This is a problem that should be addressed as soon as possible. This has gone on for nearly every single season of the game where the overall win is based on diplomatic castle take overs and has absolutely nothing to do with competitive pvp. Maybe 6 of these castles are being contested out of 32 at the moment. This is not a player made issue. This is a developer issue. Anyone that is claiming otherwise is only pushing their own coalition's agenda.

Since as long as I've played this game, except for season 9, the squad alliance has chosen the winner of every season. The main way they achieve this victory is diplomatic castles. Nobody even tries to contest the #1 placement because the population of their forces are just so large, you cannot compete unless you bring equal numbers. Which in itself is a ridiculous proposition because of the games engine being barely able to handle such a large centralized force.

This castle problem drives away the main focus of the game. Open world ZvZ battles. It is anti-competition and promotes no showing and dragging your opponents away from vital objectives. This is not the way the game should be played. It's a waste of time and not fun. The guild going for the #1 slot, should be the best guild in the game. Not the best diplomatic guild, not the best 5v5 crystal guild, not the best ZvZ guild, not the best ganking guild, not the best 20v20 crystal guild, not the best PVE guild, but THE BEST OVERALL GUILD.

This leads into the main issue. SBI has done so many things to combat other guilds attempting to go for rank #1. Disarray was added into the game to stop one shot builds from wiping entire zergs. Territories were given a cap and drain to combat this very similar issue to castles. Siphoned storage was added to territories to make it more meaningful to hold them for an entire territory reset. Territory gvgs were removed to limit the strength of the impact 5v5 teams had on taking territories. City gvgs were removed to take out the massive amount of silver it generated. This last one is very important because it shows a theme in SBI's bias towards this one particular guild, blue army.

Blue army was allowed to hold cities for multiple seasons without being contested and farming way over 100 billion silver while holding them. Elevate held them for a season, my cities being heavily contested, and they were swiftly removed. I'm willing to give SBI the benefit of the doubt on this issue because they wanted to add something for their faction warfare updated, but absolutely nothing has been added in the game to replace this and the silver generated from city crafting plot auctions is going nowhere.

I will end this post by suggesting the easiest and quickest fix. Use a similar system on castles that you use for territories. Make them launchable territories and use a siphon storage. Penalize guilds holding a massive amount of castles by limiting their overall season point gain. These are only a couple ideas but something has to be done to limit the amount of castles one guild can hold without them being contested at all. More has to be done on SBI's part to make this game more competitive overall.

Thank you for reading this and I hope this generates some serious discussion on this topic. I wish to see seasons be more competitive.

Posting near the 18 utc timer. 8 castles were flipped away from BA.

Because they are running diplomacy with way over half the black zone. Their list of guilds that are renting from them or allied with them is so unbelievably massive. That part of the black zone you are talking about, where the war is not going on, are nearly all squad allies that are just sitting in empty safe zones farming away. This brings the discussion to my point of dragging the enemy away from the vital objectives. The vital objectives are the handholding alliances uncontested castles. We are being redirected from them to a slow border war.

What you are asking for is the anti handholding alliance to match their numbers. This is just impossible. They are allied with Arch, Poe, and Squad. These numbers alone out number anyone. This excludes all their "renters and slaves".


Lastly the style of play you are suggesting is not fun for most players. It forces people to spend 30+ minutes running across the black zone for a not even guaranteed fight. This also includes my centralization argument. SBI is forcing too many players to fight in one area. The server can barely handle these kind of fights and are really low quality anyway.

There was never ever not once a season won from the city. Stop trying to strawman the argument. You are trying to slide the discussion to something completely unrelated and wrong.


Cap season points from castles just like how territories and crystals are capped. This has been going on for far too long where squad has won nearly every season based ONLY ON CASTLES.

Castles have been the only deciding factor for season wins since they have been in the game. Not just from queen. Not just from any patch. For the entire duration of the game. Nearly everything you said in this post is just wrong. Crystal gvgs matter so little in deciding season wins unless you get teams that play 5s and 20s in every single timer. They barely make a dent compared to castles since gvgs are capped points.