Alliance will never work out

[senftube.6081]

Give a kitten about 1 x 1 Balance. They will never reach it because in a PvP Mode there will be always a winner and a looser. But what peoples care is to play with peoples together they like. At the end this is the only thing that matters. No one gives a kitten about who fought then and won the battle at Day xyz. That 500 Cap destroys whole communities and that is very very very bad.  These Communities are sometimes 10 years old and i give a big kitten about 1 x 1 balance in this case. No one cares who wins in that sandbox mode where u can win....nothing? Cap higher Anet for real. Let the peoples play the kitten game with their friends. Sry for the rant. 

Edited June 11, 2023 by senftube.6081

[Nomad.4301]

In this beta I'm seeing some of the potential problems resulting from randomly throwing around guilds and players around in an attempt to balance populations. The alliance I'm in (I'm primarily a scout/roamer so no guild and randomly assigned) might as well be Mag 2.0 because we have a 1.8 KD/r and a 50+ queue 24/7 on EBG, but every other map is basically an enemy K-train because literally nobody cares or tags up. Guilds that supposedly make up the "bulk" of the alliances log in with all their players, run around for exactly 2 hours and then leave and there's not a single tag to be seen. Nearly all the guilds that were assigned to the alliance run private and have formed basically the WvW equivalent of high school cliqués.

The other "servers" have a similar problem where they have all these pugs with no leaders and nobody cares to tag up and defend anything because of the same "It's not like it's really my server, so who cares, lol" apathy that lead to EoTM becoming a pointless K-train.

In short, apathy everywhere, nobody works together for anything and the competitive overall spirit of WvW seems.. lacking (at least outside ebg). I hope this type of thing is temporary and a symptom of the short-lived nature of this beta (or isolated to just this match-up) I guess it depends on how long future links will last whether or not people will start actually working together or just blob around EBG 24/7 and ignore objectives. I guess we'll see.

[Chichimec.9364]

Hmm, I logged in Friday evening at server reset, then again on Saturday in both the morning and the evening. Didn't log in today, Sunday, because I needed some downtime. Now I can only speak about what I saw during those times and I have no idea what was happening on other matchups at those times. Every one of those times that I logged in since the start of the beta, I've seen tags on the various maps, at times as many as three tags on a map, and there was a lot of heavy fighting each time too. People were capping and defending keeps and towers. There was even some fierce fighting in a couple of camps. Again though, that was just what I saw. YMMV of course.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Chichimec.9364

[Bristingr.5034]

23 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

alot of players saying alliances won't work don't even know how they're supposed to work to begin with. there's too much misinformation out there about what exactly alliances are.

It's literally relinks, but at a more granular level. That's it.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, Nomad.4301 said:

randomly throwing around guilds and players around in an attempt to balance populations

It's not random.  It's supposedly based on playhours.  So a guild that has 100 people and only logs in 2 hours one night is only providing, for the sake of simplicity, 200 playhours in the match while the 500 other pugs playing 8 hours a day are having a bigger impact on the match outcome because they play more.

They are balancing playhours, not number of players.  They might balance for timezone too.  Or playstyle, or skill level.  Who knows?

Edited June 12, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Mabi black.1824]

On 6/11/2023 at 6:20 AM, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

basically, there's been a major problem affecting the game mode for many years called server bandwagoning. this is where players intentionally transfer to a stacked server, causing it to be stacked even more, and essentially keep their team queued on all maps for most of the day, allowing them to dominate.

You should stop at this. and propose a solution to the transfers you mentioned. So apply some sort of check to these transfers to resolve? Or delete all WWW servers do you think it can help you better?

[Mabi black.1824]

On 6/11/2023 at 6:20 AM, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

the main complaint against it is "server identity" which hasn't mattered in quite a long time. this is something i still see thrown around alot, but the truth is its been all about guilds for at least half a decade now and alliances just pushes that as the final direction. i believe the game was always meant to be about guilds and the world system was a mistake from the very beginning.

It's probably your guess, but it's certainly not my experience in this game for many years. Even a guild of 100 active players left our server, of course sorry to see regular players leave your team, but practically the Serve did not make a bend, went straight on his way. precisely because it is a server. Anet created them on purpose. Precisely because the whims of a guild cannot dismantle it.

because they are out of the control of any guild that has the presumption to represent something in this game mode. This is WVW, large-scale PVP, confrontation and competition. You can't compare the guild to another guild, it's been like that since the dawn of time because my guild is 10 people and your guild is 100 people.

[Zok.4956]

22 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

i'm confused at what you mean by this. alliances won't have server transfers, as servers won't exist anymore.

Servers/teams will continue to exist, only the players will be shuffled to the servers from time to time (maybe every 2 months) . And Anet has stated in the past that transfers could/will be possible in the future.

[Chaba.5410]

13 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

You should stop at this. and propose a solution to the transfers you mentioned. So apply some sort of check to these transfers to resolve? Or delete all WWW servers do you think it can help you better?

Transfers should be reworked to where guilds and alliances can't just up and mass-transfer yet still allowed for the individual player who comes back to the game from a break and wants to be on the same team as their guild/friends.  One way to do this would be to only allow transfers to a guild's assigned team.  There would have to be some additional restrictions in place so players couldn't just invite whole guilds to a new guild on a different team.

[Zok.4956]

11 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

It's not random.  It's supposedly based on playhours. 

It's random from the player's point of view. While you can specify your own WvW guild (and alliance) and hope that you will be on the same server as them, you cannot predict which players and guilds will make up your temporary new server.

[Zok.4956]

15 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Transfers should be reworked to where guilds and alliances can't just up and mass-transfer yet still allowed for the individual player who comes back to the game from a break and wants to be on the same team as their guild/friends.  One way to do this would be to only allow transfers to a guild's assigned team.  There would have to be some additional restrictions in place so players couldn't just invite whole guilds to a new guild on a different team.

Some players and guilds will always try to game the system for their own advantage. 

Over all the years that Anet has been talking about alliances and world restructuring, Anet has not yet addressed and solved this because the system is far from finished and Anet probably has no concept for it.

[Chaba.5410]

11 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

It's random from the player's point of view. While you can specify your own WvW guild (and alliance) and hope that you will be on the same server as them, you cannot predict which players and guilds will make up your temporary new server.

It seems random from the player's POV, yea.  If one player has more playhours than another though, that isn't random.  Players don't have visibility into playhours.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[jul.7602]

Nothing really changed. Indo is still blobbing EBG. Mag is still trying to cloud. Pugs are still getting destroyed boonblobs. Pugmanding is dead and most builds suck against the meta builds. People will still find a way to cheat the alliance system (despite people insisting that they can stop this). Alliances wont have any material effect in the day to operations. All pointless I'm afraid.

[Heika.5403]

And what did you expect from randoms and casuals or guilds with few players at alliances?  If i join my WvW i try to help plus do my things because we have being playing together for a decade. Talked a lot a discord and enjoy together despite if we are splitted in a lot of guilds with few players from each one together. And no, we don't have space for WvW dedicated guilds and also not interested in join one for alliances.  But if i'm assigned to a random alliance with or without one of my guilds, i can careless if the alliance/team win, lose , is stomped or  there are 100 commanders there asking for people join them.

At most, if someone blame me for not join tags, they only thing it could happen its me blocking and if i get upset even going a T3 or relevant structure and touch all the tactivatos to give them at least a proper reason to get upset 😆🤣

The only reason i will go there is if some friends want to do some achievement, or if i need something for myself like a Gift of the Battle or do the minium for earn some tickets.  Nothing more. At my server i often do more and helps but due to the coeshion we won and we have together from all the years there. So i sometimes spend time  with them there.

On the other hand.  It will be very interesting to watch how much will toxicity increase in WvW due to the restructuring system and giving more power to guilds with less population per alliance/team.  With the traditional server toxic players and guilds are often diluted due to the big population that often reject them and refuse to play/colaborate with those kinds of players.  But............... with the power of control who join your guild, vote for kick unwanted ones, etc....... And  a lower population per team/alliance. It's very easy to figure alliances full of hardcore player,  other full of toxic guilds.  And why not,  one with guilds full of cheaters that joined in a big alliance of cheaters. Imagine be matched with a team full of toxic players that are also cheater obliteraring everything in their way while spamming laughs.  I see that very plausible. And i'm pretty sure that those kind of players will pursue and find the way to join together and fill alliances.   It will be a nightmare be matched with and/or against them.

A also recently saw a lot of players jumping from sPvP due to the low population there and  searching duels, gvg and pvp at WvW.  So don't expect that a lot of them will contribute with the strategy there or to conquest/cap things.  Like casual and random players often do not. Will be them as toxic in WvW as in sPvP? I guess that yes. They are looking pvp there, or roaming pursuing players to kill them.

It is a matter of time to see how this restructuring evolves. But be prepared for those things that I mentioned above.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Heika.5403

[Custodio.6134]

On 6/11/2023 at 8:49 PM, jul.7602 said:

Seven pines/stonefall/firsthaven is a typical example of what a bandwagon with alliances would look like.

What is the basis for your judgement here? I can give you at least a small part of information of how the team of Seven Pines is composed. The biggest chunks of this team is built out of community-guilds (on my end, since i play on Riverside, the community-guild Rising River [Side] is the one a big amount of general Riverside-players chose for the beta), which includes basically just a handful of "actual" guilds. In other words: this team has nothing to do with bandwagoning, since it´s mostly built out of existing communities you would find in any other normal linking currently. 

[Ya Ya Yeah.7381]

This system is better than the linking system we have now. I would take this all day every day than the match manipulation, band wagoning, and transfer garbage, that we have now. 

I just wish Anet would quit being big chickens about making this new system go live. Just make it live and work out the kinks as it goes. Bring it on.

 

[Manasa Devi.7958]

I used to play with RL friends but they all left and I have no desire to be part of any kind of online community. So this match-up system is just the luck of the draw for me. And I got a bad draw this time. I tend to play for an hour or 2 in the morning and my current "alliance" is completely dead that time of day, whereas my usual server is pretty active. I'm just left with capping a few camps and other trivial stuff for the dailies and hardly run into any ally at all. I can't even manage to do all my dailies in WvW since this started. This system just kills the game for casual play. I'll sooner stop WvW altogether than get more involved.

[Junkpile.7439]

Annoying when enemy have all guilds and we have pugs. Anet make like 5 arenas for guilds and still they come ruin pug game mode.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

On 6/11/2023 at 12:53 PM, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

 

there's no mechanism to stack alliances. that;s the whole point.

Except for alternate accounts, and there are some guilds out there which have enough players with alternate accounts they form alternate guilds which can be in other matchups without even being in an alliance.

If people paid for transfers before, and base accounts are free, which is cheaper? How much more would buying the hot/pof version cost as opposed to transferring a time or two ifbsomebody caught those while on sale? Some people will always game the system and they will find a way to do it.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

Does anyone remember the window of time they predicted you would be able to change matches if you changed guilds? Instead of paying anet for transfers guilds might be able to charge players to get into some matches. Hopefully this will not be the case

[RisingDawn.5796]

We're still at the stage of testing the backend systems with many bugs to iron out. The new system should allow them measure and control the populations better, allowing for better matchups in the end, but they will need feedback and to collect and look at the data very closely, to ensure things such as Alliance caps and population balancing is going to work out for the best.

Hopefully the next beta will have the actual Guild Alliances, so maybe players, communities and will try and organize a bit better than this, when we get to that stage of the beta aswell.

Although we have Communities inviting anyone to their Discords and Teamspeak channels, there is nothing you can do when organizing the kind of pugs, who just cloud, run around aimlessly, hide on walls, afk and queue up maps, even with the current Server Linking system.

It's a good time to take an early summer break at least, especially if you have the worst kind of Matchup, in terms of open field content.

Edited June 13, 2023 by CrimsonOneThree.5682

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Dinas Dragonbane.2978 said:

Does anyone remember the window of time they predicted you would be able to change matches if you changed guilds? Instead of paying anet for transfers guilds might be able to charge players to get into some matches. Hopefully this will not be the case

No such window. 

What they've said is that just like current WvW, the "season" would be 2 months or 7+1 weeks. During those 7 weeks you can set another WvW guild at any time, but it wouldnt actually do anything (you're still in your current team with your "old" WvW guild). That last week, you wouldnt be able to set a new WvW guild. And on week 1 with the next "season", you would be reshuffled to your new WvW guild.

But the did also say that transfers might be there as an additional feature.

[TheGrimm.5624]

On 6/11/2023 at 7:21 PM, senftube.6081 said:

The 500 Cap is dumb. It is no Alliance it is a big guild. And sadly with that cap u can't make a real Alliance full of members from your old server. That means you have to play against your own friends. Then this cap is also toxic because every stronger alliance will insta kick peoples which are not that active in wvw ....for making place free for "better Players".  The Cap has to be bigger. 

Understand your point yet this would occur even if the cap was raised to a 1000. 500 prevents an Alliance from just telling the rest of the match made server to get off the map when their players are on so that they can get theirs squads on and then we are back to the 2012-2014 mindset of map drama.

[TheGrimm.5624]

On 6/11/2023 at 9:50 PM, Nomad.4301 said:

In this beta I'm seeing some of the potential problems resulting from randomly throwing around guilds and players around in an attempt to balance populations. The alliance I'm in (I'm primarily a scout/roamer so no guild and randomly assigned) might as well be Mag 2.0 because we have a 1.8 KD/r and a 50+ queue 24/7 on EBG, but every other map is basically an enemy K-train because literally nobody cares or tags up. Guilds that supposedly make up the "bulk" of the alliances log in with all their players, run around for exactly 2 hours and then leave and there's not a single tag to be seen. Nearly all the guilds that were assigned to the alliance run private and have formed basically the WvW equivalent of high school cliqués.

The other "servers" have a similar problem where they have all these pugs with no leaders and nobody cares to tag up and defend anything because of the same "It's not like it's really my server, so who cares, lol" apathy that lead to EoTM becoming a pointless K-train.

In short, apathy everywhere, nobody works together for anything and the competitive overall spirit of WvW seems.. lacking (at least outside ebg). I hope this type of thing is temporary and a symptom of the short-lived nature of this beta (or isolated to just this match-up) I guess it depends on how long future links will last whether or not people will start actually working together or just blob around EBG 24/7 and ignore objectives. I guess we'll see.

I see these aspects during most of the betas. This one less so for whatever reason, maybe it's the sort of the scouts. Seeing more scouting reports and more pugmanders this time around and they are defending. Again it is more likely the sorting but not on purpose, aka I don't think they added in any logic to sort the tags based on guild size and divided them up more. I am seeing a decent mix of various size guilds and in the matchup I am in seeing a good spread on the havocs and roamers on all three sides. Scoring early primetime yesterday also have all three server in a 4 point spread coming out of the weekend. Will have to see how the week holds and how the +1/-1 works out. 

But as far as the loss of hey its us versus them, going to have to plan for that since it will make all of us feel like we had a forced transfer applied every 'x' weeks unless you get into an Alliance with as many as you can from your server.

Edit: considering the spreads across all NA tiers there is large differences and how much of the first week sorts we see in relinking are also throwing numbers off as servers are dropped in the wrong tier after relinks may also be adding some randomness to the mix.

Edited June 13, 2023 by TheGrimm.5624
Not the same across all tiers.

[Zok.4956]

On 6/12/2023 at 1:21 AM, senftube.6081 said:

The 500 Cap is dumb. It is no Alliance it is a big guild. And sadly with that cap u can't make a real Alliance full of members from your old server.

A very big guild is a one-guild Alliance. If Anet allowed server-sized alliances, the entire world restructuring project would be pointless.

 

On 6/12/2023 at 1:21 AM, senftube.6081 said:

Then this cap is also toxic because every stronger alliance will insta kick peoples which are not that active in wvw ....for making place free for "better Players".

Yes, this topic was addressed by players when the alliance system was first introduced - but so far Anet has not said exactly whether and how they want to solve it.