June 2023 Alliances discussion

[enkidu.5937]

On 6/19/2023 at 9:32 PM, Cameo.4073 said:

Still don't think I understand what ANET's goal is with alliances.

Anet wants to turn WvW into a second EotM

every team has an Alliance raid that rolls over Randoms all week long   ->  PPKs look equal at the end of the match

and Karma trains all week long over keeps  ->  PPTs look equal at the end of the match

 =  balanced game mode 🤣🎉

[TheGrimm.5624]

On 6/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Cameo.4073 said:

Still don't think I understand what ANET's goal is with alliances. Is it to establish a guild v guild option? Is it to break up servers and put everyone with random guilds each week?  I have a few guilds that I like to WvW with at different times because life is complicated.  With every beta I've had to only been able to run with one of them. This is a big switch from the have many guilds and play with them all philosophy.  And lets face it, if you are in a guild it is probably because you like running with those commanders and members. 

Maybe there are tons of people that WvW just to WvW and could care less who they run with. My personal preference is running with people I know and trust and who aren't jerks.

If the goal is to have guild vs guild, why not make hybrid battlegrounds designed for a preset number of players in each guild can face off against each other for the glory of bragging rights, glowy something,  temporary bonus to the battle etc.  Fight guilds can fight, people who enjoy long term capture and defend can do that and most of all we can still play with our friends.

Thanks

We haven't actually gotten to the Alliance part yet. The point of the World Restructuring (WR) is to take the server linking system and break it down into smaller bits to try and form closer population balances. Now I am not saying I am for that, just trying to describe the concept mind you. What they found was players weren't rebalancing themselves just grouping up. So even relinking just created more population shifts.

When they started to do the linking they thought they could keep servers whole and just by linking they could create matches where the population would mean full maps on all sides. Due to whatever, lets call it lots of reasons, it didn't work out as they intended. When they looked at it they thought the only way to rebalance would be break all the servers down to smaller bits since the players didn't self balance to try and see if they could more balanced populations. Hence the betas that have been running overtime testing if an algorithm could be used to sort out people into more equal populations.

Now we get to what we haven't seen yet, Alliances. A subset of the WR system is Alliances. Alliances are meant to allow people to group up with other people they have played with overtime and be sorted together versus just at their guild or player level. The idea of Alliances is to allow your guild to link with others as a larger segment of population so that hen the sorting occur every 8ish weeks you can grouped with people that may not be in your guild but you know and see on a regular basis.

As far as a random, this comes up a lot on the betas, its not random, it based on playtime and other attributes. Picture round robin. A player has an average of 'x' hours over a period of time to make a baseline for that player. Now if the player is in an Alliance add that player count and time to an Alliance to form a baseline for that Alliance. If their guild is not in an Alliance add that time to their guild, else leave that time at the player. Now during sorting, rank each Alliance based on playtime and players and pass one to each server trying to balance players and play time based on those numbers. Each server gets one and then the next and next till they are divvied up. Now layer in the non-allied guilds on the same concept ranked on total playtime and player counts and other attributed aspects like commander tags.  Each server gets one at time till all the guilds are assigned. Now take the players that are not in a guild and thereby not in an Alliance and rank them by normal playtime and other attributes, rank them and then round robin them out to each server to fill in the difference in server playtime and player counts. After all that place these new servers into a tier for match making. This last part.....we haven't seen much details how that works to be fair, but as we have seen after relinks the current glicko system we have is already a bit off so again, not much info to share there. Let the matches go and do a +1 up in a tier for the winning server for the week and -1 tier for the server that loses the week and matches and tiers work themselves out. Playtime is averaged over time for each player so when we come back to a new sort after 'x' number of weeks new numbers can be calculated based on players and what new Alliances/Guilds/Players have reformed into or have broken out of.

Hope that helps.

[Ultima.5280]

I’m not very experimented in wvw but I don’t get how alliance will solve ANY of wvw problems.

Maps were a little more populated but most of the time 2 or 3 were empty.