How will Alliance Rosters and their caps Work?

[devastoscz.9851]

I am wondering how Alliance member rosters/caps will work in relation to current guild system and its player caps; at this point I've racked my brain and can only see the current guild systems being a hazard to Alliances. I tried to re-check all my facts and extrapolated logic here, but if anything is inaccurate, please let me know and I'll edit it.

 

First, lets establish what we know about alliances:

1.) An alliance is made up of a group of guilds
2.) An alliance has a cap of 500 players

 

Second, lets establish what we know about guilds in relation to the Restructuring (not Alliance) Betas so far:

1.) A guild has a cap of 500 players

2.) Players must select one of their 5 guilds as their WvW guild, and will be placed with that guild (and their Alliance) on a team when matchups reshuffle.

 

Having established what we know, lets start identifying the unknowns and their potential points of conflict.
 

Key Question

What constitutes a player slot in an Alliance?
- Scenario A: Any player in a guild roster.

- Scenario B: Any player in the guild roster who has specifically chosen Guild X as their WvW guild.

For scenario A:  lets set up a hypothetical scenario to identify the points of conflict.

• The alliance is made up of 3 guilds (all players take up a slot even if they havent selected these guilds as their WvW guilds)

- Guild A: 150/500 members

- Guild B: 150/500 members

- Guild C; 200/500 members

TOTAL: 500 total members

Points of Conflict
1.) If a player has 5 guild slots, and each of these guilds belongs to a different alliance, is the player taking up 1 slot in each of these alliances, just by being on the roster?
2.)What happens when these guilds recruit more people, seeing as their individual guild caps are not reached (lets assume Guilds A and B recruit an additonal 10 ppl each and they choose these guilds as their WvW guilds).
- Will the Alliance now have 520 people?
- Will the guilds not be able to recruit those people?
- Will the extra 20 not be able to join the Alliance because the cap is reached? (first come, first serve until cap)
- Will there be a way to assign a certain number of slots available per guild within the Alliance?

For Scenario B: lets assume a hypothetical scenario to identify points of conflict.

• The alliance is made up of 3 guilds

Guild A: 300/500 members - Only 150 have selected Guild A as their WvW guild

Guild B: 200/500 members - Only 150 have selected Guild B as their WvW guild

Guild C; 200/500 members - All 200 have selected Guild C as their WvW guild.
TOTAL: 700 "potential" members /  500 "active" alliance members

Points of Conflict: (Assuming a player can only switch WvW guilds at the beginning/end of a match)

1.) 50 "potential" alliance members want choose guilds A-B-C for the next matchup, none of the current active players deselect Guilds A-B-C as their current WvW guild
- Will these potential players be left out of the Alliance the upcoming matchup?
- Will these players be allowed into the alliance, effectively making it a 550 player alliance?
2.) Will the choice of WvW guild be reset (put to neutral) for everyone at the end/beginning of a matchup?
- If so, what happens to the players who for some reason can't login within the choice window
- If not, what happens to inactive players take up roster slots if they can't be reached to remove themselves

In both Scenario A and B the independence of guild/alliance caps constitute points of conflict.
•In Scenario A: Guilds will have to purge non-WvW people from their rosters so they don't take up a slot in the alliance

•In Scenario B: Guilds will have to decide, from their roster, who's going to be valuable enough in terms of playtime, skill, etc. to choose their guild as their WvW guild

 

Both of these scenarios lead to guild fragmentation, especially when it comes to non-WvW exclusive guilds. The WvW portion of the guild will have to make hard choices which will in turn fracture guild as a whole.

These are some questions that have been on my mind for a while, and I felt a need to put them out there seeing as Anet is announcing an actual Alliance (not restructuring) Beta for the near future, and people are starting to make plans about their alliances without the full information.

Edited May 8, 2023 by devastoscz.9851
emojis showing up when C :

[subversiontwo.7501]

For all we know, Scenario B is the proposed functionality. Exactly how it is designed and visualizes I presume we will get to see in ~july, though I agree with you that they can be more forthcomming with information about it.

Apart from that though, when making possible problem scenarios like this, keep in mind that there are many more moving pieces to the whole thing and a system is this is built to bring functionality and balance, not convenience. There will always be outliers in any system and a more fitting approach when looking at possible problem outliers is to consider how plausible and impactful they may be. Are they really a problem? How much? How frequent?

How many large PvX guilds are there out there who may look involve themselves with an Alliance ambitious enough to stack 500 players and consider their value? Time will tell, but we know nothing about what kind of arms-race Alliance organisation will become, sizes can be adjusted to reframe these questions over and over while typical behaviour would suggest that more ambitious groups tend to go smaller and less ambitious groups go larger. So, while yes, technically the relatively casual and sizable PvX guild Y may be looking to get into more ambitious Alliance X and the Alliance will only have room for 90 out of 100 interested players - forcing Guild Y to make tough choices of trimming or looking elsewhere.

However, is it really a problem for them to look elsewhere? How much of a problem is it for them to make either choice? How likely is that problem to come up for them again?

Just the fact that at current a rather ambitious 500-man Alliance would be absolutely devastating to an entire region and all its content should lead you towards other things of higher importance to be concerned about before these scenarios. If we get to a point where multiple 500-man Alliances compete to stack players of value, then this entire mode has recouped to a far more healthy place than it is in right now in terms of players numbers, activity and content. The system also kind of hinges on alliances of many more flavours than that being formed so as long as many alliances are formed, I'm sure that Guild Y can find something that fits them better.

Edited May 8, 2023 by subversiontwo.7501

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, devastoscz.9851 said:

Points of Conflict
1.) If a player has 5 guild slots, and each of these guilds belongs to a different alliance, is the player taking up 1 slot in each of these alliances, just by being on the roster?

Each player declares a primary WvW guild, as they already do now.

1 hour ago, devastoscz.9851 said:

2.)What happens when these guilds recruit more people, seeing as their individual guild caps are not reached (lets assume Guilds A and B recruit an additonal 10 ppl each and they choose these guilds as their WvW guilds).
- Will the Alliance now have 520 people?
- Will the guilds not be able to recruit those people?
- Will the extra 20 not be able to join the Alliance because the cap is reached? (first come, first serve until cap)
- Will there be a way to assign a certain number of slots available per guild within the Alliance?

For Scenario B: lets assume a hypothetical scenario to identify points of conflict.

• The alliance is made up of 3 guilds

Guild A: 300/500 members - Only 150 have selected Guild A as their WvW guild

Guild B: 200/500 members - Only 150 have selected Guild B as their WvW guild

Guild C; 200/500 members - All 200 have selected Guild C as their WvW guild.
TOTAL: 700 "potential" members /  500 "active" alliance members

The most likely solution or implementation here:

1. an alliance can only recruit guilds which are smaller than their remaining free slots. An alliance with 200 free slots can't invite a guild with 201+ players.

2. a guild can not invite additional players if the alliance cap is met.

3. a guild can not be selected as WvW guild for additional players if the alliance cap is met (though it is more likely that all members of a guild will count towards the alliance cap, no matter if active in WvW or not).

How exactly all of this will work and which changes are made to the idea we will see.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Cyninja.2954

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

For all we know, Scenario B is the proposed functionality.

Yes and no. 

In order for the "join guild with a fixed number of slots to an alliance" system to even work, you need a player that has the guild as his WvW guild *and* some kind of related rank group (ie "alliance member").

Sure random assignments would technically be possible, for example if the guild join with 50 slots and 300 select it as their WvW guild then 50 randoms gets dumped into an alliance team and 250 join the same team as a guild. But you get the idea, it would be utter chaos and literally break everything.

When you add a guild management layer that actually control which of its members are part of the alliance regardless of how many members have it as their WvW guild, it all comes together.

As far as I know, Anet has never gone into this "management" aspect of guilds and alliances, just on a very top down alliance leader/guild invites point of view.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Dawdler.8521

[TheGrimm.5624]

Just because I keep losing this one. Reference link for a reminder of the top down view that Dawdler I believe is referring to: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-world-update-june-2022/

How the management is handled will be something to test.

[TheGrimm.5624]

Yeah, re-reading notes hope they do an AMA or another notes updates before the Alliance beta. Lots of questions and assumptions based on the top down view. Easy example, gold cost as labeled on one of the flow document details? Another as mentioned above is how does this lockout a guild from recruiting new members, do non Alliance members still get a higher priority on getting linked to a shard/server where the rest of their guild is going due to its Alliance placement and capacity settings? Ah the geeky joy of having access to data points, would be curious how many PvXers WvW has, they have got to be one of the big random factors in their design concept.

[Xenesis.6389]

Not much point discussing and speculating. They will release information on their own time as usual, most likely a week before the next beta. At this point I'm sure they have the foundation on how the entire system will work, troublesome if they don't, cause they've had like 7 years to plan this whole thing out after all. 🤷‍♂️

Edited May 9, 2023 by Xenesis.6389

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Not much point discussing and speculating. They will release information on their own time as usual, most likely a week before the next beta. At this point I'm sure they have the foundation on how the entire system will work, troublesome if they don't, cause they've had like 7 years to plan this whole thing out after all. 🤷‍♂️

Wot!? And remove the option to banter while waiting on a download at work. Taking your popcorn away. 🙃🍿 

Fine, back to debugging those records lock issues.

[devastoscz.9851]

22 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Not much point discussing and speculating. They will release information on their own time as usual, most likely a week before the next beta. At this point I'm sure they have the foundation on how the entire system will work, troublesome if they don't, cause they've had like 7 years to plan this whole thing out after all. 🤷‍♂️

 

There is a point to discussing this, mainly to curb expectations. After the last Alliance update, several guilds re-ignited their pursuit of forming teams and the variables here discussed would be relevant for the formation of those teams. Depending on how this works, limitations will apply according to what size guilds you can invite into your alliance and how many slots they will take up.

 

When designing a process, feature or system, it's always good to have questions brought up, just in case there's some variable you didn't consider impactful to the system. I hope Anet's thought about it, but if they haven't... its a good idea to think about this.

[Xenesis.6389]

11 minutes ago, devastoscz.9851 said:

There is a point to discussing this, mainly to curb expectations. After the last Alliance update, several guilds re-ignited their pursuit of forming teams and the variables here discussed would be relevant for the formation of those teams. Depending on how this works, limitations will apply according to what size guilds you can invite into your alliance and how many slots they will take up.

I'm sure the re-ignition of guilds pursuit of forming teams now is because alliance beta testing is now confirmed to actually be around the corner in a couple months. But again we're not going to get any ideas on the actual system until anet decides to do their blog, or the system actually beta week.

 

11 minutes ago, devastoscz.9851 said:

When designing a process, feature or system, it's always good to have questions brought up, just in case there's some variable you didn't consider impactful to the system. I hope Anet's thought about it, but if they haven't... its a good idea to think about this.

Sure, if this was a two way street in design, it's not, they don't talk to us, I'm sure they have their secret discord talking to guild leaders. So again, pointless to discuss around speculation, we will wait until anet presents their system, and then we can ask the questions or make suggestions. They didn't even talk to us about OSR what makes you think we will have any real input on alliance systems. 🤷‍♂️

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Not much point discussing and speculating.  🤷‍♂️

Lol its all people have done for years and made up their own often straight up false claims about alliances.

Speculating is fine but we have to do it under the assumption that Anet arent complete baboons.

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Lol its all people have done for years and made up their own often straight up false claims about alliances.

Speculating is fine but we have to do it under the assumption that Anet arent complete baboons.

They even speculate on things that have been released and working how Anet told us it works...

[prototypedragon.1406]

16 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Lol its all people have done for years and made up their own often straight up false claims about alliances.

Speculating is fine but we have to do it under the assumption that Anet arent complete baboons.

In 10 years they haven't shown their butts to us how do we know if they are blue or not 😉?

[MaLong.2079]

Speculating can be fun. Is like solving a puzzle or a riddle. Or a math problem in school.

For example:

If a player can represent only one guild in wvw. And a guild can only hold claim to one objective at a time per map.

Then. If a map has 11 objectives.

How many different guilds an alliance will need to be able to claim the whole map?

[TheGrimm.5624]

1 hour ago, MaLong.2079 said:

Speculating can be fun. Is like solving a puzzle or a riddle. Or a math problem in school.

For example:

If a player can represent only one guild in wvw. And a guild can only hold claim to one objective at a time per map.

Then. If a map has 11 objectives.

How many different guilds an alliance will need to be able to claim the whole map?

Remember though an Alliance is just going to be part of a shard/server and not the majority per previous writeups. So that should be handled.

[devastoscz.9851]

On 5/9/2023 at 5:24 PM, Xenesis.6389 said:

I'm sure the re-ignition of guilds pursuit of forming teams now is because alliance beta testing is now confirmed to actually be around the corner in a couple months. But again we're not going to get any ideas on the actual system until anet decides to do their blog, or the system actually beta week.

 

Sure, if this was a two way street in design, it's not, they don't talk to us, I'm sure they have their secret discord talking to guild leaders. So again, pointless to discuss around speculation, we will wait until anet presents their system, and then we can ask the questions or make suggestions. They didn't even talk to us about OSR what makes you think we will have any real input on alliance systems. 🤷‍♂️

Normally I would roll my eyes at your cynicism, but at this point its entirely warranted; everything you said is accurate. That said, I felt the questions planted were relevant, and figured I might as well get them out there, particularly for any of those guild leaders already committing to some sort Alliance without taking the factors WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT into consideration.

[TheIceman.1039]

I don't know how alliance caps works. But I am sure that the question of alliances roster will be full of scene of "Game of thrones". Everyone wants to be a king. Already in the current so-called alliance guilds there is a sharp drama and power struggle. And whoever claims that you have to join their alliance quickly, because otherwise you won't be able to join anywhere else later, is a kind of part of the comical scenes of "Game of Thrones".

[TheGrimm.5624]

35 minutes ago, TheIceman.1039 said:

I don't know how alliance caps works. But I am sure that the question of alliances roster will be full of scene of "Game of thrones". Everyone wants to be a king. Already in the current so-called alliance guilds there is a sharp drama and power struggle. And whoever claims that you have to join their alliance quickly, because otherwise you won't be able to join anywhere else later, is a kind of part of the comical scenes of "Game of Thrones".

lol, Alliance drama threads will be had, this we are somewhat sure of. Upside to server pride, we are slack and that at times does mean less drama, at times.

[Zikory.6871]

On 5/10/2023 at 10:01 AM, MaLong.2079 said:

Speculating can be fun. Is like solving a puzzle or a riddle. Or a math problem in school.

For example:

If a player can represent only one guild in wvw. And a guild can only hold claim to one objective at a time per map.

Then. If a map has 11 objectives.

How many different guilds an alliance will need to be able to claim the whole map?

I'm not reading the whole thread so maybe I'm missing something your are referencing but you should still be able to rep all your other guilds and claim stuff with them. You just need to select a WvW guild to be placed with. 

Forcing guild/Alliance rep in WvW would be a wild and questionable direction. 

[Dawdler.8521]

2 minutes ago, Zikory.6871 said:

I'm not reading the whole thread so maybe I'm missing something your are referencing but you should still be able to rep all your other guilds and claim stuff with them. You just need to select a WvW guild to be placed with. 

Forcing guild/Alliance rep in WvW would be a wild and questionable direction. 

"Forcing" alliance rep (however it will visually show a player is part of one) would be rather logical since I highly doubt people will be able to just turn off the alliance they are part off like a guild rep.

In fact regardless of how it is managed, I suspect alliance rep will be "forced" even if you technically have already chosen to leave it or joined another - you wouldnt be "allowed" to change your alliance status until the following reshuffle.

[apharma.3741]

54 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

"Forcing" alliance rep (however it will visually show a player is part of one) would be rather logical since I highly doubt people will be able to just turn off the alliance they are part off like a guild rep.

In fact regardless of how it is managed, I suspect alliance rep will be "forced" even if you technically have already chosen to leave it or joined another - you wouldnt be "allowed" to change your alliance status until the following reshuffle.

They have already explained this, you select (or not) your WvW guild and when they create the teams for the 2 months like we have with relinking your team is created and you cannot change it. You can freely change your WvW guild but it won't do anything until the next time teams are drawn up.
Your WvW guild is entirely different to the guild you rep, we saw this in the last beta and every other beta. I selected my server guild for the beta but the whole time I was repping and getting rewards for my other guilds.

As for the OP, as far as I know we're currently planning that all members of a guild take up an alliance slot regardless of if they select it as a WvW guild. When you think about it this probably makes more sense as if someone is in your alliance guild but doesn't select it then you could kick them and get a slot back. You can then invite someone who hasn't selected a WvW guild or intends to play with you. Some might say "oh I don't want to kick my friend" well if they're your friend they will be on your friends list, in another guild or should have selected the same WvW guild.

The biggest issue I see is that we still have 5 guild slots and they simply cannot make more, having a specific WvW guild slot would have helped a lot especially if it was auto set as your WvW guild for teaming. I know some computer engineer will come and say "well achully anything is possible to be coded 🤓 " yeah come back to the real world where businesses have to deal with cost/benefit, that everyone who built the system has left and the napkin they documented the important stuff on was used to clean up last Thursday's buffalo wings.

[Xenesis.6389]

Alright despite what I said I'm gonna bite, since I posted in another thread with a similar question.

I don't think it will be Scenario A.

There is going to be a checkmark system in place so it would logical to use this as the base foundation for the number of players who will be joining an alliance, there's no point reserving space for people on your guild who may never play/return to wvw.

 

Now for Scenario B. 

Alliances will be capped at 500 players, and probably no extra spaces to bank additional players(would be unfair). I don't think anet needs to place any additional roster rules, and this should all pretty much be handled by the guild leaders involved in the alliance. Guilds will have the options to join an alliance who has room, or maybe make their own to make sure all their members and close partners stay together.

1. I would hope once the alliance cap has been reached, it will grey out all guilds in that alliance from being selectable as the wvw guild for the remaining players.

2. I'm sure alliances will probably reserve space for returning or new players, or even additional guilds, maybe 50-100. I don't think any alliance is going to fill themselves to the brim and run into the constant trouble of trying to trim the roster.

3. I think there should be a two layer check mark system that ultimately the guild leaders chooses who on their guild roster joins the alliance. So for example, the player selects their guild as the wvw guild, the guild leader sees the check mark on their roster on who actually selects to join the guild in wvw, the guild leader then check marks from those players on who actually joins the alliance roster. If someone chooses the guild as their wvw guild, but the leader didn't, that player would then be treated as a regular solo placement(and they should probably question why their leader didn't pick them, and the leader should probably question if their guild needs to be in that alliance that has no space to expand or maybe make their own). This double selection process isn't needed for a solo guild not in an alliance however.

4. There should be a way to remove players from an alliance without needing to do a guild boot, and it could be as simple as removing the checkmark off a player on the guild roster in the above example.

5. The original WR post states that players will be able to change their guild/alliance settings through the season, but for the last week everything will be locked in place. In this case I would hope(as you pointed out) they have a system in place to automatically reset the checkmarks right after world creations, and have members reselect the guild again as a way to show they're active, and help purge inactive players from alliance rosters, kinda like a Ready check system every season.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Xenesis.6389

[Dawdler.8521]

6 hours ago, apharma.3741 said:

They have already explained this, you select (or not) your WvW guild and when they create the teams for the 2 months like we have with relinking your team is created and you cannot change it. You can freely change your WvW guild but it won't do anything until the next time teams are drawn up.
Your WvW guild is entirely different to the guild you rep, we saw this in the last beta and every other beta. I selected my server guild for the beta but the whole time I was repping and getting rewards for my other guilds.

 

I intentionally skipped guild rep in my post and was talking about alliance rep. So nothing of this have anything to do with what I posted.

People keep thinking that wvw guild selection is directly/passivly linked to the alliance the guild is in. It wouldnt work like that because it cant as I previously mentioned. You would obviously be able to have a WvW guild selected, but not be part of its alliance.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Dawdler.8521

[TheGrimm.5624]

9 hours ago, Zikory.6871 said:

I'm not reading the whole thread so maybe I'm missing something your are referencing but you should still be able to rep all your other guilds and claim stuff with them. You just need to select a WvW guild to be placed with. 

Forcing guild/Alliance rep in WvW would be a wild and questionable direction. 

Not sure I agree, you are linked to your WvW guild so I don't know if you will be able to switch guilds after that since now you would be in a different matchup.

[Dawdler.8521]

16 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Not sure I agree, you are linked to your WvW guild so I don't know if you will be able to switch guilds after that since now you would be in a different matchup.

Argh! 

Again, complete misconception on how we know the system would work.

The wvw guild selection is for the bi-monthly sorting and team assignment. 

Swithing wvw guild (or even joining/leaving an alliance) will do exactly nothing until after the next team assignment. Because you are on your team for 2 months and play that teams matchups for 2 months. Just like WvW today if you are a link.

Repping different guilds wouldnt do any more -or less - than repping different guilds today.