How positive are you about the alliance system? [POLL]

[greyseer.1806]

waaaay too little too late. keep in mind we all have had the option to make our own alliances and transfer to the servers. I think it would be better to focus on fixing what has caused people to play less, or even just leave.

[Optimator.3589]

Mildly positive change that will allow somewhat greater granularity in matchup balancing, as well as potentially bringing about a reduction in how many tiers there are for NA. That being said, I am very doubtful that Anet is putting any effort at all into improving their metrics. They have yet to demonstrate any understanding that play hours =/= coverage.

So it will be left in the hands of the players to "balance" coverage, and we've already seen how well THAT works.

[Ghost.7032]

Well it already destoryed my guild and it's not even out yet lol. It destory small size guilds that are family wvw players or some of them well skilled. After 7 years of playing and being hardcore guilds as RG, TA, BoRP and SoL i just get sick of repeating story that guilds get destoryed cause of Anet doing and people doing of asking nerfs in things without understanding how it supposed to play lol. So i call it and quit the game. Not even intrested anymore of Allience. They took my intrest of the game gone after my last guild died (SoL) cause of this stupid system that comes out.

[BlueMelody.6398]

@Ghost.7032 said:Well it already destoryed my guild and it's not even out yet lol. It destory small size guilds that are family wvw players or some of them well skilled. After 7 years of playing and being hardcore guilds as RG, TA, BoRP and SoL i just get sick of repeating story that guilds get destoryed cause of Anet doing and people doing of asking nerfs in things without understanding how it supposed to play lol. So i call it and quit the game. Not even intrested anymore of Allience. They took my intrest of the game gone after my last guild died (SoL) cause of this stupid system that comes out.

Honestly I don't have a lot of respect for a guild that implodes and dies just at the very notion of an alliance-based system, long before the system is even given an implementation date and certainly long before they have a chance to try it and then see if it lives up to their Chicken Little histrionics.

I think it addresses one major issue with wvw, hopefully allowing them to turn their attention to the other myriad issues. I think the overall competitiveness of worlds is going to come down to whether the lowest-pop timezones (SEA and OCE) decide that they'd rather all gang up and run roughshod through empty maps or whether they'd rather split up and actually have competitions and fights...you know, the stuff WvW is supposed to be about.

[ArchonWing.9480]

Too little, too late. This is merely the foundation. It can't solve anything on its own. Plus history certainly counts against it.

Without a dedicated WvW balance, you just don't have a game mode people will want to play or take seriously. And considering they're going back to unifying skills again (aka we only balance for PvE) there is not much hope.

I mean it's great they're doing stuff like nerfing arrow carts mind you, but I expect without much more proactive measures this will only buy some extra time before they just use it as proof that activity is not enough and use it as a reason to finally take it to the back.

[b k.1648]

It should, in theory, make WvW a little more competitive. Potentially. The problem is, it's not going to make it any more interesting.

[hunkamania.7561]

The only way to truly balance WvW is moving the individual guilds one guild by one guild to multiple worlds. You know all these alliances are just going to stack up and nuthug/blob/out coverage you to victory not caring about balance what so ever and a 500 cap is silly and too large in the current year.

[Grim West.3194]

I want to believe, but..

None of ANET's actions indicate that they have learned anything from the last 5 years of garbage.

The alliance system could work, but only if they killed the transfer system and balanced all time zones. They are too greedy and short sighted to kill transfers, in spite of the fact that it is obviously the biggest problem in WvW. And balancing coverage is easier said than done.

Transfers should be changed RIGHT NOW. Should only be allowed once every six months or so (if that) per account and on a random schedule. Only allow transfers to low tier servers and lock all top tier servers for at least a year. You can't do half measures with the transfer system or the game mode will always be garbage and the alliance system a waste of time and resources.

[Junkpile.7439]

Combat will still be total kitten. Red circles everywhere. At least remove scourge and nerf firebrand healing

[Victory.2879]

What system? Alliance you say? IF it ever gets implemented, we can judge it then with all it's bells and whistles.

I wonder if a new map will come before 2020. It's a race between a new map and alliances, doubt we'll get both...just hoping we get one before a new decade starts!

[Strider Pj.2193]

@"Victory.2879" said:What system? Alliance you say? IF it ever gets implemented, we can judge it then with all it's bells and whistles.

I wonder if a new map will come before 2020. It's a race between a new map and alliances, doubt we'll get both...just hoping we get one before a new decade starts!

Thy have said there will be no new map. As recently as this week in the August Forum Chat. Reference is this threadhttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/52335/wvw-content-updates#latest

[Etheri.5406]

@"Ubi.4136" said:Players are already testing their alliance stacking. The only thing that will change is instead of saying one of the current stacked server names, it will be a generic world name with a stacked alliance on it. Players keep telling the forums "they want fights" yet have consistently proven they only "want easy loot/ranks" and "fights they can always win (usually by just outnumbering their opponents)". It is literally going to change nothing except perhaps the names of all the trolls wasting keep supply and pulling the tactics each matchup. The only other possible change I see, is that we go from 4 tiers to 3, which will make the reset que's unbearable for most people and make a lot of people find something else to do.

Players will continue to stack because they rather stack and have NO FIGHTS 9/10 times and only fight eachother, occasionally, than deal with still having no fights and NEVER having ANY competitive action or progress which is what happens when they play with all those amazing players who aren't on stacked servers. A

Is it the fault of the few remaining "fight oriented" guilds that the attitude of other players towards them is so hostile they refuse to play with them across both EU and NA?It's been made painfully clear that these guilds are only respected for what they offer others, and others continuously make demands about what they have to do. Yet they have to do all the effort. Even now, guilds have to balance WvW. Not pugs their fault, nooooooooo. Sorry but howmany stacked servers are there, 3? So the other 9 are literally incapable of doing anything on their own? Top kek.

Most servers which had an exodus of players caused the exodus themselves. The players that are there are very much responsible for others leaving. But by all means keep blaming them ;)

@Kraljevo.2801 said:Why? Because transfers are not going anywhere. As long as transfers exist, wvw won't be competitive. Ever.

correct

@"Hollywood.3490" said:Where's the "it's not gonna happen" option?

Apart from that, if the alliances EVER happen, I'll grab my popcorn and watch the giant implosion of all the tryhard kitten groups. Lots of guilds in EU already disbanded and that's just the beginning.

There are no "tryhard" guilds left. The few players that remain still are so much more skilled than the average pug that they still completely faceroll them. Then the average group complains about stacking, tryhards, elitists and how population isn't balanced.

I'll grab my popcorn and watch the tryhard guilds disband / leave. Not exactly much of them left, are there? It'll be applauded by the other groups, happy they'll finally no longer have to deal with these players! And then I'll grab my popcorn and watch the result. The constant complaints of those that remain when they realise it still doesn't create a balanced & fun game for them. In fact it only gets worse.

Destroying the population that is excited about a gamemode is rarely the way to make it "healthier". ;)

[Etheri.5406]

@"joneirikb.7506" said:It won't be the magical "fix-it" button, but it is a good system to build other things from later on, so it is a useful change to the core system.

This won't fix: Humans/Players, coverage, competitive/casual, fairweathers, so most of the main problems still remain. This does partially fix stacking, and if players actually divided up more than they're going to, then it would have helped somewhat on coverage as well (but it won't, because humans).

The system has NOTHING that fixes coverage. The only way you can fix coverage is by doing it manually in your alliance, but an alliance is still a small part of your servers total coverage.

So this fixes granularity, making it easier for a "sorting system" to sort players into "equal" groups, but anet isn't even capable of defining what makes a group equal. They're using total playtime - nothing else. And total playtime across 24/7 and thousands of players on vastly different levels MIGHT even out if it was a fully random distribution, but it's not. It's bound by human interactions and styles.

So we have improved granularity for a non-existing sorting system which DOES NOT CONVERGE AT ANY LEVEL towards balanced populations. How people think this will be enough of an improvement to be worthwhile is beyond me.

As you stated, this won' fix coverage, different goals for wvw, humans, ... As soon as people realise that alliances don't really improve the gameplay and you still depend on RNG every 2 months OR you depend on stacking your own alliance to a point where you minimize the RNG aspect (neither of which are entirely desirable); I assume most players who get "hyped" will leave again. And players who stick around believing anet has the slightest bit of clue about WvW... Those will be gone too.

Bad updates speed up WvW decay. Good updates can fix a LOT, and restore faith. But from what I've seen so far, this update still lacks a lot of things required to actually be a net positive. It's slightly in the right direction, but still so far off it feels like it'll be wasted effort.

[Etheri.5406]

@"Optimator.3589" said:Mildly positive change that will allow somewhat greater granularity in matchup balancing, as well as potentially bringing about a reduction in how many tiers there are for NA. That being said, I am very doubtful that Anet is putting any effort at all into improving their metrics. They have yet to demonstrate any understanding that play hours =/= coverage.

So it will be left in the hands of the players to "balance" coverage, and we've already seen how well THAT works.

Exactly this. Greater granularity is great if you have a way to "balance" coverage ... But anet doesn't have ANY metrics or ways to balance coverage. I mean they're using play hours without even checking timezones at all... TOP KEK.

There is no issue with players balancing coverage manually - if you give them a reason to do so. Right now the game is giving them reasons to win by any means necessary. Not to create competitive servers or matchups; mostly because of no rewards for winning and non-controllable transfers. Instead of trying harder and aiming to win, we rather just move to the winning side and pretend everyone's a winrar. Which feels particularly pointless since 9/10 players don't even want to try and earn a win. They just want to magically become winners; while blaming others for not trying hard enough for them.

[Etheri.5406]

@"hunkamania.7561" said:The only way to truly balance WvW is moving the individual guilds one guild by one guild to multiple worlds. You know all these alliances are just going to stack up and nuthug/blob/out coverage you to victory not caring about balance what so ever and a 500 cap is silly and too large in the current year.

Half the guilds will be put on servers with hundreds of players they absolutely don't want to play with, and instantly quit.

Those players that RELY ON THEM for carrying their ass will say "good riddance!!! don't need those guilds!! no respect they just want ez ktrain !!!" but none of them will lift a finger to make their situation better. None of them will step up. And even if they do, the vast majority will still just ignore anything they aim to do, which is exactly why it'll still fail.

You need to create a system that makes guilds WANT to spread out and fight eachother; be competitive. Create a scenario where players themselves create the competition. You can try to manually force them all you like but it's a videogame; so you can't /really/ force them.

I find it hilarious that the people who demand "balance" away from these "stacked fight guilds that don't fight!!!" are also the players who go "wvw isn't competitive, it's more PvE than PvP and you're all too tryhard. WvW is for casuals and nobody cares about being the best or winning or losing". Until other people win and you keep losing because everyone who cares about winning moved on.

[Aridon.8362]

There's a surprisingly low number of fight guilds left so there's no point in quibbling over matters such as this. Every time my commander goes into the field the usual saying is "we should not be losing to these guys" and we never do.

[hunkamania.7561]

@Etheri.5406 said:

@hunkamania.7561 said:The only way to truly balance WvW is moving the individual guilds one guild by one guild to multiple worlds. You know all these alliances are just going to stack up and nuthug/blob/out coverage you to victory not caring about balance what so ever and a 500 cap is silly and too large in the current year.

Half the guilds will be put on servers with hundreds of players they absolutely don't want to play with, and instantly quit.

So, instead of worrying about their guild they're going to quit because of who is in their world? I doubt that lol. Shouldn't they be more concerned about their guild? I want the alliance I'm in to have few guilds so I get all the fights instead of sharing. Hey, call me different I guess.

[Etheri.5406]

@hunkamania.7561 said:

@Etheri.5406 said:

@hunkamania.7561 said:The only way to truly balance WvW is moving the individual guilds one guild by one guild to multiple worlds. You know all these alliances are just going to stack up and nuthug/blob/out coverage you to victory not caring about balance what so ever and a 500 cap is silly and too large in the current year.

Half the guilds will be put on servers with hundreds of players they absolutely don't want to play with, and instantly quit.

So, instead of worrying about their guild they're going to quit because of who is in their world? I doubt that lol. Shouldn't they be more concerned about their guild? I want the alliance I'm in to have few guilds so I get all the fights instead of sharing. Hey, call me different I guess.

There's 2 kinds of guilds in EU. The ones that try to improve and fight, and literally skillclickers. The skillclickers are generally worse-than-pugs and not worth fighting unless you're a pug group. They mostly end up ppt'ing or fighting pug zergs with their own pug groups.

The ones that fight? I know maybe 10 that still raid across 15 servers in 5 different tiers. The moment you have 2 guilds that aim to fight you're a "stacked server" and waltz over the full-pug ones. If you're alone as "only fight guild" on a server with literally 10 times as much pugs as your guild, then you don't do guildraids. You do raids while followed by 2 to 3 times as many pugs as you have players there, and still can't actually find appropriate stuff to fight in at least half the matchups.

So what do people do? As you say. They do guildraids. Outside of guildraids their players have nothing to do. No fun, no action, they can ppt at a very low level if they wish to but frankly it's even more boring than zerging. Or they can tag themselves, organise themselves and try to carry their pugs. Both of these tend to lead to burnout because the fraction of players doing this stuff is very very small compared to the amount of players playing. Half the servers stuck on "dead" servers end up struggling with retaining their players. No suprise as half the raids are boring, outside of raids is even more boring, GvG is dead, competitive is dead, the amount of enemy guilds in a matchup is maybe 5 and of those 5 guilds maybe 1 has about the same skill level as yours.

So of course. The first month they hold on. The second month maybe. That's literally one alliance link. By the time you get 6 months of this, most guilds lose enough players that they're like "fuck this, i'm done" anddddd yeah that's pretty much the reality of WvW :). And then there were 9 guilds left ;)

Having nothing to do during guildraids and nothing to do outside of guildraids because the entire gamemode is completely and utterly screwed and progressively gets worse isn't a healthy environment for guilds to survive in.

[reddie.5861]

all tards transfer to server X to become best

or

all tards join same alliance/guild to stack on random server to become best.

same shit? sadly all these self proclaimed idiots all gonna quit out of boredom cus there is nothing to fight for em since they manage to stack everything on 1 server and bulldozer whole WvW map like they are fighting npc's. its fun for 1hour then your bored.

thus why always say better die in a good fight then win everything all the time.

[reddie.5861]

@"Etheri.5406" said:You need to create a system that makes guilds WANT to spread out and fight eachother; be competitive. Create a scenario where players themselves create the competition. You can try to manually force them all you like but it's a videogame; so you can't /really/ force them.

why create a system? if u wanna fight everyday for example u just create it your self u obviously dont bandwagon the so called big guys.

like years ago i was in TOP "guild" in other game with FFA pvp thru the world.my leader at some point refused to recruit people in clan that raped half the people in our guild simply because he didnt wanna win all pvps with 2 fingers up his nose.he wanted fights he had chosen to send far better players then some in his guild to enemy side in order for him and others to keep server alive and fun.

u see for example if piken EU is badass strong server many people will want to transfer there, but why i always ask my self? to have easy bandwagon train? whats the fun? might aswell do some meta event to 111111 thru all mobs and get badass loot.tho the real good guilds arent really bandwagon any servers neither they give a rats ass about ppt or k/d score

if u ask me should just make a mega server every week u get smashed into different home border and enjoy no more servers at all..only thing u have to do is give proper rewards at the end of week. so people will actually fight for it.

reward for most pptreward for most killsreward for best k/detc not just 1 shit reward for winning server cus even losing server can have reward for having best k/d score or w/eso every1 is happy..

[Victory.2879]

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@"Victory.2879" said:What system? Alliance you say? IF it ever gets implemented, we can judge it then with all it's bells and whistles.

I wonder if a new map will come before 2020. It's a race between a new map and alliances, doubt we'll get both...just hoping we get one before a new decade starts!

Thy have said there will be no new map. As recently as this week in the August Forum Chat. Reference is this thread

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/52335/wvw-content-updates#latest

Thanks. I did read it. I was obviously making the point that there is no start date for alliance and apart from that, no real development going on for wvw- the fact they have said there isn't going to be a new map tells you a lot about how low down in priorities wvw is. PVE gets new maps and features on a regular basis- wvw gets alliances some time in the future whenever they can find spare time out from checking shoe colours on an npc in a new map, as that has priority over wvw work.

Without a new map wvw is stale. Alliances won't make it less stale, they will just shuffle the deck a little until people work out how to game the system completely.

[shiri.4257]

@hunkamania.7561 said:

@Etheri.5406 said:

@hunkamania.7561 said:The only way to truly balance WvW is moving the individual guilds one guild by one guild to multiple worlds. You know all these alliances are just going to stack up and nuthug/blob/out coverage you to victory not caring about balance what so ever and a 500 cap is silly and too large in the current year.

Half the guilds will be put on servers with hundreds of players they absolutely don't want to play with, and instantly quit.

So, instead of worrying about their guild they're going to quit because of who is in their world? I doubt that lol. Shouldn't they be more concerned about their guild? I want the alliance I'm in to have few guilds so I get all the fights instead of sharing. Hey, call me different I guess.

^been Fight Guild Meta 2015+. When you start losing, go hide in a GH, transfer, or stack. Might as well call it dead guild meta.

[LegohBrave.1823]

I know this isnt rocket science or anything, but the numbers from WVW will always continue to dwindle. You don't just reverse that. The game mode itself lacks dev support. Let's be honest, anet intended it to be a side game to pve. WvW never really changes. Same maps for the most part, not we will have alliances that rely on algorithms to fix issues. There's not enough events, game breaking changes or updates to the game mode. At least Dark Age of Camelot the devs still do wvw events with the player base, they have what, 1000 people? Alliances will be DIFFERENT, but i dont have enough information to tell me if it'll be better or not. They have not specified how the algorithm will work to adjust pugs and such or if it even works for them or us. Let's be honest, meta or gtfo is not an inviting battle cry when anet cant balance for bunnies.

[Foghladha.2506]

I'm still wondering how with an alliance cap of 500 how many guilds can fit in an alliance if a guild roster is already 500. Being not all of our players play WvW I find myself curious how their going to code the threshold and how it will react if 3 500 person guilds suddenly have an influx on WvW players. A whole lot of moving parts that could go wrong quick in the perfect storm.

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Foghladha.2506 said:I'm still wondering how with an alliance cap of 500 how many guilds can fit in an alliance if a guild roster is already 500. Being not all of our players play WvW I find myself curious how their going to code the threshold and how it will react if 3 500 person guilds suddenly have an influx on WvW players. A whole lot of moving parts that could go wrong quick in the perfect storm.

500 is the current guild maximum so it wouldn't be an issue. The guild leader would need to kick people to have room. And even if that happened, and new people came in, unless they were currently in that 'world' they wouldn't be able to join that matchup unless they either transferred to the world (if there was room) or waited until the new world creations.

As far as the 'Alliance' piece, the alliance cap is 500 as well most likely to prevent guilds from inflating numbers: i.e. an alliance is made up of 5 guilds each with 100 people. In order for more to join one of those guilds and be an actual member of the alliance, either one of the guilds would have to boot a player, or the alliance leader would need to boot a guild. This would create space for the next 'world creation' (every 8 weeks)