What's point of Alliance if it's like fixed server

[vivienkid.7241]

Not sure if this is correct, but I thought the alliance would be randomly matching guild registered every period, which may possibly decrease of the influence of unbalanced match and dead wvw server. But now it kinda feels like old-fixed-server-style for me, just you can play with your guild, and still dead wvw servers and one side farming, correct me if I understand aliance incorrectly.

[Dawdler.8521]

... it's literally reshuffle for teams this friday.

[Sheff.4851]

On 7/21/2024 at 7:41 AM, vivienkid.7241 said:

Not sure if this is correct, but I thought the alliance would be randomly matching guild registered every period, which may possibly decrease of the influence of unbalanced match and dead wvw server. But now it kinda feels like old-fixed-server-style for me, just you can play with your guild, and still dead wvw servers and one side farming, correct me if I understand aliance incorrectly.

Sort of correct. Alliances aren't random matchmaking, they are matchmaking based on an algorithm. The algorithm uses things like overall activity, commander presence, timezones, and other factors to place guilds and individual players together in a way that, in theory, should produce a more even distribution of activity overall. In the current implementation, it sounds like there were a handful of issues that led to some servers being more stacked than others -- Cecil wrote a blogpost on this, I can link it if you would like to take a look. But those sorts of imbalances will be addressed over time, since the properties of the algorithm that controls matchmaking can be changed as issues are identified. This isn't something that you could previously do with servers, because you can't force players to transfer to different places, you can only "control" overall population levels and whether a server was open or not, and who it got linked to.

As far as dead vs. active servers, some alliances are heavily stacked with close to 500 players, but the upper limit on the matchmaking that the player can control is that 500 players. Previously, groups of multiple guilds could come together and decide to stack low-pop servers, transferring over more than 500 people, since the server population cap is much higher than the guild population cap. So that's another element of the Restructuring system that mitigates previous issues with the older server system.

[Johje Holan.4607]

18 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Previously, groups of multiple guilds could come together and decide to stack low-pop servers, transferring over more than 500 people,

Did more than 500 people actually transfer to the same place?  I find that hard to believe. I would bet the number was far smaller. And in this way, world restructuring might lead to less balance. 

[Spiral.3724]

yes, there are alliance guilds with 500 people. 

[Cyninja.2954]

15 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

Did more than 500 people actually transfer to the same place?  I find that hard to believe. I would bet the number was far smaller. And in this way, world restructuring might lead to less balance. 

They did. There was literally players complaining that they could not transfer their entire community with the WR system.

Meanwhile you are assuming that every guild is 500 players big. 500 players is the cap, a cap which did not exist before. The vast majority of guilds are smaller.

Edited July 23 by Cyninja.2954

[Sheff.4851]

6 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

They did. There was literally players complaining that they could not transfer their entire community with the WR system.

Meanwhile you are assuming that every guild is 500 players big. 500 players is the cap, a cap which did not exist before. The vast majority of guilds are smaller.

So many people transferred to BG for Season 1 that it didn't get a linked server until like 2018 (citation needed), and in general, the servers that camped T1 during Seasons were there primarily because they had absolutely massive populations relative to virtually every other server in the game. JQ and BG specifically were gargantuan, and the problem is that ArenaNet doesn't have any tools to remove people from servers if there's a mass transfer, they only got to open and close the transfer window once every week based on raw activity. Server stacking and bandwagoning was a nightmare problem for years and years.

[Evenge.4067]

It's been very obvious over the last few weeks that people must have put in tickets with Anet, and bandwagoned to the same guilds that used to stack their servers.

Come on Anet, a week or 2 of giving transfers but STOP giving in to people who are ruining WvW!

[Riba.3271]

Yea. There is no point. It should resuffle teams at least weekly,  ideally every 3-4 days.

[Sheff.4851]

1 hour ago, Riba.3271 said:

Yea. There is no point. It should resuffle teams at least weekly,  ideally every 3-4 days.

Personally, I'd love it, but I think it would do more harm than good to the overall community. You need at least some time to get to know people on your team, work together, socialize a bit, otherwise it's just going to further widen the gap between players with guilds and players without guilds and make the gamemode more isolated. The last six weeks have definitely reinforced the idea that eight weeks was too long, but I think anything shorter than four weeks would be too short for meaningful community building to occur.

[Riba.3271]

3 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

5 hours ago, Riba.3271 said:

Yea. There is no point. It should resuffle teams at least weekly,  ideally every 3-4 days.

Personally, I'd love it, but I think it would do more harm than good to the overall community. You need at least some time to get to know people on your team, work together, socialize a bit, otherwise it's just going to further widen the gap between players with guilds and players without guilds and make the gamemode more isolated. The last six weeks have definitely reinforced the idea that eight weeks was too long, but I think anything shorter than four weeks would be too short for meaningful community building to occur.

Ideal system is monoservers to get to know people, build community and organise events. If intent is to make worlds equal according to previous weeks datas, then shuffling should happen as frequently as possible.

I would actually argue it is impossible to build a community with restructuring system since no1 will take it seriously if they know it is just temporary. Might as well give up on it. It was already impossible to get most people on same page during linking system.

So best option is monoservers, which will never happen since it didn't seem to even be consideration over this, but if they are adamant at trying to create equal teams, which is impossible, it is better to rebuild teams as often as possible. They should choose systems that are logical together rather than starting a fire inside electric sauna.

Edited July 23 by Riba.3271

[igmolicious.5986]

As others have suggested before, I feel like guilds should have maximums lowered to something like 200 to avoid things like this, but I think it's also unreasonable to ask that now too, since that would mean figuring out a way to trim down guilds that already had over that amount of players flagging it as their wvw guild. Silver lining is that those 500 players are very unlikely to be on at the same time, though it does allow fight guilds to stack in a single link, which makes fighting that link a nightmare for most other links. Not sure what I'd suggest as a solution to this, since it seems like that train has already left the station other than maybe resetting everyone's wvw guild to unflagged next link, and only allowing a maximum of, say, 200 people to flag a guild as their wvw guild at a time regardless of total guild population.

Edited July 23 by igmolicious.5986

[Mabi black.1824]

20 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

they only got to open and close the transfer window once every week based on raw activity.

therefore the first thing to do is to solve this problem. What is the purpose of counting the players (in reference to their playing time) if you then open the gate and everybody inside? it is almost trivial to ask . If this was the first problem (because as they say in my area, understanding where the problem is is already half a solution to the problem) you can't turn away, or even worse invent an alternative solution (That has nothing to do with the real problem ) with the result of demolishing the ''competitive/confrontation'' aspect in a team-based PvP format.

or, as is our case, you can do it, but you must not claim to solve any problem, so you cannot think of avoiding a good dose of criticism in the choices you have made.

Edited July 24 by Mabi black.1824

[Mabi black.1824]

19 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Personally, I'd love it, but I think it would do more harm than good to the overall community.

The issue, at least for me, is not limited to harming communities, because the problem at this point is bigger. it is about purpose, the reason to participate (in any form you prefer) in a team/server game. Because at the precise moment when you make the teams/servers useless, the need arises to rewrite the design of this game mode. Before, confrontation and competition were built around the team/server (with a series of problems that everyone knows ) Not now. The feeling is that of playing a useless PvP format, purposeless, therefore meaningless.

Saying this for some time, the answer has been to see the changes to our scoring system in a predetermined time slot (no comment) but how the week before we delete the concept of server and the week after we update the point system that still delivers points to the server? Is it possible not to see that there is something wrong?

Edited July 24 by Mabi black.1824

[Mabi black.1824]

I can also try to answer myself. Because it is clear that if you make the server meaningless, what remains is the guild, consequently the points will have to be delivered and refer to the guilds. But fixing and updating the point system with reference to guilds would really show what this WR project is. that is, a new game mode that excludes a part of players (the so-called filler) while taking into consideration only another portion of players.

[Atoclone.4810]

15 hours ago, Riba.3271 said:

 

So best option is monoservers, which will never happen since it didn't seem to even be consideration over this, but if they are adamant at trying to create equal teams, which is impossible, it is better to rebuild teams as often as possible. They should choose systems that are logical together rather than starting a fire inside electric sauna.

Mono servers worked great til it didn't. For example each server starts with 50 players, everything's great. 5 people from server a quit the game, not you've got imbalanced servers, the longer this goes on with me players joining their friends servers and others leaving the game. 10 years down the line and you've got a big old unbalanced mess.

The only way to sort this out is rebalance the servers. Or link them . Linking worked well for some servers, less so than others.Which leaves you with rebalancing them is what we have now made 

There's no way you could get perfect balance. There's far too many variables to take into account, but what you can do, and what I presume they are doing is tweaking the algorithm as they go along. 

 

The proof of the experiment is not a month after they made this big change but a year +

[Sheff.4851]

4 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

therefore the first thing to do is to solve this problem. What is the purpose of counting the players (in reference to their playing time) if you then open the gate and everybody inside? it is almost trivial to ask . If this was the first problem (because as they say in my area, understanding where the problem is is already half a solution to the problem) you can't turn away, or even worse invent an alternative solution (That has nothing to do with the real problem ) with the result of demolishing the ''competitive/confrontation'' aspect in a team-based PvP format.

or, as is our case, you can do it, but you must not claim to solve any problem, so you cannot think of avoiding a good dose of criticism in the choices you have made.

Because the populations could only update once a week. What's the alternative -- you have a hard population cap, and a guild gets split in half after paying gems to transfer just to find out that the population cap got hit mid-transfer? That's a horrible solution. 

[Mabi black.1824]

1 hour ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Because the populations could only update once a week. What's the alternative -- you have a hard population cap, and a guild gets split in half after paying gems to transfer just to find out that the population cap got hit mid-transfer? That's a horrible solution. 

As you open the gate and let anyone in, who cares about numbers and balance is a perfect solution? I have not indicated a solution. I told you that if someone from the development had identified, pointed out, focused, where and how and why the problem manifests itself, face it and correct it. Circling around it won't get you far. and getting into a mess will take you even less far.

Edited July 24 by Mabi black.1824

[Sheff.4851]

55 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

As you open the gate and let anyone in, who cares about numbers and balance is a perfect solution? I have not indicated a solution. I told you that if someone from the development had identified, pointed out, focused, where and how and why the problem manifests itself, face it and correct it. Circling around it won't get you far. and getting into a mess will take you even less far.

The correction to mass transfers was released last month. It's called the Restructuring system. If you check the other thread with the dev interview, we even talk about the process of identifying, pointing out, and focusing on the limitations of the old server system, and the relinking system.

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Because the populations could only update once a week. What's the alternative -- you have a hard population cap, and a guild gets split in half after paying gems to transfer just to find out that the population cap got hit mid-transfer? That's a horrible solution. 

Before the activity-based population algorithm, a full server like BG or TC would open up briefly during low activity hours.  So players would set up an auto-clicker and leave their PCs on overnight to transfer.  They were not just full servers, they were *overstacked* servers.

You can look today at the servers that stayed mostly full and never became a linked server as having won the server meta because they started out large enough.

[Chaba.5410]

4 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

The correction to mass transfers was released last month. It's called the Restructuring system. If you check the other thread with the dev interview, we even talk about the process of identifying, pointing out, and focusing on the limitations of the old server system, and the relinking system.

Sure, but when some group can socially engineer Support into mass transferring them, we're back to the same problem.

[Sheff.4851]

7 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Sure, but when some group can socially engineer Support into mass transferring them, we're back to the same problem.

How prevalent has this been, exactly? I've seen people talk about it happening, but not really give specifics.

[Chaba.5410]

8 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

How prevalent has this been, exactly? I've seen people talk about it happening, but not really give specifics.

Not sure.  Our EU friends are saying it happened though in a large enough quantity to take notice.

[Sheff.4851]

6 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Not sure.  Our EU friends are saying it happened though in a large enough quantity to take notice.

Interesting. The only one I heard about on NA was [BACK], but I think that one was a game of telephone -- they left the PAN Alliance, but I don't believe that they petitioned for a transfer or anything. I could ask Pooch about it later.

[Mabi black.1824]

1 hour ago, Sheff.4851 said:

The correction to mass transfers was released last month. It's called the Restructuring system. If you check the other thread with the dev interview, we even talk about the process of identifying, pointing out, and focusing on the limitations of the old server system, and the relinking system.

I don't understand a word of English so I can't help you with reference to an audio interview. unless it is subtitled to be translated. In any case, if the only technological solution that development is able to follow to solve the problem of out-of-control transfers is called WR, then the same development will be forced to add an extra work wagon if it wants WVW to still find a meaning/purpose to be played.  At the moment it is a meaningless mode. A team-based PvP mode where teams are no longer the reference for anyone, makes no sense. Choosing WR as a solution is like choosing to redesign this mode. unless you deliberately want to leave it in this meaningless state.