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Guild Battlegrounds Arrival Feedback

  • Thread starter DeletedUser4770
  • Start date

Ryker.

New Member
Oh dear god, what a mess the initial match-ups will be.

Considering how much of an issue that has been on Beta, why didn't they just start everyone in Gold or Copper on an equal footing and let things work themselves out? Now we are going to be hearing complaint after complaint about how unfair it is that X guild got promoted even though we have defeated them every round so far, and they get more rewards, more prestige for their guild giving them a higher ranking, etc, etc.

And that unfairness (whether real or perceived) makes people frustrated and not want to play. Why put up artificial impediments that can otherwise be avoided? Do the devs really want players to become discouraged and not play, making this no better than GvG?

It's been 50 days on Beta, and the guild leagues aren't even close to sorting themselves out. How many months of this are we going to have to put up with and listen to?

Also, I hope that the devs make the live version not show that a guild has won rewards if the guild didn't qualify to receive rewards. That is going to flood the forums for a long time as well if they didn't, as players complain that it isn't fair that a guild got almost as much reward as they did for doing nothing (while not realizing that the guild that did nothing got nothing).

As an aside, it would be nice to see the number of advances needed for a guild to qualify for rewards be added to that section of the FAQ (40 I believe it is now).

If not, I guess Agent will have himself a lot of fun...
GBG should be interworld like GE. You can't win unless several of your guild members have 9-digit points. You can't even get off the beach against those guilds, so why play it.
 

Emberguard

Well-Known Member
GBG should be interworld like GE. You can't win unless several of your guild members have 9-digit points. You can't even get off the beach against those guilds, so why play it.
Somehow I don think inter-world would change that as GE is randomised based on size but GBG is performance based. It may even make it harder then it is now. You’d pitch old worlds that have been around since Day 1 against guilds on worlds that have only been around for one or two years.

I wouldn’t mind seeing it inter-world, I just don’t think it’d make it easier
 
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Salsuero

Well-Known Member
Not possible. If it were, it would be the same as GE: you compete against yourself.

I think that's the point he's making... that it would be easier to "cheat" for rewards... kind of like a GBg push guild. Would only be for a week and a half, but that's probably something that would fall under the "abuse" category if it did.
 
Has anyone brought up the fact that GBG is ridiculously unfair to those who have built their city on trading? I have both types and I'm thinking about just getting rid of my trading city because it's a YYYYUUUUUGGGGGEEEEE disadvantage in GBG.

You've pretty much killed anyone who wants to make a trading city and participate in GBG.

Even if I use diamonds nonstop it's still massively slower than fighting. Which is very strange because isn't the whole point of spending diamonds to do things faster than people who don't spend diamonds?

The first thing that should be done is getting rid of the 6 good negotiation. It's not uncommon to fail 5 or 6 times in a row even for good negotiators. Inno still would get a ton of diamonds because failures for even the 5 good negotiations are very common (I don't know the exact math but I'd say it's at least 30% of the time I fail on a 5 item negotiation).

I'd even say they should toy with the idea on beta of having negotiations worth 3.
 

Salsuero

Well-Known Member
You've pretty much killed anyone who wants to make a trading city and participate in GBG.

I disagree. Negotiations are perfectly useful in GBg as they provide DOUBLE the results for the same attrition as battles do. They might be more challenging or costly, but they are worth more to the guild individually compared to fights in terms of taking territories. There's nothing in this game that suggests that all efforts should pay out equally. Battles are a part of this game. Guild BATTLEgrounds could have only involved fighting, but they chose to include a second way to participate. That's more than GvG offered and is closer to what GE offers. But GE doesn't give you twice the completed encounters when you negotiate instead of fighting. The various objectives in this game employ multiple potential avenues for success. Not all avenues can be taken if you choose a style of game play that is skewed to one side of things. That's a choice you make. The game doesn't cater to your choices alone and it shouldn't.
 

Lancer2

New Member
It's possible this has been suggested before, but I don't frequent the forums much and have no knowledge of that. With GBG having run a large number of campaigns, it is clear from the results that military guilds have come up with an unbeatable strategy that clearly is suppressing most other guilds except the big military guilds. The grapevine says many guilds and players are dropping out of GBG due to the utter futility of competing with big military guilds. What military guilds have done is seized upon two aspects of GBG characterized by the map and the feature's construct: 1) Advantage gained by early time zone players and guilds; and 2) No obligation to manage logistic supply lines as would be the case in real military expeditions. Their clever strategy is what I call: 1) early campaign blitzing and 2) salt-n-pepper province control.

In 1) those players and guilds who are up at first light in an early time zone (Eastern U.S. or earlier) can jump on the map before most players are up and about such as in the Western U.S. time zones and begin to compile a huge early victory point hourly flow that can be 2X-3X what any other guild on the map can construct. In 2) military guilds blitz the map and then scatter the provinces they own across the map including parking flags just short of conquest right next to other guilds' home provinces. From that position, military guilds can cut off all attacks by other guilds at will. I suspect they regionally organize their members to police and defend against any such attacks by other guilds. Additionally, to enhance their control of the map, military guilds then park battle flags on as many other provinces as they can with cumulative victories up to just a few battles short of capturing the province, and wait for something to happen which they can destroy by finishing their capture in a matter of a few minutes. In most cases, this "salt-n-pepper" map result includes many provinces with no traceable connection to the military guild's home province. In real military terms, those isolated military units would have to live off the land, retreat or perish. Living off the land is usually unsustainable, and those armies move out or perish as history will attest.

What I propose to re-balance GBG campaigning:
1. Applying the same logic that limits the number of FPs an individual player can accumulate to 8 (1 per hour) and 100 total before being obligated to reduce their total on hand FPs, I propose that guilds in GBG be limited to a victory point hourly flow of 30% or a lower percentage if deemed reasonable) of the total victory point hourly flow for the map in which they are campaigning. Upon reaching that percentage or exceeding it, a guild is blocked from attacking or capturing any other provinces until its victory point hourly flow is once again below 30%. Nothing in the preceding is to suggest the existing flow be stopped at any time, just capped. Two military guilds together could still capture 60% of the map's hourly victory point flow between them. However, it would stop military guilds' penchant for blocking other guilds or peppering the remaining provinces with nearly completed battle victory flags. Being blocked from attacking and capturing at the 30% cap would mean those partially conquered provinces could no longer be attacked by that guild to complete their capture, and battles fought previously might be at risk of being wasted.

2. Based upon the history of real military campaigning and real logistics management, the game algorithm should be modified to include a check that all provinces belonging to a guild are adjacent on at least one boundary such that there is a traceable line of owned adjacent provinces from the most distant provinces to the home province. If that line is broken, the affected guild will be required to re-establish the line within a time period of 48-72 game hours (whichever makes most sense to the programmers) or after the clock runs down to zero, the guild will lose control of the affected disconnected provinces and lose their victories in a disconnected province which they are campaigning in but have not yet captured. The lost provinces then revert to non-owned status and can be captured by any guild not constrained by the proposed change in 1. above or in this proposed change. Supplementary to this I would like to point out that the "logistics continuity" principle has been a part of many past high-quality military board games such as those pioneered by Avalon Hill years' ago.

Military guilds will not like the above because it will limit their ability using their current strategy to dominate a map, or split it up between two military guilds in just a matter of hours at their first light and from that point suppress all of the rest of the guilds on the map. However, I do not see how it could possibly stop a big military guild from achieving first or second place if the guild works at it. All I see as an effect is to make a GBG campaign more challenging for a big military guild in any time zone, especially an early one, by altering conditions away from what today is making GBG campaigns a cakewalk for them and a discouraging, useless endeavor for most other guilds.
 

Salsuero

Well-Known Member
The thing is... the guilds you are complaining about have an edge because they work hard to have an edge. They've grown as individuals and then grown as guilds. They are kicking ass because they've worked to become ass-kickers. While I agree that they have taken the fun out of Diamond League, we are now focusing on staying out of Diamond League. It's not exactly ideal for us, but we're not one of those guilds. So we can't be expected to compete with them. Those players deserve somewhere to go to flex their muscles just as much as we deserve somewhere to go to have fun. I think it maybe could've been better balanced, but really... anything is exploitable by a top guild.

1) those players and guilds who are up at first light in an early time zone (Eastern U.S. or earlier) can jump on the map before most players are up and about such as in the Western U.S. time zones and begin to compile a huge early victory point hourly flow that can be 2X-3X what any other guild on the map can construct.

Agreed 100%. As a west-coast player, it is annoying to wake up and find other guilds already in the center of the map. We could recruit players from places east of the Mississippi, but that's kind of specific, isn't it? We don't know where anyone is from without asking. It makes it very difficult to properly construct a guild based on talent when you have to groan at someone who lives in Alaska. I do think it's an unfair head-start.

Applying the same logic that limits the number of FPs an individual player can accumulate to 8

8? I can accumulate up to 10. You should report this bug to Inno. It shouldn't be 8.

1 per hour

1 free per hour. You can accumulate them faster under many other circumstances, so that clock is really only for the very newest of players in my opinion.

100 total before being obligated to reduce their total on hand FPs

You are only obligated to reduce them if you wish to collect more from your town's production. I routinely have upwards of 500 or more sitting in my bar waiting to be used. 100 is only the cap for collection.

I propose that guilds in GBG be limited...

You are proposing that slow maps force a strong guild into a situation where they wouldn't be able to earn personal rewards just because other guilds are slow. You're artificially penalizing individuals in a guild based on what other guilds DON'T do. That doesn't make sense to me. If you don't fight, I can't fight? Unrealistic.

the game algorithm should be modified to include a check that all provinces belonging to a guild are adjacent on at least one boundary...

This doesn't make sense either. If I want to advance forward, but someone comes in behind and cuts me off, should I lose what I've worked to gain? Why should my guild lose territory I've earned just because territory in the middle has been taken? There are up to 7 avenues of attack a guild must thwart. If all 7 guilds attack you, the likelihood of getting cut off in multiple ways from your base is inevitable. Yes, guilds do "salt and pepper" the map. But you'd penalize guilds that do not do that and simply fight linearly. Forcing me to have to move backwards to retake territories when there is a 4-hour lock on them after they are taken from me means my guild stalls out for at least 4 hours. A guild can abuse this by constantly cutting you off at different intervals preventing you from doing anything but constantly moving backwards. Like I said... everything is exploitable.
 

Salsuero

Well-Known Member
Please make it so when a guild puts up a stop sign guild members literally cannot attack that sector.

I think Inno was clear that they want to allow individuals to play GBg. If you are allowed to stop them by blocking all available sectors, how will they get rewards? This is too much control. When it first came out, you couldn't even put up those "stop signs" because they didn't exist. Inno gave us a compromise by adding them to the game the way they are. If they had wanted them to be barriers, they would've made them that way.
 

DravenOfTheStars

New Member
I think Inno was clear that they want to allow individuals to play GBg. If you are allowed to stop them by blocking all available sectors, how will they get rewards? This is too much control. When it first came out, you couldn't even put up those "stop signs" because they didn't exist. Inno gave us a compromise by adding them to the game the way they are. If they had wanted them to be barriers, they would've made them that way.
If only people could follow directions. They made GbG strategy, right? But if people can't follow directions what strategy is there? Making a stop sign literally restrict hitting a sector would help this along.
 

Kranyar the Mysterious

Well-Known Member
If only people could follow directions. They made GbG strategy, right? But if people can't follow directions what strategy is there? Making a stop sign literally restrict hitting a sector would help this along.
It's up to you to get your guild members to behave properly. Besides, some guilds I'm in don't use the stop sign for the same purpose you do. That symbol means whatever your leadership decides to have it mean, the meaning is not set in stone.
 
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