I’d like to suggest that there be more reward tiers in Guild War. The current ceiling sits at Legendary, which is pegged at seven victories. Any guild is eligible to enter fifteen wars a month, which means two things:
A. That a guild with a win rate of only ~47% can qualify for the highest reward tier; that’s hardly something I’d consider a legendary performance. (7/15=46.667 repeating)
B. Since war victories are a zero-sum game, the need to only win ~47% of your matchups creates the possibility of every guild attaining legendary status in the same month. I’ll make a quick illustration: suppose we have 1,000 guilds fighting 15 wars a month. That’s 15,000 matchups, which must necessarily produce 7,500 victories and 7,500 losses. But those 1,000 guilds only need 7 wins each- or 7,000 wins total- to have every single guild reach the legendary bracket.
Of course, in practice the victories won’t be equally distributed, but I evoke this off-hand calculation only to raise attention to the possibility. Nevertheless, I expect the number of guilds entering the legendary rank under the seven-win system to be close to (or exceed) half of all participating guilds on any given server.
The solution I’m proposing solves what I consider to be two issues: one, that guilds who win seven matches early in a month have to sit defending their titles for no reward for over half the remaining time, and two, that the barrier of entry into the top bracket would be too forgiving. It’s almost a punitive system for well-performing guilds: they are subject to more difficult match-ups for a strong early performance, earning only the pittance from the daily War mission, but likely having to spend noteworthy time and resources on fighting and sabotaging further enemy guilds.
If, for instance, there were twelve reward tiers, even the best guilds would only reach legendary status on the twenty-fourth day of a month, simultaneously bottlenecking the number of entrants to the top bracket and ensuring guilds who continue to win wars don’t see their efforts go unrewarded (except in this case for the last six days of the month).
I also have one separate point to make: the loser of a guild war should receive some incentive to actually participate. As it stands, losing is (I would imagine) quite an onerous endeavour, since the guild takes the blow of both the loss and the resource sink (sabotaging). I think a participatory box delivered to the loser contingent on the bracket the guild has attained would be quite a sensible solution, pegged at a fraction of the rewards given to the war’s winners.
