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Guild Battlegrounds Update

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DeletedUser4770

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Hello Queens and Kings,

Our sincere apologies for being slightly late on this one but it's for good reason.

The feedback and considerations that we have received from every community have been phenomenal. The level of passion and commitment that you all show to Forge of Empires always humbles us, and the level of detail and thought that has gone into feedback and suggestions has taken us a little longer than we anticipated to sort through. From all of us here in Forge of Empires, thank you!

Before we start to give you all a further update one very important note to one of your most named concerns: We won’t remove GvG. Please don’t worry about that.

Okay, now back to your feedback and ”things we considered”

The feature should allow small and big guilds to compete fairly against one another.

There have been different suggestions around this topic and we consider the following way the most valuable path: Managing a big guild successfully takes a lot of effort and skill and Battlegrounds should reward going for this extra mile. This means that the more members a guild has, the more likely it is for them to get into higher leagues. Also, thanks to the league system, guilds will only fight against guilds of the same strength, so smaller guilds will fight against other small guilds.

Allow individual guild members to decide if they want to participate in the Guild Battlegrounds.

We feel like this inhibits the accessibility of the feature, if a member misses the window to participate then we'd be blocking them from the battlegrounds for up to 14 days, which is not desirable. Conversely, if a guild has several members who can sign up on behalf of the guild, then all guild members can participate at will. All guilds will be able to compete with one another, regardless of guild size.

Attrition should count for negotiations too.

Thank you very much for that one, we absolutely agree and we'll apply levels of attrition to both negotiations and battles.

Attrition reset should not be fixed, but rather decrease over time, to avoid issues similar to the GvG daily calculation.

Currently we don’t foresee any similar problems. We are designing the feature from scratch, based on our latest standards. That means we are very confident to provide the technical structure that is needed for this feature. If the worry is due to only having activity around the time of the reset, this is strategic. You may want other guilds to do their actions first, so that you can counter them later. However, we will observe the behavior on beta and see if we need to make changes to this system.

Random goods for buildings could be a problem for many guilds.

We believe that as costs are randomized there will always be something that guilds can build; having looked at guild inventories, we've seen that a lot of guilds have a lot of goods from a lot of eras so we're not anticipating this to be a problem. It should also help bring relevance to the goods of lower level eras for higher level users.

The amount of progression to take over a province (advancements) should be different for each league.

Once again, thanks for the feedback, we had a mechanic like this in mind and your feedback has helped us to settle on it. The different amount of advancements required per league will make sure that the pacing (how often provinces change owners) will feel roughly the same throughout all leagues.

The support pool bonus should have a function for this feature.

We'd prefer to keep it separate, as GvG and Guild Battlegrounds are very different features we don't want to mix up bonuses for them. However, we'll see what we can do in the future in terms of applying certain bonuses to the Guild Battlegrounds feature.

Things we want to look at for later

Add an alliance System

An amazing idea, however for the initial version we cannot add this, but it could be an interesting addition later on.

Contribution tables for guild members

This is also a good idea and we want to add it, possibly later on, to the feature.

Things we rejected

Being able to attack only sectors adjacent to your unprotected sectors would get boring. You should include something similar to HQ move in GvG so guild can progress a bit further at once. And also it could lead to possibility of developing different strategies than just spreading from one point as much as possible.

We're designing the map in a way that this will not become an issue, since all users start in the lower value provinces on the outer ring and try to move inwards, there will always be many available options to spread out (both easy and hard).

Allow guilds to choose their starting location.

This shouldn't be necessary as we're designing the map in such a way that we're sure we can provide a fair base for each round. All guilds will have a fair and equally distributed starting location.

Add cross-world leagues

Definitely an interesting thing to consider for the future... Unfortunately this would be a huge technical challenge; Guild Expedition leagues only communicate points across servers which is not a lot of data. Having real-time PvP data sent across multiple servers, trying to keep everything in sync would increase the scope of the feature incredibly.

Add fog of war and scouts

There's already quite a bit of strategic uncertainty in the feature. We even discussed this point internally, but stepped away from it on the initial version we want to deliver.

There's a worry that you will have to be online 24/7 to protect provinces, etc

Players actions are soft-capped via attrition, once that cap is reached then you cannot perform anymore actions, on that day, without significant cost in units or goods, therefore there's no reason to "watch" the battlegrounds anymore. It's also performance over a battleground period that counts, not the actions of a single day.


What happens next?

Well, in short, we'll develop the feature.

We'll start the development of Guild Battlegrounds very soon, with the aim of releasing it on our Beta server towards the end of this year. It will require a longer testing period than normal there to make sure that we get everything right for the live release. In the meantime, however, we will share regular updates with you on our progress and some sneak peaks into the feature. Once we get closer to the beta release date, we'll send out more information on how you can enjoy the feature on the beta server.

Of course, please feel free to discuss the mentioned topics in this thread!

Sincerely yours,

Your Forge of Empires Team
 
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