I love GbG. I've played and helped strategize every round from the first. My guild began in silver and we are steadily in diamond now - and have been since March. We have a 24/7 operation to keep things running, invested heavily in our members to increase strength and to boost our treasury. GbG really put our guild on the map, because while most guilds were still complaining that it was just a drain on resources, we used GbG to skyrocket our guild's growth.
Despite all this, I do have some concerns about GbG and I do agree that there are some problems with it. In the beginning, the matchups did seem fair and reasonable. We really had to work hard to move up. For the past several months though, there has been a gradual increase in the number of diamond guilds every round, but also in the number of 1000 point guilds. And if you play GbG as much as I do, you will know that there can be a VAST range in actual guild strength between all the guilds at 1000 MMR.
For example, our guild is still no match at all for the top two guilds in our world. We keep trying but the gap to overcome is *huge*. Their top players -700 million to 1 billion+ points with lvl 150+ GBs- vs our top player, about 140 million. We still do well in spite of it, and will keep working. However, then you have these incredibly weak guilds that turn up in the rounds who barely make it out of their HQs, where the gap in strength is so ridiculously out of whack between them and these behemoths that it makes no sense whatsoever. What ends up happening is they form a sort of buffer where there is no chance whatsoever that we can lose... we will remain 1000 MMR even if we play blindfolded. What's the fun in that? And how is it fair for the top guilds who end up bored out of their minds, for the bottom guilds who do nothing for 11 days and for us caught in the middle, neither moving up nor down?
A lot of guilds in my world are getting tired of GbG, because aside from individual rewards, there is no longer really a point to it. I feel like all of the limelight for what makes competition exciting and worthwhile has been drowned out. For starters, who ever heard of a twenty-four 1000 point tie in a competitive game or sport? Why are there not tie breakers to actually determine who actually played the better game? Prestige ranking does not work, because the ranking is still dominated by points earned in GvG, whereas the GbG plateau does nothing for a guild at 1000.
There was a point where my guild excelled to the point of being the 3rd or 4th strongest GbG guild in our world. This was before everyone hit the 1000 point plateau over and over. And who knew about it? Nobody. Why couldn't there be a scoreboard of some sort to show off how all the guilds are doing overall? Maybe show some kind of ranking points for vanity, but keep the cap for the sake of matchups.
My point is simply this - most guilds have stopped playing competitively, because all of the joys of competition simply do not exist. No special ranking, no top score, no big prize. Nothing to brag about. As I said in the beginning, I love GbG, but surely it wouldn't take much to fix some of these issues to at least make it competitive again and allow guilds to brag a little?