I wanted to start a new thread to jump off of some comments on another Guild Wars post. I’m genuinely curious to hear especially from people who really like Guild Wars. What is so exciting about it? How does the global leaderboard (rankings) affect your gameplay and the overall game experience? Why is there so much overall excitement, to the point that players feel pressure, stress, anxiety, wanting to compete and do well for the sake of their guildmates?
For me personally, I actually really like PvP because it is the closest we get in the game to having a competitive interaction with a real live person (rather than the AI). PvP defense teams are the hardest battles in the game against a team with similar strength. Obviously, battles against Lv 500 troops with ridiculously high stats are ‘harder’, but they’re not challenging in the same way. The only thing that would make PvP more exciting for me is if you could be on the server live and play against the other person actually deciding as a human what to do on their turn!
So yeah, I get why it’s fun to play against the best PvP defense teams in the game with a scoring system that gives you something concrete to try to achieve. I just don’t think I understand why there is so much excitement, to the point where players feel like if they don’t do well they’re letting down their guild. And yeah, adding a staged reward system with points accumulated guild-wide (like any other weekly guild event) might add to this pressure.
I still think GW needs better rewards. Probably because I just think the game should have more and better drops in general. But that’s how the devs get you. They’re amazingly good at getting you to resign yourself to the fact that some resources take months and even years to accumulate to the point that you get the Big Shiny you want. And they’re good at making you want it! I would just like to know what it is that makes people want that Guild Wars ranking so bad, since it’s not deeds/books/diamonds/dragonite/etc.
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I would have been more into it just from a competition perspective (the ‘prestige’ of being in one of the top brackets or ranks), if it weren’t for
- (a) the extremely slow bracket progression, which even after being addressed by the dev team still wasn’t mobile enough to allow new challengers to build up unless taking over an already-established guild, and also
- (b) currently, for myself, the time commitment needed to ensure a top score (vs yeah, tbh, the lack of rewards)
The rewards haven’t been adjusted for aeons, and are a bit too top heavy for the slowness of bracket movement, imo (have always been) – too much grandfathering of rewards. (Your guild could just not play for multiple iterations of GW, and you’d still get better rewards than a mid-ranked guild fighting it’s way up.) There was a whole thread including posts from Sirrian, back in the day, about how this was essential/the best they could do, as thinning out the rewards too much didn’t feel satisfying and they couldn’t feasibly give everyone the top rewards – but I’m sure there’s a better solution, looking not just at the rewards themselves but also how you earn them and bracket movement.
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The scoring mostly makes it differ from the rest of the game. Healthy competition inside the guild and competing/progressing as a guild. Sadly as said above the way it works makes it near impossible for some guilds to gain the rank they deserve. For three years we won nearly all guild war brackets and when we got tired our bracket was somewhere around 80.
Still it was an extremely fun ride having the right kinda players in the guild.
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Guild Wars feels like a team tournament with something at stake. Newer players ask older players for advice. People openly complain about losing a battle, it given meaning by the structure of the matches. The stars flaunt their scores. After you finished kingdom quests, the rest feels like a grind. But here, at least to start, you’re actually losing battles again! There’s finally another challenge. You can see gradual progress in your win/loss ratio, especially as you move up the ranks. Finally, you’re winning every battle and being crowned the new guild paragon, but you have to defend it against the rest of your guild every month.
The progress and camaraderie are the biggest things.
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It’s the only competitive mode in game. It’s fun to see who is the top guild in wars each month. It’s also cool to see who gets paragon. I can see why some folks do not like it. Like on Xbox there is only 3 guilds that have won it in last 4 years and only 6 that have ever won it. Two of those guilds do not exist and the other one is not competitive anymore and are in bracket who knows. It’s a lot of work to win 1st and I think some guilds think it’s not but they usually do not win. For instance if you have players that cannot get 30/0 most weeks and will not stream then it’s very likely you are not playing for first.
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I have never had a chance to experience the event from that perspective! Maybe one day when I have a nearly complete troop collection and super high kingdom stats, I’ll see GW totally differently 
I was in Heavens Gate when we won it! Can’t believe it is that few of guilds that have ever won though. It makes sense, but still blows my mind at the same time
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U1, DA GOT, HG, GA, EDT have all won it at least once. The first 3 have won several times. Also U1 and GOT have always been B1 neither has ever finished below 6th place. That’s a long time to be at the top with all the players that come and go IMO.
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Agreed. Just with the turnover i have seen in the past year alone