Why so much of the feedback i have seen here is both valid and bad

[wowMuchGuildWars.6125]

So I've spent a lot of time over the last few days in the forum reading many very passionate and valid complaints about the Alliance beta going on at the moment, but there are a few problems with these complaints.

The main one being that a lot of them are based on incorrect information and a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on or why Anet are even doing this.

• "This Alliance system is terrible" - The Alliance system doesn't currently exist, we are testing World Restructuring (which places players into teams) along with the underlying infrastructure, Alliances are a whole other thing.
• "My match up is dead/bad/unbalanced" - World creation in this Beta only uses activity and selected guild as a metric to determine where to place players, it does not take into account the time zone you play in, what kind of game play you engage in or anything else (thought it has been said that these could be added in the future) so teams generated should be balance in the context of activity, when these other metrics are added you will see a considerable difference in what your world looks and feels like. However I will concede that its possible that players who are really unhappy with the match up(beta) may of decided to not continue participating OR that your world has an uneven distribution of players across the different time zones (can be especially bad in NA) which will alter the balance of your match up. Both of these things also happen in the "normal" server format but can't be fixed by tweaking an algorithm.
• "I miss my social connections, alliances will ruin this part of the game" and "Server Pride" - This is the one that I feel is the most relatable but at the same time counter intuitive and have only seen one good argument here , Alliances and guilds allow you to maintain the social connection most important to you and strengthen some of the more casual ones but unfortunately some will also be lost. Your server only means as much as the people that are on it, I don't think anyone fights for a server, they fight for the community that they are a part of regardless of what arbitrary name it has. It also feels like there are many long time players who have stayed on one server and who maybe see the game mode through rose tinted glasses, clinging on to the server because of the nostalgia of a community that no longer exists (the good'ol'days) and are resistant to these changes which is completely understandable, but fixating/holding on to something in the past that will never exist again holds you back from having new rich experiences.
• "This system favors guild/group play, us solo/roaming players are being left behind" This is probably the most valid complaint, to me there is no obvious solution in the short term but I can see certain kinds of alliances recruiting this type of player as they can play an important part in winning a match up in the future.

There are other complaints that have already been addressed in the past but people don't bother to take the time to learn about what is going on, so much can be answered if you spend a little over an hour and a half listening to what the relevant people have to say.

Match balance and rewards are two of the most important things in a competitive gamemode and highly influence how players engage with it and its longevity. WR will be able to respond dynamically to the playerbase creating more "tiers" as it expands and shrinking when large groups of players take breaks or leave all the while hopefully keeping the matches balanced, changes to rewards in a way that makes winning a match up matter will change how groups of players value and interact with each other.

As I said before, most of the complaints are valid, some Anet are already of aware of, some are based on what they think the system will be in the future and some based on what they think the system is because of the beta, but what all of them miss is that the beta is not representative of what the system will look like or do in its final form. Some one used an analogy saying something along the lines of "If you go to a restaurant and get served a bowl of dirt as the starter, you don't need to have the mains to know you don't like what they are serving" to justify disliking the whole system just from the beta. I would argue that what we are seeing in some of these threads is more like going to a bakery, eating a hand full of flour and saying "I don't like this steak" when really you should be eating a cake and saying "I don't like this icing"

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

This not being Alliances doesn't change the fact that for people this is just a pile of garbage. 
The wrong colors, team names being all over the place were present in the previous beta, but this time we can actually play.
In my experience we just got the exact same dumpster, but atleast this time the lid is not welded shut. I'm going to complain about - not being able to play WvW with the people I used to, because "oops sorry they are in a different Guild",
- not being able to understand chat a bunch of time, because those who played on French, German or Spanish servers might be in the same team now due to everyone being assigned randomly. Not fun for them, not fun for us.
- having to play at a certain time of day or see barely any action other than some blob steamrolling
- having to put up with the bugs that were present in the previous beta

The "it's not Alliances" and "it's just a beta" is not a good reason for people not to complain about things that make this beta so garbage for some, despite it being good for others. 
They saw during the weekend that the system can last under pressure, there was no need to do this for one week.

[wowMuchGuildWars.6125]

I never said not to complain, what i said was to be informed, objective and reasonable with your complaints.
Saying that this beta is a dumpster fire is hyperbolic and not helpfull. All the things you compain about are reasonable but hardly the end of the world and have solutions. The lack of understanding about software/game development along with the expectation that betas should be bug free creates an unrealistic picture and many assumptions, having a weekends worth of data is less beneficial than having a whole weeks worth when trying to solve any problem. Living with some discomfort in the short term for larger benefits in the longterm/future seems like a worthwhile trade to me

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

47 minutes ago, wowMuchGuildWars.6125 said:

I never said not to complain, what i said was to be informed, objective and reasonable with your complaints.
Saying that this beta is a dumpster fire is hyperbolic and not helpfull. All the things you compain about are reasonable but hardly the end of the world and have solutions. The lack of understanding about software/game development along with the expectation that betas should be bug free creates an unrealistic picture and many assumptions, having a weekends worth of data is less beneficial than having a whole weeks worth when trying to solve any problem. Living with some discomfort in the short term for larger benefits in the longterm/future seems like a worthwhile trade to me

I expect a beta coming out a month after the previous one to fix some of the issues it had, namely the random team colors and the RI timer being random as well. None of that was fixed.
Just because one isn't a software developer they can expect software developers to atleast fix the known problems. 

I never said I want the beta to be bug free and I compared the beta to a dumpster, not a dumpster fire. My comment is public, it's readable by everyone, no need to be creative, no need to rephrase what I wrote.

[Zikory.6871]

There are only 2 topics that seem valid to me at this stage. 

1. A in-game notification of some sort because not everyone follows dev posts and a lot of super casual players were rightfully confused af. 

2. Unbalance matchups due to some groups of players are just stronger then others, whatever the reason be. No idea how Anet can manage this. 

Most everything else is uninformed nonsense about "Alliances" that haven't even been developed yet. 

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Zikory.6871 said:

2. Unbalance matchups due to some groups of players are just stronger then others, whatever the reason be. No idea how Anet can manage this. 

They already manage it by using a tier based one up one down matchup system.

So technically only one point is valid.

[wowMuchGuildWars.6125]

2 hours ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

I expect a beta coming out a month after the previous one to fix some of the issues it had, namely the random team colors and the RI timer being random as well. None of that was fixed.
Just because one isn't a software developer they can expect software developers to atleast fix the known problems. 

I never said I want the beta to be bug free and I compared the beta to a dumpster, not a dumpster fire. My comment is public, it's readable by everyone, no need to be creative, no need to rephrase what I wrote.

The fact is they did fix some of the known issues, the critical game breaking ones that stopped us from actually playing. Its not uncommon for developers to focus resources on critical bugs just so they can get a stable build, its also not uncommon to know that a bug exists but not know how to fix it straight away. What I would expect is that those non critical issues will be fixed but there will be a new set of problems that wont be discovered until we get our hands on the next beta.

Im sorry that I miss-quoted you and it wasnt meant as an attack, but that doesn't make the statement any less hyperbolic or your complaints any less valid, part of the issue is when people (not you) say things like "if this is what alliances is going to be, I'm going to uninstall the game" when if anyone spent any amount of time doing any research, like watching the video I posted above, they would be informed enough to know how ridiculous that statement is.

Again, I'm not saying to not complain, just be as be as informed and objective as you can (not you specifically, but everyone) before you do and you might find that even though you are right, you don't need to be so angry about it.

Edited December 9, 2021 by wowMuchGuildWars.6125

[Zikory.6871]

18 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

They already manage it by using a tier based one up one down matchup system.

So technically only one point is valid.

That's fair but 500 is more then enough space to stack a world. Nothing Anet can do to stop people from organizing without punishing casual guilds. I'm not particularly concerned about either point but I'll concede to semi-validity. 1.34 points. 

[God.2708]

1 hour ago, Zikory.6871 said:

That's fair but 500 is more then enough space to stack a world. Nothing Anet can do to stop people from organizing without punishing casual guilds. I'm not particularly concerned about either point but I'll concede to semi-validity. 1.34 points. 

I think the stacking will be less obvious when alliances are actually implemented.

At the moment since it's based on guilds, there are a select few guilds that maxed the cap that obviously already have the organizational structure built in to make them roll everyone else, and the rest are haphazardly thrown together (and incomplete from people not wanting to join a temporary guild) or just don't exist yet.

Trying to take away team balance from this beta is a futile effort. The only thing that should get noticed is if overall player count is similiar, and honestly going by total kills/deaths that's fairly true.  Hell even score wise, There's only one that's a total landslide smash, which is impressive given it was basically just 'make sure every team has the same play hours'.

[wowMuchGuildWars.6125]

Problems like stacking and balance can be solved with math and algorithms, the most common complaints that for me had no really obvious solution (even though I gave answers to them) are the roamer/solo player and social connections issues. After thinking more about it the "just make a guild for you and your friends if you want to play together 4Head" solution doesn't feel like enough or that it will be applicable in every situation.  There really should be some sort of middle ground like maybe taking into account your friends list/social network but that is open to exploiting for match manipulation so I really don't know.

[Chichimec.9364]

11 hours ago, wowMuchGuildWars.6125 said:

So I've spent a lot of time over the last few days in the forum reading many very passionate and valid complaints about the Alliance beta going on at the moment, but there are a few problems with these complaints.

The main one being that a lot of them are based on incorrect information and a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on or why Anet are even doing this.

• "This Alliance system is terrible" - The Alliance system doesn't currently exist, we are testing World Restructuring (which places players into teams) along with the underlying infrastructure, Alliances are a whole other thing.
• "My match up is dead/bad/unbalanced" - World creation in this Beta only uses activity and selected guild as a metric to determine where to place players, it does not take into account the time zone you play in, what kind of game play you engage in or anything else (thought it has been said that these could be added in the future) so teams generated should be balance in the context of activity, when these other metrics are added you will see a considerable difference in what your world looks and feels like. However I will concede that its possible that players who are really unhappy with the match up(beta) may of decided to not continue participating OR that your world has an uneven distribution of players across the different time zones (can be especially bad in NA) which will alter the balance of your match up. Both of these things also happen in the "normal" server format but can't be fixed by tweaking an algorithm.
• "I miss my social connections, alliances will ruin this part of the game" and "Server Pride" - This is the one that I feel is the most relatable but at the same time counter intuitive and have only seen one good argument here , Alliances and guilds allow you to maintain the social connection most important to you and strengthen some of the more casual ones but unfortunately some will also be lost. Your server only means as much as the people that are on it, I don't think anyone fights for a server, they fight for the community that they are a part of regardless of what arbitrary name it has. It also feels like there are many long time players who have stayed on one server and who maybe see the game mode through rose tinted glasses, clinging on to the server because of the nostalgia of a community that no longer exists (the good'ol'days) and are resistant to these changes which is completely understandable, but fixating/holding on to something in the past that will never exist again holds you back from having new rich experiences.
• "This system favors guild/group play, us solo/roaming players are being left behind" This is probably the most valid complaint, to me there is no obvious solution in the short term but I can see certain kinds of alliances recruiting this type of player as they can play an important part in winning a match up in the future.

There are other complaints that have already been addressed in the past but people don't bother to take the time to learn about what is going on, so much can be answered if you spend a little over an hour and a half listening to what the relevant people have to say.

Match balance and rewards are two of the most important things in a competitive gamemode and highly influence how players engage with it and its longevity. WR will be able to respond dynamically to the playerbase creating more "tiers" as it expands and shrinking when large groups of players take breaks or leave all the while hopefully keeping the matches balanced, changes to rewards in a way that makes winning a match up matter will change how groups of players value and interact with each other.

As I said before, most of the complaints are valid, some Anet are already of aware of, some are based on what they think the system will be in the future and some based on what they think the system is because of the beta, but what all of them miss is that the beta is not representative of what the system will look like or do in its final form. Some one used an analogy saying something along the lines of "If you go to a restaurant and get served a bowl of dirt as the starter, you don't need to have the mains to know you don't like what they are serving" to justify disliking the whole system just from the beta. I would argue that what we are seeing in some of these threads is more like going to a bakery, eating a hand full of flour and saying "I don't like this steak" when really you should be eating a cake and saying "I don't like this icing"

Generally what you are saying I very much agree with. There are some concerns I have about what's coming though that I haven't heard discussed much at all yet. Iirc, it was in the video you linked that @Josh Davis.7865made the statements that concerned me. One was that he wanted to make WvW more competitive by changing the reward system to make winning matter more. The other was that he wanted to develop a public ranking system for guilds that play WvW. Those two changes, separately, and especially together, I'm afraid may end up baking more toxicity into the WvW structure. 

Making winning pay better seems like it may increase cheating. Ranking guilds seems like inviting trash talk and exclusionary actions toward guilds that are not deemed "gud" enough. The first one makes me think of the longstanding charges of bots and hacks in pvp tournaments. The second one reminds me of what I've heard people say about raid groups in lfg. If you can't prove you are good enough, you are not welcome unless you want to pay someone to carry you through raids. We haven't seen these two changes at all yet and don't even have any concrete detail on how they will actually work. I am concerned though and hope that such changes can be implemented in ways that do not significantly increase the toxicty of a game mode I really enjoy.

 

Edited December 10, 2021 by Chichimec.9364

[Dawdler.8521]

6 hours ago, Zikory.6871 said:

That's fair but 500 is more then enough space to stack a world. Nothing Anet can do to stop people from organizing without punishing casual guilds. I'm not particularly concerned about either point but I'll concede to semi-validity. 1.34 points. 

But seemingly the most common complaint on the forum is that there is too much blobbing and smaller groups as that is something bad for WvW mkay. People saying that roaming is dead (and we've never heard that before) because there are only 10-30+ man groups ie voiceless pug tags or it wouldnt be a blob.

Is this not casual?

Even if 500 is enough to stack a strong force, ideally there would be at least 1000 as stacked meeting you in the 3-way matchup. Again, kind of the point of a tier based matchup system. Even with the link system a tier 5 server meeting a tier 1 server thats got 5x the population can accuse that server of being stacked and organized for sure, but its not really a meaningful complaint because tiers.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

I actually doubt anet has much of a QA department.  The lack of being able to segregate beta environment out from the live one is enough to know that the fact anything is working at all right now is a bit of a miracle.  

 

We really shouldn't be testing the grouping part of this system for an entire week like this--because they've had EoTM for years.  It groups in the exact same way...in fact that's actually what kills me.  Because they HAVE EoTM and it is segregated naturally from the borderlands...so how about using THAT to test?

 

Because if EotM is working, scaling it up to the borderland level shouldn't have been hard at all.  I can see the initial resource bugs, but the team and color mismatching is pretty inexcusable at this point.  If EoTM is not working or not working like alliances will, then again use that as a test ground and give some incentives for guilds to go fight there for a week.  

[enkidu.5937]

On 12/9/2021 at 5:38 PM, wowMuchGuildWars.6125 said:

There are other complaints that have already been addressed in the past but people don't bother to take the time to learn about what is going on, so much can be answered if you spend a little over an hour and a half listening to what the relevant people have to say.

 

 

First of all, its great that Anet gives us streams and blogs 👍

 

But what did they actually tell us: They want WvW to be a competitive game mode and that’s why they want to balance the team populations. So what’s their plan to do this, apart from killing the servers and split those communities in smaller chunks?

 

The most telling quote imo:

“this is a really big EXPERIMENT, we have a lot of ideas and THEORIES how this is gonna pan out” 🤨

 

So, only two things are safe:

(1) Introduction of Alliances: this ofc is completely irrelevant for the game experience, because we already can stack 500 ppl in on guild. Its just a maybe QoL thing.

 

(2) The servers that the communities have built up over a whole decade will be deleted. And Anet even admitted that “there is a story and community behind servers” (they say that’s why they replace the server names with “First haven”, “Dragon’s claw” etc.)

 

So Anet will do this, it is safe. It will NOT being tested in any way. NOT BEING TESTED. It is already set in stone that the servers get killed. To justify this big step (and also the unforseeable consequences) I think they should present a plan, and not just a: We will try this and hope that it works out somehow.

 

Because deleting the servers, their histories, and their communities is IRREVERSIBLE (and at least meaningfull to some of us). We cannot just HOPE that ppl somehow will manage to restructure the whole system. Its not just preserving cores of the old communities by making alliances, it also affects the team profiles + long-lasting server rivalry, the fluent integration of newbies, in-game communication (e. g. voice chat) for the whole team etc.

 

On a minor note:

A lot of other things that imo are absolutely fundamental are not PLANNED. They MIGHT be adressed in the future:

 

Any plans to prevent specific alliances from dominating? 00:35:52

“I think the hope for us is that we don’t have to police things on that level” 😝

 

Introduction of a transfer window, to prevent bandwaggoning directly after re-linking? 00:52:38

“we don’t have the full details of what transferring will look like”

“we don’t want to be too much movement there”

 

Overhaul of the reward system? 00:24:04  

“some small changes in the short term, but no focus at this point for new rewards or reward systems”

 

Edited December 12, 2021 by enkidu.5937

[Nidome.1365]

On 12/9/2021 at 4:38 PM, wowMuchGuildWars.6125 said:

• "This Alliance system is terrible" - The Alliance system doesn't currently exist, we are testing World Restructuring (which places players into teams) along with the underlying infrastructure, Alliances are a whole other thing.

 

That test was completed easily within the first 6 hours. in fact they didn't even need to run that as a test on the live servers, they could have easily made a duplicate set of servers to test that on offline and just checked the data and then rerun that as many times as needed to get it right.

 

They run their test on live servers then they made those of us who ended up with kitten matchups who were separated from our WvW friends sit through the remaining 7 days of hell. Why?

[Custodio.6134]

24 minutes ago, Nidome.1365 said:

That test was completed easily within the first 6 hours. in fact they didn't even need to run that as a test on the live servers, they could have easily made a duplicate set of servers to test that on offline and just checked the data and then rerun that as many times as needed to get it right.

 

They run their test on live servers then they made those of us who ended up with kitten matchups who were separated from our WvW friends sit through the remaining 7 days of hell. Why?

Straight no. Population is made out of multiple factors, some of them being average playtime, amount of players, and the consideration of peak- and off-hours. Also you need to consider what part in the matchup the players are. We have seen matches being very close till the very end of the week, and matchups being one-sided. And matchups that shifted every day from one side to another. You CANNOT account for these within just 6 hours. Especially since probably a large amount of players dropped into the first days of the week, even though not being a frequent wvw-player. Let me call that "the curiosity of the random player". This would also have distorted the outcome of the test, making the data inaccurate and in worst case, lead to tweaks in the system that worsen it in the long-term. 

If it was one, then the test was pehaps even too short, because it was just one single matchup. It would have been more accurate if they tested it for 3 weeks instead, taking different matchups into account. But ANet decided not to do in order to interrupt the normal gameplay as little as possible. 

also reminder: this system is working on a scale, that you cannot simulate. ANet could have just simulated everything in unrealistic conditions (because it is impossible to simulate player behaviour) and decide to make it final the way it ist. So be glad that they tested it, instead of saying: "we simulated it, it should work, so this is now the new norm. deal with it"

Edited December 12, 2021 by Custodio.6134

[Nidome.1365]

4 minutes ago, Custodio.6134 said:

Straight no. Population is made out of multiple factors, some of them being average playtime, amount of players, and the consideration of peak- and off-hours. Also you need to consider what part in the matchup the players are. We have seen matches being very close till the very end of the week, and matchups being one-sided. And matchups that shifted every day from one side to another. You CANNOT account for these within just 6 hours. Especially since probably a large amount of players dropped into the first days of the week, even though not being a frequent wvw-player. Let me call that "the curiosity of the random player". This would also have distorted the outcome of the test, making the data inaccurate and in worst case, lead to tweaks in the system that worsen it in the long-term. 

If it was one, then the test was pehaps even too short, because it was just one single matchup. It would have been more accurate if they tested it for 3 weeks instead, taking different matchups into account. But ANet decided not to do in order to interrupt the normal gameplay as little as possible. 

also reminder: this system is working on a scale, that you cannot simulate. ANet could have just simulated everything in unrealistic conditions (because it is impossible to simulate player behaviour) and decide to make it final the way it ist. So be glad that they tested it, instead of saying: "we simulated it, it should work, so this is now the new norm. deal with it"

 

No, you are wrong. The entire argument has been that they were not testing alliances & population balance but the restructuring infrastructure. That infrastructure was tested the moment everyone was assigned to a team.

It failed and a number of people had to be reassigned. At that point infrastructure testing was complete.

It has been pointed out that population balance cannot be tested until the full alliance selection system is implemented which it hasn't. Therefore there was no more significant data to be gathered at that point.

Player behaviour is irrelevant to an early test such as this. This test was merely to check if people were assigned to a team they would expect to be assigned to based upon their selection and the others who made the same selection.

That did not actually require live play to achieve. By implementing it as live it garnered a lot of negative feedback due to the supplementary map bugs etc and created a negative play experience compared to normal for a number of players.

[God.2708]

7 hours ago, Nidome.1365 said:

 

No, you are wrong. The entire argument has been that they were not testing alliances & population balance but the restructuring infrastructure. That infrastructure was tested the moment everyone was assigned to a team.

It failed and a number of people had to be reassigned. At that point infrastructure testing was complete.

It has been pointed out that population balance cannot be tested until the full alliance selection system is implemented which it hasn't. Therefore there was no more significant data to be gathered at that point.

Player behaviour is irrelevant to an early test such as this. This test was merely to check if people were assigned to a team they would expect to be assigned to based upon their selection and the others who made the same selection.

That did not actually require live play to achieve. By implementing it as live it garnered a lot of negative feedback due to the supplementary map bugs etc and created a negative play experience compared to normal for a number of players.

I am glad we have an anet employee here to explain everything for us.

Or maybe your assumption on what they were testing is wrong and not actually the whole picture.

[Nidome.1365]

On 12/13/2021 at 12:53 AM, God.2708 said:

I am glad we have an anet employee here to explain everything for us.

Or maybe your assumption on what they were testing is wrong and not actually the whole picture.

 It is not an assumption. Whenever anyone has criticized the beta they were told that the only thing  being tested was restructuring infrastructure so therefore all critique of the test is wrong. Anets own posts seem to generally support this theory so therefore I have generally accepted it.
My position is that if that is all they were testing then the test succeeded within hours, and if it wasn't all they were testing then it failed within hours. Either way continuing past that point was bad as it demotivated a significant portion of the players for the rest of the week. Defend stuff? Apparently a lot of people believed there was no point in doing anything unless it was a daily because it was a beta.

[Chaba.5410]

10 minutes ago, Nidome.1365 said:

 It is not an assumption. Whenever anyone has criticized the beta they were told that the only thing  being tested was restructuring infrastructure so therefore all critique of the test is wrong. Anets own posts seem to generally support this theory so therefore I have generally accepted it.
My position is that if that is all they were testing then the test succeeded within hours, and if it wasn't all they were testing then it failed within hours. Either way continuing past that point was bad as it demotivated a significant portion of the players for the rest of the week. Defend stuff? Apparently a lot of people believed there was no point in doing anything unless it was a daily because it was a beta.

Is Anet not allowed to gather the metrics of an entire week's match when they said ahead of time that the test would be an entire week because some GW2 forum posters who also don't really know what Anet was testing told you differently?

Edited December 14, 2021 by Chaba.5410

[Knighthonor.4061]

On 12/9/2021 at 1:21 PM, wowMuchGuildWars.6125 said:

I never said not to complain, what i said was to be informed, objective and reasonable with your complaints.
Saying that this beta is a dumpster fire is hyperbolic and not helpfull. All the things you compain about are reasonable but hardly the end of the world and have solutions. The lack of understanding about software/game development along with the expectation that betas should be bug free creates an unrealistic picture and many assumptions, having a weekends worth of data is less beneficial than having a whole weeks worth when trying to solve any problem. Living with some discomfort in the short term for larger benefits in the longterm/future seems like a worthwhile trade to me

Telling people not to complain because you like this Alliance system is also a hyperbole and not helpful. 

[Chaba.5410]

6 minutes ago, Knighthonor.4061 said:

Telling people not to complain because you like this Alliance system is also a hyperbole and not helpful. 

Did you even read what he wrote?