Are we sure about Alliances, or Married to a Memo?

[Sly Mutha.3195]

Two ("three") Betas in the bag, and now we know a bit more what teams can be like.  But have we really stopped to ever consider why Alliances is necessary?  It's been so long, do we even remember why?   Or have we just all been married to a memo that someone at ANet wrote 5 years ago and, well, dangit, that memo was written and shown to people so we just have to live up to it...somehow?   I've got to tell you, I just do nightly WvW for the fun and the fights and I have loved every minute of it through all these years.   And I'm not really saying we MUST be on Servers either because "great times" or history or whatever.  I was just out running the other night with my guild and we were rolling new enemies with new friends, or plowing through old friends, and old enemies too, and wow, this is how it's going to be for a while, this mixed bag potpurri science mixing burning test tube WvW thing, once they push that final "Go With Alliances" button, well, that will be that. Then will we shrug and say, what have we  gotten ourselves into?   There are going to be bugs, and people are going to be teamed wrong, friendships and guilds will be forever changed, people will quit, new people will play, new super-mutant blobs of ridiculous will be borned, and well, it's a big deal.   Why then did we do this Alliances thing? Does anyone know?  Is any one person responsible going to be stopping and saying, "are we sure about this?" at any time?  Because, honestly, I never really liked that memo to begin with, but I really hope it's what's best.

[God.2708]

The Memo was written 4 years later than it should have been.

Yes we're sure.

[Chaba.5410]

While thinking about all the players in this beta who were placed on the wrong team and locked out of playing with their friends for only a single week, remind yourself of the players locked out of playing with their friends for months and months on end because the server their friends transferred to while they "took a break" or whatever remains Full.  Maybe they are stuck transferring every 2 months to a linked server.

Alliances is a solution to that.

Edited January 21, 2022 by Chaba.5410

[Dayra.7405]

The memo in fact is the result of a intense discussion of a former ANet WvW-Teamleader and the community some years before the memo came out. People were very much against closing some server and closing some server was only a temporary solution in  case for further shrinking wvw-pop and completely unable to handle growing wvw-pop (as happened e.g. due to corona-lockdowns). As a first result of the restructuring started there, we got the linking of server.

But server are clumsy to link as they are to different in size, some much to large, there are to few server to produce good linking results and still harmed by a transfer system, that makes imbalancing transfers to a minor of a large server very cheap.

Some server have also thousands of inactive WvW-player rotting in their catacombs, from time to time some reactivate and may harm balance strongly, if to many do at the same time.

On the other side people that crashed their relation to a community remained to long on worlds they hate and that hate them partially due to transfer costs, some of them developed into griefing trolls.

There is also no communition to people on your server. Before Mega-Server, you could call for help in lionarch, if tide turned bad in wvw, but this disappeared and never got replaced.

Also there are to many people on server, that never enter WvW, simply because they have to choose a server on first login. If there is ever an wvw-event that attract many PvE-player (temporaily) to WvW, things likely run completely out of balance as well, as the number of PvE-player on worlds is likely very different as well and not even measured since several years.

PvE-guilds are today usually shattered over several server, they cannot even try PvX and play WvW together.

Alliance are a possibility to overcome all these disadvantages of server.

Edited January 21, 2022 by Dayra.7405

[kash.9213]

12 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

While thinking about all the players in this beta who were placed on the wrong team and locked out of playing with their friends for only a single week, remind yourself of the players locked out of playing with their friends for months and months on end because the server their friends transferred to while they "took a break" or whatever remains Full.  Maybe they are stuck transferring every 2 months to a linked server.

Alliances is a solution to that.

Their guilds could have transferred down to scoop up all their members but they don't. The problem you brought up was a problem with their guilds, not the game. 

[God.2708]

29 minutes ago, kash.9213 said:

Their guilds could have transferred down to scoop up all their members but they don't. The problem you brought up was a problem with their guilds, not the game. 

Transfers all members to low pop server to recruit.

Server gets full.

New friend wants to join.

???

Profit. but not for us.

[kash.9213]

25 minutes ago, God.2708 said:

Transfers all members to low pop server to recruit.

Server gets full.

New friend wants to join.

???

Profit. but not for us.

That's still a guild problem, even if there's one single guild that could bring a low pop server to full suddenly. 

[God.2708]

14 minutes ago, kash.9213 said:

That's still a guild problem, even if there's one single guild that could bring a low pop server to full suddenly. 

Right, because the guild is totally in control of random people not in the guild transferring to the server because the old server they were on is 'dying'. Or some other guild saw that the guild was on low pop server and wanted to try to play them and so transferred on and was the reason the server filled, or any other number of other reasons because this forum is literally filled with 10 years worth of them.

Or we can just blame the guilds. If no one had any friends none of this stuff would be a problem! Gosh darn guilds playing together and coordinating and trying to be communities and getting annoyed when they can't.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, kash.9213 said:

Their guilds could have transferred down to scoop up all their members but they don't. The problem you brought up was a problem with their guilds, not the game. 

So?  There *are* guilds that "transferred down".  Then a bunch of other guilds and players follow because "hey I heard this place is hopping" and server goes full.  Have you just ignored seeing that happen with server relinks and some servers that were previously linked become host servers?  Entire guilds are supposed to keep paying gems every two months?

And then there's the issue of recruiting.  You can't recruit players from outside your server if your server is full.

What you wrote is true but is not a good argument against world restructuring/alliances.  Servers go full and lock other players out for months on end.  That's a structural issue, not a guild issue.  Under restructuring, teams may go full still but players will only be locked out until the next reshuffle.  It doesn't have the permanence that teams based on servers has.

Edited January 21, 2022 by Chaba.5410

[kash.9213]

45 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

So?  There *are* guilds that "transferred down".  Then a bunch of other guilds and players follow because "hey I heard this place is hopping" and server goes full.  Have you just ignored seeing that happen with server relinks and some servers that were previously linked become host servers?  Entire guilds are supposed to keep paying gems every two months?

And then there's the issue of recruiting.  You can't recruit players from outside your server if your server is full.

What you wrote is true but is not a good argument against world restructuring/alliances.  Servers go full and lock other players out for months on end.  That's a structural issue, not a guild issue.  Under restructuring, teams may go full still but players will only be locked out until the next reshuffle.  It doesn't have the permanence that teams based on servers has.

That wasn't an argument against Alliances. I don't know what to tell you, it's still a guild problem, and that problem will still be there, except some guild leaders will have a chance to get paid instead of the Gem store. 

[kash.9213]

1 hour ago, God.2708 said:

Right, because the guild is totally in control of random people not in the guild transferring to the server because the old server they were on is 'dying'. Or some other guild saw that the guild was on low pop server and wanted to try to play them and so transferred on and was the reason the server filled, or any other number of other reasons because this forum is literally filled with 10 years worth of them.

Or we can just blame the guilds. If no one had any friends none of this stuff would be a problem! Gosh darn guilds playing together and coordinating and trying to be communities and getting annoyed when they can't.

There was nothing random about people stacking on those servers. Those guilds who initially stacked could tank a few matches by just fighting but if they're going to welcome the ktrain, that's still on them. 

[Mabi black.1824]

for sure to solve / improve the balance of the matches there are many ways. Alliances is just one of the real possible solutions.

any solution you want to consider for sure must consider transfers, even alliances does and it is the real solution. any algorithm you create to balance the population loses its meaning if the next day the players delete it by moving to the flock.

you can't find the fault in the server and you don't find it in the guild but you find it in the manager that allows daily transfers for a fee.

the right question to ask anet is whether it is really convenient to delete the server communities to go through this solution among many.

personally, so only my personal opinion, I would have invested the resources on wvw differently. I would certainly have worked on transfers and I would have invested in the competition between the servers with new, fresh and updated rankings, mini tournaments maybe in time or something like that, just like guilds do independently practicing gvg etc etc.

I would also have given a bit of freshness to the mode by periodically changing the setting, with the necessary proportions and maintaining the concept of the structures as now.

I would have reduced the links / matches to 4 weeks instead of 8 and I would have reset the servers and then the rankings once a year. but that's all stuff about me.

[subversiontwo.7501]

9 hours ago, kash.9213 said:

There was nothing random about people stacking on those servers. Those guilds who initially stacked could tank a few matches by just fighting but if they're going to welcome the ktrain, that's still on them. 

This seems like an odd statement since the main contributing factor to the formation of the nomadic communities in EU was that guilds did transfer down and then had to become nomadic to avoid the k-train transfers. The very fact that they are nomadic is because they do not want the k-train. It is those larger machinations that also makes all of this "server" issues rather than "guild" issues. That's the least server-oriented side of the coin.

There are issues on the most server-oriented side of the coin too with singular guilds making up 75% of servers' coveted public content and once they transfer down their original servers risk becomming as much of a husk as when a nomadic community transfers off a temporary server. I've written about this countless times. How alot of people who praise their server communities many times are just fooling themselves. On one hand they celebrate the server and on another hand they have four dead maps and a 100-man queue to where a guild plays. They are then in for a rude awakening if such a guild transfers. I've been in such guilds myself, I see them on a daily basis and know their leaders. I was apart of stacking one of the original dead link servers that later turned nomadic, as part of a guild leadership. So I sat in on the talk where this was discussed.

All of this is beyond the simple point that having to pay for transfers, gold or gems, simply makes people stop playing or not start playing WvW and reflects incredibly poorly on the game, treating its players so wildly different. Any transfer, whether it is a nomadic layover or a guild transfering down has always been marred by players quitting over the cost or over getting out-paid by unrelated players. Those are game, matchup and server issues, not guild issues.

Edited January 22, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[gitflap.9031]

Let's be clear, the Alliances idea came about as a solution to chronic NA server stacking; a problem that was and is comparitively minor on EU servers. In NA, new ways to stack will be exploited, in EU, what's left of server based communities will be further threatened. At reset last night on Gandara, so many players expressed thier joy & relief at being re-united with their friends after just 7 days, imagine what 2 months would be like. Trial it on NA servers. If it doesn't turn out to be a waste of time, then fine, stick the rest of us with it too.

Spoiler

Can't get rid of this so, belated Happy New Year everyone!

Edited January 22, 2022 by gitflap.9031

[enkidu.5937]

On 1/21/2022 at 10:57 PM, Sly Mutha.3195 said:

It's been so long, do we even remember why? 

5 years later, still no alliances, but ppl still playing 😮

 

-> we don’t need alliances, we just need the promise

 

a dream of a better WvW waiting just around the corner

 

so better let it stay a dream