snowball AT more popular than regular gvg AT

why cant gvg be just as popular?!

Because you can't make $500 in a week afking or even winning GvG ATs.

Snowball ATs are too simple. You have the same health and energy as everybody around you, you can easily dodge snowballs, you can easily block through snow fort, its all simplified. It probably takes less brain cells than to run any SF build. Anybody can do it and people are usually looking for guests in GtoB so people tag a long mainly for the TPs as stated by Lemming.

Costume Brawl isn't necessarily more fun, it is just more accessible. I really miss GvG, it was easily the most fun I had in the game, but everyone I played with quit and it is too much work to get a good team together for a dying game. More people do snowball AT then GvG AT because it is easier to play. If they had a good GvG team I bet they would say GvG is more fun, but GvG not being fun comes from not having a good team to play with.

Snowball AT happens once a year. GvG is available year round.

Snowball AT doesn't cost anything to join. Bad teams can still with half their matches. More than half if they go against some AFK teams.

GvG AT costs tournament tokens to enter. Bad teams get wiped over and over. Little-to-no AFk teams to beat.

I think its rather easy to see why Snowball AT is so much more popular.

Sub-1000 guilds in Snowball still get participation (aka, AFK) points. The added AFK teams also increase the number of teams in the top quarter getting additional RPs for placement, which means most teams actually playing are garunteed good points. The ATs also require close to zero build/equip prep and the matches and therefore tournaments are dramatically shorter.

Hero Battles tournaments happened year round but they were very popular too ( not as much as those sAT's but still a lot) . The reasons which apply for HB and sAt's are :
- easy access, people know they won't waste their time since there are players from every level .It's not like you will lose to the 4 top100 guilds because your monk aren't enough exped.
- You don't need to play snowball 24/7 to get good at it.
- Personal skills matter. In hb it relied entirely on your ability to control heroes , and here it rely also on your ability to watch a map and dodge , etc...
- Winning conditions are easier and map is/are smaller . You only have to pick a gift and run it .It's not like having to deal with " boring tactics " for 20mn.
- It's less long : a 3 round AT still takes close to 2 hours , which is the same as a 6 round snowball+ 1 playoff...

Cause the entry level for snowballs is so low. Literally everyone can win at least one or two matches if you just get 8 real people or even with a few henches. This would work for GvG at's aswell (if enough people entered), except the added downside for gvg at's would be the enormous rating loss, long wait times and low reward for time invested.

I really don't know why people posted after this has been posted.

Watch black market forums get swarmed with zkeys in a couple of days/weeks.

People are greedy like mentioned.
Nothing else to say. If the rewards were the same as regular gvg AT's, do any of you honestly believe there would be close to this many participants?

Yes. Maybe not same , but pretty sure there would be easily 1 full group( i.e HB tournaments, where reward wasn't really high..). But just saying " if " always lead to actual PvP now , only doing test updates maybe to see the reactions could help...

This.

Christmas is the absolute worst time for GvG. There is very little people are to play, or guest in the AT, when the snowball ATs start half an hour earlier.

This is just an easy extra way for most people to get zkeys and reward points. Since GvG actually requires a degree of skill, experience, and coordination to get a decent rank at the end of any AT.

I'm not suggesting snowball ATers are worse players by any means. Just that the lower degree of difficulty in snowball ATs is desirable by a broader spectrum of players.

Don't forget that snowball AT has a lower barrier to enter, because it eliminates build wars.

Yeah, but it introduces botwars, so that's hardly an advantage.

Theres pick up bots? I always thought those players just had f11 3rd last box checked and were just good at switching between picking up and DPSing. I mean the onlything that i would find unfair would be having a macro keyboard where you can turbo your space button and spam space 1000times in 1seconds just by holding on it.

That's still a dilemma. On the end , i don't believe they would prefer a place where noone can play rather than a place where there are over 200 guilds/teams , half being botters..