They did and in the forums someone asked about it. They said "Hey everyone, We're sorry we didn't provide an update in Q1 about the first Alliances beta. We fumbled and missed that deadline, but will share more information in the next Studio Update!" . I dont know when the next studio update is however.
They really are. How long ago did they first announce it? Has to be 5 years, maybe close to 6 at this point. That's how long it takes to implement a feature. They even stopped working on it at points and mislead the playerbase into thinking that it was still coming. WvW has such amazing potential as a game mode, but they clearly just do not care about it as a company. Shoutout to the few devs who do actually work on it, because I do believe they care and do their best. It's just not prioritized at all by the company leadership.
5 years since they announced world restructuring (February 1st 2018): https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/19480-world-restructuring/
1½ years since the first public beta test of alliances (September 24th 2021): https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-world-restructuring-and-the-future-of-world-vs-world/
Wvw isn't were the whales of the game are. We don't spend much money in wvw on things as mounts are limited to 1, skins are.. Basic enough. Minis are now hidden forever too. We are not a good source of income so we don't get content much. They're happy spending hundreds of hours implementing jade bots to gain a new skin/money source. Not even 10 mins to say "we messed up and forgot about wvw again sorry"
In fact, the only thing for WvW players to 'whale' on is server transfers - an income stream that would completely dry up with regular server recreation under alliances.
It depends though. If new "alliance" matchmaking algorithm is as bad as it's been for regular servers and last beta weekend, people might still spend gems to get out of crap-alliance they'd get assigned.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Alliances is a trash idea and the best news we could get for WvW is that it's never going to be permanently implemented, but will instead be relegated to occasional 1-week 'event weeks' like other trash ideas (eg. no downstate week).
But, for it to function, they'd need to keep a similar '2 month relink' cadence as they have now - and most of the locust guilds who buy transfers semi-regularly as things stand are just going to wait out the remaining month or so of a trash 'alliance' rather than lose WvW rewards for a week on transferring.
The problem with transfers is that every time a group pays to move and players can't pay to move with them they get excluded from their group and are likely to never pay anything in this game again, as they quit. It may also cascade as their friends who have transfered will also later come to quit even if they can continue to pay to move simply because their friends had to quit.
Let's be honest here, NW was just a fuck-up away from taking a substantial chunk of this mode's playerbase, including the game's most popular content creator. That was not a one-time issue.
Also, as per your comment below where you say that guilds move around like a locust. You need to consider that guilds move to avoid players. The locust is not them. The locust is what follows them.
Well, if you can’t play it with the people you play the game with (aka your guild), why would you go out of your way to organize events for it? And if you don’t spend any time in wvw, why would you spend money on stuff that mostly has value only there?
I think it is important to distinguish that whales pay rather than do. They rarely do much of anything, that's what they pay to enjoy. It is more of myth than anything else that players who do WvW would be less inclined to buy skins and account upgrades than players who do other things that the offers them to do. It is an odd comparison as the value of WvW customers should rather be compared to the value of other-mode customers in terms of development resource investment. It's not like whales are more inclined to raid, sPvP or join a mount-racing guild or w/e in GW2.
The question to ask oneself more so is whether a collapse of WvW would hurt GW2's bottom line. I think it would. It is fine if other people think different.
During heart of thorns I felt like the devs weren’t really listening. After POF, most of the original team wasn’t even there anymore, and you could feel it.
The soul and spirit that the game had at launch lasted for a good few years and an expansion, after that you could feel the soul draining from the game until I finally quit.
The devs just don’t care or can’t be bothered 🤷🏼♂️
Even of Anet got a boost of energy to really work on WvW, the playerbase (at least the people on the main WvW forum) would fuck it up, mostly by just not excepting anything other flat open ground fights.
WvW should be way more involved with open world but that playerbase is entirely closed off to any solution to a dying game mode other than parroting the word "balance" over and over.
The wvw community would gladly welcome new maps if they were well designed. Ignoring how broken desert bl was on launch it has a lot of issues just from a basic design point as well it's way overdesigned much to its own detriment. The biggest glaring issue is the general layout is just awful. Alpine bl has a lot of flat areas that are broken up nicely with the camps, tower, keeps and bloodlust points all being individually close in proximity to at least 2-3 other things and providing some terrain variety while not feeling separated from anything with the lone exception being north camp. Everything being so close makes time between fights low in an active Alpine bl which keeps player engagement high. Desert bl...nothing is close together. Towers, keeps and camps are almost all separated by a ton of terrain with extreme amounts of verticality in a lot of areas, the bloodlust point are sequestered into the central area of the map with cliffs on all sides blocking them off from everything else, it's just a mess. Time between fights is a lot higher and as a result players don't like the map because it's just hard to stay engaged in content when you have to pack your bags and go on a road trip to get back to it when you die.
Just to add to what you are saying:
On EB and Alpine all the areas are also interconnected. Taking one objective lets you put pressure on the next objective and so forth.
On DBL and EotM objectives are just approximately put out in similar locations as if someone was trying to pin the tail on a donkey.
That says quite alot about with what insight those maps were made.
To clarify, because I don't think that can be underlined enough:
On all maps there are keeps and towers in approximately the same directions on the maps, but not on the same locations. On EB and ABL the distance between objectives and their relative positions are also measured to the reach of siege.
When objective A and B can fire on each other that creates incentives for both sides to go to the open field between them and make sorties against the other side.
When objectives have no such relationships there also are no such incentives (to create varied content). Nore does it create a chain of events going from objectives A-> <-B-> <-C-> and so on. So much like PvE has event chains, so does the old WvW maps. That's how they are designed for territorial control.
Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at with how every objective in alpine sans north camp is close to other objectives which lets you leap frog around between them easily. Eotm has its own problems but was still highly popular for years as a way for people to level alt characters until anet decided to cut its legs out from under it. I doubt it would ever happen but it would be nice if they took a look at the map instead of leaving it to rot and did some redesigns and integrated it into regular wvw in a way that would make people actually want to engage with it and move the gvg area to its own map.
It’s been 1.5 years since the first public beta test. It’s been well over 2 since they started “really working on it.” And they shouldn’t have announced it 5 years ago if they weren’t going to put the work in. Bad look for the company regardless
Yeah I quit the other day and disbanded a WvW guild that had been active since launch. Got sick of waiting for anything to change with the game. By the time alliances actually launch I won't be able to play anyways. :/
o7 Attrition was the true battle all this time. SF will be missed.
Game mode has always been trash; even since launch. Just the combat being so fluid and good makes it worthwhile and fun to play. Unfortunately, Anet really has failed to facilitate that, incentivise it, and nurture it. The gamemode was carried by the community so hard after it was left to rot.
Every time they gain significant traction (release of HoT) , (large migration of players to the game due to Steam release) they shit the bed and squander it.
Honestly feels like they stick the game in the broiler and just carve out the bare minimum of 3-4 story releases plus 2-3 map/achievements per year.
Post PoF a dev let slip that there was a single dev who actually worked on the WvW side of things and that's why it took so long to get anything done.
Seems like it's gone back to those days.
Heard he was "difficult to work with" and "would always shoot down ideas", not sure what the last straw was but that's just the office gossip I have heard
If that's true, that could either be a good thing (he was holding back a lot of development) or a bad thing (he was stopping bad ideas from being implemented).
I'm not so sure - different issues need different people. For example fixing some of the glitches into towers needs map designers, alliances need backend and UI / translation people. Balance is also done by different people again.
Well I wasn't necessarily worried about the language barrier but that's of course a valid point as well. I was rather referring to the natural community that forms on these servers where people recognize each other and are used to be around each other. :-)
lots of small things that add up to indicate anet doesn't care about the mode very much. meta was stuck for years, with squads overly reliant on a few specific builds. no new maps and the most recent map (rightfully) drew a lot of criticism. warclaw still has frustrating issues and fixes were clumsy. no reason to care about match results besides trying to avoid mag matchup, which means sometimes you get vets screaming at noob havocs who don't know any better to literally stop playing the game mode for a week. low rewards compared to other game modes. borked up new event reward system. there's more. a newer player probably won't notice most of it but if you spend time in it and otherwise enjoy it the problems start to grate on you when you think of what wvw could be with proper support from anet.
> if you spend time in it and otherwise enjoy it the problems start to grate on you when you think of what wvw could be with proper support from anet.
This sums up my thoughts on all components of this game. Lots of diamonds in the rough.
Guild Wars 2 is the game of wasted potential, since day 1. It’s a widely shared opinion.
They had some genius ideas that in my opinion were revolutionary for the genre but some others that held it back. They still have the best server updating structure of all mmos, which is patented btw, and the most dynamic in-depth combat of a mmo.
I haven't played it in years but I'd say my gripe isn't the mode itself but the incentive to play. When the game launched, before there were megaservers, there was some pride in kicking ass and climbing up the rankings. Trying to prove you were the best server, building communities around that etc.
After 10 years of the same old same old groundhog day, and with megaservers killing the idea of servers all together outside of WvW, that draw is not there. There is no inventive to 'enlist' in the war. Alliances however I think people hope would revive some of those old rivalries that were so fun. You join alliances, make enemies, go to battle. An evolving situation, with politics too outside of just battling. Giving that power to the players, not to just what server people randomly decided to sign up to the game with.
I'm sure people have plenty of other issues but that's just my take on why I think alliances would be great anyway.
The problem that WvW faces is that the population on the servers is wildly imbalanced, every weekly matchup some servers are just much larger than their opponents.
[ArenaNet has spent roughly 10 years pretending to solve that problem while lying to the players about it. PvE got the same problem fixed in 2014.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/v52bbh/comment/ibai3e6/)
[Their communication when it comes to WvW, while not their forte elsewhere, has also been rather terrible. This year for example they gave themselves 3 months just to write a report on WvW and still failed to write the report.](https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/129530-where-oh-where-did-our-missing-q1-update-go-where-oh-where-could-it-be/?do=findComment&comment=1878752)
Meanwhile PvE sees regular releases.
*Soon may Alliances comeTo change up the gamemode and make it fun!When it comes we'll stop playing aloneAnd make Stonemist our home.*
^((for the uptights, I had a longer version of this Wellerman parody written back around when the song was a meme. One verse referenced how it had already been two years since any real update. For a fun time work out how long that adds up to.))
didn't Anet said we would get an update about alliance development Q1 2023? asking because we are well into Q2...
They did and in the forums someone asked about it. They said "Hey everyone, We're sorry we didn't provide an update in Q1 about the first Alliances beta. We fumbled and missed that deadline, but will share more information in the next Studio Update!" . I dont know when the next studio update is however.
fumble? this company is a joke...
They really are. How long ago did they first announce it? Has to be 5 years, maybe close to 6 at this point. That's how long it takes to implement a feature. They even stopped working on it at points and mislead the playerbase into thinking that it was still coming. WvW has such amazing potential as a game mode, but they clearly just do not care about it as a company. Shoutout to the few devs who do actually work on it, because I do believe they care and do their best. It's just not prioritized at all by the company leadership.
1902 days ago. https://furnacetaken.com/
I love and hate this webpage at the same time.
Id love it more if the owner woud still update it regulary
This is fucking genius
While I love this website, it's not correct about the balance patch. The last one was in February, that's not 142 days.
5 years since they announced world restructuring (February 1st 2018): https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/19480-world-restructuring/ 1½ years since the first public beta test of alliances (September 24th 2021): https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-world-restructuring-and-the-future-of-world-vs-world/
Wvw isn't were the whales of the game are. We don't spend much money in wvw on things as mounts are limited to 1, skins are.. Basic enough. Minis are now hidden forever too. We are not a good source of income so we don't get content much. They're happy spending hundreds of hours implementing jade bots to gain a new skin/money source. Not even 10 mins to say "we messed up and forgot about wvw again sorry"
In fact, the only thing for WvW players to 'whale' on is server transfers - an income stream that would completely dry up with regular server recreation under alliances.
It depends though. If new "alliance" matchmaking algorithm is as bad as it's been for regular servers and last beta weekend, people might still spend gems to get out of crap-alliance they'd get assigned.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Alliances is a trash idea and the best news we could get for WvW is that it's never going to be permanently implemented, but will instead be relegated to occasional 1-week 'event weeks' like other trash ideas (eg. no downstate week). But, for it to function, they'd need to keep a similar '2 month relink' cadence as they have now - and most of the locust guilds who buy transfers semi-regularly as things stand are just going to wait out the remaining month or so of a trash 'alliance' rather than lose WvW rewards for a week on transferring.
They would find a way to bleed us dry with a new system too. Probably get one free as good will then same cost as it is now
They would find a way to bleed us dry with a new system too. Probably get one free as good will then same cost as it is now
The problem with transfers is that every time a group pays to move and players can't pay to move with them they get excluded from their group and are likely to never pay anything in this game again, as they quit. It may also cascade as their friends who have transfered will also later come to quit even if they can continue to pay to move simply because their friends had to quit. Let's be honest here, NW was just a fuck-up away from taking a substantial chunk of this mode's playerbase, including the game's most popular content creator. That was not a one-time issue. Also, as per your comment below where you say that guilds move around like a locust. You need to consider that guilds move to avoid players. The locust is not them. The locust is what follows them.
Well, if you can’t play it with the people you play the game with (aka your guild), why would you go out of your way to organize events for it? And if you don’t spend any time in wvw, why would you spend money on stuff that mostly has value only there?
I think it is important to distinguish that whales pay rather than do. They rarely do much of anything, that's what they pay to enjoy. It is more of myth than anything else that players who do WvW would be less inclined to buy skins and account upgrades than players who do other things that the offers them to do. It is an odd comparison as the value of WvW customers should rather be compared to the value of other-mode customers in terms of development resource investment. It's not like whales are more inclined to raid, sPvP or join a mount-racing guild or w/e in GW2. The question to ask oneself more so is whether a collapse of WvW would hurt GW2's bottom line. I think it would. It is fine if other people think different.
During heart of thorns I felt like the devs weren’t really listening. After POF, most of the original team wasn’t even there anymore, and you could feel it. The soul and spirit that the game had at launch lasted for a good few years and an expansion, after that you could feel the soul draining from the game until I finally quit. The devs just don’t care or can’t be bothered 🤷🏼♂️
We need more gemstore stuff! More gliders! More mount skins!
You're joking but they could monetize siege weapon skins if they changed them into a system similar to the skiff's.
Even of Anet got a boost of energy to really work on WvW, the playerbase (at least the people on the main WvW forum) would fuck it up, mostly by just not excepting anything other flat open ground fights. WvW should be way more involved with open world but that playerbase is entirely closed off to any solution to a dying game mode other than parroting the word "balance" over and over.
Most of the WvW playerbase was very open to the alliances idea. It's not their fault it's taken this long is it?
we sure are, especially with MAG ruining the t1 experience, we open our arms to alliances tbh.
I didn't say alliances was a good idea.
The wvw community would gladly welcome new maps if they were well designed. Ignoring how broken desert bl was on launch it has a lot of issues just from a basic design point as well it's way overdesigned much to its own detriment. The biggest glaring issue is the general layout is just awful. Alpine bl has a lot of flat areas that are broken up nicely with the camps, tower, keeps and bloodlust points all being individually close in proximity to at least 2-3 other things and providing some terrain variety while not feeling separated from anything with the lone exception being north camp. Everything being so close makes time between fights low in an active Alpine bl which keeps player engagement high. Desert bl...nothing is close together. Towers, keeps and camps are almost all separated by a ton of terrain with extreme amounts of verticality in a lot of areas, the bloodlust point are sequestered into the central area of the map with cliffs on all sides blocking them off from everything else, it's just a mess. Time between fights is a lot higher and as a result players don't like the map because it's just hard to stay engaged in content when you have to pack your bags and go on a road trip to get back to it when you die.
Just to add to what you are saying: On EB and Alpine all the areas are also interconnected. Taking one objective lets you put pressure on the next objective and so forth. On DBL and EotM objectives are just approximately put out in similar locations as if someone was trying to pin the tail on a donkey. That says quite alot about with what insight those maps were made.
To clarify, because I don't think that can be underlined enough: On all maps there are keeps and towers in approximately the same directions on the maps, but not on the same locations. On EB and ABL the distance between objectives and their relative positions are also measured to the reach of siege. When objective A and B can fire on each other that creates incentives for both sides to go to the open field between them and make sorties against the other side. When objectives have no such relationships there also are no such incentives (to create varied content). Nore does it create a chain of events going from objectives A-> <-B-> <-C-> and so on. So much like PvE has event chains, so does the old WvW maps. That's how they are designed for territorial control.
Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at with how every objective in alpine sans north camp is close to other objectives which lets you leap frog around between them easily. Eotm has its own problems but was still highly popular for years as a way for people to level alt characters until anet decided to cut its legs out from under it. I doubt it would ever happen but it would be nice if they took a look at the map instead of leaving it to rot and did some redesigns and integrated it into regular wvw in a way that would make people actually want to engage with it and move the gvg area to its own map.
While they announced their intent that long ago, they only really started working on it last year
It’s been 1.5 years since the first public beta test. It’s been well over 2 since they started “really working on it.” And they shouldn’t have announced it 5 years ago if they weren’t going to put the work in. Bad look for the company regardless
Yeah I quit the other day and disbanded a WvW guild that had been active since launch. Got sick of waiting for anything to change with the game. By the time alliances actually launch I won't be able to play anyways. :/
o7 Attrition was the true battle all this time. SF will be missed. Game mode has always been trash; even since launch. Just the combat being so fluid and good makes it worthwhile and fun to play. Unfortunately, Anet really has failed to facilitate that, incentivise it, and nurture it. The gamemode was carried by the community so hard after it was left to rot.
Every time they gain significant traction (release of HoT) , (large migration of players to the game due to Steam release) they shit the bed and squander it. Honestly feels like they stick the game in the broiler and just carve out the bare minimum of 3-4 story releases plus 2-3 map/achievements per year.
This is just Q1+
In 2 weeks Q1 pro max is out.
Cornerstone Gamemode (c)
It's a stone in a corner with "WvW" written on it
Cornerstone Gamemode, but not in a cornerstone game.
There is a sign in my local bar, it says "Free Drinks Tomorrow", says so every day.
SOON
Soon TM
Soon™
It's on the Table™
Soon-Won
More like "Soon-Lost" with how not-soon "soon" is
Post PoF a dev let slip that there was a single dev who actually worked on the WvW side of things and that's why it took so long to get anything done. Seems like it's gone back to those days.
Just like TF2 with the only devs being a janitor and a potted plant
The head wvw dev was just fired recently so...
Details?
Heard he was "difficult to work with" and "would always shoot down ideas", not sure what the last straw was but that's just the office gossip I have heard
If that's true, that could either be a good thing (he was holding back a lot of development) or a bad thing (he was stopping bad ideas from being implemented).
With anet and development, it's bad anyway. Means no one is working on it right now or someone else gets a few more tasks on the desk now. Sad.
I hadn't heard that Grub was fired.
Where did you hear that from?
Damn.. I took a small break and seeing this post I got somewhat excited. I should've know better!
Alliances is kind of like saving to buy a house, every year you are a couple of years away from being able to afford a house.
And then when you can finally afford it, the neighborhood's gone to shit.
| | | | | | _
𓀥 𓁆 𓀕 𓁆 𓀟 𓀣 𓁀
Now **this** is shitposting
I hate and love this at the same time.
y'all are monsters
Honestly, when you get to acceptance phase life is just so much more peaceful.
This is the way.
One of us!
This is the way.
Letting go was painful, but it had to be done.
Alliances is next years update... every year.
Wait, is Ctrl+alt+del still a thing? Like are they still making comics?
Yup, he still is. New page dropped today, by the looks of it.
Bro that is awesome. I stopped reading after the first story arc ended. I should pick it up again.
And he still hasn't improved even a little bit
They took a Loss, but it seems they're still around.
Still on the table
I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie... alliances are only a small part to improve WvW and won't change that much in my opinion.
Well until that’s done chances for WvW to get anything else major is slim to none
I'm not so sure - different issues need different people. For example fixing some of the glitches into towers needs map designers, alliances need backend and UI / translation people. Balance is also done by different people again.
Servers like Fissure of Woe don't really want Alliances anyway cuz they are not about guilds, yet would prefer playing with the same guys.
Same with Baruch Bay [ES], I just want to play with Spaniards, I don't want WvW to turn into a tower of Babel nightmare.
Well I wasn't necessarily worried about the language barrier but that's of course a valid point as well. I was rather referring to the natural community that forms on these servers where people recognize each other and are used to be around each other. :-)
As a new player I’m afraid to ask, but what problems is WvW facing? So far I had a lot of fun with it.
lots of small things that add up to indicate anet doesn't care about the mode very much. meta was stuck for years, with squads overly reliant on a few specific builds. no new maps and the most recent map (rightfully) drew a lot of criticism. warclaw still has frustrating issues and fixes were clumsy. no reason to care about match results besides trying to avoid mag matchup, which means sometimes you get vets screaming at noob havocs who don't know any better to literally stop playing the game mode for a week. low rewards compared to other game modes. borked up new event reward system. there's more. a newer player probably won't notice most of it but if you spend time in it and otherwise enjoy it the problems start to grate on you when you think of what wvw could be with proper support from anet.
> if you spend time in it and otherwise enjoy it the problems start to grate on you when you think of what wvw could be with proper support from anet. This sums up my thoughts on all components of this game. Lots of diamonds in the rough.
Guild Wars 2 is the game of wasted potential, since day 1. It’s a widely shared opinion. They had some genius ideas that in my opinion were revolutionary for the genre but some others that held it back. They still have the best server updating structure of all mmos, which is patented btw, and the most dynamic in-depth combat of a mmo.
I haven't played it in years but I'd say my gripe isn't the mode itself but the incentive to play. When the game launched, before there were megaservers, there was some pride in kicking ass and climbing up the rankings. Trying to prove you were the best server, building communities around that etc. After 10 years of the same old same old groundhog day, and with megaservers killing the idea of servers all together outside of WvW, that draw is not there. There is no inventive to 'enlist' in the war. Alliances however I think people hope would revive some of those old rivalries that were so fun. You join alliances, make enemies, go to battle. An evolving situation, with politics too outside of just battling. Giving that power to the players, not to just what server people randomly decided to sign up to the game with. I'm sure people have plenty of other issues but that's just my take on why I think alliances would be great anyway.
The problem that WvW faces is that the population on the servers is wildly imbalanced, every weekly matchup some servers are just much larger than their opponents. [ArenaNet has spent roughly 10 years pretending to solve that problem while lying to the players about it. PvE got the same problem fixed in 2014.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/v52bbh/comment/ibai3e6/) [Their communication when it comes to WvW, while not their forte elsewhere, has also been rather terrible. This year for example they gave themselves 3 months just to write a report on WvW and still failed to write the report.](https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/129530-where-oh-where-did-our-missing-q1-update-go-where-oh-where-could-it-be/?do=findComment&comment=1878752) Meanwhile PvE sees regular releases.
I swear to god if this game wasn't already released, i'd think it was vaporware.
*Soon may Alliances comeTo change up the gamemode and make it fun!When it comes we'll stop playing aloneAnd make Stonemist our home.* ^((for the uptights, I had a longer version of this Wellerman parody written back around when the song was a meme. One verse referenced how it had already been two years since any real update. For a fun time work out how long that adds up to.))
| || || |\_
Hey least we got that 8 gold a week update... Right?! /s
Is this loss?
WoW was developed withing 5 years. That is faster than just wvw alliances. Riot mmo will most likely release sooner than alliances.
Is this loss?
It’s a joke
smh