Weekly Guild Battles Reward. Please read.

Crystals would be too much of a reward. I know this is an easily downvoteable comment, but please here me out before making a decision.

Crystals are already given out for everything in the game. Crystals are also the pay currency that drives free to play players. Let's take into consideration that if a player can complete ToA each rotation, and beats all the arena rivals each day, and gets conq1 each week in arena, and collects their daily bonus each day for 28 days, they get almost 1500 crystals.

That's a lot of crystals.

That's already creating a gap between the already good, and the struggling to improve. Normally, this is not considered to be that big a deal, because up until Guild Battles, the only thing that represented the difference between those two groups has been Arena. The rewards for arena are laid out so well, that mostly you don't have to worry about getting garbage each week if you're progressing naturally. As it stands, the people who flake off in higher ranks is concurrent with the people who improve and get better each week. So generally, you won't notice the depravity of accelerated growth there. You'll just keep collecting your rewards each week, and keep using your glory points for devilmon. Like everyone who isn't quite Conq1 yet.

However, Guild Battles brings up something that is complicated to differentiate in this aspect. That thing, is cooperation. When you are in arena, you are fighting one person who has no control over whether you win or lose, except their unit placement. However, when you are in Guild Battle, you are up against 10 (or 20) people, who must rely on cooperation, and efficiency, to win. For a group of level 30s, this may sound nice. You take your 4 stars into battle, and if you win then you win, if you lose, then that's fine too, you had fun. The rewards of Guild Points for the guild shop, and summoning stones, is trivial. So you can keep enjoying yourself without regret.

However, when you think more about it, and the concept of accelerated growth (those who have growing at a more accelerated rate than those who have not, creating an exponential rift between the two over time), the rewards that you already get from Guild Battles, are immense.

Guild Points buy you a LOT of stuff. A natural 5 star, a natural 3 star, a REALLY cheap mystic scroll, a NAT 4 MAXED RAINBOWMON. The prices on them may seem extra-ordinary. However, when you look at the prices from the stand-point of a well-organized, competent, and communicating guild, those prices are very, very low. The AVERAGE for someone in a top ranked guild is 42 points for their three swords. Winning gives another 52. This is 94 Guild Points for each battle. There are 6 days of battle, 1 battle energy each 12 hours, that's about 12 battles. That's 1128 Guild Points a week. That's enough for that person, who is in that high ranked guild, to get:
20 Ifrit pieces
and a 4-star max rainbowmon.

That is not a small prize for a week. In fact, the only other 4-star rainbowmon I know of is in ToA, and you get 1 every 30 days.

That may seem like they're widening the gap a lot, but think about what you get out of Guild Points:
Scrolls (Mystic, Fire, Water, Wind)
Rainbowmon
Units
Stones
Fusion Units

These are things that will not help a very high ranked player a lot. They will be helpful, yes, but a high ranked player is going to be able to make a max four star unit easily. The 5-star summoning pieces is nice, yes. But that's about it. These rewards, while not being the absolute best possible rewards, are amazing for players who are not at the absolute end game. Then you take into account that for most of the week/2 week rotation that you'll be in, you'll be fighting people about the same rank and power as you and your guildies. This means that you can still keep getting that 94 guild points per guild battle more often than not. So you're getting these prizes at the same rate as everyone else, including the top rank.

The summoning stones, are much the same as all these other rewards. They give everyone a possibility of the same result. They make it so that high end players still get 3 stars, and the low end players, still have a chance at a 5 star.

What the reward of summoning stones does is it gives everyone an absolute reward. The higher ranked players will get more summoning stones, and more chances to summon, but it's still based on RNG. More often than not, that's only going to come out to more 3-star units. In the end, a mid-game/low-end player will make more use of a 3 star than an end game player ever will.

However... Crystals? Crystals can be used on ANYTHING. Crystals are what high end players have learned to use efficiently to constantly create that divide between them, and the mid-game. Crystals means higher arena rank. Crystals means more six-stars. Crystals means more free mana stones. And more importantly, Crystals means more energy to farm for six-star runes on auto-mode in dragons b10.

Please believe me when I say, that every Crystal you think is a blessing for you, will hurt the totality of your ability to compete in the long run, by creating a separation between the have-alreadys, and the struggling-to-improve. With Guild Battles being a thing, and that comparison becoming more evident in every-day play, by making you come face-to-face with these people, you want that gap to be operable enough that a hard working mid-game player has a chance of continuously gaining benefits from guild battles.

/r/summonerswar Thread