Alliances = canned

[LSD.4673]

https://wccftech.com/guild-wars-2-qa-arenanet-on-switch-to-yearly-expansions-secrets-of-the-obscure-learnings-and-2024-update/

6+ years of "active development" to turn around (sorry, "pivot") and say "hey actually, this system is basically the same as what a guild is, so it's not necessary".

Quote

[we were] building a system that would largely be duplicative of Guilds

Quote

We’re actively looking into solutions for this that don’t require the steep development investment that alliances would. We should have more news to share on that front early next year.

If WvW is the cornerstone, it's the cornerstones that are missing from earth keep's walls.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

if only players could understand the difference between alliances and world restructuring, society would become a utopia.

Edited December 23, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[LSD.4673]

Just now, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

if only players could understand the difference between alliances and world restructuring, society would become a utopia.

This is explicitly stated as alliances. World restructuring's been through, what, 3 betas over as many years, each of them horrendously buggy and with little actual change between each one. It's just EotM matching applied across the board.

Alliances are what was promised over half a decade ago as a way of revitalising the game mode. People had hope (and others envisaged the hellscape of big guilds trouncing everyone). 

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

Leave it up to the WvW community to ask for a system, then at the same time cry about it not being needed and complain when it got ""canned"".

 

[Dawdler.8521]

They already said that a while ago, this isnt news.

[Vasdamas Anklast.1607]

Of course xD

Did you really believe their overlords would let this happen? Do you know how much players spend on this kitten?

[CafPow.1542]

I, for one, am kinda happy. The beta week made it unplayable for me. But that’s just me.

[Dawdler.8521]

59 minutes ago, CafPow.1542 said:

I, for one, am kinda happy. The beta week made it unplayable for me. But that’s just me.

None of the betas have had alliances. We have never even seen the feature.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

a lot of ppl are going to be separated from each other and wvw is going to be a more lonely experience. honestly without alliances i would prefer keeping the current system. ppl probably aren't going to form many other connections outside of their guild with how often ppl will get shuffled around and without alliances if you're not in a big guild there is much less incentive to log in and continue playing long term. more balanced matches won't matter if you have no one to play them with :/

[LSD.4673]

5 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

They already said that a while ago, this isnt news.

This is the first i've heard. I thought the whole point of world restructuring was to set the ground for alliances. If not then...what's the point in world restructuring? To remove any semblance of community left in the game?

[CafPow.1542]

1 hour ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

None of the betas have had alliances. We have never even seen the feature.

It was active once. I remember it cause all the guilds i played with where in another teamcolor and i could not play with them.

[CafPow.1542]

57 minutes ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

a lot of ppl are going to be separated from each other and wvw is going to be a more lonely experience. honestly without alliances i would prefer keeping the current system. ppl probably aren't going to form many other connections outside of their guild with how often ppl will get shuffled around and without alliances if you're not in a big guild there is much less incentive to log in and continue playing long term. more balanced matches won't matter if you have no one to play them with 😕

I don’t get it.

if you are unable to vonnect with people in a community that is very stable, how are you supposed to be able to socialize if ever week, all the people can be somewhere else if they want.

this makes no sense at all. If you don’t want to participate in some kind of server community, why would you want to enforce some other form of community?

[Dawdler.8521]

33 minutes ago, CafPow.1542 said:

It was active once. I remember it cause all the guilds i played with where in another teamcolor and i could not play with them.

That wasnt alliances. Again we have never seen the feature. 

WR is not alliances.

Even Anet knows as this is from the article, highly ironic:

Quote

The terms “World Restructuring” and “Alliances” are often used by our community interchangeably, despite being very different things.

 

[XenesisII.1540]

Alliances was already functioning in the way of guilds, many guilds were already running their alliances in the betas. All alliances would have done is grouped up guilds individually, but the member cap would have been the same as a regular guild. The only stickler was that most people probably didn't have an extra guild slot to use. They are looking alternatives in the meantime, going through their spaghetti code.to add another guild slot or code a group of guilds is probably making them think twice about it.

WR is still the primary component of this entire project. Is it worth it holding up the entire project even longer for what amounts to an alternative view of a guild? Most serious wvw players have main wvw guilds and will make room for an alliance guild, pve will complain about dropping one of their 4 pve guilds for it. This was the same issue back in 2015/16 that held up a lot of wvw features, wanting to release all at once instead of parts.

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

This is the first i've heard. I thought the whole point of world restructuring was to set the ground for alliances. If not then...what's the point in world restructuring? To remove any semblance of community left in the game?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/wvw-update-guild-hall-arenas-and-world-restructuring-beta/

Also top sticky thread on the subforum. 

Mind, I am server side, but to state the goal is to deal with all the issues that time and players have created in population balances across the various servers and get us bak to a state where we might be able to get back to reasons to win.

World Restructuring and a lot of the coding has been what Anet has been working on. That's the underlying structure that allows them to collect information and create the code to do the sorting logic to divide up the players and try and place them on equal sized teams. The Alliance sub-piece of the WR sits above that aspect in that instead of taking guilds and players it would take groups of guilds and players and look at them as bigger first chuck of the groupings. As per the other article that was released, another thread in this subforum they recognize that groups of player from different guild and non-guilded players may want to group up and they are still looking at that. The stop gap in the meantime has been ID'd as doing things like community guilds, which requires more effort than more causal (me included) players see then they do today where they can login now without thought and visit their favorite pub. If the don't group up then they face the mixing bowl that the WR will toss people around in every 4 weeks while they refine the code to create better sorts. For people that don't intermix outside their guild this may not seem relevant. For more pug orientated people it will be more impactful. Alliances were already going to be capped at 500 so the guild stop gap makes a sense when setting a limit to how big a group can be since they didn't want an Alliance to control a server and wouldn't be the majority of any server. So from a numbers perspective this makes sense.

Hope that helps.

[CafPow.1542]

2 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

That wasnt alliances. Again we have never seen the feature. 

WR is not alliances.

Okay what is WR again? Sorry most things i read in german so i might have mixed up aomething.

and how would hypothetical alliances work then? How can i make sure that all my wvw-guilds are in the same team as me?

[joneirikb.7506]

World Restructure = The system of creating "new servers" every X time, by grouping together Guilds and solo players until they reach an estimated Y amount of Player/Hours (with some variables).

Alliances = The system for multiple guilds to "band together" into a "guild of guilds", and the only thing it did, was to let this "guild of guilds" group together in World Restructure. With the same Max cap as a Guild (500players), it is very easily replicated by just making a guild have have players join that, minus that it takes a guild slot.

[Sonderm.4639]

4 hours ago, CafPow.1542 said:

Okay what is WR again? Sorry most things i read in german so i might have mixed up aomething.

and how would hypothetical alliances work then? How can i make sure that all my wvw-guilds are in the same team as me?

With alliances your WvW guilds could have formed an alliance (a guild of guilds so to say) which would have been put on the same team.

With WR the only people that are on your team for sure  are people who have selected the same guild as you as their (primary) WvW guild. So for all your WvW guilds to be on the same team, all the members would have to join the same guild and select it as their active WvW guild.

That is to say in the absence of an alliance (guild of guilds) feature people will probably form mega guilds to ensure they are put on the same team.

[Cyninja.2954]

🤦‍♂️even after all this time and articles, even this very one (where Grouch ironically even metions how some players don't understand the difference), people still get it wrong.

We've never had alliances. In none of the betas. What we did have was a fully, but buggy, implemented world restructuring.

World restructuring for all intents and purposes IS what was meant and referred to in the past as alliances (when the feature was mentioned years ago for the first time). The basis and redesign of the server system of how worlds/shards/servers are created to serve as temporary sides (red, blue, green) for WvW.

What is understood now as alliances is literally "only" the ability to let smaller guilds be fused together into a large guild, which behaves and is treated no differently than a large guild of up to 500 players. An alliance with a player cap of 500 players = a guild with 500 players.

As server, under the new wr system, will still be compromised of different guilds and players versus different alliances, guilds and players. Alliance/guild size was and always has been 500 players max. A server is roughly 1,500 - 2,500 players.

The cons:

The loss/postponing of the alliance feature means that some convenience will not be present. Players, and especially smaller guilds, will be pressured to join or be remade as community guilds if those players want to assure they are all part of the same server.

The current guild management and information system is functionally very poor to handle managing guilds of large sizes, especially in regards to make them functional for WvW.

The hope was that a new UI and system like alliances would help and improve this.

The pros:

World restructuring, or what was refered to alliances 4-5 years ago, will be fully functional and (hopefully bug free) working as intended in creating more balanced sides for WvW with the ability to react to fluctuating player activity. 

 

Also none of this is new. We had a blog post weeks/months ago which mentioned exactly this: world restructuring will go live without this "management/organisation" feature implemented on launch.

Edited December 24, 2023 by Cyninja.2954

[Knighthonor.4061]

21 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

if only players could understand the difference between alliances and world restructuring, society would become a utopia.

nah you all are being fooled. its the same thing, just one has more guild control. Both systems break up the server concept

[Dawdler.8521]

9 minutes ago, Knighthonor.4061 said:

nah you all are being fooled. its the same thing, just one has more guild control. Both systems break up the server concept

If you implemented alliances right now as is in WvW linkage, it would do exactly nothing to your server or how it matchup. You’d just have a super guild with members from different guilds with the net effect being essentially another chat channel.

So no, the irony of Anets statement still stands, especially for you.

[CafPow.1542]

8 hours ago, Sonderm.4639 said:

With alliances your WvW guilds could have formed an alliance (a guild of guilds so to say) which would have been put on the same team.

With WR the only people that are on your team for sure  are people who have selected the same guild as you as their (primary) WvW guild. So for all your WvW guilds to be on the same team, all the members would have to join the same guild and select it as their active WvW guild.

That is to say in the absence of an alliance (guild of guilds) feature people will probably form mega guilds to ensure they are put on the same team.

I don’t quite get it sorry.

for me, i was unable to play with my guild / buddies for an entire week. Call it what you want but that is a bad system and i will never call it otherwise.

We won’t get more people into wvw by destroying communities, i think.

[Dawdler.8521]

52 minutes ago, CafPow.1542 said:

I don’t quite get it sorry.

for me, i was unable to play with my guild / buddies for an entire week. Call it what you want but that is a bad system and i will never call it otherwise.

We won’t get more people into wvw by destroying communities, i think.

If you had selected your guild as your WvW guild, you'd have played with your guild. So dont use that part as an excuse. But yes you can still dislike it after that and be one of those "oh but I know 1000+ random people on my server that dont have any idea who I am but I need to play with them regardless of them wanting to play with me or not so now I will hold them all hostage instead of trying to improve overall balance of the game" peeps of course.

Edited December 24, 2023 by Dawdler.8521

[joneirikb.7506]

1 hour ago, CafPow.1542 said:

I don’t quite get it sorry.

for me, i was unable to play with my guild / buddies for an entire week. Call it what you want but that is a bad system and i will never call it otherwise.

We won’t get more people into wvw by destroying communities, i think.

* World Restructure groups players first by guild.
* It had a menu/option where you picked one guild to be your "WvW Guild".
* If checked (and it didn't bug, which happened some betas) you would be put on a team with everyone else from that guild (if they also checked that guild).
* This is different from the normal repping guild, and has nothing to do with it.

I tried it and got grouped with my guild just fine.

[SweetPotato.7456]

"The terms “World Restructuring” and “Alliances” are often used by our community interchangeably, despite being very different things. World Restructuring describes the new team-based WvW matchmaking system that we’ve been developing for the past few years, while Alliances are a sub-component of that system that allows multiple small/midsize guilds to group together for matchmaking.

As we started digging into Alliances implementation, it became increasingly clear to us that we were on the path to building a system that would largely be duplicative of Guilds and the functionality that they offer. Players can already create alliance-like guilds that contain up to 500 players. Now, the main downside of this pivot is that not every player has a free guild slot they’re willing to use to join a new ‘super guild’. We’re actively looking into solutions for this that don’t require the steep development investment that alliances would. We should have more news to share on that front early next year." 

HOORAY TO EXTRA GUILD SLOTS!!!!!! GIVE ME 10 PLEASE.