BIG oversight: People with no guilds can choose their server freely

[Riba.3271]

Heard it from multiple people. We definitely won't be seeing whole servers in one overpopulated linking. Wasn't whole point of alliances to get people to group up in guilds and play together, rather than incentivise them to have none at all? 🤭 Anet

[Custodio.6134]

Not entirely. 
The purpose of alliances/WR is to break down big groups of players (currently semi-static servers) into smaller groups to build the teams from. 
The smaller the pieces are, the easier it is to build the teams. 

RL example: 
Instead of having lots of big rocks you have to fit into a bucket, you  break them down into smaller pieces. 
Alliances = medium-sized rocks
Guilds = small stones
players without guilds = sand

first you fill the bucket with big rocks, until there is no space left for the bigger rocks
then you fill the space in between with small stones, where otherwise big rocks wouldnt fit
and after that, you take the sand and fill up the remaining even smaller spaces to completely fill the bucket. 

Yes, you lose some "community-stability" by de-prioritizing random players, but you gain flexibility and population balance as players are always able to organize in guilds (what is already happening prior and during the beta-phases). While you sacrifice things like "server identity" (although this is just shifting into "alliance-identity"), you gain a lot of flexibility and most likely more fair matchups. Additionally, as far as we know, mid-season transfers (or as currently, mid-linking transfers) won´t be a thing anymore, so the bandwagoning should also stop and teams should (theoretically) become more stable. 

[Chaba.5410]

I'm just not seeing how this is an oversight.  Don't you want new players to be able to pick where they go like they do now?

Edited August 16, 2022 by Chaba.5410

[Dawdler.8521]

Also as has been explained before, Anet hasnt exluded the idea of transfers. So we know people can join other teams. 

The only difference is probably going to be that the transfer/"free join" window is much narrower than before since they can set the "full" populations of all servers across the board relative to the "targeted" population upon restructure,  regardless of what that number actually is.

Will it be in the final version? Who knows. But going off the beta as an "oversight" is silly.

[Riba.3271]

17 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

I'm just not seeing how this is an oversight.  Don't you want new players to be able to pick where they go like they do now?

New players choosing a server isn't the issue, issue is older players staying guildless

Players or group of them can abuse this system for following:

1. It gives population advantage since alliance linkings are decided at start with equal populations
2. It allows you to choose most "stacked" alliance after observing a while
3. It allows you to go beyond the 500 man guild cap
4. It allows known trolls to follow alliance that left them out intentionally to get rid of.

I am sure there are couple of other reasons why it is a bad idea to give people a choice for alliance linkings rather than matchmaking everyone. Imagine if in ranked SPvP you could choose a team to join after the match has gone a while. It will not only be 6v5 but you will also get to choose winning side with better players. Of course if they pay gems to transfer, it would be fine but doing it freely every alliance linking...

Edited August 17, 2022 by Riba.3271

[Draygo.9473]

I dont think that is how the system will work. I'm sure if you are an active wvw player, even if you have no guild you will be assigned to a team when the restructure happens. I think for the first go of the system, these players were simply left unassigned. I had a few guild members that had to select their shard even though they were guilded.

 

One of them was a completely new player, he had selected our guild for WvW but never played wvw before, reset happened, and he was unable to get into the map. When I had him share his screen, it was asking him what team he wanted to be apart of.

 

Another player hadnt played wvw for over a year, and did not select a guild for WvW, and was able to choose which 'server' to join. 

 

So I think the system is allowing players that either have not played WvW for a while or havent played WvW at all to manually select their server for the first time. I do believe this is a 'first time only' and they will automatically be assigned in the next matchup.

 

Its probably preferred to do this instead of throwing new players on a random team just because they dont understand the system. 

[Nauda.3678]

Pretty sure it was mentioned somewhere that in the full release the population would update in "realtime" so no 1 week grace period where overstacking could occure. Pretty sure the ideas was (is?) that as long as a server is not the "fullest" (since there is now  way that all servers have actually perfectly equal player numbers/hours) that people can transfer to it. But, like I said, it will update the population faster (maybe on a per player transfer basis?) so that you can't abuse it like you currently can.

Edited August 18, 2022 by Nauda.3678

[Chaba.5410]

8 hours ago, Draygo.9473 said:

One of them was a completely new player, he had selected our guild for WvW but never played wvw before, reset happened, and he was unable to get into the map. When I had him share his screen, it was asking him what team he wanted to be apart of.

Ok cool! Your post confirms to me something I've been hunting for. I think there is a big mistake with the instructions and procedure. A player who has never played wvw before (i.e. inactive player) should still be placed with their selected guild, don't you think?