[2022] Guild Battlegrounds Watchtower and Siege Camp Ability Re-balance

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Dear Kings and Queens,
On Thursday, June 30th, the season with the rebalanced Siege Camps and Watch Towers will start.

This is the place to be if you have any questions about it or would like to discuss it with other players.
Please keep in mind that your opinion may differ from the opinions of other players, you don't have to convince each other of anything here.

Feedback provided here will no longer be forwarded. If you want, that your feedback gets forwarded, have a look in the Feedback Thread!

Thank you very much and have fun!

Sincerely,
Your Forge of Empires Team  

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We have an important update regarding a re-balance that will come into effect with the next season of Guild Battlegrounds on Beta. We have now changed the formula that determines the Watchtower and Siege Camp's ability to prevent attrition increases after adjacent provinces are conquered.

With the new season of Guild Battlegrounds, these province buildings' chances will now be calculated based on a multiplicative formula rather than additively, and will also calculate based on the number of building types already set. In addition, there will now be a limit that is capped at 66.6%.

To provide further clarification, we will use an example. In terms of Siege Camps, with each placed, they would be valued at the following (in terms of chance to avoid attrition increases):

1 Siege Camp	2 Siege Camps	3 Siege Camps	4 Siege Camps
24%	42%	56%	66.6% Cap Reached

Additionally, it is also important to note that both province buildings' will stack based on their own values (Watchtowers at 8%, and Siege Camps at 24%). These value formulas will be calculated independently, but will be added together and considered towards the overall cap. For instance, if you have 2 Siege Camps at 42.2%, and 4 Watchtowers at 28.4%, they will be added together for a total of 70.6% (but capped at 66.6%).

You may ask why we made this change. Quite simply, we believe this re-balance is necessary for the long-term sustainability and viability of the feature. We always envisioned attrition to be an important factor. Previously, these province buildings could be stacked to the extent — that when an adjacent province is conquered — guilds could effectively completely nullify the chance of receiving attrition. Stacking Siege Camps and Watchtowers, therefore, became too powerful and caused significant balancing issues between different guilds and players.

In addition, it was something often remarked upon by our communities and players, who participated in Guild Battlegrounds. We even had this same suggestion polled on different occasions, with players voting overwhelmingly for a change to the Watchtower and Siege camp ability formula.

For those very reasons, we have decided to re-balance, but to first try on Beta. We would like to try it in a live testing environment, and see full results both in terms of data and player feedback. Following that, we will make the decision on whether to implement it live.

Overall, we are very interested in your feedback on this re-balance, we ask you please get involved in the comment thread and provide your thoughts during the seasons! Please let us know what you think of the change here! if you want to discuss this change with other player, have a look here!

Sincerely,

Your Forge Team  

You still need to build enough Camps/Watchtowers to get any attrition reduction at all you know? ^^
Of course it will not be 100% reduction anymore, but 66.6% is worth the 4 Camps in my eyes.  

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Dear Kings and Queens,
On Thursday, July 14th, the second season with the rebalanced Siege Camps and Watch Towers started.

We appreciate your feedback! Please note, that in this forum, no other player can see your feedback. We will make sure to forward it to the developers!

Please write your feedback in a factual and constructive way and stay on topic.

So that we can pass your feedback on to the developers, the following points would be important to note:

• Feedback that only contains one sentence like "I can't do maths" is not helpful. Please make sure to include reasons for your opinion.
• The same goes for positive feedback. We are happy about it of course, but describing what exactly you like is always very helpful!
• Limit your feedback to the actual content. Feedback like "You should improve X" is not helpful.

If you want to discuss it with other players, please visit the Discussion Thread!

Thank you very much and have fun!

Sincerely,
Your Forge of Empires Team

Spoiler: Poll results

Round	Voters	Likes	Dislikes	Undecided
Initial Feedback and 1	466	153	319	not included yet
2	323	114	207	2
3	301	104	194	3
4	236	79	152	5
5	92	39	52	1
6	64	22	42	0
7	63	26	37	0
8	48	14	34	0
9	50	12	36	2

 

Dear Kings and Queens,

Because of recent discussions on the feedback thread, we have decided to make some changes on the way we handle feedback for this change. Please see a list of all the changes we have applied now below:

1. We have split the Feedback Thread into a Discussion Thread and a Feedback Thread.
2. We will not forward any feedback posted in the Discussion Thread. Every feedback provided there until now has of course been forwarded already.
3. The new Feedback Thread is set to "moderated", meaning you can't see the feedback others provided. Only the Forge of Empires Team can read them.
4. All comments will be set to public, once the change is done on the live servers or if it is decided to not go forward with it and it gets reverted.
5. We will close the poll on the Discussion Thread shortly and have created a new, poll in the new Feedback Thread for the second round. We will reset the vote every new season, however before doing that, will write the current results down in the first post of the feedback thread.

Now, what are the further plans with the Siege Camp and Watchtower rebalance? For now, we will have this change active for at least one additional season here on beta. Our game designer will evaluate the feedback and game data they received and act accordingly (making further changes for example). We will of course inform you, once further steps have been decided on.

Thank you for providing all your feedback and we can't wait to see your upcoming feedback!

In addition, we want to give you a small overview on the feedback we have provided by now. Please note, that this is only a small part of the feedback, but in includes the most concerns raised by you. Also, when forwarding, we have internal criteria on how "valuable" feedback is. This has been remove for this table.

Spoiler: general Feedback until now

Feedback	Mood
General feedback is very mixed, with 1/3 of players liking it and 2/3 disliking it.	So-So - Negative
The change is seen as a step in the right direction, however more adjustments were requested (especially regarding matchmaking)	Positive
The change comes too late for many players. It is a problem, that exists for a while now and led to a major imbalance. It should have been done years ago.	Negative
Not being able to do 0 attrition fights was the major discussion point. Most that gave feedback on it complained, that it is no longer possible and will harm the game.	Negative
Players wish for "positive" changes for players as well. Some ideas were increasing the rewards, removing the cap and giving more slots, making camps less expensive and other balancing changes.	-
The cap of 66.6% is seen as too low by most. It should be removed or at least adjusted to 75% or higher.	Negative
Previously, gbg felt too grindy. Now, players can calm down a bit and have no performance pressure anymore.	Positive
Activity on map has decreased. This has negative effects (map feels boring in higher leagues) but also positive ones (possible for smaller guilds to advance).	So-So

 

Thank you for voting everyone!

The results of season 2 with these changes are as follows:

• Yes: 114
• No: 207
• Undecided: 2

The poll has now been reset for season 3, please cast your vote again with your experience this season and feel free to leave any feedback.  

Dear Kings and Queens,

Since the start of this test, many questions, especially on how the test is handled arose and we want to communicate these concerns here.

Firstly, we want to point out, that we plan for this change to be tested over several seasons on beta first before we evaluate it and make possible adjustments or bring it to our live markets.
We appreciate your feedback and activity on this topic. We would like to emphasize that both game data and feedback we receive from forums and tickets are important for decision making. Unfortunately, not the whole player population of a market is represented on forum and in tickets, so supporting feedback with game data is crucial for determining our next development steps. For now we continue gathering data and your feedback and once data is sufficient, we will evaluate it and plan further steps. Until then, please keep on providing feedback, as it is crucial for the further development of Guild Battlegrounds and the whole game!
Thank you!

Your Forge of Empires Team  

Dear Kings and Queens,

It has been a while since the last update, so I wanted to inform you about what is going on and what will happen next.
Firstly, I want to thank all of you for your feedback. We know, that this is a very sensitive topic for some players, which is one reason we created a moderated feedback thread, where you could give your feedback without worrying about other players commenting on your feedback. This will stay like this until there is a resolution to the current test.
Speaking of the test: More and more players requested, that this change gets either released on live (for further testing especially) or gets removed. Sadly, none of these options can be done currently. The test will probably stay beta only for at least the rest of this year. The reason for that is, that we want to see the long term effects of this change. When a new change gets implemented, a lot want to test it out, give their feedback based on their initial thoughts and stop testing it again after the first 1-3 seasons. Of course this feedback is also very valuable, however the data received is very important too. And getting the intended data might take a while.
Now you may ask: If we need data, why don't we collect it on the live servers? The reasons are simple: We don't want to bring this change to live until we are sure it has the intended effect (which we wrote in the initial announcement). The other reason is, that starting it now on the live servers do not give the data we want. As written previously, we want long term data. Releasing it on live does not provide this data. Even if it would be tested on live for this long, we believe it would not change the result. Also, testing on live servers is not something, that general players like a lot. We are on the beta server here, testing is normal, changes are normal, on live, the situation is different. You might remember one or another change done on the live servers. And based on the feedback, many did not like them, as they could threw away plans you had, based on beta (changes to event buildings, changes in daily specials, etc.)

Thank you for reading this text and please keep on providing feedback with your experiences from Guild Battlegrounds!

Your Forge of Empires Team  

Dear Kings and Queens,

I wanted to share an update about the ongoing test of the Siege Camp and Watch Tower balancing on Guild Battlegrounds (GBG).

Thank you very much for providing valuable feedback and testing the change here on beta! We are happy to see so many dedicated players and so many different opinions. Your activity has proven yet again that GBG is a feature you like and want us to continue improving.

We share your feelings about GBG, so, among other plans, we would like to revisit GBG later this year to introduce more changes that will hopefully help us improve the feature. Because of this, we will keep the current balancing on beta and not yet release it on live markets. This way, we will not go back and forth with the changes and later can shape the whole feature to see how everything performs in a complex.

That said, I would like to emphasize that we might have to adjust the game development plan over the course of this year and eventually adjust or postpone any of our original plans, including the GBG changes. As always, we will keep you posted.

Hope this update was useful for you and please stay tuned for future news about this!  

For the new Guild Battleground season (starting Thursday), we will revert the balancing for the Siege Camps and Watch Towers to its previous state, which is currently active on live servers.

We're exploring bigger changes to Guild Battlegrounds. Reverting to the previous balancing will help us lay the groundwork for the upcoming update and gather viable data to make it happen. With these changes, we would like to address Guild Battlegrounds as a whole and not just the balancing side of the feature.

We will now display all messages from the feedback thread. At the same time, we will not collect feedback about the return of the old balancing. You will definitely have the chance to share your thoughts once the planned update is here!

Important note: the development schedule is subject to change, so it's possible that planned updates will be re-scheduled and/or revised. Stay tuned for news!