Spellstone News — March 9, 2017
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hello everyone!
Exciting news to share with you today! As you may have guessed from the title, we made some exciting changes to the upcoming Guild War.
Overview
Guild Wars are being changed from 5 day events to 4 day events. The first day will be a Guild War Placement event. This will be a Guild Clash style event with the end rankings being the starting rank for your Guild War matches. The next three days of the event will be Guild Wars as normal, but with much tighter matchmaking that is helped along by the Placement Guild Clash. Final ranking in the event will be based on Victory Points that are earned at the end of each war based on your ranking at the end of the war. This makes the war similar to a “King of the Hill” style event where the longer you stay on top the more points you accumulate.
Guild War Placement [1 Day]
So what is the placement event exactly? Guild War Placements are a Guild Clash style event where guild members earn stars for their guild. These will work identical to a Guild Clash except for a few key differences.
- The event lasts 24 hours.
- All players start with 30 battles.
- Battles do not recharge over time.You will face tougher opponents earlier on.
At the end of this 24 hour event, the rankings will determine your starting Matching Points in the Guild War. It is important that you do well in the Guild Clash because you will begin earning Victory Points right away in the Guild War, explained in more detail below.
The goal of the Placement event is to quickly get guilds into reasonably accurate Matching positions, skipping the early matchmaking that previous wars had which lead to a lot of very one-sided matches.
Guild War [3 Days]
The mechanics of the individual matches are going to be the same as they are now. Two guilds are matched for an 8 hour war where they attack each other for dominance in points. Our matchmaking is going to be much tighter than it has been in the past though, as our goal is to deliver meaningful high intensity battles for every match. First place will fight second place, third place will fight fourth place, etc. We’ve also reduced the length of the main War period from 5 days to 3 days, meaning that instead of a total of 15 battles you only get 9. This is offset by the fact that all 9 of these matches will be important for your guild, where in the past the first few days of the event were a slow climb with many wars being extremely one sided.
So here are some of the key differences for the 3 day Guild War:
- 3 Days (9 Battles) instead of 5 Days (15 Battles)
- Tight Matchmaking. 1st place always plays 2nd place, 3rd vs. 4th, etc.
- Removed the limitations on guilds having the same matches in a short period of time.
- Players will no longer face the same enemy deck more than once within one match unless the enemy guild has less than 10 members.
At the end of each match your new ranking will be calculated and your guild will earn a number of Victory Points based on your new Matching Ranking. At the end of the Guild War event rewards will be given based on your Victory Points and NOT your final standings for matchmaking.
What are Victory Points?Victory Points are a new way to rank guilds. At the end of each match, guilds gain Victory Points based on their new standings. The higher your rank, the more Victory Points your guild gains. This means the longer you stay at a higher rank, the more Points you will earn and the better your final ranking.
The old point system that determined both matchmaking and ranking still exists and is still used to determine matchmaking. These points are now known as Matching Points.
Why Victory Points instead of Ranking?
We felt that there was a lot of importance put on the final days of the event where a guild could be knocked down multiple rankings in the final war when they had been on average much higher for the majority of the event. We felt that this was an inaccurate way to rank guilds, and we wanted a system that would reward guilds for doing well throughout the entire event and not just on the last day or two.