Alliance guild member number.

[SweetPotato.7456]

I think 500 per alliance is too many. 

Discuss.

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 minutes ago, SweetPotato.7456 said:

I think 500 per alliance is too many. 

Discuss.

To be fair; I went leaf on the wind for my havoc to see what it looks like. So going to come at it from that direction.

If you reduce it to less than guild size you give the advantage to max sized guilds. If you reduce guild sizes you force guilds to cut members. 

For a substitute for Alliances keeping guild size at 500 makes sense since Comm Guilds need to account for how many of each guild to leave space for. It leaves pure Guild in advantage though. Is that right right or wrong? No idea.  

 

[bq pd.2148]

500 casual players in an alliance is no problem at all.
500 people with very high activity and experience however is too much.

as guilds dont have to be used for WvW and might be purely pve, reducing the maximum number of players is probably not an option.

so we would at least need a way to declare the guild to be a WvW guild, that can be used to form teams to have any sort of max member adjustments.
then anet already supposedly counts players differently based on playtime and commanding, guess some people just have to take up more than 1 member slot in a WvW guild.

[SweetPotato.7456]

I was thinking, it is too much because there are still players complaining about empty maps,  if the 500 strong alliance were to be cut  into smaller chunk, there will have more guild to distribute. 
or am I  thinking wrong ? 

Edited June 18 by SweetPotato.7456

[bq pd.2148]

24 minutes ago, SweetPotato.7456 said:

I was thinking, it is too much because there are still players complaining about empty maps,  if the 500 strong alliance were to be cut  into smaller chunk, there will have more guild to distribute. 
or am I  thinking wrong ? 

maps being empty does not always mean that the opponents can't muster more players.
depending on team a simple ping in discord that a somewhat capable commander is tagging up and that there is 'content' will spawn a ton of players out of the void.

in WvW we provide each other with content, the more even the fights are, the more stable is the content. it is just not a good use of your time to get farmed without much chance of a win.
smaller chunks would make it easier to get evenly sized teams but how would anet get a metric on the players 'skill' in various scale combat, siege warfare, supply management etc. ? 

in EU apperently big and ntm alliance are on one team as well as good and xx, but all 4 would have to be on a team of their own as they have too much player experience stacked in each of those alliances. so anet still put the wrong chunks together regardless of their size.

Edited June 18 by bq pd.2148

[Mistwraithe.3106]

2 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

smaller chunks would make it easier to get evenly sized teams but how would anet get a metric on the players 'skill' in various scale combat, siege warfare, supply management etc. ?

I feel like Anet should have all the metrics they need to measure individual player skill. If GW2Efficiency can use the API to tell me all sorts of stats about how many times I've died, how many players I have killed, etc, then Anet must have all that data too and more. So I don't buy the excuse that Anet didn't have the info necessary to balance teams.

I will however believe that due to mega guilds (made up of multiple WvW guilds who banded together into a custom made guild for this purpose) Anet may be unable to balance even teams. Not sure what the solution to that is though

[Dean Calaway.9718]

36 minutes ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

If GW2Efficiency can use the API to tell me all sorts of stats about how many times I've died, how many players I have killed, etc, then Anet must have all that data too and more.

They do.

The problem is how to write a program to use all that data to make the teams, this is why Alliances took this long, clearly they had a lot of issues making this system, now let's see how it works out over time if it does manage to balance itself out or what.

[T G.7496]

This is an excellent question and gets to the heart, possibly, of a lot of the problems that the new system either has, or is perceived to have.

And it's a gnarly one, because changing that number now is gonna break some eggs somewhere.

Personally, I think a lower number is appropriate for the limit on a WvW guild. How low? I dunno. 250? Who knows.

Mechanically, it should be fairly trivial to prevent any player from declaring as a WvW guild any guild that has more than the limit. So the standard guild limit could remain at 500, but any guild exceeding the WvW member limit is unavailable for selection as a WvW guild.

That might still lead to some difficult choices, and suboptimal experiences for some people.

But it might be better for the mode.

It really is a tricky one.

I'm sure they considered it. They decided 500 was fine. Maybe they'll change their minds. I think less would be better.

Edited June 18 by T G.7496

[Crystalreves.3965]

500 fight guild players vs 500 pugs whats the out come?  anyone can guess?

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

I was hoping that an alliance system and UI would be used that way if 500 is too many or not enough alliances numbers could be changed without impacting guilds. That said I think it is too early to tell where the balance issues are.

[Zok.4956]

6 hours ago, SweetPotato.7456 said:

I think 500 per alliance is too many. 

I think a fixed limit on the number of players will never really be a good fit.

An example: My server community guild is approaching the 500 player limit and therefore only accepts players who really play regularly in WvW (or at least promise to do so) - guild spots are a rare commodity these days. In my main guild, however, many players are not WvW regulars but only check out WvW every now and then - so they are not in the WvW community guild because they don't want to "take away" spots from WvW regulars. And of course they don’t want to lie to the guild leader.

If I remember correctly, when determining the maximum alliance capacity, it was not just about the absolute number of players, but (also) about player activity (i.e. the same metric that is used when assigning servers). That would have been better.

 

[Jski.6180]

I like to know how this system deals with inactive ppl (what we have now) and groups (when we get full alliance.) If we lose space for a long time due to ppl not showing up (and groups) it will be an issues the 500. If there are way to change things during an mach it should not be an issues.

Its 6 weeks for the first run i think but it should drop down to an lower span of time. Once that happens it will be much less of an issues depending on how space is used for active and inactive.

[cannibalkitteh.8376]

I'd agree in general that 500 is too many, and for sorting purposes, 100-200 would be better. But we're also missing a lot of context, if you have 500 casual PvX players that just want to be able to play together whenever they jump in, that's going to be less impactful than say ten 50 person comped and dedicated WvW guild groups coordinating across the day. We would also need to know how many players total in a team there is. If 500 is an appreciable chunk of the team, I'd favor shrinking it down a bit to not just have a team be your alliance by themselves.

Ultimately, the smaller the chunks we divide ourselves into, the more dynamic the matches are going to be.

[XenesisII.1540]

You guys are discussing this as if it would make sense for anet to lower guild member max cap 12 years into the game. There is no point discussing lower caps on alliances when guilds are max 500, just like there's no reason to discuss limiting squads sizes, there is no way to adjusts these things until the work arounds are removed too.

Fight guilds stacking too hard for you now? well too bad, too late, devs cater to their every whim, welcome to the fish farm era.

[neven.7528]

too large for sure, i would have loved for 200-300 members only.  If a guild has 500, then only the first 200-300 get in.  Their fault for not managing their guild roster.  If this is too harsh for people then perhaps force the guild leader to flag the guild as a WvW guild, imposing the limit, no flag, no WR inclusion.  You can have smaller guilds automatically have the flag if you want, but when they want to extend their player cap beyond the wvw limit, they get warned about losing WR eligibility for wvw.

The more pieces it takes to fill in a world, the better there is for balance once the algorithm factors in more variables than now.

Edited June 18 by neven.7528

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

There is no way reducing or increasing guild sizes would work. Now just like teams for PVP or doing PVE events you cannot have all 500 people active at once so if numbers need to be dropped it can be in an alliance GUI but that is probably a far off plan or might never come so for a long time I expect to be stuck at 500.

[Zok.4956]

51 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

I like to know how this system deals with inactive ppl (what we have now) and groups (when we get full alliance.) If we lose space for a long time due to ppl not showing up (and groups) it will be an issues the 500.

First of all: It is very doubtful whether the originally planned alliance system will ever be implemented. I think the current system will remain as it is for the next few years. There may just be a few small changes to the calculations.

Inactive guild members are guild members (unless they leave the guild or are kicked from the guild). A guild with 500 inactive members would still be full.  Because the server populations totals are calculated based on WvW player activity (and maybe somtimes other metric) players with no WvW activity would not use "population space" on a server. 

Which of course offers the overstackers a theoretical possibility: Assuming a guild with 500 players does not play in WvW for a week (as an example, to be considered inactive for the activity calculation), then it would not be measurable/relevant for the capacity calculation of the new servers, because it does not or hardly increase the server population. But if this guild then starts playing WvW intensively again after the server is created, the new server would mathematically have about 500 players too many.

 

[TheGrimm.5624]

7 hours ago, SweetPotato.7456 said:

I was thinking, it is too much because there are still players complaining about empty maps,  if the 500 strong alliance were to be cut  into smaller chunk, there will have more guild to distribute. 
or am I  thinking wrong ? 

Empty maps may be a number of reasons:

• Players just not playing
• A side stacked only certain time zones
• A side overstacked a timezone and killed their own content
• Mis-matchs in scale of play
• Bad placements
• Lack of familiar faces
• Mis-match in tags 

Remember we just also scrambled servers, different servers had different levels of community. Some were more everyone get in voice and some all way down to they could emote chat. For the players that played regular you knew what to expect from your server (and over time your link) since you saw them day in and out. Inside of all that were player behaviors and guild behaviors and if players didn't take the time to look at that as well it can be chaotic. So light maps maybe people looking in, seeing who is around and then, ok out not seeing content. 

With a scramble of servers also means more mixed of smaller scale of play that can snowball into larger scale content. So for people used to more large scale via a tag it may take them time to ID when that small scale is going to escalate into larger content if they weren't already used to that kind of thing. 

The geek in me is assuming they have analysts pouring through the numbers they have access to currently since this is a live fire exercise. What they won't be able to read is impacts on morale, interest of play, changes of playstyle. 

Which is why the tidbit about scoring should have players ready with feedback. 

[Shadows Creed.3902]

1 hour ago, neven.7528 said:

too large for sure, i would have loved for 200-300 members only.  If a guild has 500, then only the first 200-300 get in.  Their fault for not managing their guild roster.  If this is too harsh for people then perhaps force the guild leader to flag the guild as a WvW guild, imposing the limit, no flag, no WR inclusion.  You can have smaller guilds automatically have the flag if you want, but when they want to extend their player cap beyond the wvw limit, they get warned about losing WR eligibility for wvw.

The more pieces it takes to fill in a world, the better there is for balance once the algorithm factors in more variables than now.

you sounding like a real Quaggan right now! 

[Jski.6180]

10 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

First of all: It is very doubtful whether the originally planned alliance system will ever be implemented. I think the current system will remain as it is for the next few years. There may just be a few small changes to the calculations.

Inactive guild members are guild members (unless they leave the guild or are kicked from the guild). A guild with 500 inactive members would still be full.  Because the server populations totals are calculated based on WvW player activity (and maybe somtimes other metric) players with no WvW activity would not use "population space" on a server. 

Which of course offers the overstackers a theoretical possibility: Assuming a guild with 500 players does not play in WvW for a week (as an example, to be considered inactive for the activity calculation), then it would not be measurable/relevant for the capacity calculation of the new servers, because it does not or hardly increase the server population. But if this guild then starts playing WvW intensively again after the server is created, the new server would mathematically have about 500 players too many.

 

If its just active players any number of ppl is not important in an guild and or alliance. I guess you could kind of cheat the system but you can only get so far doing that (inactive ppl playing becomes active.)

[Gotejjeken.1267]

What actually happens if you have 500 people set the same WvW guild? Do they take up an entire team name like Moogaloo or whatever? If not, how many guilds can a team hold?

To me, they needed way more tooling for this.  If alliance size is guild size, then huge guilds should be spread across multiple alliances--may not get to play with all the people you want but would get to play with your guild. 

So, say alliance is 500, you could put a cap at 100 people in any guild go to that alliance, then groupings of 100 in four other ones.  Might have to fight guildies but would distribute the power around. 

Not knowing what guilds comprise what teams is also not great--it makes the new system entirely ambiguous as far as stat tracking goes.  If UI elements are made, it should have at least been there--hover over the team's name and it shows a list of guilds (or click it or something in the likely event they overflow a GUI element).  

[Junkpile.7439]

It's kind of weird because i am like 99% sure that we don't have any kind of alliance and enemies doesn't have either. Our alliance is like couple guilds and totally randoms pugs. Enemies alliances are couple smaller guilds and totally random pugs.

[disForm.2837]

6 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

What actually happens if you have 500 people set the same WvW guild? Do they take up an entire team name like Moogaloo or whatever? If not, how many guilds can a team hold?

To me, they needed way more tooling for this.  If alliance size is guild size, then huge guilds should be spread across multiple alliances--may not get to play with all the people you want but would get to play with your guild. 

So, say alliance is 500, you could put a cap at 100 people in any guild go to that alliance, then groupings of 100 in four other ones.  Might have to fight guildies but would distribute the power around. 

Not knowing what guilds comprise what teams is also not great--it makes the new system entirely ambiguous as far as stat tracking goes.  If UI elements are made, it should have at least been there--hover over the team's name and it shows a list of guilds (or click it or something in the likely event they overflow a GUI element).  

No, Teams/shards are significantly bigger than 500. There are several Alliances with max players and they are not the majority on their Team.

Also, there's a huge variance on how much impact an Alliance can make. 500 casual players that go to WvW to do dailies and cap a camp or tower will have significant less importance for the matchmaking than 500 no-lifers playing all day long. Players-Hours matter a lot.

[Johje Holan.4607]

Don’t tell me that it’s the Titan Alliance from the beginning of the game all over again. Who could have predicted that?  Give players the means and they will stack stack stack. 

[Chaba.5410]

7 minutes ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

Don’t tell me that it’s the Titan Alliance from the beginning of the game all over again. Who could have predicted that?  Give players the means and they will stack stack stack. 

It's not TA all over again.  No one can overstack anymore by exploiting low server pop hours.  No one can transfer teams anyway.