Hello Adventurers,

As we close out 2024, the Gems of War team is hard at work on the 8.4 update which contains our New Guild Wars feature! Today. We’d like to share a little inside info on the current plans around New Guild Wars.

Thanks to so many of you, we received some great feedback about what you liked (and what you didn’t like) about the old Guild Wars. We had our own list too – believe me – as well as data from millions of games that were played in the old system. With that in mind, when we were setting up the framework for New Guild Wars, we built it with four pillars in mind.

The Four Pillars

1. Real gritty PvP – no pay-to-win. This was our number one consideration. We – much like you – want Guild Wars to feature the fairest fighting possible. If there is anything for sale as part of a Guild Wars event, it will simply be for personal advancement of your account, outside of the Guild War.


2. Strategic choices. This goes beyond the battle to reward the guilds who coordinate well and plan intelligently. Old Guild Wars had this to a small degree, but we really want to ramp this up so Guilds who enjoy the challenge can attempt to optimize their play and be well rewarded for it, BUT more casual guilds can sacrifice those rewards if they just want to crack some skulls.


3. No Hidden Scoring/Bonuses. Old Guild Wars could be tricky to optimize, because the scoring system was opaque. Players got a “feel” for it after a time, but it was more art than science. With New Guild Wars, we’ve had more time to consider this, and all scoring methods will be clear and documented, so you will know exactly how you get the points you earn.


4. Real Guild Leaderboards. The old Guild Wars bracket system, was problematic in all sorts of ways – it held back new Guilds who should have climbed faster, and it caused a lot of repeat fights, where you were trapped in a bracket, often fighting the same Guilds each week. Our aim is to solve this with a single dynamic leaderboard using ELO ratings.

The Core Concept

So what is the big idea behind New Guild Wars?
It’s pretty simple really.

• Your Keep: Your Guild will choose a “Keep” to defend for the duration of the Guild War Event – it could be anything from 1 day to 7 days. We’ll likely start with 4-day wars.


• Attacker Restrictions: Each Guild War event will contain a simple restriction for ALL attackers, which applies to the entire event. The troop pool is now over 1500, and the weapon pool is over 600, so we DO need restrictions to keep things sane! We promise – no complex restrictions that make team composition too hard though!


• Defender Restrictions: Defenders can choose a location in the Keep to defend. Each location comes with its OWN troop type restriction too! Each player only needs the one defense team for the entire Guild Wars event.


• Daily Enemies: Each day, your Guild will be assigned an Enemy Guild, and you will each attempt to invade the other’s Keep.


• Reach the Palace: With only 5 battles per day, your objective is to reach their Palace by one of the various routes available, fight enemy players along the way.


• Organizational Benefits: Successful guilds will not only defeat the palace as many times as possible, but will also coordinate a good spread of victories throughout the rest of the keep.


• That’s it!

Work in Progress

We’ve included some screenshots because a picture is worth a thousand words. Please remember these are a work-in-progress. We still have many weeks of work left here, so everything can (and will) change.

First, we have the main Guild Wars Overview. This one is pretty straightforward and gives you access to all the areas you will need. The Guild Wars Medallion is a personal reward track that players can engage with – we’ll have more on that later.


And here we have a Guild War in progress. The Attacker has defeated the Gate, and can either re-engage there, or move on to the Tavern or Smithy to unlock more battles in the Enemy’s Keep. Moving forward is almost always a good idea, because although the battles get a little harder, they’re also worth more points!


Once we return in January, we’ll share some more info with you all. We’re very interested in feedback and questions while we develop this, but as the holidays are almost upon us, we do apologize in advance if questions are not answered as quickly as we would like.

Merry Christmas to all!
-Sirrian