Guild Wars: Factions Preview Event ends


So it’s over, 3 days of Guild Wars: Factions Preview Event, the last chance and event to play GW: Factions before the final release on April 28th (April 27th for those who bought the Pre-Order box).

It was fun, waay fun. I can say that the greatest feature of it is the 3 PvP Arenas (which from hereon I will call as Factions PvP Arenas collectively).


Follow up:

That’s the strength of the stand-alone expansion evident by the reaction of the players who were able to participate in the FPE (Factions Preview Event). Majority are very sad it ended already (March 27th, 8:00am UTC/GMT), common reactions are “GW is never the same without Factions”, “Back to oblivion”, “Bye GW, see you on April 28th”, “Cryogenics state till April 27th” and so on.

Factions made that much of an impact. The battles were great, thanks to the “Alliance Battles” PvP Arena where 2 12-member teams battle it out by taking “resource points”. I’ll be honest, it’s a closed image (copy is too strong of a word) of World of Warcraft’s Arathi Basin BattleGrounds. Same concept, same system, same rules (sorta). The only difference I noticed other than the name changes and different map is the way in capturing a resource point.

In World of Warcraft, a player needs to change the resource point’s flag to their own flag (by right-clicking on it). For GW:Factions, a player must be in range for the capture ‘timer’ (more exactly a bar) to activate. Moreover, in Factions, the more players (of the same side) in the area, the faster the capture will be.

After the capture, an NPC will appear to defend the resource point, which is great. These NPCs can serve as an additional force as compared to WoW’s Arathi Basin BG of 15vs15. This is Guild Wars’s largest PvP match-up – 12vs12 and that is the number one most missed part of GW currently.

Questions are lingering now as to how exactly things work in GW:Factions. To those who do not know, in Factions, there is a borderline that moves depending on which side is winning the war. As this borderline moves, certain towns in its path are conquered (or switch sides). Everything in it, from NPCs to quests changes.

That part, there’s no question about it. But what many players are asking more is about the feature wherein a guild can ‘own’ a (conquered) town. Based on our experiments and the inputs of other players (sorry there are lots of you guys to give credits), our theory is that…

Before that, the notion of a town being owned by a guild must be changed a little bit. Do remember (for the GW:F players knowledge) that a guild must belong to an Alliance first. The leader of the Alliance then must pledge allegiance to one of the factions – Kurzick [Kur-zik] or Luxons [lax-sons].

(Now back on topic…) our theory is that, the faction points contributed by the members of ‘each guild’ in an Alliance determines the order by which the conquered towns are given ownership to an alliance or guild.

Let’s say there are 3 guilds (A, B, C) in Alpha Alliance. 3 guilds (D, E, F) in Beta Alliance. Guild A’s ranking in the Alpha Alliance (which depends on how many faction points it’s members donated for their guild) is 160. Guild B’s 50 while Guild C’s 10. Alpha Allinace has a total of 160 rank-points. While the Beta Alliance has a total of 240 rank-points contributed by Guild D with 150, Guild E with 40 and Guild F 100.

The towns will then be given to the alliance and guilds that contributed much to the “Factions War” (ie Kurzick vs Luxon).

The system then considers 2 factors. The Alliances’ total points and the guild’s points in their Alliance.

Thus, in our scenario, the system will give priority to the Beta Alliance.
Town 1 will be given control to Beta Alliance’s Guild D with 150 rank points.
Town 2 will be given to Beta Alliance’s Guild F with 100 rank points.

Then the next condition is the per guild rank points, thus:
Town 3 will be given to Alpha Alliance’s Guild A with 100 points

then it continues as:
Town 4 will be given to Beta Alliance’s Guild E with 40 points
Town 5 will be given to Alpha Alliance’s Guild B with 50 points

While the rest will get no town (if there are no more towns to give out).
The reason behind Town 4 and 5’s distribution is the factor of Beta Alliance’s total rank points of 240 vs Alpha Alliance’s 160. Now if the difference is great (let’s say 50 points difference) then the system will follow the guild-to-guild ranking computation instead of alliance-to-alliance.

We may be wrong but that’s what we understood during the FPE. We may be close to the actual computation and we hope that ArenaNet will share the information so we know how much we need and what we should do to “own” a (conquered) town.

It’s a great game. I bought a Pre-Order and already reserved 2 Guild Wars: Factions (GW:F or GWF) Collector’s Edition (CE), one for me, one for my friend. In fact, the Guild Wars is so great that Im going to buy my fiance all the Guild Wars releases as a gift for passing her Engineering Board exams which she is going to take this December (yes I’m optimistic about her passing it). By December, Guild Wars Chapter 3 will be out according to ArenaNet, they’re committing to a 6-month expansion release interval. If Chapter 2: Factions releasing this April 28th, then more or less Chapter 3 will be out by December.

That’s how great Guild Wars is. Good Job ArenaNet, keep it up!!


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