My first reaction after seeing this system was that I strongly disliked it. I have identified with my home server and grown fond of playing with the same people there over the years. I think that having changing groups of people to play with would reduce my enthusiasm in participating in WvW, especially doing things that may be boring for me (like scouting) but help the server. Problems I see with the new system: Organizing over teamspeak will have to be essentially privatized in the sense that there will be ts for each guild, since the fluctuations make it impossible to have consistent ts servers. I had the feeling that for commanders trying to lead public zergs it was one of the main hurdles to get casual players to download ts, register on the server and listen to the commander there. Now someone who wants to casually play would need to register to a new server every 9 weeks (if guilds allow them on there), so will basically be left out of organized large-group play.Matching players according to their skill level would result in one server containing the majority of people who regularly do a commander for large groups, one tier of groups containing experienced players without commanders and one tier of people who never/rarely played wvw and have no idea what to do. There have been surveys concerning wvw for all kinds of things (alpine vs. desert, repair hammers etc) but to me it seems that this system overhaul is starting to be implemented without such a survey. The reactions in the forums seemed positive, but this may be a biased reaction and a survey would offer more quantitative feedback.Let me finally sketch an alternative to this new system, that may be able to avoid certain downfalls of this alliance thing:The mercenary systemEach player can switch between being a loyalist (staying on their current server) or a mercenary. Mercenaries get assigned to a new server every 9 weeks and are a tool for ANet to balance populations. As a reward for their services, they get 1 (additional) gold for each tier of wvw rewards (wood, bronze, etc) that they complete. A guild can select to be a mercenary guild and players can select one of their guilds which is a mercenary guild if they want to be a merc and transfer with them (a bit like in the new system). These guilds will remain intact and are at ANets disposition to balance strengths. Perhaps such mercenary guilds could additionally receive tactics/guild weapons as a reward for their participation.If a mercenary switches back to loyalist, they will end up in their original server again. This system leaves people who identify with their home servers a chance to forego the money reward for being a merc. At the same time this money should ensure that ANet has enough mercenaries to balance out things. Since servers remain intact, ANet can still earn money from transfers. On the implementation side, this system would likely require to establish most of the functionalities of the new proposed system with alliances but without destroying the server identities. This abolishment of server identities is an action that cannot be taken back in a meaningful way, so why not try an intermediate step first and see how it plays out?
