What bothers me the most about Gems of War is the lack of transparency and the outright deception that the game has towards its player base. There is nothing in the game that even comes close to this as Tower of Doom. Let’s take a look. Here’s the in-game ‘Overview’:
On the ‘Fight’ page we see rotating lines of information at the bottom:
In each room is the same description:
In fact, even in rooms you’ve already cleared on that floor, you get the same description. It doesn’t even tell you what scroll you received after you pass the victory screen. The ‘Rewards’ screen is the only place it tells you what scroll you got. If you miss it, you don’t know.
Information from the Doom room:
On the Rewards tab:
Wait a minute… earn points by defeating rooms? That’s just false, completely false. Points are earned for each defeated doom, not by defeating rooms. You don’t get any points for just defeating rooms. You get points in two ways: defeating a Doom room, and getting a Luck scroll (which adds +2 points to the Guild’s Doom total). There is no other way to earn points.
Telling players to defeat rooms to earn points is LYING.
Finally on the Guild page:
I don’t see ANYWHERE in any of these tabs the following information:
- A list of the scrolls you can encounter that aren’t covered elsewhere (Haste, Luck, and Power scrolls). The Fireball and Heroism scrolls are mentioned, and the Boon scrolls are mentioned. But nothing is mentioned about the others. The only place you can read about them is when they show up as rewards from defeating a room and you mouse over it.
- There is no mention anywhere that all of the scrolls are exactly the same for each player in the guild. There is nothing to indicate that if I get a Luck scroll in Room 2 on Floor 5, I should tell all my guild members “Hey, if you start on Room 4 and get the Unlock scroll, don’t just skip to the Doom, also clear room 2 for the Luck scroll.” This has a huge implication, because some players literally just pick random rooms or start on room 2 (which is actually room 1, I never understood why it starts with 2), and they only clear rooms until they get to the unlock.
- There is no information on the fact that it requires more and more Boons to keep getting bonuses to Life/Armor/Attack/Magic and that generally speaking, you’ll actually get MORE Dooms if you just skip all the boons. In fact, the only people who should be getting Boons are the scouters and people clearing dooms past level 25.
- There is no information about the fact that forge scrolls stop dropping from the doom past level 25 and that random scrolls replace the forge scrolls.
Gems of War deceives players because it’s hoping they spend more gems to make up for progress. “Oh, I didn’t know there was a path to follow, so I cleared all the rooms, and now I don’t have enough sigils to keep up, so I’ll spend gems to get more sigils… but I don’t have anymore gems, so I’ll buy them so my guild doesn’t think I’m not participating.”
Here’s what a coordinated team effort looks like:
On the next page though, we have two new players in our guild who don’t know how Tower of Doom works:
Notice the top person has more Boons than Dooms and the second person almost the same? And they were not scouting. They were just doing the event like the game tells them to.
The game doesn’t say “Hey, you might want to coordinate with your guild – someone may have already cleared this room and it’s not something that’s important to your guild’s total doom count!”
And that total doom count is what determines the rewards everyone gets. Tower of Doom is one of the very few events that everyone in the guild gets the same reward from the placement on the leaderboard.
And one of the biggest problems is that uncoordinated guilds are heavily punished, because they spend vastly more gems than they need to and get almost no rewards for it.
| Rank | # of Gems | Total Guild Gems | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 500 | 15000 | 6000 |
| 2 | 300 | 9000 | 3000 |
| 3 | 200 | 6000 | 3000 |
| 4-6 | 100 | 3000 | 750 |
| 7-10 | 75 | 2250 | 750 |
| 11-20 | 50 | 1500 | 750 |
| 21-50 | 25 | 750 | 450 |
| 51-100 | 10 | 300 | 300 |
If your guild is ranked 51, that means everyone is going to get 10 gems at the end. That’s 300 gems handed out. The next reward is 25 gems, which is 750 total gems handed out. That’s 450 more. If ONE person in the guild buys Tier 7 for 500 gems (20 sigils) and their 20 sigils gets enough dooms to get the guild up to rank 50, then essentially that player is trading 500 gems in and redistributing 15 of them to everyone.
I always caution my guildmates against spending gems to get a higher guild rank, because if lots of players do it, we’re actually lose gems overall. Imagine if two players need to buy Tier 7 to get from 51 to 50? That’s 1000 gems spent just for a bonus of 450. So as a guild we actually lose 550 gems.
But that’s where Gems of War and the devs are just shady, because right from the start, if you have guild members who don’t know any better who are clearing every room instead of following a path, you’re automatically going to have less dooms than another guild that has everyone following a path. And now your guild is behind in ranks, and players spend gems to “catch up” and earn “more rewards” except they are spending more than they’re getting back. It’s just a huge con.
And it’s certainly not limited to Tower of Doom. Look at Delves and Treasure Hoard upgrading. My god. Imagine the amount of gold WASTED by players who don’t know any better who are trying to level up their hoard using Coin Purses and Gold Rings. News flash: you can end up wasting hundreds of thousands of gold trying to level up if you do it inefficiently. Use this website instead: Hoard Master
Input your treasure and where you’re starting from and it will tell you the optimal path to upgrading, saving you tens, hundreds of thousands of gold. Example:
vs:
