Community Q&A: War of the Three Banners
Greetings, House Leaders!
Last week’s call to arms has been answered! You responded with your most burning questions for our design team in hopes of peeking further into the minds behind our newest feature, War of the Three Banners. We tracked down our senior designer, zShuffling, who was more than happy to tackle your questions:
Q. It seems like Alliances are excited and fired up to start. But the phases are very long in between battles. Why the longer wait times? Building your teams is quick, as is deploying, even with strategic discussion.
A. This is something we went back and forth on, but largely it’s a difference we see in our top Alliances versus everyone else. Our hardcore players log in multiple times a day, optimize energy and time spent to a pretty high degree; our more casual players may log in once a day for 15 minutes. Those casual players are the vast majority of our player base and we want to make sure that they can still engage with the Alliance War. We will continue to monitor feedback and how players interact.
Q. How do you determine the opponents for each Alliance?
A. We look at the Glory first, then the amount of players opted-in, then if you fought them in the last two Wars. So if Glory perfectly matches opted-in matches, and the last two Wars didn’t have them, you will likely fight them. All of this has caps though. Eventually, Glory caps at how much it will search, so a tier 1 with 15 opt-ins isn’t fighting a tier 3 alliance. And if the perfect options were in the last two wars, we will ignore that check and slot them in.
Q. Glory points are confusing to me. How are glory points awarded to players?
A. Glory is awarded at different amounts based on the Tier your Alliance plays in. Depending on your placement in the War, we grant more or less. The best way to think of it is using the Tier thresholds in the War screen. At the lowest level, we give smaller amounts of Glory because the thresholds to the next Tier are pretty small as well. Then as you grow, we also start increasing the amounts of Glory you earn because coming in third, and at higher levels in second, will cause you to lose Glory.
Now, why aren’t we telling the exact values at every level? The simple reason is we are making sure that what we have mapped on paper matches reality. The values are only attached to First, Second, and Third. Once we see the data start replicating our projections, we may reveal the exact values (if the community doesn’t figure it out for themselves first as we expect after a few more wars). However it is also an area that is likely to be tweaked and adjusted to make sure that at each rank is an appropriate number of Alliances.
Q. When you decided on Outposts what was the logic behind the buffs? Some are great some are not, was it about balance or something more strategic?
A. The goal is to make sure that all possibilities of gameplay are represented. While certain Bonuses are definitely going to be more popular for players right now, having more options allow for more niche ideas and tertiary team compositions to come through. Within our internal tests, we often found that Alliances that could use something ‘niche’ or ‘complex’ more effectively had an easier path to victory. Plus, it's just more fun to explore what things ‘could’ work. For example, DODGE became an internal favorite for how much it could destroy certain playstyles.
But we will be monitoring Win Rates and adjusting buffs that don’t perform up-to-snuff.
Q. How often will the War Bonuses be rotated?
A. We have over 90 buffs and they change every War. While we will be adding in more in the future, it will likely take time for players to even see all potential buffs.
Q. Will the team consider adding summaries of how various battles went? Something similar to Legendary Assault so we can see who within our Alliances are pulling their weight.
A. We do plan on adding this in the future! I can’t promise a date, but this is at the top of our list of things we want to add.
Q. What was the initial team brainstorm like for War of the Three Banners? Was there anything in the initial concept that changed drastically and ended up being what we see today?
A. It went through a bunch of phases. The original pitch I made had significantly more complexity and probably would’ve required double the time it took to make this. So I worked with the team to distill it down to the core ideas for the mode, which were:
War is never as clean as a 1v1 mode, and certainly not in Game of Thrones so it should feel more chaotic and alive in the way it changes over time
Battles in Wars are fought over strategic bonuses, not points. The Battles should be to gain a strategic advantage for your Alliance over others, rather than just some points.
There should be no “silver bullet strategy.” What works in one instance of War shouldn’t always work in another. You should feel engaged with the Map.
Once we had this, we cut parts of the original vision to distill it down to what you have now. I don’t want to say how the original idea differs too clearly, since we still want to add more to War and will likely pull from that.
And there you have it. Thanks so much, zShuffling, for taking the time to answer our community’s questions about War of the Three Banners. And thank YOU for submitting questions and continuing your passion for Game of Thrones: Legends.
Join the conversation in the Game of Thrones: Legends Discord!
Happy gaming!
The Game of Thrones: Legends Community Team