Discussion Guild Battlegrounds Watchtower and Siege Camp Ability Re-balance

[Owl II]

This will likely solve the problem that GBG has become a tool for self-enrichement instead of a tool for determining guild strength

To some extent, yes. But not in the way you would like, but rather the opposite: the different between the strongest and the rest will be greater
It is sad that this will not affect either the position of the guilds in the ranking or the position of the guilds in the leagues. And the beach dwellers will continue to proudly declare they play in the diamond league. That's such a bad summer...

 

[beelzebob666]

To some extent, yes. But not in the way you would like, but rather the opposite: the different between the strongest and the rest will be greater
It is sad that this will not affect either the position of the guilds in the ranking or the position of the guilds in the leagues. And the beach dwellers will continue to proudly declare they play in the diamond league. That's such a bad summer...

yeah, the ranking system also needs an overhaul, but that has been clear since 2 years... it just is not very easy to find a transparent solution for that and someone has to implement it...

my take on it: https://forum.beta.forgeofempires.com/index.php?threads/jubers-gbg-suggestions.15503/post-135500

 

[HunZ95]

that argument can very well be turned around... "if you want to play non-stop play an offline game were you are not held back by the community"

BTW: if you have time allday long you can still choose your battles and only pick the ones with low attrition, while the others have to do the battles that are available at the time they can log in

the offline game runs out of content, as well as those who play for hours also like the community, that's why they choose online games, and those who have time usually like the competitive situation. If you have 10 minutes a day, 1 offline game is enough for months.
If you choose a sectors with the lowest attrition, you will still reach the maximum in 10 minutes.

 

[HunZ95]

I reread the 30 pages and no one said that.
Once again you are ready to lie to justify your dissatisfaction.

And if you like comparisons with strategy games, without any strategy game you can't overflow everything, on the contrary you have to make concessions to get the minimum.
FOE is no longer a strategy game when it is enough to be present in the right guild at the right time to chain 1,000 fights without ever exceeding 10 of attritions. (I've experienced it before on live servers)
If Inno simply replaced the FP and Diamonds you can earn in GbG with Crowns, would you still be battling with such vigor?
Just to show that you only care about your greed and don't care about anything else, I would like Inno to put the camps back as before but replace the FPs with crowns.

They want to fight when they enter the game, with no time limit, isn't that their expectation?

Impossible 1000 battles in 1 day with 10 attritions(max in very extreme cases).Even with 100 battles, at least 4 or more will merge, because you can't continuously hit sectors with 5 camps.

replace Fp with guild prestige, whatever, then the fights would still make sense, gvg also works to this day without fp rewards, only limited both in time and for pc players.

 

[Sher55 the Hot Mess]

1) requiring a separate login for beta forum is an... interesting design decision
2) Only changing SCs and WTs is nonsense. Like planetofthehumans2 called out, the buildings all work together. Are you really suggesting that you're going to have SCs and WTs have multiplicative, capped impact and the others be additive? That would not make it through even a brainstorming session in my product group, much less to a design doc or beta testing. That proposal should have been nerfed from the second it was created.
3) The ranking system is the biggest issue. We're in a season right now where there are a bunch of folks that moved up from platinum to diamond and cant keep up. so its super slow in the top league. For other seasons we're with a bunch of competitive guilds and someone gets bumped down to platinum that shouldnt. Put limits on the number of guilds in each league as many others have suggested. These limits could be tied to percentages of "active" guilds on each server.
4) I understand why cross server battlegrounds is technically difficult or even impossible, but that would be way more interesting. Larger pool, more evenly matched guilds, you dont "know" all of the players, and people actually fight
5) If you want to get rid of farming, introduce a mechanism to encourage or force guilds to team up - cumulative scores, mechanisms to support guilds you're teamed up with, etc.
6) This low of a cap will massively reduce participation. A lot of people that are for this change are calling out the benefits of being able to spend less time. The amount of time you spend is a personal choice. If you have issues with self control, perhaps therapy is a good option instead of pushing Inno to limit everyone else based on the amount of time you want to spend on the game. Inno effectively capping the time in GBG is really confusing. You're creating a disincentive to be online for more than 10-30 mins - I'm estimating that max fights for a person that gets to 100 attrition is 300 and you can do ~15 fights a min if you're in a good flow. That would be 20 mins of activity, but buffer a bit for swapping troops as attrition gets higher. Why are you forcing that limit?
7) Perhaps most importantly, almost 70% of people in the poll attached to this thread are against this change. Will you guys act in accordance with what the majority of people want?

I second MFB!!!

 

[LastWarrior]

Again this is not a majority decision?
Did you even ask for a vote on this or just go with the moaners.
Whatever you do it will not work, so leave it as it is.
Oh and bin gvg if you want to sort anything out.

 

[Ted the huge]

This is a bad idea that won't meat the stated goa;l: (To take away an advantage that was not intended). There will still be advantages that good players will exploit.

One of the main reasons to do ge is for the personal rewards. Battlegrounds with seige camps is the same thing lots of rewards. Gvg does not have personal rewards so hardly anyone plays it. GBG will go the way of gvg if this change is made.

I think proposed changes to seige camps is bad idea. You finally enticed me to purchase diamonds with money. The seige camps were a big part of decision. Seige camps make small guilds that are good at managing fighters and goods are able to get the advantage they deserve. There are fighting guilds out there and guilds that create a lot of goods. This change will make creating goods unncecassary. This poposed change will give big guilds even more of an advantage. In ge there is an incentive to do level 4 because of personal rewards. The seige camps give the opportunity for personal reward as Well. If you take that away. There will not much incentive to do battlegrounds. If you want to make changes to buildings, I suggest you create a 3rd map with completely different buildings and maybe buildings that lose effectiveness with distance from base. Just like in real life when a long way from home there are supply chain issues.

To restate my point in gvg from a different angle. You have just 2 or 3 guilds that control the map and they split themselves into 2 or 3 other small guilds to decrease there costs when conquering sectors. With this change it will just become gvg again. You see how few people do gvg now.

Another way to state your goal is you want attrition to go up so certain players will participate less. Making a change that decreases participation just seems like a very bad idea.

 

[Lativi]

Killing the motivation of players who like to fight and who are progressing in this game, you are killing the game itself. Many people spend real money to strengthen their army and become the best competing for each other, and this is interesting ... but after such absolutely not smart decisions, it makes no sense to buy anything else and build anything. The attrition of 94 and only 200 fights - do you think that this is really interesting for advanced players who love dynamics, not farming????
You ban macros and bots because someone fights fast, but people use this to make the game more interesting, and not a boring boring swamp .. you can look at them as patriots of this game ...you should make a pilot project and let people play how they want and use whatever they want, give them freedom and see what happens...but no, you started with repressions and restrictions instead and maybe, your goal is to kill the game itself and lose a lot of good players on different servers ... perhaps you should change the management by more progressive..

 

[sirblu]

I agree with some of the posts here regarding the "testing" of this new feature. It will be difficult to really test it in Beta since the Guild make-up here is not the same as in the "LIVE" worlds. That said, The capping of the SC's at 66% I think will definately hurt the smaller Guilds - so if the purpose of this change is to balance this out it will not do the trick. The larger guilds will continue to dominate the map and the smaller Guilds will just get pushed to the outside and not be able to participate. The 0 attrition feature by having 5 SC's is most definately a help for the smaller Guilds. And, while it also benefits the lager Guilds it does help the smaller one get a foot in the door. With the 66% cap the larger guilds, especially those with larger number of members will continue to dominate the map while the smaller ones just don't have the numbers to take them on.

The main problem in GbG is that INNO constantly pits Small and Medium Guilds with less than 30 members against Guild with 50-80 members. So there is no way the smaller guilds can get a sector or two on the map. This is where the imbalance is.

Perhaps split the Diamond League into upper and lower levels and/or add a new higher level above the Diamond one and re-vamp the point system.
Now 1,000 poins is the maximum for the diamond league so any guild who has accumulated 1000 points is thrown into the Diamond league against all the others. Maybe, keep calculating the points so from say 975-5000 is lower Diamond and 5000, 10,000 is upper diamond and above 10,000 is a new Crystal level or something. This would put more space between those Guilds just coming out of Platnimum and those member heavy guilds who never leave Diamond.
And, yes of course, you will still have those small Guilds that have accumulated 10,000 or more points and have been thrown into the more advanced levels - but at least this would give them a chance to play once in a while getting there.

 

[xivarmy]

Nothing really happens, it will not be the same as before as we knew GbG, but at its curent state its ultra bad.
Did some math in my head, not sure how good it was, too tired right now, might be needed 75-80% camps support for a top player to reach 500 fights/day which is fair enough to reach 4000-5000 fights per round according on how many times You get the 75-80% reduction. This will allow others in that guild to reach 3-4k too(if they are active), not only the leader and top whales to leech the sectors each 4 hours.

All that InnoGames wanted was to reduce the things they gave to players, especially the diamonds and forge points from ping-ponging GbG and I am 80% sure they don't plan to revert this, so I want to find alternatives. )

So far what I could do was this, 136 atrition yesterday and 122 today, total 613 fights, keeping this constant will lead me to 3.3k fights at the end of the round.

Spoiler

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While I'm generally in favor of the changes, I agree that the initial state might be a bit more severe than necessary. (Though as I said earlier, I also expect that might be intentional).

*If* they're planning a broader slate of changes, it can be part of a communication strategy to first release it in an overaggressive pure-nerf state. Let people air their distaste for it. And once people are starting to run out of wind, then give back some positives. If you announce the nerf and the positives at the same time you get the same amount of venting over the negative side of the changes, and don't really get to see honest reactions to the positive side.

They could roll back the cap to a higher value while leaving things multiplicative and still have achieved the end of endless-fights.
They could add more lucrative rewards to the end of round positions to encourage winning and existing in higher leagues so teams stop avoiding 1000-diamond, and try their best.

But if they're going to do those nice things, the first thing they need to do is fix the systemic problem of allowing attrition to be made almost meaningless past the first day for a portion of the guilds in the battle. It's supposed to be the gate to limit maximum participation per player - not the 4 hour lockout (which is really to make sure you can't immediately lose all your progress). It can be possible that through development of the guild and individual you make that attrition go farther. But it cannot be endless.

 

[mcbluefire]

The majority of the people who is here, which is not the majority of the playerbase, and not even representing the whole active playerbase either.

As Juber already said - the poll is biased as long as you do not prepare a poll (via the game for example), in which every player (or at least a random selection of players) is obligated to participate.

It is just overwhelmingly likely that players that do like the change will not come to the forums (because they have no reason to complain) and therefor will not participate in the poll.

(Assumption) Assume = Makes an Ass (of) U (&) Me. I'd proffer the same of ideas presented in the forums. They are voted down "overwhelmingly" because the total player base has no idea about the new idea and don't come to vote. Seems to be a sad thing to let potentially good ideas die because a small non-representative minority vote against it.

The good or bad news is that if these changes hit live people will vote again in the live servers and Inno will likely make the same assumption that it's just the upset vocal minority. Then in time inno will know the truth as people vote with their feet (or don't).

People have been voting with their feet (uninstall button) for the last couple of years over the unneeded extra adds to this game that just made it too time consuming for them to keep playing and GbG is one of those. The 66.6% cap may help some feel like they can now spend less time in the game again but it will also anger others that they can no longer contribute & gain as they did prior to the change.

 

[xivarmy]

To some extent, yes. But not in the way you would like, but rather the opposite: the different between the strongest and the rest will be greater
It is sad that this will not affect either the position of the guilds in the ranking or the position of the guilds in the leagues. And the beach dwellers will continue to proudly declare they play in the diamond league. That's such a bad summer...

1) How are beach dwellers worse off? They had little to no benefit of sieges before. And will get about the same benefit now. i.e. they might occasionally get 2 siege support, but 2 siege support isn't much worse than it was. They might have more time to actually take a sector before it goes into lockout again - so in that way they might benefit.

2) It may affect somewhat the position of the guilds in the leagues - not because of what happens in diamond, but because of what happens in platinum to determine who goes to diamond. With an increased focus on which guild can handle the most attrition vs which guild can build lots of siege camps once they're out of the gate, it should encourage guilds that are more capable of doing their thing without buildings to be the ones that rise to be beach dwellers. One of the guilds I'm in definitely falls in the category impacted by this: we have an effectively endless treasury that lets us win platinum comfortably atm. But we are usually in the bottom half in terms of speed out of the gate in those rounds. Sometimes even being last in platinum on the first day - but winding up winning more often than not by the end. These changes may let an actually-stronger guild take the place instead and give us better matching to maybe more often get a fun, competitive round.

 

[jovada]

No, it is clear you do not know how to see the situation in general, and not just your personal small interests

You are right i don' know how to see the situation , i thought all that yelling, fake arguments, and the negative reactions was all about small personal interests

 

[Pass Go]

it sounds like Inno is getting tired of this game too .... like the current event where they took the frogger game and just changed the frogs to the knight picture. now the nerfing of GBG, which was a great addition to the game - now it will be just another aggravating waste of time, and it seems like there won't be as many people wanting to play. Maybe they want to get the longtime players off and get brand new players that will buy diamonds?

 

[TheSovereign]

Speaking solely for myself as a player, my experience after the first two days under the new 666 regime is one of depression. Not just psychologically, but economically as well. Our guild is predominantly a farming guild, but we battle competitively with other guilds almost every season. But, for me and my own player expectations of the game, I consider fps the 'currency' behind the 'economy' of my city. There are never enough fps to do everything that can be done. But, the game has a pace, the frequency of levels, the number of 1.9 positions we can take to help other players, and I can see my city grow and as it does, it becomes supportive of better performance in gbg. GBG is like my job. I go there to earn fps to build my city. I do this in three worlds, under different names and have enjoyed the play. But now, in this beta city, two days into a pay cut at my gbg job, I am already clear that, IF this change, as currently manifesting, appears at my production gbg jobs, I will definitely quit one of the cities right off the bat. The gbg job fp pay reduction simply reduces the sense of accomplishment with a satisfactory level of growth. I'm a macro-economist and what I know is that small changes in an part of a system often have massive ripple effects in the performance of the overall system. Being reduced to barely one tile's worth of fights per day at my 'job' is an effective large 'pay cut' that tells me it's clearly time to quit that job. Trouble, is, there's no other 'employer' in InnoTown. GVG is a volunteer organization, GE isn't a real job. And settlements are "peace corps volunteer work." This change has resulted, after my second day in a clear ability to see the ripple effects this has everywhere. To Inno, to paraphrase James Carville in the US Clinton White House in the '90's, I'd say, "It's the economy, stupid" Don't screw up the city economies by instituting wage and price controls in the workplace. They don't work in the RW and they won't work in the FOE city world either. They'll create the depression of boredom and apathy which, over time, may well spread to your own INNO financial statements.

I oppose the change as currently implemented... STRONGLY!

 

[Thunderdome]

Monkey Wrench meet Well Oiled Machine.

I could say "if it wasn't broke, why fix it" but in this case, it doesn't warrant the first letter of that sentence for if Inno's aim was to curb the cheats/botters from "farming sectors" for their enjoyment and exploits then they (Inno) are not really doing their jobs in curbing such.

This change pushes the small player back even further than your typical average advanced player in terms of being able to fight and reap the rewards from their hard worked efforts. Or, if they were negotiating, it will put a strain on their amount of goods available. I mean, we all have been there before, so let's get off our high horses of high attack power and defense.

For the past two days (and at 43 attrition on both) this is the number of fights I managed to take in with this change:


Imagine what the small player would go through. This would be one feature they will not be able to partake in. Congratulations Inno, you had killed part of the game. And for this, this will get a vote of "no" from me after carefully testing and considering within my own abilities and only speculating on how it would impact the small player much more.

 

[jovada]

For the past two days (and at 43 attrition on both) this is the number of fights I managed to take in with this change:

Imagine what the small player would go through. This would be one feature they will not be able to partake in. Congratulations Inno, you had killed part of the game. And for this, this will get a vote of "no" from me after carefully testing and considering within my own abilities and only speculating on how it would impact the small player much more.

I guess it is without help of any camps , and the past GbG were you able to do more fights without camps ?????? Because i really can't see what difference it made for you with this change.

 

[Thunderdome]

The first day was with camps (stated my past post on this very subject). The second day is still with SCs deployed as I did get a few 0 attrition procs (just not as many as the day before).

In the times before this travesty, I was able to get between 250 to 300 within those two days (because I would get more fights with low attrition when it procs).

 

[jovada]

The first day was with camps (stated my past post on this very subject). The second day is still with SCs deployed as I did get a few 0 attrition procs (just not as many as the day before).

In the times before this travesty, I was able to get between 250 to 300 within those two days (because I would get more fights with low attrition when it procs).

Don't take me wrong it's not a critique , but i read you can affort 43% attrition (maybe higher i don't know, but that is not important)

But is that not the real gameplay to bring up your att/def so you can affort more attrition and do more normal fights without exploiting camps and go for free rides.

 

[NandodeMC]

I think the 66.6% cap is not necessary. If a guild can have the chance on paying for more than 4 SC to attack a sector, I think they should be allowed to. If we can build for example a total of 6 SC for 80.7% reduction on a sector, then let us pay the goods (and diamonds) to build them and use them