Some thoughts on the new system: Server prideBelieve it or not, but there are people in the game who are strongly connected to their server. People who brought guilds on the server together to form a community, who provided web pages, forums, etc. People who are still playing WvW on the same server since day one.The new system will destroy this connection to a server, will make all that work useless.Yes, maybe it will be replaced with something like alliance pride. But what is an alliance compared to a server? Something far smaller.Players who don’t care about which server they are on, on the other hand, will simply exchange “server hopping” for “alliance hopping”.I think you are punishing the wrong people. Player toxicityOne benefit of having servers as a reference is that guilds who do not get along with each other had a simple way to avoid all that drama. One guild simply moved to another server, problem solved. World linking was already a step back in this regard, and the alliance system will make things even worse. Voice communicationNowadays, every server (as far as I can tell) has a dedicated TS, often set up by those “server pride” people who care about their server and its community. They put in a lot of effort to provide all that fancy stuff a good WvW TS needs (multiple channels per map with map-wide whisper lists as well as cross-map whispers, etc.) and that separates modern day WvW from the stone age situation at the game’s release.World linking added a little extra work for the TS admins on those days when links change, because many server TS only provide access to people of that server and the linked one(s). But still, even on link change resets, every WvW player has a TS server that he can join for reset.With the alliance system, basically every alliance will need to set up its own TS server, and hopefully on every world there will be at least one alliance that is willing to open up its TS to all players on the world. Otherwise, that world will be put back into stone age WvW for at least 8 weeks. Unless ArenaNet decides to add in-game voice communications (which I don’t believe they’ll do) this will turn the start of every season into an organization nightmare. Pressure on casual WvW playersA lot of guilds have some players who are hard core WvW players, while other players in that guild are more on the casual side but still like to join their guildmates every now and then for some WvW action. Imagine multiple of these guilds forming an alliance, and the alliance reaching its capacity limit. What will you do if other players want to join one of those guilds and play WvW with their guildmates? Or if players returning after some months of absence and want to get back into WvW with their guild? Tell them they cannot do that and send them away? Ask the more casual players in the guild to deselect their main guild and choose another guild for WvW? Ask the guild with the lowest member count or the highest number of casuals to leave the alliance? Night cappingThe new system will not improve time zone coverage globally. With the current system, servers can try to find guilds for their server who are more active during the night. With the alliance system, it will be almost impossible to make sure every world has an equal coverage over different daytimes, especially when your pool is limited like in the language specific European servers. If one world has an alliance with a night crew, and the others don’t, guess who’ll win. And the automatic upgrade system just works in favor of the server who already has an advantage.ArenaNet should first continue improving the scoring system before messing up servers. ConclusionYou claim What a waste of resources :(
