I noticed problem with Guild Battlegrounds and which is pretty complex since it is not purely technical issue. I play in a second tier guild, meaning that we easily advance to diamond league, but there we usually can't leave beach because of 2, rarely 3 powerful guilds. It is now common that this powerful guilds ask to play "friendly" which means not building traps nor destroying Siege Camps. And the situation on Battlegrounds looks like that the 2 guilds dominate taking sectors from each other so quickly that it is almost impossible to compete with them. It is not the problem itself, because they are strong and they can do whatever they want. But the purpose of the 2 guilds is not to compete with each other but synchronize taking sectors just to maximize Forge Pionts output with minimum diamond and resources investment. Sadly Guild Battlegrounds became Forge Points making machine, not a place for competition as I believed it was intended to be.
This is possible because of several reasons:
- you can earn a lot FPs (1k or even more daile if you have time) just with Alcatraz, Zeus, Catedral and Castel,
- prizes for winning season are worthless in comparison to available FPs output. It is better to cooperate with other guild than trying to be the best,
- it is too easy to advance from Platinum to Diamond League. Just 1-2 wins after falling to Platinum and you compete again with the best guilds on server which potential is overwhelming.
I play on polish server where I spend a lot of time on the Battlegrounds since its launch and I see that things are going wrong way. At the begining it worked nice, but recently it looks like this: one "rich" season where we easily beat every guild in Platinum and gain a lot of loot. And then we have 2 weeks of holidays, because we can only watch 2 powerful guilds farming FPs. Then we can play again which usually means that we dominate ruining fun to others.
Finally I think there are several solutions. For example working with rewards, so that winning would be profitable and the prize would be worth effort. Another example is to decrease MMR points gained or lost during single season so competing guilds matching would be more balanced. Or even maybe the MMR should be biased so that only 3 guilds get positive MMR. Reaching the top should be rather difficult like in other games like LoL. Maybe adding additional League with even higher FP output would be better, but with only one guild getting positive MMR once in it. Just to create thing worth fighting for. Now fighting for the first place is just waste of resources.