A thought about alliances

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

If alliances are determined and balanced by guild sizes and hours per person in WvW per week, doesn't that make it really easy for one large guild to tank one week so they get put in a larger alliance, and then steamroll the next week? I mean logically, with that system if you tryhard your guild end will up playing pretty much by itself, then burning out and leaving anyone else on their own. How is this going to make things more stable?

[Riba.3271]

They will most likely use whole alliance period for activity, with more weight towards the end, rather than just the last week.

Anyways don't think guilds want more players on their side, rather on the enemy side, so they have something to do.

And yea, alliances won't be stable population wise. Commanders/guilds that run servers go on vacations some weeks and the server is on a graveyard duty, same goes for alliances.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

sigh... sounds like its possible. one would hope that not all members of a large guild would be down for not playing wvw for a week, which would apply to most people I think. will have those few try hard guilds ofc, but chances are if they are doing this for easier fights then they have less skill.

[Dawdler.8521]

First, alliances are not worlds. You're talking about worlds. It is a massive difference. You would never be "put on a larger alliance", they are player created. Its the eqvivalent of saying your guild is going to get put together with a larger guild next relink this friday.

Secondly, you wouldnt get put on a new world "the next week" because the basic premise of the system as Anet laid it out was that we retain the 8 week shuffles. Whether large guilds/alliance can tank their playtime for the next shuffle depends entirerly on how the system works in the background. We dont know that. At this point most question its existance.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

@"Dawdler.8521" said:First, alliances are not worlds. You're talking about worlds. It is a massive difference. You would never be "put on a larger alliance", they are player created. Its the eqvivalent of saying your guild is going to get put together with a larger guild next relink this friday.

Secondly, you wouldnt get put on a new world "the next week" because the basic premise of the system as Anet laid it out was that we retain the 8 week shuffles. Whether large guilds/alliance can tank their playtime for the next shuffle depends entirerly on how the system works in the background. We dont know that. At this point most question its existance.

Yeah, they're player created on guild membership, but if they also take into account playtime in WvW it leads to the possibility of guilds not playing to change how they're grouped. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty certain they said that. The eight week turnover is a very good point tho, I wasn't aware they were retaining that.

Honestly I'm in the group questioning it's existence too, I'm just trying to take ANet at their word and assuming they've done something towards it, no matter how minor. Time will tell whether that's foolish or not.

[XenesisII.1540]

You could tank your guild the last couple weeks of the season time I guess to hope to get placed in a world with a bigger alliance, but there's no guarantee of placement with them when there's a lot of other factors when creating the worlds. It's a waste of time trying. Or do it the old fashion way and transfer after the recreation, if they don't make transferring difficult. To add more fun with it they could lower the weeks to 6 or 4 for recreation and make transferring worthless/pointless.

[Dawdler.8521]

@"XenesisII.1540" said:You could tank your guild the last couple weeks of the season time I guess to hope to get placed in a world with a bigger alliance, but there's no guarantee of placement with them when there's a lot of other factors when creating the worlds. It's a waste of time trying. Or do it the old fashion way and transfer after the recreation, if they don't make transferring difficult. To add more fun with it they could lower the weeks to 6 or 4 for recreation and make transferring worthless/pointless.Theres no guarantee Anet would be so stupid as to use the momentary hours played when deciding the "activity rating" of an alliance/guild.

I mean lets imagine that an alliance is 10 out of 10 in "activity" with a million hours played one 2 month period, then the next 2 month they are all still in the alliance but with 0 hours played. Activity 0 out of 10? Not necessarily. Maybe it drops to 8 out of 10 because it averages with previous 2 months seasons. Who knows. Thats why I'm saying we have no idea how the backend would work. Maybe its possible within a season, maybe you need 6 months of inactivity to tank. We. Dont. Know. And its futile to speculate on it as something that must be a flaw..

[XenesisII.1540]

I wonder what "a lot of other factors" means.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

I just reread the post about world restructuring. it doesn't say that the last week will be weighted differently.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065

i'm guessing some some people will try to game this new system by creating guilds with their alts, dividing their playtime in half or not playing their alts at all. this will give them easier matchups and lead to another server/ alliance stacking game. will this be dealt with when it inevitably occurs?

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:I just reread the post about world restructuring. it doesn't say that the last week will be weighted differently.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065

i'm guessing some some people will try to game this new system by creating guilds with their alts, dividing their playtime in half or not playing their alts at all. this will give them easier matchups and lead to another server/ alliance stacking game. will this be dealt with when it inevitably occurs?

They likely will. If one up one down stays in effect, which I think it will, it will be less impactful.

But what algorithm they use to put alliances in the same world will be very interesting...

Along with those unaffiliated guilds and players for filler.,.

[SkyShroud.2865]

Alliance is just glorified bandwagoning like how guild is a glorified lfg for pve.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@"Strider Pj.2193" said:They likely will. If one up one down stays in effect, which I think it will, it will be less impactful.

But what algorithm they use to put alliances in the same world will be very interesting...

Along with those unaffiliated guilds and players for filler.,.

it says in the thingy.

World Creation builds teams so they have similar predicted participation, skill, coverage, and language. Team assignment moves players onto teams by calculating the contribution value of a player and using that calculation to distribute players fairly. We plan to track stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels. The exact stats have yet to be determined and we are open to suggestions of other stats to use in this system. This new system will expand upon the current calculation that uses play hours for linking.https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/26547/world-restructuring/p1

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:

@"Strider Pj.2193" said:They likely will. If one up one down stays in effect, which I think it will, it will be less impactful.

But what algorithm they use to put alliances in the same world will be very interesting...

Along with those unaffiliated guilds and players for filler.,.

it says in the thingy.

World Creation builds teams so they have similar predicted participation, skill, coverage, and language. Team assignment moves players onto teams by calculating the contribution value of a player and using that calculation to distribute players fairly. We plan to track stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels. The exact stats have yet to be determined and we are open to suggestions of other stats to use in this system. This new system will expand upon the current calculation that uses play hours for linking.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/26547/world-restructuring/p1

From the first world restructure update on the opening page:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/45856/world-restructuring-update-1/p1

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:

July 2018 Update

Player Play Hours

In the original post and discussion, we talked about using player hours (the current method we use for calculating world sizes for links and “full” status) and then adjusting those hours by other metrics like command hours, etc. We subsequently have decided to, at least at the start, use only play hours and not adjust using other metrics. This will allow us to compare apples to apples so to speak once the system is in place. From there we can simulate how certain adjustments would change the matchups. This will make it easier to determine if an adjustment will have a positive impact.

With no additional change in the second update.

But yeah, play hours. HOPEFULLY, it will be a multi week algorithm for this play hours.

So an alliance would, for example, have to effectively cut hours for 4-6 weeks or something.

But there WILL be ways to game it, though I think it will be... more challenging to.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@Strider Pj.2193 said:With no additional change in the second update.

But yeah, play hours. HOPEFULLY, it will be a multi week algorithm for this play hours.

So an alliance would, for example, have to effectively cut hours for 4-6 weeks or something.

But there WILL be ways to game it, though I think it will be... more challenging to.

alright cool thanks, didn't check any of the updates.

welp! it will be easy to just create a guild or even an entire alliance with alt accounts, play maybe a week with them, then play the alts 100% of the time after the next reshuffle. action on this would require anet to go in on a case by case basis, which would be pointless since the players in question would just create a new guild. so there would have to be account penalties, but penalizing an entire guilds players is a terrible decision from a business perspective so its likely to not happen. also anet is sorta infamous for not penalizing people for breaking the rules. there was some action taken a while back in pvp, but people continue to destroy that mode with all sorts of nonsense that its likely to never recover with out a team q option.

its not looking good man.

[joneirikb.7506]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:

@"Strider Pj.2193" said:With no additional change in the second update.

But yeah, play hours. HOPEFULLY, it will be a multi week algorithm for this play hours.

So an alliance would, for example, have to effectively cut hours for 4-6 weeks or something.

But there WILL be ways to game it, though I think it will be... more challenging to.

alright cool thanks, didn't check any of the updates.

welp! it will be easy to just create a guild or even an entire alliance with alt accounts, play maybe a week with them, then play the alts 100% of the time after the next reshuffle. action on this would require anet to go in on a case by case basis, which would be pointless since the players in question would just create a new guild. so there would have to be account penalties, but penalizing an entire guilds players is a terrible decision from a business perspective so its likely to not happen. also anet is sorta infamous for not penalizing people for breaking the rules. there was some action taken a while back in pvp, but people continue to destroy that mode with all sorts of nonsense that its likely to never recover with out a team q option.

its not looking good man.

More likely, I'd see a bandwagon alliance, all with a 2nd account, make a own alliance for each, so they could alternate between 2 different alliances, and then basically play each alliance 2 months (until new alliance shuffle) and then swap.

This would easily enough be countered by setting the "cool down" period for activity to 4 months.

So if they played say 8 hours a day on average for 2 months, and then 0 hours for the next 2 months (because Alt alliance), then they would still average out at 4.

That way they wouldn't really be able to break the system, without also having to play quite a few more even matches inbetween as well. The larger problem would be the impact this has on the rest of the "World" their alliances lands on. If their Alliance1 lands on a world, and then they abandon that alliance in order to play on Alliance2, this would mean that world would play with one less alliance. Now a single full alliance (500) is likely to count for no more than about 10% of a world total, so this might not be all that drastical, unless several ones hit the same world.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@"joneirikb.7506" said:This would easily enough be countered by setting the "cool down" period for activity to 4 months.

Now a single full alliance (500) is likely to count for no more than about 10% of a world total, so this might not be all that drastical, unless several ones hit the same world.

wouldn't anet need to know the ip addresses of each player? how would they link 2 separate accounts to a single person?

that's what they said but I don't believe that at all. just 1 active 20 man guild can make a huge difference in wvw.

[joneirikb.7506]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:

@"joneirikb.7506" said:This would easily enough be countered by setting the "cool down" period for activity to 4 months.

Now a single full alliance (500) is likely to count for no more than about 10% of a world total, so this might not be all that drastical, unless several ones hit the same world.

wouldn't anet need to know the ip addresses of each player? how would they link 2 separate accounts to a single person?

that's what they said but I don't believe that at all. just 1 active 20 man guild can make a huge difference in wvw.

Why would they need to know the IP ?

They can just log the hours on each separate account (as they do), and add them together for the guild/alliance (as they say they will).

Just set the cooldown to long enough that such a group can't abandon a 2 month world/link, and completely reset their hours.

Then they'll come back to a match they have to play normally, instead of rolling over an empty match-up.

[Kassablanca.5821]

alliance wont stop ppl from transfering to the server they want to bandwagon

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Limodriver.4106 said:alliance wont stop ppl from transfering to the server they want to bandwagon

No, it won’t. But it may be slightly more predictable.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@joneirikb.7506 said:snips

ahhh ok ok. brain fail there. thanks for clarification.yeah nvm seems like the alt account thing wouldn't really work after all. i'm wrong.

[joneirikb.7506]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:

@"joneirikb.7506" said:snips

ahhh ok ok. brain fail there. thanks for clarification.yeah nvm seems like the alt account thing wouldn't really work after all. i'm wrong.

Well, technically it could work. But it depends on what "cooldown" ANet sets on the play hours, and if they actually tells us or let us know that number, and how many alternative accounts such a bandwagon would be willing to use....

I mean, if they set a cooldown for 6 months, with 2 months world resets. Then a dedicated bandwagon alliance could solve this by having 3 different accounts each, and make 3 different alliances, and rotate them over 6 months.

It's a tug-of-war between how ANet wants to solve it, and how much work players are willing to put into being able to "roflstomp" each others. Also, since a general alliance will likely count for only about 10-20% of a "world" total, I think the effect wouldn't be quite as big as we see now.

So it is a valid concern, but something that ANet has to deal with. We can't really say how it will turn out until they've put the limitations in words for us.

[Jugglemonkey.8741]

Thanks for all your thoughts by the way, it has been interesting reading them. I guess we'll have to wait and see.