Feedback from a smaller guild leader perspective

[InspectorCaracal.2970]

I mean, I agree in general that roamers tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to dev attention and focus, but honestly, I've heard a lot more about this Blobs Forever thing than I've seen. The main imbalance I've noticed is actually completely counter to this "big guilds covering all the timezones" thing - my team is dead during my timezone.

I've been on Giant's Rise (NA) and, despite the team being in the lead for the skirmish basically the whole week, we've been consistently in third place during my usual play hours. It's incredibly disheartening when I'm getting kitten pips and there's nothing I can do about it because 90% of my team is active at completely different time. And unlike before, I can't scurry around flipping camps on an Outnumbered map to make up the pips from being in distant third because no one's around to organize against the other teams.

This isn't saying we're losing because they're blobbing and we're not, either. It feels like exactly the same level of big guild groups and small roamer groups from the other teams, just more of both. And less of both on my own team during the hours I play.

I've been assuming this is because this beta didn't have any active-timezone balancing in it, which I sure hope is the case because it's either that or their player activity balancing just doesn't work.

[Moira Shalaar.5620]

On 12/7/2021 at 6:30 PM, Daerth Riverstone.3218 said:

Arenanet has to decide what direction the want WvW to go in, if you want to bring PvE to WvW you are on the right track...keep screwing it up. If you want it to be a competitive large scale PvP game mode, (wasn't that the intention?) than these alliances are too big. 500 is too big. If you reduced the number to 150, or even 200 (still big imo) you force people to think about their rosters, which lets smaller guilds be relevant in this current meta and balance. The issue with smaller guilds is 50% of smaller guilds ARE casual but make up half or slightly less of a map queue. When that's your only team mate on the server and they dont want to get better, nor do they want to listen, nor do they want to learn basic game mechanics. And all you have to fight is a map q with pin snipe. I'm sorry but thats not the game for me. And it's not like you're pve content is thrilling (sitting through pointless dialouge that you can't skip yawn). 

. . .

Now to a solution???? Shorten map caps on bls to 50 max (there isnt even enough ppl in the game for that to matter) and give rewards to eotm and make the eotm map cap 80-90. Back in the day when eotm had rewards it was a great place for people to go and PPT or find mindless things to do. There was no obligation for holding objectives because its a 2hr instance and when WvW was dead it was a fun place to go try to beat a blob. This would allow WvW to have roamers again, this would allow 10man havoc groups to do things, and 15-30 man groups to enjoy fights. Other option, alliance capped at 100-150 people. If you need more friends then that to enjoy a game than you have issues. 

 

While I can understand your frustration, I certainly do not agree with your solution. My own guild is a medium sized guild, and our server has quite a few guilds that have been playing together for a long time. Many of us have cultivated a very deliberate atmosphere of friendly cooperation in WvW and over the years we have become friends and allies. For us the Alliance system is already going to end up destroying the community that a large number of us have worked hard to promote and develop. The best we can do going forward is to try and band together as many of our separate guilds as we can so that we might still be able to play together. Reducing the number of guilds and players in an alliance by the degree that you are talking about would finish us off entirely. 

[displayname.8315]

Lowering map caps is a decent idea but the kiddos cried so hard last time it was tested.  The mob always wins.