Dev comments: Guild Battlegrounds FAQ and update

Earlier this year, we announced we'd look into updating the Guild Battlegrounds. We're happy to report that our team has started their work on the second iteration of the feature! While we can't give you an ETA for its arrival yet, we've prepared this post to cover frequently asked questions and tease the upcoming update.
Below, you will find the list of common comments and concerns about Guild Battlegrounds, along with answers from our development team.

Important! The information we share here is based on the current plan for the update. However, the new data and technical limitations found in the development process might force us to change the original plan, rendering the information below no longer actual, partially, or fully. Nevertheless, we do our best to avoid this and deliver the highest-quality update with the resources at our disposal.

Let's start with the...

Matchmaking

Comment: The current matchmaking system often leads to a mismatch in Guild opponents' power. As a result, some Guilds may not ever encounter a stronger opponent, leading to an easier Championship victory. At the same time, weaker Guilds often get matched with much stronger ones, leading to frustration due to power imbalance and difficulties in achieving a satisfying experience.

Answer: We're investigating the matchmaking mechanic and possible changes for the upcoming update. In particular, we are analyzing the amount of League Points gained and lost, as well as as the number of Guilds competing on a given GBG, to see how this mechanic can be improved for better matchmaking.

A potential change would be adjusting the number of League Points required to place in top Leagues, Diamond specifically. By decreasing the number of "buffer" points in between Leagues we could make the Diamond League more competitive, thus ensuring more Guilds are available for matches in lower Leagues. This way, we aim to make the feature more gratifying for players who experience the competition as too challenging.

However, the complete elimination of the competition is not our goal. We still aim for the Guild Battleground to remain a highly competitive feature. So even in an adjusted matchmaking system, your Guild could get matched to a stronger Guild. Our desire as game developers is to push players to grow, improve their stats, find more Guildmates to play with and improve their GBG results this way.

Guided by this logic, we're investigating the possibilities of making the competition more gratifying for top Guilds. One way to go about it is introducing a special mode for Diamond League Guilds where the most formidable opponents could put all their strength into securing a spot in the rankings while remaining in the Diamond League. But more on that when the update comes!

Finally, to address the general repetitiveness in matchmaking, we are looking to introduce an avoidance mechanic that would avoid matching the same Guilds to each other too often. It is important to note that avoidance doesn't equal elimination, so it will still be possible to get matched to the same opponent, especially on smaller worlds, which brings us to the next point.

Comment: The challenges of the matchmaking combined with the Guild Battlegrounds being world-based and the limited selection of Guilds create a situation where some worlds/servers do not have enough players to compete with.

Answer: An obvious approach to improving matchmaking would be increasing the number of Guilds available, which can be aided by decreasing the maximum allowed Guild size and/or making GBG available on a cross-world basis. We encounter both suggestions often and would like to clarify that neither of those changes is planned for now.

The decrease of the max. Guild size would pose multiple technical challenges, such as changed player states, and many Guilds being well over the limit already. At this point, such an undertaking falls outside of our scope. A similar thing can be said about the cross-world GBG: it is, unfortunately, not possible within an acceptable scope from a technical perspective.

Attrition

Comment: The way attrition is calculated is random and some players do not find the current system beneficial enough despite having invested in attrition-reducing buildings.

Answer: Up until the last GBG update, the attrition reduction mechanics would allow for a full attrition elimination — a situation that posed challenges in competition and fairness. So we adjusted this mechanic last year to introduce a more flexible limitation that would help avoid battle farming.

Now, GBG fortifications provide a chance to reduce attrition which can go as high as 80%. This means all players will face some attrition even if they have the highest reduction bonus. The reduction being based on chance also means that you may not get the reduction you hoped for, which may lead to a feeling that it does not work as expected. The reason why you may not always get the highest reduction lies purely in the chance-based mechanic.

Attrition adjustments are not being considered for the upcoming update. The current state creates an acceptable balance between managing the number of battles players can do and making more battles available to less competitive and active players. Of course, we understand that any system can be further improved, so we will continue to monitor both the player feedback and data.

We have also prepared a Knowledgebase article that explains the attrition mechanic separately. Click here to view it. 

Provinces and building

Comment: The difference between Victory Points generated by provinces and the number of available fortifications on them may create an unfair disadvantage or advantage depending on where a Guild is placed on the Map.

Answer: While we can't mention any specifics yet, we are happy to say we're considering the overall balancing of the feature for the upcoming update. At this point though, it is hard to say how exactly the update will look like and whether it will make it into the upcoming release.

Comment: The building costs for fortifications feel imbalanced to players at times, or the Goods may be challenging to acquire due to Era difference and the general availability of Goods in a Guild. 

Answer: The cost of the fortifications is a part of the overall balancing topic mentioned above as well. We are considering the possibility of scaling the number of required Goods based on a League, to make fortifications more accessible to lower Leagues. 

The lag

Comment: Guild Battlegrounds are laggy, so smooth and fast battles are not always possible .

Answer: We are aware your reports about the GBG performance issues, and our team is carefully investigating them. The investigation is ongoing, so the team is yet to determine the next steps. If you experience the lags yourself and would like to make a report, we encourage you to do so in detail, providing also information about your internet connection, the time of battles, etc. 

That being said, GBGs in general require lots of data to be processed, and we are gradually improving the process of managing it, especially at the starting times. As a part of that, we've recently started spacing out the GBG instances (sets of data) over a longer timeframe. While this may help ease the load at the start of the feature, unfortunately, it will not have any effect on the feature performance overall, hence why we continue exploring our options .


We hope this post helps address some of your burning questions and that you're as excited as we are about the Guild Battlegrounds update we're preparing!

As always, join the conversation with other players on our official Discord server to discuss this post and speculate about what else may come in the update!


Sincerely,
Your Forge of Empires Team

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