Guild vs Guild Improvements Update

[DeletedUser104881]

Hey everyone,

First up, we wanted to thank you once again for taking the time to continue to contribute your feedback on the upcoming changes to Forge of Empires, especially in relation to Guild Battlegrounds. You will remember that during the announcement of the Guild Battlegrounds here, we stated that we'd be putting some effort into improving Guild vs. Guild (GvG) as well. We'd like to keep you updated on what we're planning to do, as we're about to get started on implementing the following improvements, and would love to hear some community insight into if you feel these additions address some of the fundamental issues GvG faces.

Additional Recalculation Timers
Probably the biggest change we plan to implement is that we're going to change the daily calculation to a 4-hourly calculation. Within this the Guild Power, Guild Ranking, GvG Support Pool bonus and sector protection will be recalculated. However, Guild Level, HQ relocation and GvG Sector freedom grants will remain on a 24-hour timer.

With this we hope to improve the issues we have with lag around the recalculations, as well as increase the GvG participation by opening accessibility of the feature not only to those who are available during the recalculation time each day.

Removal of Bronze Age Units
We will no longer allow the usage of bronze age units to be used on the All Age Map in GvG. With this, we hope to address the usage of Spear fighters in GvG and push the feature towards a much fairer and competitive experience when battling for a sector.

Reduce Point Farming Profitability
To combat farming ranking points with Champions, once a sector is freed, all units that were placed there will be replaced with random, NPC units of the sector's age. In the All Age Map, the units will be replaced with units from the highest age.

Confirmation Checkboxes
To improve the overall user experience and enable people to quickly place siege and defensive armies, we'll add a "never see this again" checkbox. This also makes the overall experience more consistent with other aspects of Forge of Empires and gives you the benefit of being able to interact with GvG faster without having to spend time needlessly clicking away message windows.

Camera Focus
Another small tweak we want to make to the user experience is the camera focus. When entering the GvG window, the camera will now automatically be centered on the sector that you last interacted with during your current session.

Bug Fixes
Finally, we plan to address several bug fixes specifically impacting GvG, to improve the quality of the feature. These bugfixes will be detailed in future changelogs.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback, so please leave any comments or concerns in this thread. We're hoping with your help, we can shape these improvements to achieve an overall better experience for all who participate in GvG.

Many thanks,

Your Forge of Empires Team

 

[Deleted member 109369]

Hello Kings and Queens,

We wanted to give you all an update to the progress we've made based on the Community's comments for the GvG changes. The Community Managers have shared your feedback with the development team, and we've started to make some adjustments to our plans to reflect the Community's opinions. The bulk of the changes are still in progress, but we wanted to keep you in the loop on where we are at after taking into consideration your feedback.

For details on what the changes are, please see above for the original post. The changes we will implement as per our original announcement are:

• Camera Focus when returning to the map
  
• Changes to the confirmation checkboxes when placing Siege and Defensive Armies
  
• Removal of Bronze Age Units from the All Age map

The main reason for going ahead with these changes as they were announced was due to no significant criticisms for these specific proposals were given. With this in mind, the listed changes above will be added to Beta shortly, and then to live markets in the upcoming weeks.

The other topics discussed in the original post, as well as any bugfixes are still in progress, so look out for more information on these, but we are taking community feedback into consideration when shaping these changes further.

As always, thank you for providing us with your invaluable input, as this helps us to shape changes and adjustments to better suit the community's needs.

Your Forge of Empires Team

 

[Deleted member 109369]

Hello Kings and Queens,

Thank you so much for all of your feedback so far on the improvements we're making to GvG. We wanted to give you a short update on where we are at with our progress. A few weeks ago we released two changes to GvG on our Beta market, randomized unit placement in released sectors, and changes to the GvG timers. On September 19th we will enable the randomized units in GvG for all markets, bringing us one step closer to our goals of improving the feature.

To give a little more detail for how this works on the All Age Map. When you release a sector, the sector will be filled with random units from the era of the released units. For example, if the sector had 5 EMA units and 3 LMA units when released, it would be replaced with 3 random LMA units, and 5 random EMA units.

The change to the GvG timers will not be enabled just yet on all markets, as we are still analyzing the impact of this change. More news on this will follow soon, so watch this space!

Please don't forget to leave any comments or concerns in this feedback thread
Thanks again,

Your Forge of Empires Team

 

[Deleted member 109369]

Hello Kings and Queens,

We want to thank you for helping us to continue to understand the impact of changing the GvG Timers to happen multiple times per day. Thank you also for taking the time to give us your impassioned feedback.

We wanted to give you an update, and final news on this specific topic (GvG timers). We enabled the change initially on Beta to gather data and feedback, to see what impact this change had on a number of different factors, like participation rate, as well as performance in general around resets. We opted to enable a secondary market in a live setting to give us a feel for how these changes would look in a live setting.

The data we've observed has mostly helped us to conclude that the change is not having the desired impact, both from a player standpoint, but also from our standpoint here on the development side. The changes have not proven to significantly improve GvG's overall performance and moreover, the timezone differences remain a major and significant issue for both us, and the game itself. Additionally, many players have expressed concerns around the 4am reset timer being wholly unrealistic, and even more so on localized markets.

With this in mind, and the results of both our analytics and community feedback we have concluded that this change doesn't achieve what we set out to do, we will revert to the 1 per 24 hour reset timer on Beta first on November 18th 2019. We will then switch back on EN at a later date once we've confirmed we don't run into any issues with the process of switching back.

In terms of what the future holds for GvG, we have made a number of changes outside of the GvG Timers changes that we will keep, and have had a positive impact on the overall performance and user experience of the feature. We will of course continue to address bugs found in GvG, but our main focus in terms of feature changes, or changes to the overall functionality of GvG will be refocused as our Development team shifts its efforts towards other upcoming features.

Once again, thank you for your patience and understanding.

Kind regards,

The Forge of Empires team

 

[Deleted member 109369]

One final update.

We will roll back the timers here on Tuesday, November 26th. I'd like to thank you all for bearing with us. This market was important to determining the path we took going forward, and our Community here responded passionately and clearly.