Guild Wars 2

I still like Devon Carver’s idea of having 24 8 hour matches so things like night capping don’t play as big of a role. It at least helps balance out imbalances between time zones.

applecup.3047:

My problem with the alliance thing is that it boils down to turning wvw into alliance v alliance – megaguild v megaguild. To an extent that is how wvw rolls at the moment, at least in high tier servers, but it also has the effect of shutting out roamers, newbies, small and/or unconventional guilds, etc. As someone who’s been on the recieving end of guild drama, I’m also not keen on the idea of such a huge part of the game potentially being dictated by the whims of guild and megaguild politics – a difference of opinion between a couple of people that ultimately resulted in an alliance kick could result in tens of people suddenly unable to play a core part of the game through no fault of their own.

I really want to emphasize this post. The red post proposal sounds lovely, but only really for guilds. Ultimately who it hurts are the roamers and players who are new to WvW.

Someone like me who reps a more social guild as opposed to a competitive one, would likely find himself in a random server/alliance.

But Cross, the populations would be more normalized, making it more fair, right?
Well, sort of. You see, organization is always going to trump randomness. An alliance focused on WvW with sheer numbers and centralized locations both in-game and out of game will trump individual competence every single time.

Right now, I can be a part of my social guild and participate in WvW on the server forums/TS, which is nice because this is something my guild can’t provide, and I’m not willing to leave my guild.

So, while the populations will certainly be brought more in line, I foresee this method as creating a significant gap in ability between the various servers/alliances.

applecup.3047:

My problem with the alliance thing is that it boils down to turning wvw into alliance v alliance – megaguild v megaguild. To an extent that is how wvw rolls at the moment, at least in high tier servers, but it also has the effect of shutting out roamers, newbies, small and/or unconventional guilds, etc.

I see more space for them in my imagination of Alliance-WvW, then they currently have. They could even build an own alliance and compete with all the other alliances. It depends of course on how alliances are scored, but assume for a moment it is based on current-scoring:

alliance-score = (alliance-claimed-objectives-per-tick + score-not-from-tick)/alliance-size.

A large alliance must control a large area to be successful.
A small alliance of some roamer can be successful by just kill dolyaks and enemy roamers and occasionally conquering and keeping a tower over the tick.

And concerning newbies and alliance less people, I proposed to add a temporary OpenAlliance for each Match-team. newbies and alliance less people would be automatically be assigned to the OpenAlliance of the smallst team for this week.

I’m all for the alliances idea, really. I’m curious, though, about a few things:

1. JQ has a large militia population. What happens to those folks in this situation? Do they get the option to join whichever alliance sounds the most favorable to them? Hopefully without having to pay to do so?

2. Do you take guilds from all over and shuffle them to include guilds from all servers? So, say, an alliance with my guild SF, TC’s STUN, BG’s OnS, SoS’s TS, etc…? That sounds fun

3. Will alliances be populated evenly, so that everyone can enjoy a little ‘off-NA-hours’ coverage?

Cross.6437:

You see, organization is always going to trump randomness. An alliance focused on WvW with sheer numbers and centralized locations both in-game and out of game will trump individual competence every single time.

Wait, is this is bad thing? Shouldn’t this game mode reward players who organize and work together toward a common goal? I can only speak for Sanctum of Rall, but we’re happy to have roamers, individuals, and small groups. They’re all welcome on our server Teamspeak – in fact, we provide any guild on the server with a room of their own on our server TS.

I don’t see why an Alliance system (which I think of similar to a World except transfer costs are reduced/free/based on WvW population instead of PvE population and have their own chat channel hopefully) would change the value of roamers and small groups.

@ John Corpening

the idea is really good, but please make sure to explain the more accurate possible each aspect of the new system and keep us updated step by step, and even MORE IMPORTANT to give time at each community to organize properly beafore make any change.

I want to remember You the issue of the “free week transfer to medium population server”, that was a way to sudden and never gave time to communities to organize properly. Seafarer’s Rest was Rank 1 in ladder at that time and with medium population so we got massive transfers that almost killed our community. It was really an hell of a job to rebuild everything.

To prevent this kind of issues please please PLEASE move slowly and explain step by step each change, i do not want to seem paranoid but i am sure that everyone involved into WvW Communties tremble everytime hear such big changes in the air, since this kind of actions usually turns to HUGE works.

To explain better my point of view i would like to invite You or any Dev avaible to take a look at our Community, Community that was organized during the Alfa, was consolidated during the Beta and went up and running starting from the Headstart Access, and still last.

Thanks a lot for reading, have a nice day

Kresh, Seafaer’s Rest Alliance leader

Instead of guild alliance, it should be world/server alliance. Which means since leagues are organized by 6 servers, and tiers are by 3 servers each, The top tier servers should each form alliance with the bottom tiers. 1 rank gold league server should form alliance with 6 rank gold league server, 2 rank with 5, 3 rank with 4, etc. Also instead of ppt point, which majority of us now calls it pvd, the fights should be based on stomps.

John,

Let me start off by saying that it is so refreshing to see a developer ‘brainstorm’ like this on the WvW forums, thanks.

An Alliance system is certainly one solution to population imbalance issues, however I really believe that the issue of coverage is equally, if not more, influential. I think an Alliance system addresses both because a successful Alliance would take coverage into consideration when recruiting/forming. This point can be revisited when you move on to tackle coverage.

One thing stood out to me in your proposal, what happens if the guilds I am in choose difference Alliances? It would make sense that I can only play for one Alliance in each tournament, so really it’s up to each individual player to select which Alliance they are going to be a part of. This would be an issue for players who rep multiple guilds in WvW. For example, a player may have a ‘family’ guild who they like to WvW with every now and then, but also have a ‘hardcore’ WvW guild that they might raid with for a more competitive experience.

The alliance idea is a good start, but without addressing the 24 hour cycle it’s either still going to be a hot mess, or super complicated.

Break up the linking of WvW to PvE worlds. People can still have their PvE home server for world first Tequatl 3.0 kills, and now they’ll have a separate alliance to fight for in WvW, which allows population balancing.

Then, break up the 24 hour match duration into smaller chunks, so you can really match population in alliances throughout the day and the week.

Without this, you’ll still screw the non-prime timezones, unless people would balance this themselves by distributing people evenly over all alliances. But if that would have actually worked, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Rasudido.6734:

This is sad. Most posts are some made up complaint about how T1 servers should be the ones modified rather than the obvious where lower tier servers are the problem.

All tier 1 servers have a healthy WvW population, all the servers cap their maps, make heavy use of TS, have great organization, play constantly and have map blobs. All of these can be reduced to what people really want : an active server population.

I used to play in Ehmry Bay, moved over to blackgate. The reason I moved was the lack of a population in Ebay, WvW was a ghost town except for a few guilds who would do their private raids in their private TS and not invite people. This is different in Blackgate, guilds do run by themselves privately but they communicate between each other, there usually is a large guild running the “map tag” where any PUG can join in TS and listen. I dont even care about the rewards as I play 3 times a week with my guild JUST FOR FUN something that was impossible in Ebay.

And here is the reality anyone in the lower tier servers SHOULD be forced into a t2 or t3 server to “balance” the population. You want more Blackgates and Jade Quarries (the two t1 servers that have survived this long), you want more servers to get bummped up like TC did. Most people are proposing the inverse where you want to destroy T1 through harsher caps when what you want is to be a T1 server? You could probably shoot SoS into kitten compete with JQ/BG/TC right now just by moving a couple of guilds from the lower tiers into it.

I understand any lower tier server players having pride and not wanting to move, but if your complaint is that population is an issue and you dont want to move to a server with better population? thats all on you guys not the other servers…

I’ve played on Ehmry Bay since launch and you don’t describe the EBay I know. Yes, guilds running guild raids tend to be in their own channels, just like havoc groups tend to pick an empty channel to do their thing in. Always have, still do.

When you talk about “Blackgate does this thing where the guilds communicate to each other”, we do that too. We’ve got our commander whisper lists and can talk to all of them in TS, regardless of channel. You didn’t know that because you weren’t on it is all.

As for a ghost town, maybe if you were still on the server after our double exodus when we dropped from T4 to T8 and were still sorting ourselves out. But it wasn’t a ghost town before that, and it’s not a ghost town now, unless you want to compare raw population between a post-exodus-but-lots-of-people-now server versus a stacked T1 server. Note that we’re T7, not T1. Ask our peers in the same competitive band if we’re a ghost town.

I’m sorry you didn’t have fun when you were on EBay and I’m glad you found a place you prefer to play, but here’s the reality to your reality: all of the servers have been bleeding WvW population. On stacked servers (like your own current server), the effect is much more pronounced. If we have (made up number incoming) 100 people total who play WvW on EBay and we lose 5% of them, that’s five people. If you have 2000 people who play WvW on BG and lose 5% of them, that’s 100 people. It’s bad news at any scale.

Forcing lower tier servers to be merged doesn’t fix the problem of people leaving, it just stripmines (AGAIN!) bronze and some silver to let upper tier servers keep on doing exactly what they’re currently doing, and doesn’t solve any underlying problems. But it’ll let you pretend that things are still good and wonderful for a while, until the population loss gets to be noticeable again. Then where do you get replacement people?

Also, merging the servers only (as has been pointed out numerous times) means queues for people that want to actually play. That’s a losing “solution” right there – a server that queues all of the maps is a server that has people that want to play but can’t. Not a sign of health, but a sign of overpopulation with no room to grow.

Lower map caps, lock upward transfers, let the player base sort out population itself, and lets have matchups where the final scores are closer, because anybody with half a brain knows that a close match is a good match.

Later, if there is an increase in interest in WvW, map caps can be increased since there will already be a better distribution of population.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that we’re trying to come up with ideas in order to balance the populations, but we don’t actually know what the active WvW / total populations are for each server?

Would ArenaNet divulge that sort of information? Is there somewhere that already publicly lists it that I don’t know about?

The simplest solution seems to be to let the lowest population servers be absorbed into the ones just above them. You wouldn’t have to say something like “All ET are being moved to HoD”. You could just offer free transfers to certain servers from certain servers, but put an internal transfer limit that will eventually say “no further transfers to this server allowed at this time” and then see where we end up.

At least in NA, 18 servers would work quite nicely I think.

Let’s call the alliance of those who don’t have guild/alliance “The Freelancers”.

The overall idea is really interesting, kind of give guilds an even more important role on the battles, and kind of makes sense, now nobody would say “it’s called guild wars, but where are the guild wars?”

I would like to add some points I find important about a potential new system:

- The easiear /cheaper is to move around on groups the better. It allows you to be consistent with the groups forming on PvE thanks to megaservers (friends from different homeworlds being finally being able to play together on wvw). It will give the power back to the people, players will make the alliances and not the currency (meaning, deciding which alliance/group you join shouldn’t be based on how costly it is, or if you can afford or not to bring a lot of friends with you). If it’s free with a cooldown all the better.

- Caps and maximums on memberships should be made in order to let as many communities be made as possible. The more alliances, the better you spread the players, the more variety to the encounters. Keep communities, keep “alliance pride”, but seek balance in there too, so we have a more interesting competition.

- Timezones are relevant to the problem. Is easy to say “find a solution for that”, but I know it’s a complicated problem, and in my opinion this should be addressed mechanically on the game rather than by moving players from one side to another. Defending when outnumbered should offer interesting choices, remember as your new AI consultant says in his book “a game is a set of interesting choices”. When at a certain hour of the night you see that you can’t even gather a couple of groups of players, and there is a couple of enemy guilds capping the map, there is no choice, most of the time, the best you can do is flip a couple of towers and make a trebuchet on the door of your spawn (bad bronze tier experience). It is also unfair for those players to never have an opponent to fight. I suggest advertizing or showing somewhere, alliance population playtime, so you can make an informed choice when joining an alliance, at least to suggest joining groups with similar timezones.

It’s a weighing of ‘keeping the competition’ with a scoring system heavily favoring population/coverage time.

Why not combine the servers on the lower end with other lower WvW population to be similar to the population of T1 servers and reset glicko? It could be a temporary “server alliance” and as WvW population (different from server population) goes through its ebbs and flows, coverage can be more evenly spread. These servers could even be permanently “merged” (although I recommend a more floating team server format).

The issue with Blackgate server is that its not because WvW people want competition, they want to dominate and “win” the majority of the time. People can claim that guilds/random players move to BG to be part of the competition scene but the real issue is its the same cost to move to Blackgate (1600 gems) as it is for any other server.. With mega-servers on the PvE side, guilds now pooled in resources regardless of server, why would you move anywhere else? It’s not like the queues are bad on BG except on Friday restart nights. BG can claim to have an organized WvW scene (they do) but it is really no different than any Tier 1, Tier 2, T3 and upper T4 servers as well. BG isn’t winning against all because of organization, community, and tactics, it’s dominance in population and all the resources that brings.

So if you can’t fix population imbalance, what can you do?
Play with the idea that lower coverage servers (create outmanned buffs at several tiers) proving bonus PPT scoring by map. When servers are behind other servers by x% in a given week, gain a bonus PPT buff, etc. Provide undermanned buffs that also work with wxp, additional gold, additional karma, etc., have NPCs start creating free siege. Make it so the underdog actually has a reason to keep fighting. It’s not like WvW has massive rewards for playtime at the moment (compared to all other game play types) so why not use this as an opportunity to fix it? Why not make it potentially the most lucrative game play type (adding real ‘in game’ WvW competition not based solely on PPT)?

EDIT: You know what kept me playing as an underdog WvW player in those other games? More short-term “wins”. Winning the battle is more important than winning the war. WvW Seasons is by definition the “winning the war” and it’s boring/not fun for the underdogs.

The Guild Alliances sound like a really good idea. The new worlds sound like a step in the right direction BUT please don’t turn wvw into a glorified version of EOTM.

I think some clarification is needed please John as to whether we would be changing to the New World and have the option of staying there (with a transfer system for players wishing to change worlds) or if the worlds would be restructured on a regular basis which would be my main concern. Restructuring on a regular basis would be too much like EOTM for me and I can see myself losing interest in the game which is something that I don’t want to have happen.

The problem with combining servers is that you’re forcing people together who may not want to be together. I wouldn’t mind combining with Server A, for example, they mostly seem alright. But a merger with Server B? Those guys drive me crazy!

By allowing alliances, you let individuals/guilds choose their side. Perhaps you could “force” mergers by having less Alliances than Worlds, but I tend to prefer keeping them the same. So many guilds have taken their names from their servers, I think it’d be rather disruptive to force guilds to change to an Alliance with a different name.

Are 27 servers….but on the gold league servers i saw endles queue…people dont want to migrate to low servers but they want to fight in wvw with theyr guild.
When in gold servers are queue then the guild can chose to play without leaving the servers in bronze wvw servers…..in this way bronze servers are not in conflict with gold and they have some more people in wvw sometimes and guilds dont need to wait a entire week under server comunity programs to play with the guild.
Also playing in low servers in wvw to increase with a smal % the magic find and WXP.
Cut the EOTM since in my opinion this one of the reason wvw start lose people in all servers.

TY for brainstorming John. Your proposal is much better than server mergers or many other ideas. And so far sounds the best out of most proposals. It will need to be tuned though.
Remember to test it in Eotm first. At least if it doesnt work we will keep what we currently have.

Cheers.

Can someone clarify for me (I guess I’m slow) what we mean with the term “Alliances”.

Is it an alliance for specific color and then we just become… 3 alliances. Or alliances of X amount of servers to create a smaller group of competitors (say 24 worlds, become 12 alliances)?

Altie.4571:

Can someone clarify for me (I guess I’m slow) what we mean with the term “Alliances”.

Is it an alliance for specific color and then we just become… 3 alliances. Or alliances of X amount of servers to create a smaller group of competitors (say 24 worlds, become 12 alliances)?

I think the concept is servers in different tiers would be allied with each other. Basically “guesting” in a different tier if players wanted to. And, it would be swapped around every so often.

Altie.4571:

Can someone clarify for me (I guess I’m slow) what we mean with the term “Alliances”.

Is it an alliance for specific color and then we just become… 3 alliances. Or alliances of X amount of servers to create a smaller group of competitors (say 24 worlds, become 12 alliances)?

Almost certainly it will not be just three alliances. It could potentially be 24 worlds → 12 alliances.

I’m actually interested how this would tie in to the idea of Guild Alliances, something that’s a hot topic as well. Could a Guild Alliance be a “child” alliance of a larger “World Alliance?”

John Corpening.9847:

snip

Merging servers or redistributing population would only be a short term fix. Alliances could help keep people playing together, but losing server identity would definitely hurt the WvW community. It’s not just about fighting alongside your friends, it’s about fighting for your server.

Have you considered my earlier suggestion of 2v2v2 matchups? Each server would be paired with another for each match. The highest ranked server could be paired with the lowest ranked server, etc. This system would automatically protect the lower ranked servers from falling into a state of hopelessness, and thereby reduce the urge for people to abandon low ranked servers.

This would result in half as many matchups though, so we would either need to raise map capacities or add additional WvW maps. I think that adding a fifth map on a weekly rotation would be the best solution to this, as it would also address players concerns about WvW becoming too repetitive. This would be a single map from a pool of balanced maps for each matchup, either randomly chosen or on a cycle. This would also allow for the addition of new maps into the cycle without having to worry about rebalancing player distribution among maps or getting rid of existing ones.

John, I would love you hear your opinions on these suggestions.

(On a related note, EU currently has 27 servers, which would not work for this system, so they would either need to gain 3 or lose 3, as the number needs to be divisible by 6.)

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Have you considered my earlier suggestion of 2v2v2 matchups? Each server would be paired with another for each match. The highest ranked server could be paired with the lowest ranked server, etc. This system would automatically protect the lower ranked servers from falling into a state of hopelessness, and thereby reduce the urge for people to abandon low ranked servers.

.

Why stop at 2vs2vs2? If I got john right he proposed
MvsNvsO
where the
Total-pop(M) ~ Total-pop(N) ~ Total-pop(O)

Of course M,N and O could be all 2, but that’s only a special case (and likely one that has only a few or even no solutions for Total-pop(2) ~ Total-pop(2) ~ Total-pop(2)), it could also be

• 1vs1vs2
• 1vs2vs3
• 2vs2vs3
• …
• 15vs3vs6

I guess he wanted that to be unspecific in that question to stipulate variety in our thinking, discover our wishes/preferences and finally: freedom for ANet to decide later.

Alliances sound like a horrible solution. Just merge EU and NA into 9 servers each

Dayra.7405:

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Have you considered my earlier suggestion of 2v2v2 matchups? Each server would be paired with another for each match. The highest ranked server could be paired with the lowest ranked server, etc. This system would automatically protect the lower ranked servers from falling into a state of hopelessness, and thereby reduce the urge for people to abandon low ranked servers.

Why stop at 2vs2vs2? If I got john right he proposed
MvsNvsO
where the
Total-pop(M) ~ Total-pop(N) ~ Total-pop(O)

Of course M,N and O could be all 2, but that’s only a special case.

If you just glob bunches of players (or alliances) together randomly each week, there’s no server identity left to fight for. Pairing servers gives each one a counterbalance that can change organically, depending on how WvW populations move between servers.

Baltzenger.2467:

Let’s call the alliance of those who don’t have guild/alliance “The Freelancers”.

applecup.3047:

My problem with the alliance thing is that it boils down to turning wvw into alliance v alliance – megaguild v megaguild. To an extent that is how wvw rolls at the moment, at least in high tier servers, but it also has the effect of shutting out roamers, newbies, small and/or unconventional guilds, etc. As someone who’s been on the recieving end of guild drama, I’m also not keen on the idea of such a huge part of the game potentially being dictated by the whims of guild and megaguild politics – a difference of opinion between a couple of people that ultimately resulted in an alliance kick could result in tens of people suddenly unable to play a core part of the game through no fault of their own.

This needs to be addressed as well.

What about new people who don’t have a guild/alliance or the people only having a small roaming guild or guilds that don’t care about on which server they are but just wanna look for good fights?

How can we incorporate them?

munkiman.3068:

Jim Hunter.6821:

That’s what I took away from it as well.. This sounds like setting up a system for people to voluntarily merge servers. While that is better than forced merges, it still doesn’t fix the problems.

After all the discussion now, since you’re the OP, where do you stand on the solution? Do you still feel a lower map cap is going to help address population imbalance?

I do. I still see it as the best practical way to balance out the population.

An alliance system could work if done right, the problem is I’ve seen how EotM turned out, so forgive me if I’m not supportive of that idea before we get some more details.

keep in mind there are a lot of people playing WvW that don’t want to play in the tier 1 blobfest. If the population cap stays at what it is we will need bigger maps and you will need to stop rewarding bobbing so heavily.

A few ways to do this have already been mentioned such as removing the downed state and preventing hard rez in combat. I personally feel you would also need to fix whatever is preventing you from raising the aoe limit. I know it is supposedly a technical issue but the same thing was said about culling.

There are a lot of things that will need to be addressed before you drastically change WvW. You have to be ready to devote real time and resources. If this is done kitten it will kill the game. If things like the living story are going to take up too much time then you are better off implementing the cap and hopefully doing something with the scoring system to fix the overnight coverage problem.

Here’s an idea out of left field, but what if they extended the idea of the Evon/Ellen voting system (if you pure WvWers aren’t familiar, let me know, I can explain) to Alliances/server merging? Here’s how it might work…

NPC in your home BL has a token you can buy for X badges. Something easily reachable for regular WvW players, maybe 500? This token allows you to “propose an alliance” (by double-clicking it) with another server. This action is, at this point, just recorded.

Once enough players (let’s say 25% of the active weekly playerbase) propose the same alliance on BOTH servers, a vote would take place. (What I mean by this is that SoR would need 25% to propose to merge with Darkhaven and DH would need 25% to propose to merge with SoR).

There are two ways the vote could happen: 1 vote per player or vote tokens which drop when playing WvW. I tend to lean toward the latter.

Anyway, for X weeks (suggestion: two weeks), players can “vote” by using tokens to merge or not merge. If both servers clear either a majority or perhaps supermajority, the alliance is created.

Now, the problem is that you need multiples of three, so the alliance doesn’t take effect until enough mergers happen for there to be a multiple of three servers out there.

For these votes to succeed, there would need to be a SIGNIFICANT level of cooperation between servers – you would have to coordinate the alliance proposal and get your people in to vote. The system is designed to force servers to show the ability to work together before the alliance is created.

Meaning, if SoR and DH want to merge badly enough, they’ll find ways to work with each other to make the merger happen. If they can’t, they probably shouldn’t be allies anyway.

(Darkhaven, I’m just using you as an example, don’t get all worked up about it. <3 )

titanlectro.5029:

John Corpening.9847:

Alliances would provide continuity for the community. I see the server pride of today becoming Alliance pride because of that continuity. But I also see the off season as a time for the newly formed world of alliances to develop their own identity as they head into the tournament. Keep in mind that if an alliance was big enough to fill a world that mapping becomes one to one. If that became the case maybe the world could just take the alliance name. It’s interesting because that time together gives everyone involved a chance to see if they all want to ally together to truly solidify into a world. If not, you are still playing with your community for the glory of your alliance in the next restructure. But your community would be playing with other communities new to you and maybe this new bunch is a better fit for you and an opportunity for your alliance to grow.

This alliance idea will certainly help with keeping communities intact, but it also causes issues with coordination.

Currently, servers are CONSTANTLY trying to get their members to coordinate, communicate, and use the server TS. If every few months the server structure is rearranged, this work will be undone over and over.

Whose TS should we use? How should we protect against spies? What sort of conduct is allowed on the TS? Who is leading that large zerg in EB and how I can coordinate with them? I just spotted 50 XYZ headed for Bay, who should I send the call-out to?

Every server has had to answer these questions, and any community leaders know how much of a pain it can be to get these all squared away. Under the new system, these kind of questions “reset” every few months. We will be constantly trying to coordinate with our team, and never making any permanent progress.

Eventually, everyone might get to the point where people no longer try to communicate or coordinate on a server level, because it is wasted effort. Everyone would just talk to the members of their own alliance, and ignore everyone else. That would be a really sad day for WvW.

TL;DR
Frequently rearranging server structures causes a nightmare for server communication and coordination, which might end with people not coordinating at all.

THIS and so much this!

For me, spending a lot of time for server orga, this would be pure horror. How should you cooperate in an adequate way, if the others you are playing with are changing every week? The only way is to build an alliance (=community) as big as a world. So we would have new servers. Why do this then?

And many other questions:
What should public players do? Could you even play wvw anymore without being part of an alliance? (I understood “No”)
How can you join an alliance? Does there have to be an alliance leader if its build like guilds (who in hell should do that kitten job?) or would it just be like chosing a server?
Will alliances be limited? (“Hey guys, we have new guild members, who want to join our alliance!” – “Sry, its full already.”) And if not, what, if they become too big? (“Oh, this week 200 players decided to join our alliance because we win so often. Sry for the queues!”)
___________
All in all, for me alliances are not the way to go. Better bring new content. Enlarge maps, bring new objects to hold, reward splitting of zergs by giving players many more things to do with the same number of players as before. Strengthen defense in lower numbers by making objects harder to capture (no more damage against gates per hand, plz). Stop rewarding blobbing up so much and reward splitting instead. Then people might start to spread over the maps automatically.
Maybe use the idea of making shorter intervals for points, as it was already said before (6 hours per interval, winner gets 5 points, second 3 points, third 2 points -> 4 intervals per day, 28 per week.), so nightcapping wouldnt count that much.
But please don’t destroy all the work we did in the last two years, building up communities with their own ways to play, to communicate and to coordinate. Communities with more or less “server pride” (i dont really like the word, but its the best to describe the “feelings” of many people), which keeps people fighting side by side and which keeps them playing gw2 wvw as well.

I think it’s better to just adjust the transfer cost depending on performance..

Change:
Medium(500) High (1000) Very High(1800)

To :
12 Match/3 months No win (500)
4 Match/1 month No win (1000)
Win (1800)

Also, rating should adjust 2x faster

Here’s a 2-part suggestion (using NA as an example):
First Part
Create 18 new servers and close the existing 24 servers. Everyone has 7-14 days to choose their destination which means that everyone potentially has the option of keeping their community. For example, ET could discuss what our destination should be. Once selected, those of us who want to continue to play with our “family” could all transfer to the same server. Obviously, there would be a lot of new faces that came from other servers so this would give us an opportunity to make some new friends. Everyone who has not selected a server within the predetermined time, would be sent to servers that needed additional population balancing.

Second Part
Scoring would be changed to reflect three 8-hour time periods. For this example, the times (rounded) could be 10am to 6pm, 6pm to 2am, and 2am to 10am. The server that scores the most PPT during one of the three time periods would gain 5 points, the 2nd place server would gain 3 points, and the last place server would gain 1 point. At the end of the week, each server’s points would be added and the one with the highest points would win. This would allow servers with conflicting active time schedules to essentially still compete with each other even though they wouldn’t necessarily meet each other on the battlefield during both of their peak times.

The “Alliance” idea makes my spidey sense tingle, but I can’t exactly articulate why…yet. I need more time to digest it.

I’m undecided on this. I am absolutely against breaking up the existing communities within WvW. But in order to implement the apparent megaserver vision into this format this could be a decent compromise depending on the answer to some questions I have. I apologise if these have been asked already – I’ve only skimmed this thread.

Firstly we really need to know the alliance size limit compared to the size of the existing communities. If the alliance limit is smaller than the community size then it won’t work – and bear in mind that there will be Guilds whose leadership play an active role in the community but who’s members don’t so any implementation will have to account for this.

Secondly how will the cap work? Is it based on number of people or number of guilds? If it’s the former what happens when a large guild contains a number of inactives – will they count towards the cap? Or what happens if a small guild expands taking the number of people over the alliance limit? If it’s the latter does that mean a desired alliance between a large number of small guilds forces them to merge? And will that not provide a barrier to the smaller guilds being accepted into alliances in the first place. This is also very important for PvX guilds who have wvw players that belong to a community and PvE players who don’t care for the format at all but could have a negative impact on the communities ability to stick together.

Thirdly how do people who belong to multiple guilds decide who they’ll be repping in wvw? It seems silly that if they represent two guilds in separate alliances on competing sides of the same matchup they’ll be able to flit between them as they choose, and conversely if the guild system changes so that you can only be apart of guilds within the same alliances that will only break up communities not help them stick together – especially for PvE only guilds and players. One solution I see would be you choose your alliance at the start of each section (as laid out in John’s post)r and have to pay a small gem fee to transfer similar to the way server transfer works now. This is difficult though due to the fluid nature of guilds and alliances, but I guess players who leave alliances could remain on the same ‘server’ until the next switch up. It also allows communities to set up non rep guilds purely for alliance purposes.

Finally how are individual players/small guilds who can’t get themselves into an alliance going to be dealt with? The big danger I worry about with this is the small guy get’s dumped on for not being part of a large guild

As for the scoring issue I think this implementation could actually work to fix the problems within the existing one. I personally think that, population imbalances aside, the 24/7 system is the most enjoyable so getting it to work would be better to finding a lesser version.

If within the alliance system there was a way to find the alliance (wvw) activity %s by time period, preferably automated but manually if necessary, and that was made the prime method of sorting which alliance works with who then that solves a huge problem. Especially considering total world population is a very naive method to cap the server population given you could end up with huge timezone skews that way

John Corpening.9847:

Anyway, this discussion made it clear it is who you play with that’s important and a number of ideas in this thread preserved that without restricting the number of people who could play at a time. These have had a number of names but for the sake of discussion I’ll go with Alliances. The idea that I liked for Alliances is that it is a group of guilds and people that are guaranteed to stay together no matter how things are rearranged. There would probably need to be a size limit on Alliances and several of you pointed out that whatever limits are put in place it should be based on WvW participation.

A few of you noted that things will always be changing over time so the system would have to be dynamic. There are a couple of ways of addressing this discussed in this thread. An idea that would be a small incremental change to how the game plays would be to create a new set of worlds then fill them up with our Alliances of guilds and players that are guaranteed to always play together. This would happen at regular intervals, the intervals were all over the map as were the size of the worlds in this thread so I will propose this cadence:

• Off Season
• Tournament
• Restructure
  • Create new Worlds
  • Redistribute Alliances

This cycle would take a few months given the cadence of tournaments we have had which is about the time that we would want to rebalance populations. After the restructure, players could transfer like they do now if they so desired.

Alliances would provide continuity for the community. I see the server pride of today becoming Alliance pride because of that continuity. But I also see the off season as a time for the newly formed world of alliances to develop their own identity as they head into the tournament. Keep in mind that if an alliance was big enough to fill a world that mapping becomes one to one. If that became the case maybe the world could just take the alliance name. It’s interesting because that time together gives everyone involved a chance to see if they all want to ally together to truly solidify into a world. If not, you are still playing with your community for the glory of your alliance in the next restructure. But your community would be playing with other communities new to you and maybe this new bunch is a better fit for you and an opportunity for your alliance to grow.

The pieces for this idea comes from a number of posts in this thread. There are also some thoughts in there from some discussions I’ve had with several guild leaders. I just glommed it all together into something that I think could be a workable solution. I do want to emphasize though that this is all brainstorming

Let me know your thoughts and thanks again for all the great and constructive discussion!

John

Sounds like a really excellent compromise!

My only question is would Alliances be completely guild-based? If so, what about someone who joins two guilds that find themselves wanting to be in different Alliances? How would you restrict that player’s access to both WvW sides at once?

First note****
Thank you to the kind Dev for having the guts to throw out an idea for the community to poke holes in. We understand that it’s just an idea for discussion and not the current plan of action. Beware of trolls but remember we REALLY do love and appreciate THIS KIND of discussion.
*****End note****

While I liked what the red post has to say about Alliances… I do have some serious concerns that would need addressed.

Population imbalance by timezone:
Setting alliances against eachother that have max of say 5,000 players doesn’t solve timezone imbalances.

Lets say one alliance is very NA heavy, the other is of moderate NA population but also has a FAR larger SEA, OCX and EU population. The very NA heavy alliance could still be matched vs them but be TOTALLY blown out of the water just because of the TIMEZONE POPULATION!

New players/guildless players:
Please explain how new players and guildless players are supposed to:
A) Try WvW for the first time (not EOTM)
B) How do you join an Alliance?
—-Is it open invite like worlds are?
—-Or is it restricted like GW1 Alliances (because that comes with many new issues)
C) How do you change alliances?
D) What is the difference between Alliances and the current world system if its open invite?

From what I read an Alliance is just like a world, but it doesn’t count PvE only players against the player cap. If that is the case why not just alter the current World Population Cap to be based on WvW population?

Sorry if all that I have to say has been covered but I don’t have time this morning to read 12 pages.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

John Corpening.9847:

snip

Merging servers or redistributing population would only be a short term fix. Alliances could help keep people playing together, but losing server identity would definitely hurt the WvW community. It’s not just about fighting alongside your friends, it’s about fighting for your server.

Have you considered my earlier suggestion of 2v2v2 matchups? Each server would be paired with another for each match. The highest ranked server could be paired with the lowest ranked server, etc. This system would automatically protect the lower ranked servers from falling into a state of hopelessness, and thereby reduce the urge for people to abandon low ranked servers.

This would result in half as many matchups though, so we would either need to raise map capacities or add additional WvW maps. I think that adding a fifth map on a weekly rotation would be the best solution to this, as it would also address players concerns about WvW becoming too repetitive. This would be a single map from a pool of balanced maps for each matchup, either randomly chosen or on a cycle. This would also allow for the addition of new maps into the cycle without having to worry about rebalancing player distribution among maps or getting rid of existing ones.

John, I would love you hear your opinions on these suggestions.

(On a related note, EU currently has 27 servers, which would not work for this system, so they would either need to gain 3 or lose 3, as the number needs to be divisible by 6.)

I also think something along the lines of 2v2v2 or 3v3v3 with random shuffling at periodic intervals and make the existing maps available to all the participants. There was an 8v8v8 idea proposed earlier and in thinking about it, 32 maps is just too many, but 6 or 9 borderlands with 2 or 3 EBGs would be tractable. You could easily implement this right now, then run it as server “speed dating” where each match-up lasts 1 week and that would give servers a real idea of who they might want to form an alliance with… I really like the alliance idea, but it must be server based, not guild based. Make the “speed dating” matchups random but like a shuffle that matches all the combinations. Run the weekly rounds and then at the end servers can propose alliances. Allow free transfers at the begining so everyone who has bandwagoned can return to their “home server” and prohibit transfers during the “dating”.
This would be doable very quickly and the “dating” matches would allow for development time to consider how to roll out alliances that actually balance the populations. At the very least, it would be something different to rejuvenate WvW while a more global solution gets developed and if we are going form alliances getting a good sense of the other servers is kind of essential. Spoon

I think that any idea that proposes an alliance system, like Green-vs-Blue-vs-Red, would be a huge mistake. The megaserver has already caused me to feel almost completely disconnected from my server in PvE, an alliance system would do almost the same thing in WvW.

I think Anet needs to promote servers and the sense of community. But at the same time there’s servers who just simply don’t have the population to compete. Merging servers is simply the best option.

I think this idea has great potential. It means we’d have fresh servers after every tournament (and yet we’re still with the players we play with the most), a reset glicko (everybody back to 1,000) which will then rank themselves before the tournament, and a number of worlds that will allow for 9 in each league during tournaments (probably 18).

So much variety in who we face and yet we should also see more even match-ups. I love it.

Problems I see …
1. If I’m in guild A who is a member of alliance X and guild B who is a member of alliance Y, where do I fall? There was some talk of a primary guild in the guild QoL CDI, perhaps this comes into play here?
2. Players who aren’t in guilds and guilds who aren’t in alliances … where do they go? Are they just randomly assigned to a world? What happens to new players? Perhaps individuals who aren’t associated with an alliance don’t get automatically assigned but are presented with an option the first time they attempt to enter WvW, and this could be restricted to any worlds which still turned out to be a bit underpopulated.

John Corpening.9847:

Anyway, this discussion made it clear it is who you play with that’s important and a number of ideas in this thread preserved that without restricting the number of people who could play at a time. These have had a number of names but for the sake of discussion I’ll go with Alliances. The idea that I liked for Alliances is that it is a group of guilds and people that are guaranteed to stay together no matter how things are rearranged. There would probably need to be a size limit on Alliances and several of you pointed out that whatever limits are put in place it should be based on WvW participation.

I appreciate you trying to make the distinction between Community based Alliances and some of the less appealing ideas that look more like something from EotM with its RvGvB John, but it still makes me a little nervous. I would agree with other posters who have suggested testing this method using the EotM map first to see how it shakes out. It would be interesting to see what kind of Alliance size limits have to be put in place to keep things fairly full but not highly queued.

Some of the larger communities would have to split apart for certain and that could create some uncomfortable choices for some but the option to keep things dynamic and reshuffled in the off-season could either help or exacerbate the problem while people scramble to get where they want to be and together with the people they want to play with. I cannot tell you how many new MMO’s I have tried to play where all my different groups of friends head off in all different directions and the game is totally ruined for me trying to either keep up with all of them or choosing one group over another.

This is the most important point however, regardless of what is done ANET needs to offer tools that better support the WvW communities and their creation if there is going to be any sort major reshuffling going on. I was deeply saddened by the lack of awareness prior to launch on ANET’s part on how to encourage the WvW communities formation. We did it all pretty much on our own and maybe that helped make it stronger in some cases but was a still a lot of work for a few smaller groups.

JQ and SoR to a lesser extent held together because they drew on players who were familiar with the idea of Realm Pride from previous games, other worlds came together around other online gaming or forum communities, SoS was king of castle for a good long while for being the Oceanic server of choice and TC got a close knit community by being the self declared RP world. Some of those communities could not build tight enough to withstand major upsets and some were made stronger by adversity. It sometimes seemed dependent on a few major personalities or guilds making choices.

Good foundations attracted other like minded guilds and the worlds grew in personality from there but it took time and a lot of dedication from a small number of folks to make it happen with no in game help and no in games tools to make Community personalities more easily broadcastable to new players. Any sort of new system will need all of those kinds of things put in place well ahead of time to be truly successful and I wish ANET the best of luck with that seeing how little staff time and devotion has gone into the WvW Community in the past.

If these new Community based Alliances worked similarly to how they were in GW1 with their own names, chat and UI panel for management it might be possible to create something that would be more fluid to weather all the dips in population as new games hit the market. It would be a little sad to lose those world connections at this point so I hope at least those names could be preserved or combined in the new Alliance system.

~Best of luck in whichever direction things go from here but at least having the discussion is a start

The more I read this thread, the more I think that not doing anything would be the best answer.

I don’t want to have a smaller population than what t1 has currently. People in lower tiers don’t want the kind of population t1 has. Currently we have a setup that has both. If they balance the populations they’re going to have to choose a size they want them to be. For example do you want 20 servers of 100 people, or 10 servers of 200 people. In either case we’ll lose a playstyle that someone likes.

So personally I’d like if we hung this conversation up, talked about scoring/coverage a bit and revisited population once those issues are handled because IMO those are more important and more of a globally equal issue, I may be wrong though.

John Corpening.9847:

John

How does this affect RPers, server identity, and megaserver sorting?

There’s a massive amount of server pride even for the non-WvW crowd on TC. We like being TCers. More important, there’s still the RP community here, who continue to try and group together despite absolutely no help form Anet since the megaserver patch. How does this affect them? If there’s no TC tag to help sort people into proper megaserver shards, you’ll manage to kill RP even more than the Megaserver patch did.

John’s idea is interesting, could be tweaked a bit but it will surely give some variety to WvW (staleness is as bad as imbalance).

Each guild can be part of an alliance (that could even be formed by a single guild) and alliances are clustered together during off season, as per scheme John proposed, in order to have the same WvW players base.
In case a guild is not interest in WvW it will be a “freelance” and its player would act as a filler (more on that later).
Freelance guild status could work for all the PvE and PvP oriented guilds.

Regarding multi guild, let’s say everybody has to pick a primary guild (as proposed in guilds CDI) and they can play only for the alliance of said guild, its other side guild has to be “freelance” or still member of the same alliance.
If a player wants to leave a guild and its alliance, has to wait the new match up to join with the new guild.

Regarding freelance players: they can work as “filler” and be randomly assigned to a matchup each week. Of course this could rise an issue with siege trolls, so freelance could be limited on their siege deploys (like in a real battle you would give those “sellswords” less important tasks).
If a freelance player wants to join a guild, he can do that and the next week he will be part of the alliance. So recruitment during WvW will have some significance, as each week you could have different potential new player.
And people looking for different stuff can stay “freelance” for a bit a looking for a new guild and alliance to join.

Basically, any player interested in WvW will be part of some alliance. Any other joining randomly will be just an added militia useful for a PUG zerg.

It definitely needs some tweaking, but all in all I like it, I see more good than bad.

And for PvE: alliances will take the World as a parameter for assign you to a specific map, so no change with megaserver, you’ll still play with your community
There’s also good potential for RP.

When it comes to Alliances, as I have seen some others comment, the WvW Community is generally defined by the common Server voice comm (Mumble/TS) than guilds. Many people with small guilds make up the core community of the server and they are tied together by the voice comm. Personally, I’m part of 2 WvW guilds, one I classify as more a militia guild, and it varies which one I rep.

Overall, any Alliance implementation can’t just be guild focused, but more individual player focused as to joining or having access to the Alliance. Otherwise, the accessibility to new players will be limited.

Let me start with saying that I am not sold yet on the Alliance idea but I am happy a Dev made a suggestion for a possible solution. That said I would like to empathize some points:

snip

A few of you noted that things will always be changing over time so the system would have to be dynamic. There are a couple of ways of addressing this discussed in this thread. An idea that would be a small incremental change to how the game plays would be to create a new set of worlds then fill them up with our Alliances of guilds and players that are guaranteed to always play together. This would happen at regular intervals, the intervals were all over the map as were the size of the worlds in this thread so I will propose this cadence:

• Off Season
• Tournament
• Restructure
  • Create new Worlds
  • Redistribute Alliances

This cycle would take a few months given the cadence of tournaments we have had which is about the time that we would want to rebalance populations. After the restructure, players could transfer like they do now if they so desired.

I made the most important part for me bold. An Alliance will fight as one for a few months. This is very important for me. I don’t like the suggestions to changes alliances every week or even more often. Some of the coordination issues are less big when people stay together in an alliance for a few months. And I want WvW to have some continuity.

Alliances would provide continuity for the community. I see the server pride of today becoming Alliance pride because of that continuity. But I also see the off season as a time for the newly formed world of alliances to develop their own identity as they head into the tournament. Keep in mind that if an alliance was big enough to fill a world that mapping becomes one to one. If that became the case maybe the world could just take the alliance name. It’s interesting because that time together gives everyone involved a chance to see if they all want to ally together to truly solidify into a world. If not, you are still playing with your community for the glory of your alliance in the next restructure. But your community would be playing with other communities new to you and maybe this new bunch is a better fit for you and an opportunity for your alliance to grow.

John

This time the bold is not mine Community and Alliance are separate in this part, at least that is what I understand. Your Community (whatever that is at the moment, maybe your guild, maybe the group of guilds you are running with in WvW at the moment) forms with other communities an Alliance for a few months. After those months you can decide to continue the collaboration (maybe make your Community bigger by merging your community with other communities?) or go separate ways and form a new Alliance with other communities.

The more I write and think about it, the more I like the idea. But only as John described it (or at least as I understand it) and not the many wild ideas I see floating around here. No offence to Dayra.7405, I really like the fact that you participate in this discussion, but I really don’t like your ideas. It is definitely good that different people shares their ideas and I don’t hope you take offence that I strongly disagree with your ideas (or what I understand are your ideas).

Dawntree.7246:

Regarding multi guild, let’s say everybody has to pick a primary guild (as proposed in guilds CDI) and they can play only for the alliance of said guild, its other side guild has to be “freelance” or still member of the same alliance.
If a player wants to leave a guild and its alliance, has to wait the new match up to join with the new guild.

This seems to get complicated because of the one player→many guilds feature.

Maybe have people pick the alliance they want to fight for, independent of their guild? That way you don’t have to designate one guild as the special WvW guild that picks your alliance. Plenty of people are in multiple WvW guilds. This design puts a bit more work on the individual, but if a GM can make everyone show up for a raid I think they can make everyone pick the same kitten alliance.

Having the alliance choice be account wide would have to be a requirement, to limit some spying. Can’t do anything about dual boxing with two accounts.

Maybe I need more details but I don’t quite see how this would fix the current problems. Seems to me that under John Corpering’s system people would just stack the top alliances the same way they stack the top servers. In fact if there’s no gem cost during the “restructuring” phase that would probably be easier than ever.

And I know you said that you want to address overall population imbalance right now rather than timezone-specific imbalance, but it seems to me the one goes hand in hand with the other.

Mattargul.9235:

Dawntree.7246:

Regarding multi guild, let’s say everybody has to pick a primary guild (as proposed in guilds CDI) and they can play only for the alliance of said guild, its other side guild has to be “freelance” or still member of the same alliance.
If a player wants to leave a guild and its alliance, has to wait the new match up to join with the new guild.

This seems to get complicated because of the one player->many guilds feature.
.

How about handling anyone that hasn’t a unique (i.e. none or many) alliance as freelancer?

Dawntree.7246:

John’s idea is interesting, could be tweaked a bit but it will surely give some variety to WvW (staleness is as bad as imbalance).

Each guild can be part of an alliance (that could even be formed by a single guild) and alliances are clustered together during off season, as per scheme John proposed, in order to have the same WvW players base.
In case a guild is not interest in WvW it will be a “freelance” and its player would act as a filler (more on that later).
Freelance guild status could work for all the PvE and PvP oriented guilds.

Regarding multi guild, let’s say everybody has to pick a primary guild (as proposed in guilds CDI) and they can play only for the alliance of said guild, its other side guild has to be “freelance” or still member of the same alliance.
If a player wants to leave a guild and its alliance, has to wait the new match up to join with the new guild.

Regarding freelance players: they can work as “filler” and be randomly assigned to a matchup each week. Of course this could rise an issue with siege trolls, so freelance could be limited on their siege deploys (like in a real battle you would give those “sellswords” less important tasks).
If a freelance player wants to join a guild, he can do that and the next week he will be part of the alliance. So recruitment during WvW will have some significance, as each week you could have different potential new player.
And people looking for different stuff can stay “freelance” for a bit a looking for a new guild and alliance to join.

Basically, any player interested in WvW will be part of some alliance. Any other joining randomly will be just an added militia useful for a PUG zerg.

It definitely needs some tweaking, but all in all I like it, I see more good than bad.

And for PvE: alliances will take the World as a parameter for assign you to a specific map, so no change with megaserver, you’ll still play with your community
There’s also good potential for RP.

It’s not so black and white as this though. You’re assuming first of all here that there are 3 types of player: Those who play only PvE, those whole play only PvP and those who only play WvW. There are many players (myself included) who enjoy all forms of the game and classify as PvX and who mingle with all types of player whether they be PvX themselves or prefer to play only one format. In your system we would be dumped into the freelance category, have horribly restrictions and be alienated from the communities that have been a huge part of our GW2 playing experience thus far.

Likewise I know a number of “freelance” wvw only players who for whatever reason prefer not be in a guild of any size yet play a huge part in the wvw community. These are often the men/women who do the difficult and unappreciated work like upgrading, defending camps (and structures during quiet hours), escorting dolyaks and scouting incidentally.

I really hope that if this change is implemented it considers this and doesn’t just pander to the big raiding guilds. In fact I’d be in favour of the alliance system being independent of the guild system completely. Just make it essentially a non-rep guild with a much larger player cap than the guild system but limited to 1 per person.

Very large response to the latest proposal incoming~

I can’t see a guild-based alliance working tbh. What happens with guilds that aren’t WvW focused? One of the guilds I’m in mainly only does WvW on reset nights, aside from very small havocs two other nights a week…but that isn’t even half the active playerbase that participates. How could you count an entire guild of close to 300 people as part of the cap for an alliance, when only 50 of those, possibly less, ever step foot in WvW? There are PvX players who do both WvW and PvE, of course, but there are many more that only do PvE or PvP.

You’d also have to decide how big the cap is. The size of BG’s WvW population now? Smaller? Personally, I love Tier 1 WvW right now. Aside from the coverage balance issues, we can always find fights 24/7. I love those large-scale battles. I have played on a low tier server before, and I didn’t have much fun with it compared to what fun I’ve had on TC. I really don’t want to see WvW populations diminished to the point where there are large gaps of time where you can’t find fights. Lower tier servers may like that, but I love the fast-paced nature of T1.

Honestly though, it should be server alliances, not guild alliances. Doing it by guilds is way too messy, and you will ruin server communities doing it that way. Guilds work together in WvW. We’re used to running with the same other guilds day in and day out, for months or, for some, more than a year. We learn how to move together. We communicate well together. We know the usual strategy or crazy antics of all the regular commanders, so we know how to work with them.

TC has a server-wide Mumble that’s used for both PvE and WvW – something that would not be possible if half of us were in an opposing alliance. Most, if not all, other servers have a VoIP server as well. How can you say that alliances would keep server communities intact, if it does not actually include the entire server community as a whole?

You break up these guilds so we can’t play together anymore, and you will have a bunch of new guilds that don’t know how to work with those of us left from the remnants of our server, and thus will be less effective in WvW.

On the other hand, if it was server alliances, you’d already have communities intact, so learning how to work with a new community wouldn’t be as much of a hardship. We’d still be effective from the start, because we’d still have all of our server’s guilds playing together.

Server alliances is the only way I can see an alliance system working out. Otherwise you are destroying the communities we’ve come to know and love.

The biggest issue right now, though, is that you have to differentiate between PvE players and WvW players. If you did an alliance at all, regardless of whether it’s server or guild based, you can’t count PvE-only players toward that cap. That’s just not fair.

That’s the trouble that JQ’s EU/NA and TC’s OCX/SEA have had for months – our servers being listed as full, preventing most people from transferring, yet a large amount of that supposedly full population never steps foot in WvW, causing gaps of low coverage. This is a glaring issue that would have to be fixed for any alliance system to work.

I think that with some tweaks, perhaps an alliance system could be an improvement, but not if it breaks up servers. A guild isn’t a server. All the guilds on a server are a server, together. It’s not the same if we’re not playing with the guilds we’ve come to enjoy running with.

storiessave.3807 I agree with you
The start point of the new system should be:

a todays server = a tomorrows alliance

but it may develop (on players choice) into something different over time, if you allow players to found new alliances (e.g. for a large amount of gems) and leave existing ones.

Concerning counting players for WvW I proposed (in the upper part of https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance/4443728 where I described how I interpret alliances) to make it automatic, a player
- is counting, if (s)he was in WvW during the last 7 days
- is not counting, if (s)he was not in WvW during the last 7 days
A player that is not counting, will still be in the alliance, i.e. as passive with respect to WvW.

Even alliances consisting only of passive WvW-players could have a value for PvE, if alliances are placed together in the mega-server as todays server.

Another question that needs addressing is what is the optimum server size during a matchup? This will be very difficult to get right imo. Is it 24 hour queues on all maps? If so how long a queue? Too long and guilds will lose interest because they can’t raid and too small will see imbalances creep back in. Likewise non wvw active players within the alliance are going to skew things massively if not accounted for but then if they decide to come back into wvw it could make things difficult