Guild Wars 2

The only way to end this grief play is to replace the current worlds (that miss an imigration office ) by Alliances. Maybe the mega-server will go that way.

Solafein.3528:

You can transfer to a lower tier server but there is a cost, yes.

There is still a way to avoid costs: If you do not have a charackter in your account (deleted your level 10 char) you can choose any server for free, as you did initially.

So look around and lvl if you like it or restart on a different server or your choice.
Lvl 10 so far isn’t a big deal, 1h if you know what you are doing (and the money in your stash stays).

I agree that the mega-server will kill the worlds in WvW as well.

But worlds are dieing anyway. And in fact I always had the opinion that
worlds are a to bad concept to be pride off

What’s wrong with worlds?
- worlds are choosen by newbies, before they understand what they choose.
- plague of WTJ-locusts jump from world to world harming both the world they leave (loss of coverage) as well as the world they join (increase in queue and disturbance of organization) and even the worlds that are their opponents in a match (disturbance of ranking resulting in imbalanced matches) and no one can hinder them.
- the worst consequence of worlds are grief-player disturbing your play-quality and hacker ruining your reputation and again, no one can hinder them.

Mega-Servers for WvW
If worlds die they have to be replaced by something else. Random-teams as in EotM aren’t the solution, they hinder pride, make match-win meaningless and hinder any effective organizatrion, that may be ok for 3h EotM matches, but kill 24/7 WvW matches where organization is the main success as well as fun-factor.

What else?

I think Mega-servers are the big chance to get what WvW should have always been!
Guild Alliance vs Guild Allliance vs Guild Alliance read https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Collaborative-Development-Edge-of-the-Mists/3695388 for a proposal how this could be done.

But as soon as the uniform and not controllable organization in form of worlds is replaced with an organization under player control other options appear as well.

When an Alliance is formed and registered for WvW it may choose the kind of tournament it want to play in. Currently everyone has to play 24/7 or leave WvW alone, independently if a) he likes it and b) his organization (server) is capable to do so. Why not several modi to choose from? E.g. weekend-only WvW, or prime-time only wvw or 16/7 wvw or …?

For for those that just wana give WVW a try, Mega-server formed Random teams are optimal alternative as well (0-2 of them are at least needed to fill matches resulting from the number of registered alliances being not dividable by 3).

Swamurabi.7890:

Introducing the Megaserver System
by Colin Johanson and Samuel Loretan on April 2, 2014

….

This doesn’t sound like there’s any real news with respect to WvW.

Probably they originally planned to make it EotM like and then Devon got convinced in the CDI that this isn’t a good thing, such that they are currently still (again) in the design phase.

Btw.: I did not read about it, but for EotM the mega-server concept would definitely be a strong improvement over the current overflow concept.

Of course there is even another possibility:

We have currently 3 leagues, why not permanently 3 leagues with different playtimes?

A league of 3-9 server playing 24/7
A league of 6-12 server playing 16/7 (wvw is shut-down there for 8h each day)
A league of 6-12 server playing 6-8/7 (wvw is shut-down for 16h each day)

Transfers between leagues are free, transfers within a league cost, and you cannot transfer more often than once a month.

Aku Punksha.4895:

Maybe the issue is that there are too many servers and we should cut the number down to about 60% of what is out there now.

If servers are reduced, I would prefer a reduction to just 3 servers (or maybe better: 4 server with 2 two-sided matches), but with several and different types of WvW-matches running each week, and everyone can choose where he want to play:

- the normal 24/7 match
- the weekend-match (fr 19:00 – Sun 24:00)
- the day-match (each day 8:00-24:00)
- the prime-match (each day 19:00 – 24:00)

Maybe some of them with more maps (EB twice or EotM included or Borders twice or …)

If you put all EU-nightforces together you probably to not get more than 1000 people.
on day you likely get 2000-3000 people and in primetime likely 6000-7000 people.
So each of the above matches could probably be filled while it is running, and queue should be reasonable.

I do not know NA number and my EU numbers are only estimates, but ANet should know the numbers and design the matches accordingly.

But maybe even better is to let people/guilds build alliances (see https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Collaborative-Development-Edge-of-the-Mists/3695388) and let them register for the type of match (from the above) they want to play the next week.

This way the 24/7 fans can play 24/7 and the prime-time only fans can play primetime only-matches. I do not see any reasons why they are force to play in the same match.

Johje Holan.4607:

Where’d the other Nightwatch thread go?

Fall back to Page 3

Aku Punksha.4895:

I am astounded by your logic. The match is only equal numbers if all sides are full. It is unequal if one side is empty. Of course the match is most decisive at that point – as it should be. The game is not designed for you if your team doesn’t show up.

I do not talk about show up or does not.
If all sides appear with 400 people than it’s irrelevant for match outcome.
If one side has 50 in a time where the others have 20 they win the match decisively.
So 90 people make the match decision, 1200 people do not matter for match outcome.

Great game design

Aku Punksha.4895:

Football is a game of 11 on 11 (soccer if you are from US). Have 2 players sent off or not turn up and it is 11 on 9. That is the most decisive point. Should football amend its’ rules so that if one player gets sent off they play 10 on 10 rather than 11 on 10? That is the basis thrust of your assertions.

I like these football comparisons What do you think how a football match would be if it would be 24/7 long How many people would watch it? Who would win? The side with better players or the one with more players? How much money would be in football if matches would be 24/7 more than today as they are playing more? or less?

Aku Punksha.4895:

Simple solution – organise and don’t play short handed. If you are happy with the organisation and structure of your server then accept the shortcoming, and the endless opportunity to recap all that stuff back in your time zone. If not then try and change it or transfer.

I know a better thing: Play a better designed game. 24/7 with current scoring may be fun for a holiday week, but it’s a stupid game to be repeated week for week since nearly 2 years.

We will see if ANet will once be able to design a more interesting competition than coverage-by-numbers, but till then I only rarely play WvW anymore.

Aku Punksha.4895:

Wow – all this time and people still qq over the fact that it is a 24/7 game. That is just laughable. Please modify your game Anet because I like my server and want to stay here and it is not our fault they are poorly organised and don’t make any attempts to have 24/7 coverage.

You missed the point of the complain. The complain is not the 24/7. the complain is:

The times with the fewest players in the match are the most decisive ones for the match-outcome

And this is of course non-sense. The opposite should be the case.

Random teams ala EotM could be one outcome (bad) but player build Alliance of Guilds vs Alliance of Guilds (with random teams only for the ones to lazy to join/build an alliance) another (good).

ANet showed a tendency to pick bad alternatives in the past, but we will see.

No I am saying that currently the time an OCX or SEA or EU spend in a match is by far more relevant than the time an NA spends in a NA-match.

In fact how much time an NA spends during NA-prime is nearly irrelevant for match outcome.

And the truth of that you see in any recruitment post, where usually stuff like:
“We want more EU/OCX/SEA, if you are NA stay away” is written.

I am saying that the prime-times players time should no longer be worthless compared to the time of another player.
And I am saying it needs a rebalance such that both become equal in the future.

nerovergil.5408:

Your night is my day /thread

Unfortunately matches have an prime and off-time independent of anyones night and day.

prime-time >= 700 people in match
off-time < 700 people in match

(around 1000 fit a match 3 sides a 4 maps ~ 12 * nearly 100)

The people that play in match primetime are currently discriminated vs the people that play in match-offtime, as each of them as a far lower influence on match-outcome.

I never said that off-time people should be discriminated, but I always said
The discrimination of prime-time people has to end

Nice idea.

But “souls” should not be token, that can be acquired in prime and spend in off-time.

Let souls automatically flow into the last conquered objective of that player or none if this is lost / the player did not participated in a conquest.

Full points for full maps.

Half points for half full maps.

No points for totally empty maps.

Or if you like to express it differently:

1 available (the side that’s want it still has to win it) point of score per player in the match everytime and where ever she comes from.

That would be much better than the current system where the Hawaiian gets 20 pts to conquer and the one from Chicago only 0.7.

Reverence.6915:

T1 NA has 24/7 coverage with no downtime in competitive fights. kitten. Your time is not more valuable than my time.

If this is true (but I am in doubt that all maps of all side are full all 7 days for all 24 hours) any score cap or weight based on players playing will not change scoring of NA-T1. But it will make 16 (7 other NA and 9 EU) other matches more interesting.

No one assume they do In fact they will never play

Sos will just be ahead as they get more often (5 times) 5 pts in T2 than they get 1 pt in T1 (4 times), while JQ always (9 times) gets only 3 in T1 and TC get more often (5 times) 1pt in T1 than 5 pts in T2 (4 times).

Swiss tournament of course got invented to order 50 players within 5 rounds of 2-way matches, not to order 6 servers over 9 rounds of 3-way matches

And of course any league is boring if the result is 99% determined by the scoring function (masses over 24/7) and totally independed how people play.

It is NOT fair that 50 people can control as many objective points than 1000 people.

And it has nothing to do with any time in any time-zone of the world, it is just:
How many people are in this match.

20 people should be capped at 20 max tick
50 people should be capped at 50 max tick
100 people should be capped at 100 max tick
AS currently
1000 people are capped at 695 pts.

Alternatively of course: give 1000 people 69’5’00 score per tick if 10 already get 695.

Fermi.2409:

There’s no reason to accountbind Exotics. A new set+weapons+jewels is what, like 50g? That’s nothing.

Yeah that’s why it doesn’t make any economical sense to keep the category soulbound. Soulbound items are so unhandy, e.g. you cannot take them out of bank (e.g. to dish it) with the wrong char, if it is in the bank and the char is deleted you can only destroy the item (neither dish nor sell it to NPC). Stuff soulbound to different chars do not stack together, …

The highlight in anoyance are soul-bound items (e.g. karma-bottles) that increase account bound balances (karma)

Julie Yann.5379:

exotics are super cheap and don’t require weeks and months of time gating to craft. No real point in account bounding them.

Yes that’s why I said soulbound is only annoyance, without any economical meaning.

lordkrall.7241:

There is no issue.
There is never a time where there is nightwatch everywhere.

This isn’t the point.

The point is that the current scoring systems weights each player as
20 times as important when there are 50 players than when there are 1000 players in WvW.

As a consequence the effort of the 1000 is irrelevant for match-outcome. The server with the higher share in the 50 players wins the match without any competition.

See the thread linked in my signature for a more extensive discussion.

Replace all soul bound with account bound. Soul bound is only an inconvenient annoyance without any advantage.

But probably this is the wrong forum, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2 would be better.

iPsychO.5043:

This proposal is actually a good solution, however I can’t think of a way to settle the seasonal scores if they were to be swapped out.

Why not simply:
Gandara (will have) won 1st match => 5pts (which will give 4th place in gold league after round 1, there are 4 winner, but they have lowest glicko of these 4)
Augury (will have) lost 1st match => 1 pt
(6th rank in silver after round 1, as they have best Glicko of all the 4 silver match-loosers)

There are still 8 weeks to go …
(and swiss tournament usually needs not even 9 rounds to correctly sort over 50 players, and not 8 rounds to sort 9 servers)

Gold will have more total points at the end, and silver will have less, but this is irrelevant at the end.

Furious.2867:

Where is SoR?

Been out of touch with wvw since Dec 2013 and not seeing them on this list is kinda weird.

Looks like SoR run out of players ands is on the way down the ranking (12 atm), not even competitive in Silver any more.

Reborn.2934:

switch an international server like gandara with a national is a bit difficult

What’s difficult to promote Gandara to Gold and degrade Augury to Silver?

Of course the reason, why they should be switched is:
The free transfers in the week before the league is to short for Glicko to adapt to the balance shifts caused by the massive transfers.

PS: And no I am neither on Gandara nor on Augury Rock, I am on Elona.

Looks like Gandara got heavily overstacked for silver.
While Augury Rock seems to have lost to many players to be still gold.

Would be cool if this WTJ-overstacking would be punished by giving Gandara more challenge, i.e. put them in gold and I would find it also cool if you would show mercy with Augury Rock and do not let them be the punching ball of gold league for the next 9 weeks.

Ansau.7326:

with this modified random glicko system we have, it makes it even more boring.

It’s not glicko that makes matches with you boring. It’s that you make your points in the nights under the week that make matches vs Baruch boring.

But from this friday on, we will have the 2nd league with swiss-tournament. So color will be 100% determined by rank in the league.

1,4,7 => green, 2,5,8 => blue 3,6,9 => red.

And the rank in the league will be determined by the points you got from the match result: 1st 6 pts, 2nd 3 pts, 3rd 0 pts.

Initial (this friday) matches according to glicko ranking without random roll

@Ansau As this friday starts the new league and match-making will be made according to swiss-tournament (danish variant I think, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament#Danish_system) for the next 9 week you will meet SFR in the next weeks as often as you win in the next weeks. Vizu was so far quite weak in 2014, we will see if they get reinforcement for the league.

@Ansau: When you won against Kodash/Riverside you got some points and they lost some, however you did not won decisively (or often) enough to be ahead of them.

Batercus.6257:

I think match making not taking active WvW population into account is a mistake that creates unfair WvW match ups based on numbers and not tactics.

Glicko-Rating IS a measure for previous active WvW-Population and it’s performance in WvW, so it is taken into account. However no method is able to predict how the wvw-pop will develop in the next week. And it has some inertia build into the formula.

GROMIT.7829:

I am from Aurora Glade EU (Stop laughing) and was wondering why we are being matched against a giant like Vizunah Square [FR], is this a glitch in the system or an intentional if rather cruel joke on the part of Anet. Could someone explain to me why this one sided match up occurred?.

Match-Making is a combination of your worlds-rank (ca 1650 for you) and a relative small random variation (plus minus 75) and the match requirement that three servers are matched together.

With a -75 rating-modification Vizu “rolled” below Baruch (which could roll a +75 to support this) and got rolled-rank 7. And with +75 you and FSP managed to roll to rolled-rank 8 and 9. T3 is rolled-ranks 7, 8 and 9 so yes it can happen even if it is VERY unlikely.

Ken computes match-probabilities each week https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Matchup-wishlist/3783898
Vizu – Gunnar’s Hold – Far Shiverpeaks had only a probability of 0.097727%, i.e. approx. 1 in 1000. And it’s not ANet doing it, it’s bad luck that may happen.

Junkpile.7439:

Dayra.7405:

Junkpile.7439:

These kind of rewards are kind of bad. Anet need to learn how to reward players. Not just give same rewards for everybody. Hate this kitten how they try keep every casual player happy. More you contribute better rewards you get. It’s basic stuff.

What’s SFR’s contribution? Emptying other servers for a better reward?

Great! That really needs a very special reward

Well i think that every server some players contribute more than others. I haven’t been normal www maps since EotM launch more than couple times. I can’t figure out why i would get www season rewards. I want karma trainer exterminator weapon tickets.

Exactly so rewards should be according to players contribution and not according “I bought a transfer to the winning server”.

Give the top 1000 players the max reward points, the next 1000 the second most, and so on.

And how are players ranked? Easy: “How much WEXP is earned during the league”,

So the only thing missing: Add a wexp earned in league ranking to the leaderbord.
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/

keadlaw.6350:

Do the people making these decisions even play wvw?!

If they do, then very unlikely for rewards I guess.

“Spawn me reward XYZ I need to test it” is a not unlikely way to get it if you are in the developer team

Junkpile.7439:

These kind of rewards are kind of bad. Anet need to learn how to reward players. Not just give same rewards for everybody. Hate this kitten how they try keep every casual player happy. More you contribute better rewards you get. It’s basic stuff.

What’s SFR’s contribution? Emptying other servers for a better reward?

Great! That really needs a very special reward

Sad Tas.2509:

Laylie.5703:

Servers for leagues were decided at last weeks reset this week is an intermediate week.

How do you know? What servers are in what league then?

If this is true (I did not saw it anywhere) the order of servers of last friday can be seen here:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/wvw

azizul.8469:

1. coverage wins —--> blackgate
2. “we don’t ppt” attitude doom a server —- > sor

Yes, and there are further examples as well.
Furthermore:

3. repeatedly loosing due to coverage leads to an “we don’t ppt” attitude.

As a consequence of these 3: 24/7 coverage wars destroys WvW-servers one after the other.

Currently it doesn’t really matter, if TESO-WvW will be better or worser than GW2-WvW.

Just something different than what we have now since nearly 2 years is already a strong attractor.

Matches are stale and suspense of match-outcome is close to 0 now, and it’s boring to play the same thing over and over again.

Variation and suspense could be increased by simple easy methods:
- Variantion in Match-duration, i.e. we all know who wins 24/7, but who wins on 24/2 on weekend?
- different match-scoring: We all know who wins with the current off-time capping and PvD-train favoring scoring, but who wins if this is modified, e.g. to make objective only score if kept long (no objective score before you own it for at least 1day) or player-weighted scoring or …
- Allow only different sets of classes and/or weapon set in WvW for a week, e.g. this week only class A, B and C, but not D, E, F, G, H. This week only weapons A,B,C but no other … This week no AC, this week no trebs, ….

And this post is not proposing that one method (class) is better than another, it only says:

Always the same is boring after a while, and variation can be so easy.

Meglobob.8620:

But Deso, is a real disappointment they tanked into silver league for the 1st season to win it. Deso is a server with by far the most Europeon players in the top tiers of sPvP and also was the 1st to kill the 3 headed wurm in the world. They have loads of excellent players. If they tried they could easily get 3rd in gold league.

sPvP players spend their play-time in sPvP, worm-killer spend their play-time in PvE.
Maybe not one of them like 24/7 hour matches and isn’t interested et al in WvW.
Maybe some of them are achievement hunters, but now achievement hunter can hunt them in EotM.

I do not see any reason to believe that non-WvW players will be very helpful in WvW during the season. Remember, helpful in the WvW-coverage war means playing all day and night and not build a queue that hinders dedicated WvW-player to join in prime-time.

Deso and/or Piken are where they are (in case of Piken heading due to losses) since month, i.e. longer than the 2nd season was announced. Deso was only up to 7 as Jade and Baruch had a burn-out after league 1, now that they are back to play Deso/Piken are back to 9/10, maybe they both make it to silver, but that’s not really far from their place. And I think it’s understandable that you try to tank from 9 to 10

Who want’s to be crushed at rank 9 or 18, if there is a juicy 10 or 19 close by

Will season 2 be weekly matches as usual or something special that worth a season
(e.g. weekend matches (48h) only for the league, rest of the week casual achievement farming and recovery from 48h hard fighting)

Konrad Knox.5162:

This element was also present in Shadowbane. Controlling guilds could tax their territory, essentially even taxing other player guilds for holding the most cities in the region.

Why not tax in GW2 as well? This way the costs of upgrading can be distributed to all that make use of the upgrades:

If an objective has been upgraded to have merchants and or a WP, the guilds that has claimed it can set a tax between 1% and 10%.
It get the tax for any buy/sell/repair business with the merchants in this keep.
E.g. if a player sells something for 1s50b and tax is 2% the guild-bank get 3b and the seller get 3b less, i.e. only 1s47b, if you buy something you have to pay the tax additional to the normal price. If you repair for 1s50b you have to pay 1s53b and the guild get 3b.

A player using the WP has to pay as many b as tax level. E.g. if tax is 2% and 50player teleport in, each has to pay 2b for the teleport and the guild-bank gets 1s.

Of course anyone can avoid these taxes by doing business only with the border/cita merchants and using only border/cita WP. But if you enjoy the comfort of the keep-upgrade you participate in the costs automatically.

It could be combined with other things that increase binding between guilds and objectives written down in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/If-you-could-change-the-scoring-mechanic/3552163 (which also contains conditions under which a claim can be stolen from a guild that let their objective become dilapidated.)

It would also make sense that upgrades are automatically be taken from the guild-bank of the claiming guild in this case and not from the player that order them. So there is a risk in claiming. You can only claim, if the guild-bank contains enough money to pay the full upgrade and you automatically loose a claim, if the guild-bank money is below the costs of all remaining upgrades.

albotelho.2931:

I do not know if it was mentioned before but what if the PPT was not based on points per time but points per objective conquered?

Assume (just for simplicity) it would only be a 2-sided match, then the following would be the case:
- The score will never be more than 695 apart. (for you to conquer something (and get score) the opponent has to conquer it first, if the opponent stops playing, you cannot get points, after you reached 695:0.).
- The score difference exactly represents who controls how much of the map. (If you currently control 400 of 695, you are 105pts ahead of your opponent in total score)
- The winner is who controls most at match-end.
=> Anything you or your opponent do before the last hours of the last day is completely irrelevant for match-outcome.

Of course the result isn’t that clear with 3 sided, if two sides “trade” a tower, they get both points, while the third gets nothing.

Optimal strategy therefore seems to be: Either Karmatrain (to capture a lot fast) or only play for points not from score (player stomps/dolyaks/sentries) and do not attack and capture anything till noon last day, and start an offensive to own most at match-end.

As I do not like both alternatives very much, I don’t really like this scoring proposal.

Omnitek.3876:

I see the future! There will be matchups and people will complain!!

Corrected

NA statistics will be more interesting this week, I guess, only JQ is fixed in T1, but SoS can roll in and either BG and TC can roll out..

I still want Elona-Kodash-Riverside, for sure it’s not likely, but is it still possible?

Edit: Indeed, SoS not SoR

The idea of servers – where you have zero control about who is on it – is a bad one for any cooperative gameplay mode anyway. It’s like anyone can assign itself to be a member of your guild. Time to get rid of it and replace it with a method where people can form their own alliances, and for those which are to lazy to do that, balanced random-alliances, i.e. look at: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Collaborative-Development-Edge-of-the-Mists/3695388

You mean 3 keeps and a tower got lost in the fog of war?

It’s a children game, it will have new 12 years old in 3 years that run their circles in WvW.

Lol, yeah I can hear the commander in TS: “now lets get some karma at Vabbi’s WSR border”, resulting in a 50+ T1 zerg rushing fast over a T9 map.
10min later: “All red here, now to Underwords RoF border”
…
A few min later: “Oh sh**, T1 zerg ahead, lets go to …”

Not only by the winer, btw. the determined loser may have even more interest to “get some fun somewhere else”

Problem of course there is no incentive to win a match (neither the stats-bonus for score is noticed nor are the few bonus-chest taken serious by anyone (if noticed at all)

Proposal Alliance vs Alliance vs Alliance

background (no need for servers in PvE/EotM as well)
I liked the way GW1 handled cities. Instead of Server and Overflow (random-collection, in EU with babylonian language mixture and not easy to join a specific one). You could choose the different language-specific versions that currently existed. I thnk this was better for PvE-maps and also for EotM and Obsidian than the current GW2 system!

Proposal
For WvW I would still prefer the player controlled alliance as the main organization that participate in a Match.

An alliance is a collection of guilds. Where one Guild is the Alliance leader that registers the alliance for a match, determines the name, accepts guilds for the alliance (only before registration for the next weeks match) and may kick guilds (all times).
So two versions of an Alliance exist. The currently played match-alliance and the next-match-alliance in formation. Guilds may be added to the next-match-alliance till the match starts, afterwards no more guilds may be added. (ANet may charge gems for Alliance registration, reregistration of an alliance should be much cheaper to encourage stability, in this case a match win should earn the alliance leader of the winning team some (more than he would pay for a re-registration) gems).

Any alliance has a maximal number of players. This of course depends on match duration and number of maps the match is played on. As an estimate ANet could count how many different players played during a match and take the maximum of all current matches.

Not all players of a guild may want to participate in next weeks WvW and it would be bad if the non-participating players would count against the maximum head-count of the alliance. Therefore it would need a new guild-right “wvw-participation”. This has to exist in 2 versions as well: current-match and next-weeks match. Only people with this right set count towards the alliance limit and only those can enter this alliance wvw-match. It may be set only for the next-week match, it may be revoked for both the current and the next match (e.g. your guild leader can exclude you if you turn out to be a grief-player, of course the right is also turned off if you got kicked from the guild). A player can have the WvW-right mostly once (even if he is member in several guilds) and this right is independent from representing that guild. (You as a working server-community may build a meta-guild with all wvw-players of a server and join an alliance with that meta-guild, still people can represent their normal guild.)

Beside the player formed alliances there are always 3-5 random-alliances. (1 match of 3 random alliances (or more if player can express a demand to participate in a random-alliance), and 0-2 random alliance to fill up the matches of registered alliances)
Players not member of any alliance (have no (longer, i.e. got revoked/kicked) wvw right from a guild) in the current match may join any of these random-alliances (they can choose (!! a non-alliance guild may choose the same) on first join in a match, and are bound to this alliance for the duration of the match.

Any registered alliance (you pay that with your registration) should have 2 forum-threads, 1 public readable/alliance-leader writeable one for recruitment, 1 alliance-member-only read/write for community discussions). Best would be: Each alliance (and only this alliance) has access to voice-communication (a Teamspeak or similar in game), probably best combined with chat-selection and commander-squad. (payed by the registration as well).

Pro:
- WTJ is limited by max alliance size and subject to community control
- Grief-play is solved
- Wise alliance formation may give you good coverage
- An alliance that broke apart can easier reform without transfer costs
- ANets revenue from transfer costs is replaced by Alliance-registration costs.
- It’s far superior (in terms of community building and interest to win) to random assignment as done for EotM
- It’s solves the dead-WvW-servers problem

Contra:
- Alliances may be unstable resulting in inaccurate ratings and imbalanced matches.
- The number of alliances may explode, if everyone may build it’s own very small and not competitive alliance. (However if this stays stable, and is not unique, balanced matches of small alliances may occur as well.)
- No one builds an alliance, but this means: everyone likes to play random-alliances.

Why don’t you use the leagues to experiment with shorter match-ups?

How about the next league be a 28h or 52h weekend tournament?
The tournament match starts friday normal reset time and runs for 28h (till Sa evening) or 52h (till sunday evening). At that time the tournament score is taken (but the match is not stopped, but) then the match continues over the week as a normal ranking match (for after tournament match-making).

Maybe this can be even made a permanent thing if successful. My expectation would be that even lower WvW-populated server would be able to compete in a weekend-only tournament.

If you give a ranger the time to cast Barrage you already made a mistake