The next Stake Your Claim (SYC) event will begin on Friday, November 11th!
Our first Stake Your Claim proved to be an exciting event, but we’re not done yet! Thanks to the feedback you all have given us we’ve been able to iterate, and we are excited to jump into the details of our next round of SYC events!
Read on for
- A debrief on the results of first SYC event
- Q&A with one of our Product Managers from the SYC team
- Iterations we’ll be making based on your feedback for Round 2!
- Our next SYC kingdom pairing announcement
What Is Stake Your Claim?
Soon, the allegiances in your kingdom and those in another kingdom will embark on a new adventure. You will leave your current kingdoms behind as you look for new territory to stake your claim in.
When the event starts, your kingdom will compete with another kingdom as your allegiances look for a new permanent home to conquer. Seats of Power in your home kingdom will be safe from combat during this time.
Make sure to check your upcoming event panel for the exact time at which the Stake Your Claim event will start.
Click here to read more about the mechanics of this event in our guide!
Introducing Juce!
Today we have an exciting opportunity to discuss our first Stake Your Claim with one of our Product Managers, Juce! He has helped prioritize the development of Stake Your Claim and many other features and does tons of analysis on the game and its community.
Juce uses this data to understand players’ challenges and brainstorms with the development team about what we can do to make Game of Thrones: Conquest an enjoyable game to play. I’ll let him speak to it!
Juce: Hi, I’m Juce! I’m a product manager on the Game of Thrones: Conquest development team. A product manager can do lots of things. I largely help figure out areas of focus, help prioritize development, and do lots of analysis. Over the past months and years, we’ve been looking at the pulse of Game of Thrones: Conquest and thinking about the kingdom lifecycle. Of course, some of these kingdoms have had many merges, which makes an impact.
And so, we thought, “ What can we do about this? What challenges are players facing?”. We had a lot of discussions and brainstorming, looking at and analyzing other games and what they’ve done to address this.
The discussion of player agency came up a lot, and we asked, “What if we went all the way and did some KvK thing with new maps and let players choose where they want to go? “ The team got together, fleshed out this concept, and Stake Your Claim was born. Then we figured out how to deliver it.
The Data Q&A
Now let’s dive right into the results Juce pulled for us about the first Stake Your Claim. Our First Stake Your Claim demerged 805 & 828 into 1267, 1268, and 1269.
Players’ choices ended up affecting the populations of those kingdoms significantly.
Juce: It was fascinating to see what players were going to do. We gave them so much agency. Who knows what would happen?
So, first of all, it was terrific to see a relatively even distribution of 805 and 828. That was super cool to see because that’s why we did this! We wanted to mix up the competition here. What’s interesting is that 1267 was the smallest of the three kingdoms, and 1269 was the largest. However, 1267 has some of the more powerful allegiances and some big battles.
It looks like some players were avoiding some of those intense battles. That’s some of the overall population choice things that we were seeing.
Overall, how were players jumping from kingdom to kingdom? Did anything stick out that was odd or interesting while looking at the data below?
Juce: Day-to-day was interesting. At the beginning of 9/28 on the first chart, there was lots of movement to 1267. Then more people moved to 1269 by the end. The more detailed chart shows people going to 1269 from the original home maps and even from the other new maps. Some allegiances even moved from 1268 to 1269 in the last hour! It was a bit odd to see more teleports to 1269 towards the end.
It is interesting, and I’m curious as to exactly why players did all this.
Talking about SoPs, there was an insane amount of SoP Takeovers throughout the 4-day event! 1267’s looks to be the map with the least amount of SoP Takeovers throughout the first SYC weekend.
1268 comes in second place with the most SoP turnovers. However, they had significantly less activity at SoPs 4 and above.
1269 comes in first, with most SoP turnover activity happening in these kingdoms!
I’m surprised at how different these kingdoms have adjusted to these changes. What do you think about when you look at this data, Juce? Despite the activity happening in 1269, it had significantly fewer interactions at SoPs 4 and above compared to 1267, despite its smaller population.
Juce: There are so many variables. Again, with all the player agency in this event, who knows what could happen? It is just naturally going to happen, especially with these new kingdoms.
What comes to mind for me is just raw defense strength and what SoPs and titles are available.
On more populated maps, there might be less opportunity for an allegiance to grab one seat and defend another. One allegiance might have more power and say, ” Okay, just focus our power here and here.”
At some point, it also comes down to what certain allegiances care about, right? What are they willing to fight for and throw troops at? It shows me that there’s a ton of activity in 1269, but perhaps the 4 stars were better defended relatively whereas in 1267 it was more worth competing for the 4s. That’s where the intention and action was. It’s a super high-level thing to look at.
Again just so many variables. But it’s exciting to see that every kingdom isn’t the same.
Thank you, Juce, for your insight into these statistics for Stake Your Claim! If you want to listen to his interview in full and unedited, head to our November Monthly Preview blog!
Stake Your Claim Adjustments
Timing
Now onto our Adjustments for SYC; our first event played out for five days. Players fought for their seats and defended for a very long period of time. We’ve made a few adjustments that will significantly cut this down.
SYC is no longer five days but four days long. We have adjusted the SoP opening times to suit players willing to defend for long periods. SoPs during Stake Your Claim will open at 3:00 PM EDT and close the same day at 9:00 PM EDT. Then there will be a break until the next day.
PvP Keep Adjustments
We’re also trying out something new for this Stake Your Claim. Player vs Player combat at Keeps will be disabled for the entirety of the event. Only combat at SoPs will be permitted during Stake Your Claim.
Any comments or feedback on the adjustments above? We’ll open up a thread on the day of the de-merge in the #merge-and-stake channel to discuss these adjustments during the event. But if you’d like to begin discussions earlier, head on over to our discord!
Pairings
Our next Stake Your Claim will be with kingdoms 832 & 1128.
If this next iteration of Stake Your Claim doesn’t need any critical changes, kingdoms 829 & 834 shall appear soon after, currently planned for early December.
Wishing you all good fortune in the wars to come!