitions so a large portion of your allotted moves happened on a predetermined board. But the randomness that came after that expired was what made the difference between 1st and 2nd. So the people who won were skilled, because they managed the predetermined board well, but also lucky, because the random parts of the board favored them.
I think the bulk of us are reserved to the notion that Zuul’goth is bling for players who are either really patient or pay too much. It’s not even a very good troop, so that makes it easier to deal with. It’s not like it’s an Infernus level of power or something.
So, to reiterate:
I agree with your premise, but I don’t believe anything is going to change.
From experience
I can tell u it’s not people paying, it’s us long time players who have accrued more keys and gems than we will need.
Every new event is mostly new players complaining they can’t do everything that those who have played for 2-3+ years can.
Yeah zuul goth is bragging rights, bragging that we’ve played for a long time and we’re smart enough to use resources wisely enough to have them to burn now.
Good luck to all going for it
Just to jump in, the F2P model typically works like this. As mentioned above, @Rogu3 claims that players for other games would be up in arms over this perceived fault. However, a lot of other F2P games require resources or money to be spent to progress in the game. Often, this takes the form of time blocks or energy systems. Gems of War doesn’t have these, so we make our revenue in different ways. Some players prefer time blocks and energy systems, others don’t, it all comes down to preferred individual play styles.
We do our best to ensure that content is not gated by a paywall. As such, Zuul’Goth can still be crafted, it just takes a time investment over a monetary one. Also, Zuul’Goth is not the meta, so those that don’t have him are able to craft strong end-game teams in his absence. Being on the leaderboard doesn’t offer exclusive rewards that can’t be earnt in game either. We purposefully designed the events this way, as well as the rest of the game. 
I hope this has shed some light on our processes.
I think less players would be upset if certain orbs of the blue variety were a bit more common or guaranteed in certain guild tier rewards. Like major orb in tier 5 is an ascension orb in the final tier. Or at least convert major orbs of one type to another.
LOL. People on the leader board spend thousand of gems and the most they get back is 700. Sure they get an orb but I get them as well just by playing different parts of the game for free. The rich are NOT getting richer they are getting poorer.
I really do appreciate the constructive conversation we’re having here which is Definately helping me feel a “little” better. Night and day versus how convos go on Xbox.
1 thing that makes it not totally ok (despite great points) is the competitive person in me feels that eBay nature of determining 1st position really is a lost opportunity to make events truly great and fun.
Thanks everyone for how constructive you’ve been
We already told you in xbox game chat, Don’t Start A Fight You Cant Finish.
I mean let’s be honest, I left a game over “rich get richer” scenarios and this is far from it. The payoff for having a hoard and even getting to the top via F2P isn’t very good. Here’s how it worked in the previous game, and why I left.
It was Pokemon Shuffle, but a lot of this stuff can be talked about via analogy. Imagine if you could ONLY level troops via Orb of Growth and Orb of Ascension. That’s how Pokemon Shuffle worked. The only way to get that game’s orbs was through weekly competitive events. To place at all, you generally had to spend 10,000-30,000 gold worth of items. To be competitive, you usually wanted to do that 3 or 4 times and hope luck gave you a great score on one attempt.
Every week’s event was set up to require some troop that was featured that week. While there were sometimes new Pokèmon released, often the events were repeats so newer players could pick up older, powerful Pokèmon. This is where “rich get richer” kicks in.
A really good Pokèmon would need 10 Orbs of Growth and at least 8 Orbs of Ascension. Incidentally, that was the prize for 1st-10th place. If you could only afford 5 and 4, you’d place in a tier that paid back 4 and 3. If you couldn’t afford any, you’d generally get 2 and 1. So right off the bat we see that people who can max the new Pokèmon lose the least resources compared to people who can’t. Worse: if the Pokèmon were a repeat, the people getting the most back were the people who had to spend 0 orbs.
This was exacerbated by an exploit that wasn’t patched for a year. “Survival Mode” was a very long endurance challenge where 1 loss ended your run. At I think match 50, you’d get about 5 Orb of Growth. For a long time, it cost so many resources to finish Survival Mode it was cheaper to ignore it and just compete in the weekly event. But a couple of particularly powerful Pokèmon tilted that: you had about an 80% chance of getting back 20% more than your costs, PLUS the orbs. Suddenly, endgame players could loop Survival Mode infinitely.
So they did. Many players acquired the maximum number of orbs. So now, when a new Pokèmon came out, they had a 75% discount on maxing it, and could make that investment back in about 2 hours of play. Advice to newbies shifted away from “how to win competitions” towards “how to loop Survival mode”.
Then Survival Mode was rebalanced to make it impossible to loop again. 2 days after I got the looping team. Then the game had a problem: veterans had 99 orbs stored up, but everyone else had whatever they’d earned. So the developers tried to handle that, but it made things worse. A very large batch of new Pokèmon were introduced, and now instead of 1 weekly competitive event, there were often 2 or 3 at the same time. It was impossible for F2P players to maintain a position on leaderboards: you could do math and figure up the theoretical maximum resources you could farm and each event took 90% of those.
So the endgame veteran players dominated those leaderboards, and made back as many Orbs as they were spending to get there. Some unlucky players lost 5-10 orbs weekly, but that was a rate that could be sustained for 9 weeks and no one was that unlucky.
So I left the boat. An exploit gave veteran players a way to acquire more resources than they could spend, then that door was slammed shut and the game was changed to make it even harder to keep up if you hadn’t already done it.
THAT is “rich get richer”. It takes an infinite resource source. In GoW, even if getting Zuul’Goth makes the rich marginally more powerful, after they get it there’s basically nothing left to spend those resources on.