Here is a sort of Q&A on beta with ‘The Envoy’ an FoE game designer, staff member, beta admin. I’ve consolidated multiple posts over multiple pages and designated him IGD, for Inno Game Designer. Hopefully this will help clarify the current thought around GBG a bit more. Hope you all find it helpful.
Comment: I would like a 14 day cycle instead of 10 days. 13 days of actual gameplay, and 1 day off to rest, organize a new round, evaluate on previous round.
IGD: It was our plan to have a 14 day cycle so that players can have a clear schedule. Battlegrounds would last for 10 days, and then there would be a few days of rest to let you (and your resources) recuperate and give everyone in the guild a chance to see the final results of the previous battleground!
Comment: Negotiation. I assume the goods would come from Treasury.
IGD: The negotiation mini game, as in Guild Expeditions, would require your own goods. Treasury goods are used to build province buildings. And only members with specific guild roles may build these!
Comment: Speaking of that special building. Will this automatically follow player age? Maybe it would be worth considering letting it stay the age in which it was built, and be upgradeable using Reno-kits or One-up-kit?
IGD: The new building that everyone can get and upgrade by participating in Battlegrounds will work like all the special buildings. When you build it, it will be of your age. You might have to use a One-Up-Kit or Renovation-Kit, but if you use an Upgrade-Kit (to get this building to the next level), it will automatically advance to your current age.
Comment: Troops/goods - Players struggle each week to do GE because their cities are not designed to make troops and goods. And now they will need troops and goods (they do not have) to also do GBG? Even if they understand GBG mechanics and have additional time to invest in it - many of them will be simply too poor to participate.
IGD: This is one of the reasons why we are currently looking into extending attrition to also work for negotiations. If that would be the case, then a "rich" guild member can trade some goods to the "poor" members. Then they could finish some cheap negotiations and contribute before their attrition ramps up.
Question: What you mean is that for the first 10 battles it increases by 2% after every battle, then 5% for the next 10 battles, then 20% for the 10 after? Battle 31 would have 270% att/def? Wouldn't that be a bit much? Is this confirmed?
IGD: I might be wrong, but I think I mentioned this in the last Live Q&A on Facebook:
The idea of attrition was to get low and high players on a more even playing field to ultimately make sure that the contributions of low players stay relevant! For this to work, attrition increases in a rather exponential manner.
For example, the first battles increase attrition by 2% per step, until attrition has reached a total of 10%. Then it would increase by 5% per step until it reached 50%. Then there'd be 10% steps until 100%, and ultimately it just keeps increasing by 20%.
With this system, a new player should be able to make about five battle-contributions quite safely each day. And a high player would have to stop after about 30 to 40 contributions.
Comment: That sounds great! If I understand correctly, the very first battle of a new "day" always start with ZERO attrition?
IGD: Correct, each day attrition gets back to 0%, regardless of how high you have pushed it the day before!
Comment: If the idea is to draw GvG fighters to this new feature, then it needs to be comparable in terms of numbers of fights. High players can do 100-200 fights in GvG on a good day easily, it would be great if they can do 60-80 in this new feature (meaning that a new player would be able to do 10 instead of 5.
IGD: This question heavily depends on how much time the new feature should be able to "demand" from players. What I have read throughout the forums is that some players fear that the game ultimately demands too much activity if you look at everything FoE has to offer - once Battlegrounds are released.
Allowing for even more battles would be disappointing for those players who'd rather have a GvG feature that is less demanding. So we really need to find a sweet spot!
Keep in mind that we have a large share of Mobile players and Battlegrounds will be the first large-scale GvG type feature within FoE for them. Actions that can be done quickly on browser usually take a bit more time on Mobile (due to the way you do your inputs), so if Battlegrounds would allow for the same scope of total battles as the existing GvG, it might be too demanding to do this on Mobile.
The goal of Battlegrounds is not to replicate the same feeling that GvG provides and to make all GvG players necessarily move over to the new feature. The Battlegrounds feature should have its own identity. And every player should simply pick the features that are according to his/her taste!
Question: Would there also battles with 'two waves'?
IGD: After each battle, the next army setup that you will face within Battlegrounds will be randomly selected from a pool of potential setups. Maybe a few of those setups will be two-wave battles, but we will see.
Ultimately, an unfortunate setup of defense armies should not lock out a new player who is simply not able to solve a two-wave battle.
Comment: I hope "reset" time doesn’t have too much to do with GBG. I rather like I can just simply choose when (time of day) I do a few battles! Reset time is mostly NEVER a good time for me.
For GvG it's all about reset time, one of the biggest killers of the entire concept.
IGD: The idea of the reset of attrition is that YOU decide at what time during the day you "use up" your available buffer for attrition.
Personally, I don't think it's strategically the best option to always use up all your available battles for that day right after the attrition reset was happening. In some situations, it may be even better to wait for a later time during the day to see what the enemy has done - and then strike back to be in a better position than before.
Of course, the earlier you can obtain provinces, the earlier they start generating victory points for your guild. But overall the answer shouldn't be so simple.
Let's assume this scenario:
Your guild wants to take a specific province, but you also know that another guild will push for it on that same day. You let the enemy guild take it and even let them build province buildings on it. Then after the usual conquest lock-down timer, your guild uses all they’ve got, since they "saved up" their attrition, to take that province quickly.
The other guild may have generated a few extra points for the time being, but they also built all those sweet province buildings that might now benefit YOUR guild instead, given they weren’t destroyed! The enemy was so nice to pay all those treasury goods for you!
So, like I said, the idea is to make it feel more strategical and not "too obvious". If we see that issues arise with a fixed daily reset, we can still come up with alternatives (i.e. during beta stage).
Another thing to consider about the daily reset is this, in GvG, the daily reset is such an important time because the results of one moment decide about the whole outcome. In Battlegrounds, we measure the total performance over a course of 10 days, and victory points are awarded each hour. This degree of granularity should make a single point in time less important.
But again, if we see issues arise with this (or too strong concerns from you guys), we can totally think about this aspect further. The only reason that kept me from adding something about it to the concept yet, is that it would add complexity. And if we can avoid adding unnecessary complexity, that would be great.
Question: In the Facebook Q&A, it was said, “When matching guilds each guild is given base points." How are these base points calculated? Will it ever happen a one-man guild in a diamond league end up with 80 players diamond league? or a guild with full of low age players and guild with high ranking be matched (both are in diamond league).
IGD: The league system should generally take care of this. Guilds that perform very strong consistently will work their way into the Diamond league. In this case, it doesn't matter if it's a guild that consists of 80 semi-active members or 10 "big cannons". Each league will only hold guilds of similar strength by naturally considering all factors!
In the current concept, it's all based around performance. But sure: having more members that contribute to Battlegrounds will increase the odds of getting to higher leagues.
In the FB Q&A I explained that "under the hood", we will track a specific value for each guild called "Matchmaking Rating" (MMR). This value increases the higher your guild's placement is at the end of a battleground, and it decreases when your guild is at the lower end. The further you are at either end, the stronger the adjustment. And if your guild is in the middle of the placements (i.e. you ranked #3 out of 5 guilds), there will be no adjustment. To not inflate / break this MMR value, it has an upper and lower limit. We then map the MMR value to a specific league, which is what will be visible to you in the guild overview and so on.
If players keep bringing "member count" up as an issue in this concept, we will look into possible changes so that the amount of members doesn't become too much of an advantage. But again, solutions like this will increase the complexity of the feature, something that should be avoided as much as it's feasible.
Question: It’s very easy to acquire hundreds of thousands of Iron/EMA goods. What would stop a guild from loading up with lower age players and feeding them a ton of goods? I'm hoping Bronze age players are excluded from GBG.
IGD: If we assume that we can make attrition work for negotiations as well, then these lower aged players would be affected by this soft-cap. So even they would be limited by the amount of negotiations that they can perform each day.
As for the unlocking of the feature, we are currently thinking of unlocking Battlegrounds in Iron Age or Early Middle Age, definitely not in Bronze Age.
Question: Can a guild destroy their own province buildings?
IGD: Yes, they can. For instance, to free up a slot to place a different building.
Question: Is there a concept of releasing a province?
IGD: No, provinces cannot be given up. But there should also not be a reason to do so.
Question: If a province is 99% taken and the hour is up. Will the province go back to 0 at reset and the guild is forced to take it all over again? (Trying to figure out if guilds can exploit by blocking other guilds or just exchange provinces between friends.)
IGD: Progression points towards provinces are not lost over time. The only way to lose progression is either when your guild loses all adjacent provinces (to the province you were attacking) or after another guild was faster in taking it, in which case your guild loses half of its previous claim.
Question: How will prestige points will be rewarded, and how many?
IGD: The current concept stands like this:
Guilds will gain prestige points according to the league they are in. So if they drop in league, they also lose some of their prestige, but can regain that prestige by climbing up the league ladder again. The amount you gain from being in the highest league should be similar to what guilds earn in the existing GvG while being among the best.
What we are additionally thinking of is that whenever you finish a battleground, your guild will gain a few permanent prestige points (that can never be lost), and the amount -again- depends on the league you were playing in. However, only the three highest leagues would provide these permanent points, and it would only be a very few points each battleground.
Comment: I think what we are trying to figure out is, will GVG still dominate the rankings?
IGD: Both features should be relatively on par.
However, GvG will always have a higher potential, simply because you can just aim to dominate more of the different era's maps to get even more prestige. The potential of Guild Battlegrounds in terms of prestige will be rather hard-capped.