Corma.7268

Alliances are postponed, ok. But I read the Studio Update article as "the world restructuring will simply go live without the alliances part". If that is true, we'll get a new system based on guilds only, without the ability to organize ourselves, especially smaller guilds, in some way across guilds In other words, smaller guilds will get new teams every "relink", based on some algorithm. Social bonds between these guilds will break. The only way to prevent that would be the creation of large wvw guilds just for the matchmaking. We should prepare ourselves for that. In the last few beta weeks, I heard a lot of complaints on the channels about not being able to play with friends from other guilds (which are on the same servers of course). Most of these people "endured" the betas, or didn't play in wvw at all, in hope of the upcoming guild alliances. @Anet , prepare for massive complaints when you really do it this way. Don't underestimate the social aspects of the current system, on some servers this is much more important than winning or losing a tier.

Followup: Support isn't able too help. Apparently I have to live with it for the time of the beta. I'm annoyed, this problem is around since the start of the betas, and they are not prepared to help if it happens to some? Maybe the constant change in responsibility, new teams working on the restructuring every few months, isn't really helpful. At least some of the display bugs with server names in lists and notifications are fixed, there is a slight progress.

Unfortunately, there seems to be more - My selection is gone, and now i'm on some random server, separated from the guild I chose. I hope support can fix that (I sent a ticket).

Another part of the puzzle is several people getting the same queue position. You can observe that effect especially during reset when a lot of people try to get on a map at the same time. Some will move forward, some will get stuck at pos 1 forever.

I really hope this time they fixed some of the most annoying bugs, especially those with wrong server names showing in friend lists, ingame capture messages, and other places. ANet, could you please share some insights about what has changed? Which parts of the restructuring should be tested?

They do exactly THAT, that much they told us. Various effects of apparently unbalanced linkings, full vs medium servers and such result from flaws in just counting playtime regardless of the distribution of these periods - a server may seem to get queues averytime just because all people try to play during lets say 8 hours of a day, while much more people playing evenly across all 24 hours never will see queues. Maybe there simply is no good way to find good population balances. Even when you split the day in smaller chunks and try to match population in these chunks, the system can easily get exploited by assembling people at specific times AFTER the link has been done. And then there are the band wagons, transfers just after links, which immediately destroy every balance someone tries to achive.

Did I miss that recap psot somehow? We had another beta since then, and I'm quite curious about what you leaned from these events, and what will come next.

Some more issues (on EU, german language client): - Team names in guild member list or friend lists are still partially wrong. I talked to some people and know they are playing in other teams than shown. - Capture messages in-game still show the old server names (these 'structure got captured by server xxx'-messages) - I took an emergency waypoint on another map, and the resulting loading screen said "Muuguuloo" - sure enough when I arrived there, it was the intended boarderland and not Muuguuloo.

I haven't seen any alliances yet. Therefore I can't comment on that future feature. All we have now is some test of matchmaking mechanics.

This! I'll make up an opinion when we see alliances in phase two (as announced by josh).

once they said "a new cycle begins" after the end of dragons. Maybe we'll see the rising of new gods, which in turn will be superseeded by newborn creatures collecting ley energy in the far future.

For me, joining enemy squads is an exploit. It is in the same category as seeing on which people are when you have them on your friends list and they (or you) are on a linked server. The problem is not only the commander focus, but even worse you can always see where the squad is, and where it is going. When you have people from an enemy server in your squad, you are constantly marked, and can't sneak anywhere, and can't stealth. I sincerely hope this will get adressed with alliances, otherwise i guess it will get much worse.

I really prefer some of the changes from "the table", like alliances, better rewards for defending, map changes and so on. But the "stacking" problem has a much easier and cheap solution: count population across links, not for individual servers. When a link combination is "full", both servers have to be locked. That shouldn't be difficult to implement, and would stop that "link stacking" immediately.

20 Minutes to go in EU. Cross your fingers, place your bets. No information thus far....

I really miss any direction they are heading. A year ago they seemed to have a plan: slowing down combat to feature ore strategic and skillful play, and more build diversity. Now the support role of the warrior is gone, the strategic component of the scourge (deciding to use shades or have effects around yourself) was removed months ago, other changes also were reverted, but in total not towards a previous kind of balance. The changes during 2020 look erratic. Maybe if they would care to explain their reasoning behind this patch ... unfortunately, I fear there is no reasoning. I don't know much about tempest, but from what I read it's similar with builds there. We are heading back towards firebrand/scrapper/scourge with a revenant every now and then in wvw.