Ways to Make Gems of War Better

Feature Requests and Game feedback
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I am a console player, currently playing on the Xbox One. Over the years that I have been playing the game and watching how it has changed with each update, I feel that in it’s current state that there are a few things that if added/changed could make Gems of War a lot better than it is.

Some of these have been mentioned numerous times before in other posts. And of course this is all based on how i’m playing the game. I apologize in advance for the length of this.

Underworld/Delves

  1. Get rid of the daily Delve limit on Underworld Kingdoms. When the Underworld was first introduced, there were only 3 kingdoms, now there are 28, which almost rivals the normal Kingdoms (currently 34). Having a daily limit is obsolete now. And it should just be gotten rid of. Delves are just a hardcore mode/survival version of Explore anyway, so get rid of the limit as it pointless now.

  2. For the 1 day Delve event or the weekend Delve events, put in an option to start off at whatever level the Underworld Kingdom is currently at. I know i’d be more inclined to spend Gems on the shop to get the potions if I could start where my current delve for the Kingdom is at, instead of all the way at the beginning every single time.

Arena
Just get rid of this mode altogether. Who actually plays this mode for fun? The rewards aren’t even that great. Frankly, instead of random selection of all the troops from common to epic to choose from, i’d rather be given a random Kingdom and have to make a team of 4 from the common to epic troops from that Kingdom.

And while the recent revamp of Arena mode has made it slightly more tolerable, I still don’t play it. Even when it’s a task in the Campaign, I opt to spend the 100 gems to skip it instead just so I don’t have to play it. The Arena event isn’t even worth playing for the rewards to me.

Should just replace the Arena with a permanent Class Event that runs all week similar to the Bounty. And rotate the class out each week, matching it to the whatever Kingdom is being promoted for the weekly Guild event.

Treasure Maps

  1. The rewards should be revamped. This is only something that truly benefits new players and does absolutely nothing for anyone else. Add in a multiplier reward for starters. So that every 30 moves you make it to, the rewards will get increase. You start a x1 multiplier, you get to 30 moves its now a x2 multiplier, etc etc. This way doing the Treasure maps might actually be more rewarding to do.

  2. You’ve introduced Epic Vault Keys, why not introduce Epic Treasure Maps? They can drop chance to drop from a gnome (or create a new gnome) just like Vault Keys can. Or add them to the Soulforge and for 100 Treasure Maps, you can craft 1 Epic Treasure Map.
    -The Epic Treasure Map will play no different than a normal one, except the rewards a much better.
    -At every 15 moves you a guaranteed an Runic Traitstone with a chance of it being an Arcane/Celestial.
    -There are no copper or silver coins, the board starts with gold coins, bags, and the first level of chests.
    -Rewards: Gold Coins get you 100 per coin on the board instead of the normal 10. Bags get you 25 souls and 1 gold key per pag, 1st Level Chests get you 20 souls, 20 glory, and 2 gold keys per chest, 2nd Level Chests get you 30 souls, 25 glory, 1 gem, and 2 glory keys per chest, 3rd Level Chests get you 40 souls, 30 glory, 5 gems, 5 glory keys and 1 gem key per chest, and Safes get you 50 souls, 35 glory, 10 gems, 10 glory keys, and 5 gems keys per safe.

Guild

  1. Reduce the donation cost of the Epic tasks. The gold requirements in no way matches the value of what is offered as reward for leveling those up.

  2. Increase the amount of Seals you can earn in a week. It’s been done once before because it used to be lower than the 2000. Or allow players to keep earning seals after the 2000 limit, except only the first 2000 contribute to the guild to increase the Guild Chest value and you can keep earning them throughout the week. With only Orbs of Clans allowing you to go over the limit of what can be contributed to the Guild (which they already do).

Guild Wars
This is my 2nd least favorite game type after Arena. As it’s a more boring version of PvP. Every guild always seems to have the exact same defense teams that you fight against every Guild War and there isn’t any real variation. And I can’t understand why some guilds make such a big deal out of it. I assume the rewards are better in higher brackets? The guild i’m in is slowly moving up the ranks, but I never notice any rewards that were all that great. Thankfully, while our Guild Leader gets amped about Guild Wars, he doesn’t seem to care about if we win or lose as long as all guild members participate, and if you don’t you may get kicked from the guild.

  1. Some type of revamp needs to be done to the guild system for the Guild War. As it’s not fair when 1 person guilds go up against 30 person guilds. Either break things up based on Guild rank or members. Or put in a requirement that guilds need a minimum of 10 people to participate.

  2. Get rid of the 1 day battles against each guild. Make it a week long battle against the other guilds. So that if you miss a day you can still play your battles and have them count toward the score against the guild. Push back the start of the Guild Wars to Sunday, so that you can setup defense teams then. Then have the actual battles start on Monday and go through Saturday. Where you can either play all of your battles against all the guilds in 1 day or spread them out over the week. And you have until the end of the day on Saturday to finish all of your battles. On Sunday, the results and rewards are tallied up. This might add that extra excitement as you may not know who is going to win or come out on top in the bracket until the very end.

War Coins
I know this was geared toward new players, but it alienated a large part of the playerbase and essentially paywalled this item for everyone who had already completed every Kingdom’s quest line. And they also haven’t been introduced in the Adventure Board yet like they were supposed to when the update came out, so you basically have to pray to the RNG gods in hopes they show up in the Daily Deals or else you have to spend real money for them (paywalled).

  1. Award the coins retroactively to all players who have completed any Kingdom’s quest line or allow us to reset the quest line of Kingdom so that we can go through it again and earn the War Coins.

  2. On the Daily Login Calendar, remove the Gold reward for the 26th day and replace it with 5-10 War Coins.

  3. Add these to the Daily Adventure Board already, replace the Treasure Maps in the campaign rewards with War Coins, and add them to the shop as purchasable with Gems/Glory instead of just real money.

Soulforge
I know it’s in the name, but why must everything in this cost Souls to craft. Souls are literally needed for damn near everything in this game and you get so few of them from battles even when a decent Soul Farm team.

  1. Items that have nothing to do with Souls, should no longer require Souls to create a higher tier version. Traitstones, deeds, weapons, jewels, ingots, and pet food, should not require souls to make.

  2. Pet food should require white pet food and jewels to create the different colored pet foods.

  3. Remove the 2 Treasure troops/cards from the Soulforge, the fact they require Orbs of growth to craft is a ridiculous requirement. If you keep them, change the crafting requirements instead so they merely require multiple copies of the previous troop to craft into a higher version.

  4. Jewels should be craftable with 500 shards and 1 minor traitstone of that specific jewel color.

  5. Deeds should be craftable with writs and jewels only.

  6. Ingots should only require multiples of the previous version to create a higher version.

  7. Add a Deforge option for traitstones, ingots, deeds, and jewels. Where I can breakdown the higher versions of items into the the lower versions. This way I can breakdown items I have an abundance of and reforge them into things I need. This should not cost souls to do, instead you should be getting souls back from doing this. Infact you should be getting back exactly what it would cost you to create the item you are deforging.

EX) I deforge a Mythic ingot, I should get back 100 souls and 10 Legendary ingots for each one I deforge.
EX) I deforge an Arcane Storm Traitstone, I should get back the 400 souls, 2 Celestial Traitstones, 3 Runic Fire Traitstones, and 3 Runic Wind Traitstones.
Ex) I deforge a Book of Ice Deeds, I should get back the 50 Ice Deeds, 500 sapphire jewels, and 1000 souls. If I deforge an Ice Deed it becomes 100 writs, 1000 souls, and 100 sapphires.

If you read all of this, thank you for taking the time out of your day to read what is basically my rant of dissatisfaction of current things in Gems of War. What are your thoughts on these suggested changes?

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Agreed this would be nice. It likely won’t get implemented because it would allow resources to be farmed too easily, though, but I think a nice middle ground would be to allow 3 sigils per faction per day, or something similar.

That way people don’t get treasures/ingots/troops “too quickly” for the devs’ liking.

This can’t happen for economy reasons discussed ad nauseum UNLESS there’s some sort of commensurate (re: exorbitant) gem cost associated with the progress.

Devs don’t want anyone to be at the end of endgame. No one is supposed to be done with delves. Anyone who is has progressed too far past their intended gates, and is at-risk to quit the game because they are “done” with it.

Devs don’t want any player to ever be done.

Uh, no.

Consider the development costs — and you want it to just be discarded? If you don’t like it, ignore it — don’t take it from those who might like it.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere why the rework was bad (and how it could have been great), as have many others, but I’ll not bore you with the links unless you request them.

Then Mission Accomplished for the devs. If they made you spend gems, especially if it’s to avoid a time-burden, then they accomplished exactly what they wanted to accomplish. Buying a “skip” means you’re not buying a weapon or something else that, later, they might be able to charge you real cash for in a flash offer. It’s a trap — and plenty are falling into it.

And even those who aren’t are still playing into their hands, because it makes their engagement metrics look good.

Getting a revamp Soon TM

But realize anything that increases rewards without costing the players somehow is basically an idea that’s dead-upon-inception to the devs.

Devs know this, and don’t care. In fact, it’s by design: they want to sink players’ gold, and reduce the number of lucky mythics pulled from Legendary Tasks.

Mission Accomplished.

This is a non-starter for the same reason: Guild Chests are the best one. Being able to endlessly farm them would be even better than being able to endlessly farm gem keys, and that’s not possible, so…that should tell you something…

The top prize is 1550 gems for all 30 members of the #1 guild, so. That’s why it’s sort of a big deal.

And it’s also much more dynamic and difficult in the higher brackets. It’s hands-down the hardest content in the game, and certain hardcore players like that sort of challenge.

Yes, the bracket system is broken. It will never be fixed, despite dozens of good suggestions over the years.

This is already true. My guild, The Unforgiven, rarely plays a majority of its battles on-the-day, because we have a fair number of weekend-mostly players. We lose most of the head-to-heads, therefore (which means no XP bonus or 50 seals the next day), but often win the War overall (because we played when we were comfortable and had the time, rather than rush during the work week).

Pretty sure the game infrastructure can’t handle this sort of thing. There are no carry-overs from one week to the next — even Campaigns are week-to-week, probably because the foundations of the game engine (re: weekly reset) require as much.

A good idea. I like anything that allows the player more agency in when and how to play, generally.

I don’t see how this isn’t already here — watching points trickle in prior to Sunday, and then avalanche, is always a nail-biting experience in Bracket 1.

Yup. By design.

A bad design, but :man_shrugging:

Devs are going to hold firm on it, so we’ll just have to be patient for those banners.

Precisely because souls are endlessly farmable and, therefore, in need of sinks to prevent player progression being infinitely attainable.

Every thing you craft in the soulforge is a troop that goes unleveled, which means a kingdom star unearned. Devs want to slow you down, and they want you to play as much as you have to to get the millions of souls you need or, if they’re really successful, convince you to skip the grind by paying for souls with cash.

Soul costs, therefore, are never going to go away. Nor are there going to be recipes in the soulforge that are player-favorable.

Use the forge to make weapons and mythics you missed, complete campaign tasks, and convert writs into Imperial deeds. Literally don’t use it for anything else if you want to come out ahead — everything else is a noob trap (unless I’m forgetting something).

Sorry most of my response is negative. I’m on-board with a lot of the sentiments, just don’t agree with a lot of the proposed solutions, or else I lack any hope that some of the player-favorable approaches would ever be employed by this game’s dev team :man_shrugging:

(do let me know if you ever want a competitive Wars experience, though, even if only to taste it for a week. We have 4 guilds in the top 10 Brackets, and it’s a whole different animal, so if you wanted to see why some love it so much, we’d be more than happy to show you if your console is Xbox)

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I actually agree with this, in addition to making the potions purchaseable outside of the Faction Assault events. Outside the events, they’d expire at daily reset, but this would allow people to work on their grinds on their own schedules. The perk to doing the grind during the events would be the event rewards.

Since there are “rewards” on the line, I doubt they’d allow this, but maybe for a Gem cost.

I’d love to see Treasure Maps made relevant again but I’m figuring that if they actually are made relevant, they’ll be somehow gated off to stop players from grinding infinite resources.

The gold cost is for 30x the rewards since the rewards are given to everyone in the guild. I doubt they’ll ever move on this. The express purpose of adding Epic Tasks was to further gate off Legendary Tasks while acting like they were doing players a favor by offering another tier of “guaranteed rewards”. Lowering the gold cost would also require them to lower the reward value…and, probably nerf Legendary Tasks further, since the whole purpose was to make them harder to earn in the first place.

I’m neutral on this one. Part of me thinks they’d never do this since you can get Mythics from guild chests, but you can also get them from Glory chests and you can farm infinite Glory, so maybe they will consider changes to these in the future.

Your matches already count toward your weekly score no matter when you play them. The daily score, which is used for determining which guild “wins the day”, is separate from this.

I suspect changing the start day of Guild Wars would mess with the weekly reset mechanism.

Being able to play all of your battles on Day 1 would remove the “daily winner” aspect entirely, and I know a lot of players enjoy the ability to win the daily EXP buff, so this would be a double-edged sword. I do like the idea of being able to play all 30 battles at the player’s convenience, but it would still result in removing the chance for a nice daily perk for those who value it.

This was by design in an attempt to get veteran players to cough up a bit of cash. I agree they should be offered equally to all players and this was a dink move, but it was an intentional dink move.

Over time, you wind up with more Souls than you could ever spend. Because of that, I don’t know that this will ever be changed. Plus, as you indicated, it’s literally part of the name…it was intended to be a bit of a Souls sink.

Deforging, if ever added, will likely still include some sort of convenience tax so you don’t get all your materials back.

I like a lot of your ideas. I know I’ve become jaded over the years, but the fact that they’d require the developers/publisher to become less greedy immediately makes me jump the conclusion that they’ll never happen. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

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There is a big difference between Glory and Guild Seals. Yes, Glory (and Glory Keys) can be farmed infinitely and can be used to pull Mythics from Glory Chests. But each Glory Chest only has a 1 in 10,000 chance of pulling a Mythic. On the other hand, each Gem Chest has a 1 in 1000 chance of pulling a Mythic, and each Level 6 Guild Chest has a 1 in 900-ish chance of pulling a Mythic. So that’s why you can’t infinitely farm Gem Keys and Guild Seals. If Guild Seals were infinitely farmable, then it would be way too easy to build up your troop collection by spamming E2-E6 to rack up a mountain of Guild Seals.

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Arena: Just get rid of this mode altogether.

I think a better solution would be for other game modes to offer daily deal rerolls. Get a daily deal reroll for gaining XXX PvP points, get a reroll for finishing an explore 12 run, get a reroll for finishing an arena run. The reroll cap would be shared across game modes. I have a feeling gem spending on daily offers would jump massively if people didn’t have to play arena for them.

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R Just get rid of the whole game altogether and get your life back ;))
Just like the rng the game sucks b@ls!

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Please no. It’s scummy we even have one mode that rewards you with a surprise shop.

Three rewards max a day for free for completing a mode like arena? Definitely. Three things you have to buy with gems (ultimately cash if you’re out if gems), no, that isnt a reward.

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I love arena, the only reason I don’t play it more is because the rewards suck and no hero xp, but the overall game mode is one of my favourites and I have guild members who say the same. Everyone is different and everyone is going to enjoy different things, I agree with some of your points but some of them are specific to you and like minded people instead of the whole player base.

Plus, some of the points wouldn’t make the devs enough money because the current business model is more about making money than players happy.

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Excellent changes and much needed in the game to make it better and enjoyable.
Thank you for posting.

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All of your points are completely understandable as this was all just my opinion on certain game aspects. That’s why I was looking for thoughts on what I was suggesting to see if it was possible as I don’t know all the ins and outs of the game.

All I am basically doing now is just Soul Farming E2s all the time so I can medal and level up troops. And the monotony of farming just makes the game boring as playing the other modes doesn’t get me enough of what I need to progress. And as I more casual player who would rather spend the time to grind out stuff instead of forking over money to speed things up, I don’t see what is so bad about allowing people to grind out certain modes for the rewards.

Regardless of the reward, like you said, eventually we all hit a point where we have an overabundance of it that we can’t do anything with. For me currently, that’s Legendary and Mythic ingots and Treasure maps. I’ve got thousands of these and nothing to use them on as I am not crafting weapons, all my souls are currently going to medaling troops to unlock the Geoff achievement, then they’ll all go toward leveling up troops to raise the Kingdom power levels to 15, and I’ll craft something else if I need to.

And I understand that this being a free game, that the Devs created mechanics to try and get people to spend real money so that they could make a profit and cover all the costs, time, and effort put into creating the game. So I don’t fault them for the cash grab practices, especially on a FTP game. But some of them are so blatant and essentially a middle finger to the player base.

Specifically the War Coins and maybe the campaign pass. Every other FTP game I’ve played allowed you to buy their Pass with in-game currency, not just real money. And while that would defeat the purpose of buying the pass as it includes gems, there should still be an option to purchase the campaign with gems that does not include the bonus gems for buying it but just gives you access so that you earn the extra rewards the Pass would give you for earning Stars in campaign.

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I’d also love if this was a thing.

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Yes! I LOATHE arena but I play it because the only thing I need, really, are imperial deeds. So I play arena. And it annoys me. Every. Single. Day.
(Should mention I’ve given up on farming medals because making it unattainable to reach a goal is just…stupid).

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A huge proportion of FTP games gate your resouce acquisition in other ways at the same time. Many have “energy” systems that prevent you from playing very much in a short period of time unless you’re willing to spend premium currencies (or actual cash). Many also make it very difficult to farm those premium in-game currencies.

If you’re willing/able to put in the time and effort, it’s not hard to farm most of the in-game currencies. And if the concept is that you could spend gems to buy a Campaign Pass or something, that’s something that can be farmed with some reliability. And that can be done even if you’re a player like me who has never spent a penny despite playing this title for several years.

So while it would be nice to the player base if they could purchase a Campaign Pass for in-game currency, I don’t see it as something that will ever happen because I don’t see the benefits to the developers matching the costs therein. At least not without some sizable trade-off that’s likely to offend the playerbase in some other fashion. Or the complete nuking of the rewards from the Campaign Pass such as the truly high-end rewards from there being shoved behind the higher price point paywall.

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When delves first came out, I started to farm them 3 times per day at level 500. After they added the current changes, I stopped. I now have 150k shards, 50 sacred treasures, lamps, and tons of gold from it. Also, I am the first player to get all kingdoms to level 15, all thanks to arena. I was buying every deed and it was draining all my gems, but I got a ton of books from them. For the last 2 months, since I stopped spending gems on offers, I haven’t seen an Imperial deed offer in a while. I got most of my gems from getting first place in guild wars and winning 1500 gems every month over the years. So, my delves are covered and every single one will be hoard level 200 with 50% bonus from kingdoms, making it a breeze to beat them every delve weekend with minimum gems needed. I have enough books to upgrade 9 more kingdoms to 16, which gives me the bonus mythstones. I agree that guild wars is boring, facing the same defences over and over again, but I average 29/1, 55k points. When I was paragon, I created a whole bunch of disgusting defences, giving me like 5-8 wins and 3-8 losses last GW. I expect everyone to copy those new defenses and Guild Wars will start becoming more annoying to play. Since I haven’t spend gems on any offers in past 2 months, my gem total jumped from 12k to 19k. I will be using 9k to max out the 2 new buff pets and some older ones plus the next delve coming up soon. As far as souls go, I sacrificed all my extra troops after upgrading 300 to gold elite and I got another 6 mil souls. There is a trick to play the game without paying for it. I get around $10 per month from Game pass achievements and stuff and I use it to buy campaign. Using free stuff and xbox currency, I was able to build my VIP to 10 over the years. So, I kind of disagree almost everything you said. Us, tier 1 players, have so many team combos. It takes about 15-24 secs to win an explore 12 battle, so it is easy to upgrade everything to gold elite. I suggest you come up here and learn the tricks we use.

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How do you figure?

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Probably because no one on Xbox has a higher team score?

Easy enough to guess-timate, and he did make a post with the claim that no one was able to redute with pics of their own :man_shrugging:

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for me, way to get it better is to advertise this game.

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Today, I just upgraded my 3rd kingdom to level 16. I spend too many gems on regular deeds, which might have been dumb on my part. But then, a ton of imperial deeds were popping up as well. I had to sacrifice upgrading some of my pets with gems. This was all done last year up to around March of this year. Ever since I stopped buying regular deeds, I only got 2 offers for Imperial deeds in the past 2 months. I spoke to some of the players in the top guilds for PC/mobile and they weren’t sure. I posted pics as well. But then, I am not surprised players would question me. We were in the forums years ago when I used to run a guild and we got Xathenos in an LT instead of crafting it. Everybody was furious and complained to the devs about us. I let them know we had no issues of having it taken away. Instead, the devs said oops and took it away to from LT’s. They let us keep it.

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You’re so humble. I’m amazed.

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He’s just answering your question, lay off.

Nowhere in the explanation does Master say anything even bordering on “because I’m the greatest there’s ever been and - yeah - that means better than YOU,” so maybe take the advice and ignore the tone if that’s the part that bothers you, because it’s good advice for anyone, like the OP, to follow if they want to be F2P and not have to worry about souls, the Soulforge, etc… (and why they shouldn’t ignore Arena, let alone eliminate it from the game, because getting lucky offers is how Master was able to upgrade kingdoms faster than others)

Btdubs, he’s not in my guild — he’s in a rival guild to mine. But I’m not coming to his defense because he’s my friend — I’m coming to his defense because personal attacks on his character are unwarranted and not something I enjoy seeing on the forum.

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