TL-DR: Adding a 2nd, easier difficulty to the GW boss fights would improve the experience for low-end players and make PM more money.
I'm guessing this has already been suggested because it seems like it's an idea someone else would have come up with already, but I'm posting it regardless, along with my own reasons and counter-arguments. Also, this post is long, so thank you to those who go through the whole thing.
Suggestion - 2 Guild War Boss Difficulties
You have Regular and Heroic:
- Heroic difficulty is just as it is now.
- Regular difficulty is aimed towards the new- low- and mid-range players, and features 60% reduced HP (maybe around 800k-1mil), 60% reduced damage (if not less), possibly a cap in damage (a point where it won't increase any further), and a point cap of around 500 (about 60% less than current/heroic).
This way, newer players can have a chance to do more damage to the guild war boss, earn more points and feel like they're contributing more to their guild and to themselves. As it stands now, new players can barely score 100+ points since they can't score massive hits against the boss without spending tons of revives (which most new players will not have). This is also true for low and medium-end players who don't already have a gw boss card to boost their attack and survivability. I believe new, low- and mid-level players will find the new difficulty more reasonable and improve their opinion of the game as a whole. They may even decide to spend gems to get that push to over 50k even if they can't do the GW boss on heroic yet.
Regular difficulty should be designed so that it's possible to kill without an existing gw boss card, but it's not possible to score over 50k points without refreshing (in other words, if you want a boss card, you have to fight regular mode on cooldown and do a few refreshes; or do as the top-end players do and kill the boss on heroic difficulty on cooldown). Again, the purpose of this is to give non-high-end players a fighting chance of scoring points, and will open up the opportunity for those players to spend gems to earn a gw boss card.
A summary of reasons why this needs to happen:
- As it is now, the setup is so difficult that low end players cannot hope to get a gw card without spending probably hundreds of dollars. If you can only score 200 points, you'd have to fight it 250 times, and that's around 2000 gems worth of refreshes. Nobody's doing that. This new setup will make it so all the players in this category will actually have hope of getting it by spending a feasible amount of money on it.
~ It will shorten the gap between low-to-mid-range players and the high-end players, preventing people from getting frustrated with the game and quitting. (granted I can't say that it's an issue because I can't see the player data, but I feel like it might be). I believe it will increase player's overall opinion of the game.
- More players will likely spend money to get gems in order to score a boss card. Money for the company is always a good thing. I can almost guarantee that sales will increase.
- More people will fight in the guilds. As an example, in my guild, I'm the only one capable of scoring over 50k points. Typically, nobody else scores more than 1000; in fact, in this last war, second place was around 800, and nobody else even bothered to attempt it. What does that tell you? It tells me that players who can't score high on the current system don't care about scoring at all. It's understandable, since, without owning a boss card, it's difficult, if not impossible, to score over 100 points per run. You die before any offensive or defensive CD's come up, and non-high-end players don't have the revive potions to keep going; nor will they ever blow gems on refreshing and/or buying potions. It gets frustrating REALLY fast, believe me; I've been there.
- This increased participation will also decrease the gap between the top few guilds and all the others, since almost everyone will want to participate with a difficulty level that's actually doable. More players playing is what any game developer should want.
Counter arguments I imagine popping up:
Non-high-end players don't use gems on the GW bosses now and they won't for this either. ~~ I think if it's balanced correctly, players will use gems to refresh and gain enough points, especially if it means they get a copy of the gw boss card. I'd say it should be balanced out so that it requires around 10~15 refreshes (20 maximum) on top of fighting the gw boss every CD; so that each time they forget to fight it, they have to refresh more. I would have happily used 100, 200 or even 300 gems back in the day to get a GW boss card back when I didn't have a team capable of scoring 800-1000 points like I do now. On top of that, once they have a gw boss or two, they'll be more likely to build teams capable of defeating the heroic boss and will start using gems/potions on that as well.
This will negatively impact high-end players ~~ I don't see how. If anything, it should positively affect high-end players. 1: More players will buy gems, so PM will make more money and be able to afford adding more features to the game, and 2: More players will be scrambling to level up so they can get the command points to use their new cards, so that means more opportunities for friends and pal-points and stuff like that, plus more medium-high end players means more content centered around them, so see point 1.
Playmage doesn't have the resources to program this into the game ~~ Whether that's true or not, the time it would take to program and implement this feature into the game should be more than covered by the surplus of low- and mid-range players who will be buying and spending gems to compete in the wars.
So, in conclusion, I think this idea is a good idea and should be implemented. There are no feasible drawbacks to doing this that I can think of, and the benefits should more than outweigh them.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post, and I hope you will give it a +1.
~ lolwut
Ps. I'd like the ability to change my display name xD I chose "lolwut" back when I started because I didn't think I would be as engrossed in this game as I have. I really need to change it xD