I have to agree. I haven't been active on the forums or the game at all lately but I keep up with the news in the hopes of the game becoming better. When I saw alliances I knew that it was going down the wrong path. This is a topic I can't stay quiet on. I don't see how anybody is excited for this, or how Rare thought it'd be a good idea. Let me paint some pictures of what you can expect a minimum of 60% of the time you play SoT after alliances release:
1: Join or die. You'll join a server and sail around doing whatever. After a while you'll notice a group of ships approaching you. They'll be telling you to either join the alliance or have fun spending the rest of your session evading them. That'll be super fun, right?
2: Betrayal, obviously. What is the point of even keeping an alliance going? Rare said you'll get a cut of the alliances loot. Sounds cools, right? Well what about when you realize that instead of a cut you can take it all when your "teammates" aren't paying attention? You truly believe that isn't going to happen over and over and over again when grouping up with random people you've never met before, in a pirate game? (that'll be one of their favorite things to say after they betray you.)
3: Endless pvp, but not in the way us pvpers asked for. I can already see this happening more often than not. We sink a ship. Quick battle, take their loot and move on. 5-10 minutes later they're back, with another ship. Now we have to fight 2 crews. Lets say we win again. Now they're back 20 minutes later with 3 ships. This is how it's going to be. This can be fun once in a while, but not when it happens endlessly.
But my biggest reason for not liking this is that it's going to force us (yet again) to play the game a certain way. We'll have to either team up and be friendly or worry that the entire server is gonna come after us. I didn't buy this game to make friends, I have friends. I just want to play with the people I crew up with. If I have to join an alliance every time I play just to be left alone I'm just not going to play anymore. I like the makeshift alliances the game currently lets you form, the uneasiness is what makes them so much more fun. I don't want to have to endlessly fight groups of ships because I don't feel like joining them to give them a share of my work because I sure as hell don't need a share of theirs.
This basically only seems like a good idea to 1 type of person, lazy. People who just want the most reward for the least work. They'll join severs and try to get everyone in an alliance so that they can reap the benefits of accelerated exp/gold. Or they just know they can't win fights so they'll join an army. I just really hope that when these come out they let us pick between servers with and without them.