Every Monday at midnight, server time, the bidding phase marks the beginning of a new Imperial Wars cycle.
During this stage, the Imperial Wars Initiator from each server will bid for the right to participate. Bid rankings will determine whether the server becomes an attacker or defender.
Imperial Wars Initiator
The Initiator plays a crucial role as they solely decide Imperial Wars bidding and matching.
- The Imperial Wars Initiator will always be the leader of the guild that occupied Wyrmholm in the Territory War of the previous week.
- If no guild successfully captures Wyrmholm, the leader of the guild that became the champion of the Guild Alliance Battle - Green Dragon in the previous week becomes the Initiator
- If no guild meets either condition, the leader of the guild that won the server's Territory War Tournament in the current month will be chosen as the Imperial Wars Initiator.
Imperial Wars Interface
Every Monday at midnight, Imperial Wars Initiators will be invited by in-game mail to participate in the Imperial Wars bidding and matching operations.
The operations can be managed in the Imperial Wars Interface. It lists all servers, as well as their corresponding Imperial Might which is calculated using the date of server launch and the combined Might rating of all active players.
After the Imperial Wars matching, every player of the relevant servers can head to the Imperial Wars Interface to check the opponent server for this week as well as the Imperial Wars status of their server.
Bidding
The Imperial Wars Initiator uses Bidding Points to start the bid. Each server starts with 10,000 Bidding Points, and each proposal requires at least 5,000 Bidding Points. Those who placed a bid of less than 5,000 Bidding Points will be regarded as having placed a bid of zero Bidding Points.
After the Initiators have submitted their final bids, the bidding process ends. The top 50% of servers (chosen by their highest bids) become attackers, while those in the lower half become defending servers. If the number of servers is an odd one, a lucky server will be randomly selected. This server will not be able to participate in the Imperial Wars, but all server players will receive every reward in one go.
Bidding Points placed by the attacking servers will be removed entirely by the system. Bidding Points used by the defending and the lucky servers will be returned. When the Imperial Wars end, the system will generate 2,000 Bidding Points for the attackers and 5,000 Bidding Points for the defenders regardless of victory or defeat.
Challenging the Opponent
On Monday at 21:00, server time, every Imperial War Initiator of the attacking side can select five defending servers to challenge and prioritize their choices accordingly. The system will refer to your bid ranking and the selected priority of opponents to determine the actual adversary to fight. Those with higher bid rankings are more likely to fight the number one opponent of their choice.
For example:
- If you are listed as Rank One in the weekly bid rankings, then the number one opponent of your choice will become your actual opponent in the actual war.
- If you are listed as Rank Two in the weekly bid ranking and selected the same number one opponent as the Rank One server, then you will be matched to your number two opponent instead.
Each round of opponent selection and matching will last five minutes. If no option is selected during this period, the system will randomly choose an opponent for you. Once the five-minute period is up, the system will refer to the choices made by the various servers to perform Imperial Wars matching.
If there are unmatched servers after a round of matching, then the Imperial Wars Initiators of the unmatched servers must go through another five-minute round of selecting their opponents. This process will be repeated until all servers are matched.