I see the GvG crowd has turned out in large numbers again. But the announcement has stated some pretty hard numbers here: not even 5% of the playerbase is involved in GvG. That is low, even lower than I expected which was about 10% or less. But then there are those thousands and thousands of players at the bottom of the variouis worlds who I think try FoE for a short bit, don't like it, and never return. In any case it shows that the really hardcore GvG players are a tiny if vocal minority. A minority that apparently populates an echo chamber as well, since they think they're the only active players and active spenders since everyone they talk to is into GvG. Less than 5% makes me question just how much revenue Inno is getting from these players, since it's not too hard to imagine mobile whales plunking down money on the event formats we've seen in the last 2 years or so. I also see few people have read the initial post Panacea made either. Particularly the part about how adding GvG to mobile has too many technical issues to be feasible (something Inno's said multiple times before BTW), and that there are no plans to eliminate GvG.
Is the code difficult to understand? Maybe. Coding can be kind of ideosyncratic, so there could be stuff in there that's hard to figure out. Especially if that coding came from Anwar, can't exactly ask him how that stuff works, can they?
The complexity is definitely an issue. In order to fight, you're going to need a lot of units, which is most likely going to come from an Alcatraz. Then it helps to have attack boosting GBs to increase the damage you do while lowering your losses. That's already a big investment for a new player. Then GvG guilds like to have members who have GBs that boost GvG performance like the St. Basil's Cathedral, Deal Castle, and Observatory. So it takes a bit to build a city that can effectively participate in GvG. Or you go into goods farming for the guild, but that takes a lot of effort for little personal gain.
What strategy is involved in hitting the auto button over and over again? There may be some strategy invovled in deciding what sectors to take, but from what I see, GvG play is getting pretty stagnant. Case in point: I took a few sectors on one of the maps a little over a month ago. Most of those were taken back by the guild that had them originally, but one of the sectors, which was on the landing zone no less, and to which I added no defending armies, stayed in our hands until about 4 days ago from what I can tell. If that's not stagnant I don't know what is. GvG is pretty much the same dozen or so guilds parked on maps moving less than the Western Front in WWI, with some of the guilds holding down territory used for point farming. I don't pay a lot of attention to guild politics, but my understanding that at least on Jaims, GvG right now is mostly two different groups of guilds, the first group involving maybe 6-10 guilds in an informal alliance holding down most of the maps which go nowhere, with the other side being a few guilds who object to this trying to make a dent in said alliance and not really getting anywhere with it. There's nothing dynamic or exciting about it. Guilds shouldn't be able to lock down the maps like they do, and I doubt the point farming is really in the spirit of GvG's original aims. And then there's the ghosting crap.
Lack of mobile play is definitely an issue, for a while there guilds invovled in GvG didn't want mobile players who couldn't participate, and I think there's still a bit of that. But that seems to be waning a bit, probably given how much FoE is growing in mobile, GvG simply is losing its relevance. The guild I'm currently involved in is a core of mobile players who wanted to engage in strong GE competition since they couldn't build the guild up through GvG. What GvG we do is basically me and one or two other players sniping sectors here and there when we feel like it. I don't feel any great enthusiasm for it.
While it's good to see that Inno is looking to shore up problems with the code to make things more stable, I think that the time may come to retire GvG entirely. If mobile GvG is off the table, and mobile is where the game is growing, then cutting a feature with waning participation makes sense. That will depend on how exactly this battleground feature fares though. I think Inno isn't planning to remove GvG for now to see what sort of reception battlegrounds will get, and if battlegrounds can replace GvG maybe they'll remove it. If battlegrounds fails, well, then they'll have to go back to GvG to see what to do with it.
I don't know how well battlegrounds will work. For one, I was looking forward to Settlements, but found them to be disappointing. So I don't know if this will disappoint me as well. On the surface, it looks like the fight/negotiate structure from GE will be combined with some GvG elements here, but until I actually use the feature, I can't really judge it. Avoiding the problem with everyone jumping on GvG at recalc and slowing down the servers is something that should definitely be avoided here.
I'm also wondering about how guilds will be matched up in these leagues. GE just matches things up by the number of people who are in a guild, but that might not be adequate here. I think level will have to be taken into account, since a top 10 guild matched up with a bunch of weaker guilds can probably just roll all over them. Of course, experienced players with powerful cities can make a new guild and stomp over the little guys easily even if things are matched with guild level, but if those new powerful guilds can quickly climb up a ranking ladder to where they'll face challenges worthy of them, maybe it won't be too bad.
Attrition seems like a way avoid the problem that GvG has with no limits, people pretty much keep fighting until they run out of units. That ties into another problem with GvG, how the active GvG players can easily dominate the PvP towers while non-GvG players are limited to only their neighbors once a day, and up to 64 GE fights a week, assuming the guild opens the whole GE map. The province buildings look like they could address the current GvG problem of how post-FE goods aren't needed much by a guild, though there's the potential problem of guilds with lots of big Arcs being able to dominate things here.
