Alliances

Alliances were the second planned phase of World Restructuring, where World vs World was to use groups of player guilds for matchmaking instead of servers.

No Beta Events of the Alliance functionality have been scheduled, though ArenaNet have released mock-ups and design diagrams for how Alliances might function

Planned functionality

Alliances would allow one Guild to invite another into an Alliance of Guilds, subject to a cap which will initially be set to 500, the same cap as an individual Guild.. Guilds would need to accept the invite. This is mechanically similar to how alliances in the original Guild Wars game functioned.

Once a guild is in an alliance, all allied Guilds would be considered as a single unit for the purposes of matchmaking, and all players with one of the allied guilds set as their WvW Guild would be placed on the same team.

Development

There was a beta for Alliances planned for early to mid-Summer 2023 however it did not happen as part of the June 6, 2023 World Restructuring beta test .

In September 2023, ArenaNet announced that Alliances were deprioritised, wanting to release the main World Restructuring changes first

In December 2023, an interview with ArenaNet's Game Director revealed that they're looking at solutions for allowing "super guilds" that don't require the investment that Alliances would.

Alternative (current) implementation

Players were provided with a sixth guild slot, for the purposes of making a larger "alliance" guild. This allows players to choose their one of their six slots as the alliance guild, without requiring them to leave any existing guilds. This achieves many of the original goals of the alliance system, with the benefit of being much simpler to implement.

At this time there appear to be no plans to introduce the originally planned alliance system.