Returning Player Impressions

[Spurnshadow.3678]

I have thousands of hours in WvW, commanded, was a high officer in guilds.  I quit a few years ago as I saw nothing happening with population balance, alliances, and matchups became a feature instead of a temporary band-aid, and there was no progress happening with alliances.  I came back a couple weeks ago mainly to finish out LS stuff out of boredom with my other games, and check in with some old friends.

 

So far, I don't see any stability or technical issues.

 

You fail at communication.  I knew about the alliance betas, that you had to have a WvW guild selected as an alliance guild.  This is because I've checked into the forums and announcements form time to time to see if you'd ever get alliances launched.  Not everyone is going to do that.  Well, my guild selection didn't work.  Why?  because the guild I belong to, which is a roaming guild and very few people in it is a member of a larger guild alliance which I didn't know about.  So are some of the other guilds I run with.  However, since you announced this current beta, my leader and the leader of the other guild hadn't been online.  So I couldn't ask them for advice on what I should do.  I did hear back Friday, but things were too late by then as you stated in a post on Thursday that I'd have until Thursday night to make my selection, less than 24 hours notice.  Are you effing kidding me?

 

Not only that, but you added the team feature which was new and you didn't communicate about.  What we learned is that it was useless and anything done with it would be discarded.  Then why is it there?

 

So I end up playing witih a bunch of people I don't know and am not having fun because so far, my team is getting annihileted.  It seems to be a server for all the rejects and people who aren't in some guild alliance.  I'll try to make the most of it, but it sucks.

 

Alliances were advertised to function so that you'd be grouped up with people you play with the most.  We'd be tracked internally for this, and things like our contact list and guilds represented would be taken into account.  It seems as this is not a factor.

 

You announced that this would be the last beta.  This seems like a big fail.  As you have started to implement the team future, something that was planned on since inception and is needed for alliances to function, it doesn't seem like a good idea to not test this.  So far, the players have had to figure out what to do (again, poor communication) by creating a guild alliance.  However, that's limited to 500 players.  That's not nearly enough players.  The whole point of alliances is to have a somewhat even player balance.  Maps are estimated to be about 70 for the boarder lands and more for EB.  so during a prime time zone that's about 290 players.  There are generally 4 prime time zones.  That would be ideally be 1160 players.  Then there are the off peak time zones.  Since it's off peak, there won't be as many to fill the player limit, so lets just round off the total to @1500 players per alliance.  Your game currently doesn't have the population for that. with 4 matches.   So far, with this beta, I'm not seeing a lot of activity during the other peak time zones, let alone map ques.  However, when alliances are actually implemented, I'm sure that you'll get a lot of people to come back to see how it will work out.  As such, implementing teams is a must.  So you get a failing grade not beta testing this.

 

If this beta is the state of things, and it's to be the last beta, I don't have much hope for things in the future.  The general attitude in game development now-a-days is to just get something out there and will fix everything after it's been released, no matter how flawed.  It seems you're going to fall into the same trap if you don't further test this before releasing and turning off returning players.  This is literally your last chance to try to save WvW.

Edited December 4, 2022 by Spurnshadow.3678

[Chaba.5410]

Agreed on the part of not being able to know anything about what your guildmates are doing.  The UI lacks any transparency regarding who and how many guild members picked that guild for WvW and that's a big missing piece that needs to get added.

Some other comments though:

This wasn't announced to be the last beta.  It was meant to be the last Phase 1 beta with Phase 2 starting next year.  Agreed that Phase 1 doesn't quite seem ready yet though.

The player balance was never advertised to be based on number of players.  When "population" is mentioned, it's referring to the rolling average of playhours algorithm used for determining world population status.  In a past beta recap, Anet told us the biggest difference in playhour sizes between all the beta teams was something like 4% whereas with server links it's more like 30%.  Obviously that leads to issues like number of players available during the different timezones.  They've told us they plan to look at qualifiers like timezone though.  They just aren't using any other qualifier for these betas because the underlying system of team placement still has a lot of issues to be worked through.  Why add another variable to that mess?

Honestly I don't know where you get the idea about tracking contact lists and guild representation.  I don't recall reading about that anywhere.  Players were asking about their block lists being considered only.  The basic function advertised for letting players group up was always the guild "battlegroup" which then would be extended with alliances of guilds.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

21 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Honestly I don't know where you get the idea about tracking contact lists and guild representation.  I don't recall reading about that anywhere.  Players were asking about their block lists being considered only.  The basic function advertised for letting players group up was always the guild "battlegroup" which then would be extended with alliances of guilds.

 

 Remember that they first announced the idea of alliances many years ago.  @3 or 4 years?  During these discussions, they said that their system would pair people together.  There would be an alliance team and their system would look at who've you played with over time (they said they'd track that) and try its best to be sure you were on the same teams.  This has not been mentioned in the more immediate alliances discussion since betas started.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, Spurnshadow.3678 said:

 

 Remember that they first announced the idea of alliances many years ago.  @3 or 4 years?  During these discussions, they said that their system would pair people together.  There would be an alliance team and their system would look at who've you played with over time (they said they'd track that) and try its best to be sure you were on the same teams.  This has not been mentioned in the more immediate alliances discussion since betas started.

That sounds like their description of the PvE megaserver technology, not world restructuring/alliances.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance

Edited December 5, 2022 by Chaba.5410