About the Guild Run Update and Future Plans

 Hi, Cookie Runners! In the last update, we made some changes to Guild Runs, and many of you shared feedback and suggestions regarding the new system! We’d like to thank you all for sharing your thoughts, and we’d like to share our thought process regarding this revamp and how we plan on improving Guild Runs in the future using your feedback.

1. Why did we change the Guild Run system?

We wanted to alleviate the following issues through this Guild Run revamp:

• The lack of immediate rewards and lack of participation.

• For the top players, the impact they have on their Guild was low in comparison to the very high effort required to reach the highest possible scores.

• Beginners didn’t have many ways to contribute to the success of their Guild.

• Beginners needed too many Cookies to participate in Guild Runs.

• Even after deciding to invest and level up a Cookie for an arena, the same Cookie might not be used in the following season.

• The opportunities to use your leveled-up Cookies were too few.

We tried to tackle these issues by:

• Adding rewards after each arena run

• Granting points to each Guild member depending on their position in each arena

• Increasing the pool of selectable Cookies

You shared your thoughts regarding these changes and often mentioned feedback included: 

• The fear that the Guild Run meta might become less diverse (Wouldn’t each arena require the same Cookie? / Wouldn’t Cookies released a long time ago never get used?) 

• Guild Run now counting each member’s score/position makes the game mode more burdensome.

We are very attentive to these concerns, and we’ll work with them in mind to improve Guild Runs in the future! But first, we thought it might be helpful to clarify a few things regarding the current system.

2. How does the current system work?

1. Cookies usable in a Guild Run season are part of a general pool, usable for each arena which means that you can run in each arena with the Cookies you have. 

2. With this new system, new Cookies you level up will be usable for at least 6 months.

3. Buff Combis are strong enough to encourage various strategies, including the use of various Cookies, as in the previous system.

4. The point system is designed to reward players who reached the highest possible scores (and position) more.

5. The ratio of points given to the highest positions (1st, 2nd, etc.) is higher to promote player skill over guild size.

6. There are new rewards for each arena, rewarding players directly for their run.

Here’s a graph (also displayed in the game) showing the number of points granted for each position. So, for example, the player who scores the most (1st) in a given arena earns 330 points for their Guild.

As you can see, the points earned by being amongst the best players are much higher than points earnable by players ranked lower. We wanted to make a system that rewards players who rank high as the efforts required to reach such a position are very high. 

For example, let’s take a situation where a player has currently ranked 2nd with 199,000,000 points, and 1st place is just ahead at 200,000,000 points. 

1st 200,000,000 pts (1st place is worth 330 Guild Run pts)

2nd 199,000,000 pts (2nd place is worth 255 Guild Run pts)

Previously, the incentive for the player in 2nd place taking 1st place was very low as the reward did not reflect the effort needed. With the updated system, if the player in 2nd place manages to take 1st place, they would earn 330 pts while the other player would only get 255 pts (75 pts less!)! That’s a meaningful difference that could be decisive for the outcome of the Guild Run. 

On the other end of the graph, you can see that players who score less have less impact on their Guild score. This means that these players are less likely to make a decisive difference in the final ranking. That’s why we were hoping that this system would not be too stressful or burdensome for the average player.

However, after checking your feedback, it seems that we underestimated this point, and we’re already thinking about ways to improve it!

3) What’s next?

We want to make the Guild Run experience as pleasant as possible for as many players as we can and your feedback is very helpful in this process. We’re exploring various ideas and we can already tell you that, in order to reduce the pressure of all members of a Guild needing to participate, we are planning to adjust the ranking system to take into account only the score of the top 20 Guild members (instead of every member, as of now).

However, as we can’t make such changes in the middle of a season, we have plans to apply them at the beginning of the following season. Again, we will be doing our best to improve the Guild Run experience to make it as fun as possible for all runners! Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and opinions, and thank you for reading until the end! 

With love,

Your Cookie Run Team.