Will Alliance make wvw active 24/7?

If the design works, is the goal to make every borderland active at all time of the day?

I don't think that's a realistic assumption. It should balance out populations across the board, not guarantee 24/7 coverage. Region lock alone would make it pretty difficult. But you will not have empty servers anymore (see 3 German servers sharing the last tier on EU, though they are screwed because of language lock too).

ArenaNet has been so secretive with the details that we can't know for sure. The bits and pieces that we know about will likely make WvW more active at release but not over time, on their own. Those bits and pieces being the alliance mechanics, the ability to play with friends without paying gems, the possibility of some resurging pride and competition, etc. The details of the matchup algorithms are unknown to us and can either be a hail mary pass or a fumble. If there is no balance the pride and competition will disappear again. Ray has even hinted at that these things alone will not adress the core issues that the mode has, they will only create a platform from where to better adress the core issues.

The level these things are at should give you hints of the severity and state things are at. Most of these issues has either never existed in other modes of the game or are completely outdated by now, by years. This is essentially a second attempt at megaservers because they fumbled it the first time for WvW and left it to rot. The other modes have not been forced to deal with something as fundamental as being able to pull friends into the game and play with them because of servers, queues or having to pay gems to transfer. It absolutely amazes me that the WvW community has not rioted more or gone more extinct than it has. That is an absolute eloge to the community and a testament to the power of RvR design.

With the player dropout i think the only hope to have reallyIs mix na with eu

And there might be possibilities with 8 HR skirmish to move the mainserver and reset wvw map every 8 hours

What's Anet going to do? Tie people to their chairs and tell them to "play your timeslot at exactly 10:48 to 14:11 pacific time OR ELSE!!!"?

No.

The sole purpose of the alliance is to reduce the size of and shuffle monolithic servers so that the numbers can be more equal across the board. Instead of links being (A+B) vs (C+D) vs (E+F) with no options to match anything other than these huge link chunks together, the "links" of the alliances would instead be (A+B+C+D+E+D+F) vs (G+H+I+J+K+L+M) vs (N+O+P+Q+R+S+T) giving alot more flexiblity in how you mix and match it.

The current links is sort of like trying to use pebbles in an hourglass. Fine grain sand is generally a better idea.

It does not solve night or day capping by dedicated crews. It's not intended to.

@"Dawdler.8521" said:What's Anet going to do? Tie people to their chairs and tell them to "play your timeslot at exactly 10:48 to 14:11 pacific time OR ELSE!!!"?

No.

The sole purpose of the alliance is to reduce the size of and shuffle monolithic servers so that the numbers can be more equal across the board. Instead of links being (A+B) vs (C+D) vs (E+F) with no options to match anything other than these huge link chunks together, the "links" of the alliances would instead be (A+B+C+D+E+D+F) vs (G+H+I+J+K+L+M) vs (N+O+P+Q+R+S+T) giving alot more flexiblity in how you mix and match it.

The current links is sort of like trying to use pebbles in an hourglass. Fine grain sand is generally a better idea.

It does not solve night or day capping by dedicated crews. It's not intended to.

Thanks. So it might help in naturally making the wvw BLs more active across all times of the day. It's just that there is no gurantee.

It will change absolutely nothing, it will be the same as it ever was. Unless Anet comes up with some real clever plan to change how it is played :/

You ever see those threads "which server has the best ocx/sea/EU?". Those people just all want to play together and fight no1 for the most part.

Alliance is focused around making worlds as similar as possible in "total number of player hours".

This does not mean Coverage hours, so nope it won't fix that.

It is however a platform they can later make improvements on, so perhaps they will add a few solutions that will start taking coverage into some consideration, but I wouldn't expect miracles.

The "roadmap" also mentioned some 8-hour system to deal with nightcapping but that too we also know way too little about at the moment to comment on, beyond that it does not seem better than player suggestions that have already been out there for years. It could be hit or miss.

Do we know anything about Alliances that's actually gonna be a thing, 100% added to the game? No.Do we know who exactly is working on that project (except for that one cool guy that posted sth awhile ago) so we can contact them and suggest sth? No.Do we know when can we expect Alliances to happen? Maybe not the exact date, but estimated one? No.

So imo there's no point in asking questions like that to other forum users because we don't have enough knowledge on the topic to even presume things.

I would hope it would help balance out populations better, but I doubt it.

@CrimsonNeonite.1048 said:I would hope it would help balance out populations better, but I doubt it.

It's literally getting created to do exactly that. That's the only purpose of the entire system change...

It's not going to be all that different than what it is right now in terms of time zones. They're not sorting activity by time zones, they may later, but at the start it's going to sort players as it does now by total activity, so you may find it a little more balanced in NA time since that's where most of the population is at for NA servers, off hours will still be the same unless they merge down another tier.

Alliances are an urban legend.

Alliances will only succeed in taking away server pride. The rest is wait and see.

@"Xaiveer.6832" said:Alliances will only succeed in taking away server pride. The rest is wait and see.People argue here all the time that server pride is already gone long ago.

Either it would be replaced with alliance pride instead - a "mini server" that is fully in the hands of the players instead. Is that a bad thing?

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"Xaiveer.6832" said:Alliances will only succeed in taking away server pride. The rest is wait and see.People argue here all the time that server pride is already gone long ago.

It will probably become guild pride. In which case, the name "Guild Wars" will truly come to life.

Alliance will not make wvw active 24/7.

The question to ask instead is; how will Alliance differ from the downstate event and wvw mount? Absolutely None!!

Alliance is just another disguise in hiding the root cause of problems in wvw with toxicity-the wolf in sheep-clothing in total control of it

Embrace yourself for 24/7 Toxicity

((What solutions has mount and the downstate resolved to address wvw root cause problems? Absolutely None! And you really would think that adding large numbers of players= Alliance will resolve it too? ))

Why not for once deal with wvw rooot cause problems instead of increasing them even more with every balance patches?

Power Creep, +1 shotting, Bad Design/Mechanic, Stealth, Broken Specs/builds, lack of professions identity?

Why Not Resolve Them Instead??

@Burnfall.9573 said:Alliance is just another disguise in hiding the root cause of problems in wvw with toxicity-the wolf in sheep-clothing in total control of itI'm sorry are you suggesting that server population differences is not and have never been a problem with WvW?

@"hunkamania.7561" said:You ever see those threads "which server has the best ocx/sea/EU?". Those people just all want to play together and fight no1 for the most part.

You seen those guilds which claim to be fight guilds but all cram into 1 server so they don't fight each other and then complain there is no one to fight.

People will play when there is a game mode worth playing. I don't know what that is. But it's probably one with well designed and thought out combat with good gameplay placing. Considering zero thought has been put in this area until lately, it's going to be an uphill stuggle. Whatever we do, we can't change the fact that most people don't want a functional game mode, but rather one that benefits them. Nothing will change the fact that many players are actually pvers despite bashing pvers that come in that simply want to avoid fights, siege hump, and backcap as much as possible. The vocal fight crowd is but a small minority, and how many of them are telling the truth? Does "we look for fights" only apply when it's a fight you can only win because you're holding hands with all those green dots and claim to only have 17 in squad? We even have posts stating outright that player vs player combat is a terrible thing that has no place in this game mode, and gleefuly urge Anet to make sure that they don't actually have to fight other players. This, my friends, is what your dealing with.

Remember when they said "If you're into WvW, you're really into PvE?". Unfortunately they might have been right about many people that we had previously thought. I'm honestly very happy Anet has seen the light and made it harder to turtle-- not only does that improve the game pace, but those people that have been killing the game mode can either actually learn to fight or leave. Either way, it's great.

Of course, I have zero faith that alliances will work. Pride and strength in unity sounds good, but as with all things, these are easy slogans to say when one is winning. When things go south and egos collide, all those words mean nothing. My bet is within 6 months, most alliances will have collapsed and will degenerate into a revolving door of constant reforms and shuffling of people that actually all secretly hate each other but want to band together for easy wins. Eventually this just all loses to entropy and just general boredom.

Basically the same old kitten.

@"subversiontwo.7501" said:a ) > ... the ability to play with friends without paying gems ...b) the possibility of some resurging pride and competition, etc. ... If there is no balance the pride and competition will disappear again.c) It absolutely amazes me that the WvW community has not rioted more or gone more extinct than it has. That is an absolute eloge to the community and a testament to the power of RvR design.

a) for a game that survives by people buying gems this would def be a reason why Anet would be suicidal if it brought in Guild Alliances, all the pvpers that play wvw now would just join the guilds with the most loot bag record - no more gems needed means less income for the game, unlikely to happenb) Can not have much server pride when bandwaggoners leap from server to server, we get server pride from social group identity, something that is not studied in USA psychology (see the psychology research Anet is involved with - very American) European psychology includes memberships of social groups giving us an identity and in return we grant our loyalty to them - This is what server pride should be. Will not get this with guild alliances for same reason as server pride is reduced now: loot bags being the only loyalty some players have.c) From what I hear a number of things have depleted the population in wvw (do we/Anet know any actual figures?), power creep being one, ppk being another, and bandwaggoning so that Huge Blobs of players are in the top 2 tiers and small groups cannot do anything w/o being obliterated. Back before walls and gates were made weaker at least a small group could defend an objective - now a tier 3 garri can have outer and inner broken in 1 minute 54 seconds by a blob. Eloge I had to look up - good phrasingd) Anet are not interested in players' quality of game life. Are we able to suggest any way they can make profit out of their wvw players (skins for new mount was step in right direction)

Suggestions

• How about a trial week where there is no ppk? People could claim and defend objectives, working together as a group, instead of running in relative silence with a commander
• Poor Anet devs who have-a-go at wvw each week were surprised we use discord/TS for organising - little wonder they think wvw is all about killing and being killed, not much server pride for them ...
• Please put back the walls and gates at their previous strength - so we have time to say in TS or Team chat that we are under attack - and our allies can come to defend. this would make objectives a thing of pride again - atm they are being reduced to a karma train

I don't really know what you're talking about there Nora.

Alliances will make sure people can play WvW with their friends without paying gems. Every 8 weeks or something you will be reshuffled with the people of the WvW guild of your choosing. There's nothing unlikely about it, it has been decided already.

Also, no one I know of has quit over balance issues, at least not directly because of that even if that is apart of the larger reason. Everyone I know that has quit has done it over the overall lack of attention the mode has been given (like upwards 90% of my friends list).

Shilling us for access to friends in a social multiplayer game goes against the very idea of the game and destroys the mode from within, it is downright disgusting (while even content updates like LS is free for other modes). I can't stress that enough, disgusting. As far as gem sales go, the WvW players are as interested in armor and weapon skins as the next guy. In the quarter leading up to the mount announcement (after the second alliance update) I bought alot of gems. Since the mount announcement I have bought no gems at all.

Tons of other suggestions have been made, usually revolving around guild- or server themed skins of various kinds from weapons, to armor to finishers, to flags/capes/w/e, to siege items to captured structures. There is plenty to monetize that does not involve (mounts or) destroying the players' ability to invite friends to the game or charge one out of four modes gems for core gameplay that the others are not. That is another good example of why the community's behaviour still amazes me, taking that sort of unfair treatment from the developers with such stride.

@Nora.9207 said:Suggestions

• Please put back the walls and gates at their previous strength - so we have time to say in TS or Team chat that we are under attack - and our allies can come to defend. this would make objectives a thing of pride again - atm they are being reduced to a karma train

I think the objectives need to be a challenge for a side to capture, otherwise it's just boring. Obviously banging your head on a virtually invulnerable wall isn't fun, but neither is ktraining it with no opposition.

What I believe has occurred is an increase in the SPEED of WvW. The warclaw means we can move around much quicker, attack things faster, and with the walls being weakened, capture them faster. On the other side of the coin, the defenders should be able to get to the objectives faster on their mounts, but there's so little time to do so that it's silly at the moment.