At the time, there was controversy about the Siege reward structure. Winner gets 3b, losers get 150m, or a stalemate gives everyone 500m. How evil, how wrong, right?  People cried about how undeserved this was, and how perverse it was to encourage people to try not to win.   

Actually, I argue that actually this system was INCREDIBLE for the siege game and we should go back to it, and the haters were short-sighted. The big stalemate rewards created a sense of drama and strife in the war scene that was very exciting, it drew battle lines and created compelling content. 

Right now, Siege is:
1 - the powerful "castle rotation" guilds that band together and have a system of give and take and basically attempt to take turns sharing castles with each other and defending their line of succession against outsiders 
2 - the smaller guilds that show up for a fight and try to fit into the basically pre-arranged team fights set up by the rotation guilds described in #1  - the outcomes are not LITERALLY pre-determined but it gets pretty darn close to predetermined. 
3 - every other guild that places a naked stick fort purely for the 150m price, with no intent to seriously participate  


Back during the time of big stalemate rewards, siege was FAR more exciting: 
1 - the massive "stalemate alliances" huge unions of guilds working as a massive zerg to attempt to stalemate a region. They had a good story, a neat cause - they would all agree to force a stalemate to give gold to the "average player." They were the underdogs, they had numbers, they were the gigantic horde army united by a big goal. All they needed to do, was get everyone on their team to agree, no double-crossing, and they also needed to defeat the veterans who actually wanted victory. 
2 - on the other hand, you had the castle rotation guilds  - only this time, 3-4 powerhouse guilds, even working together, might not be able to gaurantee victory against 20 guilds all attempting to stalemate. 


So basically, the stalemate prize divides the teams naturally -- the people who wanna be king, and their friends --- versus the masses. It created drama when members of the stalemate alliance would rebel and turncoat and try to win themselves as the battle tides changed. It brought all these newer guilds into the fight - because as long as they could all work together to beat just 3-4 strong guilds, then they would get a big prize for a fun fight,the stalemate reward. 


Bring it back, it was a system that made people mad, greedy, put fire into people's eyes, and got good fights. I wanna go beat up on the stalemate alliances. I think disincentivizing this by removing the stalemate reward was the wrong choice, and it decreased drama, in a bad way. 

No, this bread pure cancer to the siege scene, guild alliances were formed to kill any guild trying to win, then after every guild that wasn't part of the alliance or rather pact was eliminated they all just went on a storm trooper farm fest, with no one trying for the actual goal.

It wasn't just a "oh this might happen" No it was actively happening in both NA and EU.  

Exactly! I know because I was there, and have been there. I haven't missed a siege in a long time. 

And that was way more fun than the current super-scripted siege scene. 

Bring the massive hordes of underdogs in to try and win their 5 gold bars with their collectivist united front of mini-guilds and let's play Dynasty Warriors.