Caliburn.1845

There is a strong recency bias to this list. Meaning that the list is compiled mostly of guilds from the last four years, instead of the last eight years. Many of the best roamers the NA servers ever saw had left the game before many of the guilds listed here were even formed. Covenant's AoN(I think that was the tag) 6-8 man roaming group for example were the best roamers I ever saw in the game. But very few people here can remember the first couple years of the game.

Camelot Unchained is essentially trying to do what the OP suggests.Beyond designing and running such a game however, I see two large structural problems that such games will find hard to overcome. First, the RvR/WvW crowd is small relative to say the Battle Royale population. Players who participate daily in WvW style gamemodes across the various MMOs that offer some form(GW2, ESO etc) of it probably number under 100,000. The population that play BRs daily(Apex, Fortnite, PUBG, Tarkov etc) is in the millions. You're going to need a serious hook or fantastic marketing to broaden that population.That directly ties in to the second problem. How do you make money off a WvW style game? BRs, FPSs, or even mobile games are easier to monetize due to the large number of people playing them, and any company that wants to make money would frankly be foolish to sink large amounts of money making an AAA+ WvW game, when the playerbase just isn't there to support it.

I wouldn't define eras by what was thought to be in the "meta". It was GWEN pre-HoT, and GWEN-R after HoT. All the tweaks and adjustments are pretty much just minor refinements within that framework for zerg purposes. For roaming its an entirely different story of course. The biggest systemic change to WvW was that over the course of roughly a year we had the three WvW seasons. Those seasons gave servers a reason to organize, and communities to seek new players, guilds and commanders. People played to win, they were invested in the outcome. Then Anet decided seasons were problematic, and removed them. And WvW has been in decline since then.

We've asked for a GvG format since before GW2 was released. Why when WvW is suffering all the problems that come with a decreasing population and activity levels would we finally get a GvG mode? That ship has sailed, those players are long gone.

They have some of the most dedicated players during off hours. Most other servers Attack and take a structure and leave to take other stuff. They don’t try to defend what they’ve taken. Not these BG players though. BG players won’t just take a structure and leave. They will walk dolyaks and defend camps for as many structures that they can make into T3. And their skills are above the average players so it takes a huge effort to dislodge them from whatever they’re guarding. but why isnt that same talent and mindset spread out. Why specifically they all there rather than all over the other servers?During the first two WvW seasons Choc Pudding spent several thousand dollars to recruit guilds and players to Blackgate, including off-hour guilds. The Russian guild that arrived in the middle of season one on Blackgate(and broke the spirit of SOR and destroyed them as a server within days.) was paid for by Choc. I was in another guild that was bought and brought to Blackgate by Choc. Winning caused a chain reaction of sorts as players who cared about winning inevitable moved to Blackgate. After seasons ended the incentive to stack a server for the purpose of winning a season was obviously no longer present, but BG was still stacked with those players they had bought, or who had flocked their because they cared about winning. In the years since seasons many of those players have quit or left the server, but at the same time due to lack of motivation no server has stacked itself to the same degree that Blackgate did. So while some servers have risen to beat BG for a limited span of time(Maguuma when they cared, YB when they were super stacked for example), the interest of the guilds and commanders and more importantly the financial backers who move players around, don't care about building a long-term server to beat Blackgate because there is no reward for doing so without the spectre of a WvW season to give them motivation.

10k dollars spaced over the 8 weeks of relink cycle. So like 1250$ bucks a week. We have no idea of the actual revenue generated by transfers, but if I had to bet, I'd bet under that. As to WvW players spending money on the game, some do, some don't. Depends on the person. It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of whether PVE-centric players or WvW-centric players on average spend the most in GW2.

People often state that server transfer fees make Anet so much money, and is preventing changes to that system. Have you ever actually thought about those numbers? Lets say 500 players transfer every time relinks hit. Lets say they pay full price, something like 20$ for 1800 gems. That only comes out to a little over a 1000$ per week. And that is a hugely liberal number. Most players don't straight up buy gems with dollars, they use in game gold. A large number of transfers don't go to servers that cost 1800 gems. It would not surprise me at all if Anet revenue from WvW world transfers was just a few hundred dollars a week. For a company their size, such a number is meaningless.

I'm not completely sold on Alliances, it certainly won't fix all the problems with WvW. But implemented properly it will change and greatly improve WvW from where it is right now. With that said, if there is a better alternative than Alliances I'd be all for it. But nothing of substance has been suggested or proposed here. What actual systemic idea would be better than Alliances?

Some of the stuff would be good, some would be bad. My main worry would be the two month long match-ups. Right now we see activity drop hard as the week progresses and one side starts winning over the other two servers. Now stretch that over two months. Factions would get demoralized and get too far behind to care. Personal rewards are great and all, but you need at least a pseudo-competitive framework that people can invest in. And two month long match-ups determined after the first week are going to turn people off of WvW, and drop activity in the game mode.

Yeah, maps aren't changing. Funny how hysterical the rumor mill gets.

No, you don't have it right. You lost those world communities when megaservers went in.

Where did it say that alliances would make people care about winning? It's just a population balance is all I got from it unless there's some info i didn't see. The excuse a lot of people use for not playing to win is population balance. "We can't win, they just have more people than us etc etc." Take the population balance problem away, make everyone(at least early on) think they have a chance to be #1, and you'll see people try to win the week again. Just ask someone like Xushin, he is already sniffing around talking to off-hour guilds for his potential alliance. And he is not alone. Number 1 for what? You get nothing for winning. Balance doesn't change the waste of time with no reward ppt is. Xushin is a PPT guy still to this day so he's always gonna be about coverage and all that stuff.You don't care care about being #1, and I don't care. But you have to admit that WvW works better, people play more and put in longer hours, when they want to win. Or they are under the illusion that winning matters. If population balance and alliances are done correctly, then as the 8-week cycle progresses(if your alliance+world advances up the ranks) you'll find more and tougher fights. Which is primarily what those of us who don't care about winning do want.

Where did it say that alliances would make people care about winning? It's just a population balance is all I got from it unless there's some info i didn't see. The excuse a lot of people use for not playing to win is population balance. "We can't win, they just have more people than us etc etc." Take the population balance problem away, make everyone(at least early on) think they have a chance to be #1, and you'll see people try to win the week again. Just ask someone like Xushin, he is already sniffing around talking to off-hour guilds for his potential alliance. And he is not alone.

I think a lot of people don't fully understand that WvW right now is very stratified and exclusive because for most of us winning does not matter, if anything many of us try to avoid winning. So we run closed, try to shake pugs, and look for the fights we consider quality. If alliances succeed in making people care about winning, it will become much more inclusive. You're going to be grouped with a random assortment of other alliances, guilds and solo players, and if you want to win you're going to have to at least marginally be able to work with them. All these fears about guilds being super exclusive, and toxic, and kicking people to the curb are sort of silly when we see that numerous guilds and some entire servers are ALREADY LIKE THIS. Some alliances will no doubt take the exclusive route. And they will lose. The alliances that are more inclusive will win. And the option of whom to join will rest in the hands of the individual player, as it should.

Great that you guys get to decide for all of us. We just get to decide for us, you get to decide for you.

Blackgate has not lost a match in what, well over a year now? No alliance is going to be capable of that. The only way any alliance of guilds could match that level of success is if alliances had an enormous player cap(say 2000 or more). More importantly you would have to change the mindset of most of the leadership of the competent WvW guilds out there. The "fighting" guilds are not going to all flock to the same alliance it would be counterproductive. And yes, we're already having meetings about that stuff.

Poster in this thread have actually read the OP I hope? The one with nice graphics showing that individual players will have the same ability to play WvW as any guild or alliance. Almost every guild in this game is recruiting. Every alliance is going to be recruiting. Every player is going to have a buffet of hundreds of options to align themselves with in WvW. If some players are so picky that none of those options work, and they're too lazy to make their own guild/alliance then they can remain as a solo player, sampling different guilds/zergs/alliances every eight weeks. You get to pick and choose, you can literally do whatever you want, with more choices than have ever been offered under the server based system.

There was an informal poll taken on these forums shortly after Anet posted this alliance idea. Roughly 75% of players supported the idea. I'd like to see an official Anet poll on the topic to get a real sense of what players want. But I suspect that an official poll would have upwards of 80% in favor.

If you play WvW because of server loyalty, but refuse to hit the "opt in" button to join your server Alliance when the time comes. Then all your protestations of loyalty mean less to you than one mouse click. And if it means that little to you, why should anyone else(including Anet) value that loyalty at all?

This graph was posted earlier in this thread by Anet Raymond, the driving force behind the Alliance revamp. Each column is the man hours(read activity level) of each server. Which columns represent which servers were not provided, except for the first column which we know is Blackgate. Maybe Blackgate has a better skilled WvW playerbase, maybe Blackgate has better commanders, maybe Blackgate is better organized. All of these things are debatable. What we know via this graph is that Blackgate spends more man hours in WvW than any other server, and that due to the population caps placed on servers, no other server has the chance to stack to the level of activity that Blackgate enjoys. Thus every server is outnumbered by Blackgate overall(Linked servers mitigate this somewhat, and individual times zones will vary, we're talking about overall). I'm not making an argument or stating my opinion, I'm just reading the data that Anet has given us. And after looking at that data for a very long time Anet has decided to do away with servers and give us a more dynamic flexible system.

If winning matters all those fight guilds will revert back to being ppt guilds. If.

While dependent on how you judge "activity" I don't see any server on NA being able to fill 1000 alliance slots with active players. Including BG. Most of the biggest most visible guilds playing WvW have less than 50 actives on their roster. Amalgamated guilds like TSYM/SF/TTD and a few others might be nearer 100 actives, but there are only a handful of guilds like that. If the alliance cap is 1000, no one should have a problem getting basically everyone on a server into it. If the cap is 500, then it became much more selective. And of course the wildcard is returning players/guilds that show up. And the second wildcard is how many worlds Anet creates. I could easily see them only doing 9 NA worlds instead of the current 12(with links).

Anet has already explored other options apparently. There is no third option they feel is viable. "Bigger maps, more powerful servers" seems a tad less viable for them then "Alliances"

I wholeheartedly agree, as long as the the poll includes 3 options instead of just a yes/no. What do you have in mind for a third option? Undecided? Because the choice as presented by Anet at the start of this thread is very binary. Move towards the proposed Alliance solution. Or, leave WvW as it is. There is no third party candidate in this race.

From my perspective the reaction to the WvW changes have been mostly positive on these forums. Overwhelmingly positive on the parallel Reddit thread. And from people who don't read either, even more positive, although examples of this type of person are for most of us anecdotal. The one unofficial poll that sort of asked the question on these forums had the changes at something like 78% support. I would love Anet to do an official poll in-game to reach the largest amount of players, and am confident it would have more than a super majority(66%) in favor of altering WvW as discussed.