I doubt that this has to do with hiding faction ratios, or if it does then Blizzard is being very naive. The information is out now and people will simply assume that the winning side keeps on winning even if the updates stop. That will keep pushing factions towards imbalance.
The only information based solution that might work is to lie about the faction status. If Blizzard published official statistics that were intentionally doctored to guide players towards a more balanced state it might actually achieve something.
Perhaps. But if they were caught doing that, could you imagine the sheer amount of flame/rage/bad press? No chance. I think theyāll look to do damage control (again, if that is why they broke Census - IF they broke Census) and then fix it with Free Faction Transfers. As you said, the data is already out there, though they may try and damage / counter its validity.
Also, furthermore to my last post (as an aside, as it just crossed my mind) - capping the faction at 55% wouldnāt work. Especially on servers that already exceed that cap. One would have to force people to leave the server or re-roll to a new faction, potentially losing a lot of progress / friends and guilds etc. And that would be an absolute cluster#%*& of an idea.
I like Census. I started using it because I didnt believe Wowpop which only showed 4:3 horde to alliance ratio, which felt way off (server=stonespine). My experience was it was more like 5:2 and in places already avoided by alliance (like STV) close to 4:1.
Figured Wowpop just has too little data and chose to contribute myself after some reports it now shows 4:2, closer to what it feels like.
Census became also a more interesting thing to look into. It showed me we have 2 lvl 60 guilds already, which I didnt expect. Shows the top guilds by XP, and if a guild named CTRL ALT ELITE (by in 2006 already stale) actually did attract a lot of members, and sadly it did.
It did confirm mages as most played class, and much more priests than seen in true vanilla. 3rd most played class. And such more little info to be gained from census.
As for Blizz banning it, perhaps the quering took too much requests, like a mini DDOS. It did take 27 min to complete on my PC anyway.
it would fix the issue. but tbh, there is only 2 things that matter about faction balance on a server:
AH health,
number of āgoodā guilds. usually correlating with higher population.
if you wanted to play horde for any of the reasons above you gave, you could still do so on another server. there are about 260 EU retail servers, basically about 80% of which are low/unhealthy. the amount of players it would take to fill 1 factions cap, in this case horde, on EVERY one of those 260 servers would be MASSIVE. and while wow might get more players in the future, it might need to increase its sub count 4 fold before faction capping would be an issue. now i know this is about classic, but the same logic applies. open a few more classic servers, shut down dead retail ones, and balance will balance itself via faction capping. after all, āmostā people who are after pvp would want some sort of balanced fight. too outnumbering, and the opposite faction will just stop pvp. too outnumbered, and you will stop pvp, and by those wowhead figures released recently, horde/alliance balance does seem close to 50-50 atm.
note, i did tangent a bit, cause i started thinking that this was about retail, but faction capping would still help, both BfA and classic.
No worries about going on a tangent mate, thoughts tend to ramble, especially when weāre passionate about the subject at hand =]
I have a thought in regards to your response, one I brought up earlier in separate post to Trajan. I see you mention the myriad of Retail servers, but that got me thinking about the minimalist approach Blizzard have taken with Classic servers thus far. We donāt really have a lot of wiggle room, though there are certainly a few that could potentially be merged.
That said, given the data I have seen released by Census, I can tell you for certain that some servers appear to have a massive Horde / Alliance ratio slant. Weāre talking 40 / 60 or even 30 / 70 one way or the other. On these servers, using your idea of a 55% capā¦ What would happen to all of those players already over that cap? To bring it down to the bar, Blizzard would have to force people to leave the server or re-roll to a new faction, potentially losing a lot of progress / friends and guilds etc that they made along the way. This would really upset a lot of people and cause a huge amount of backlash? Do you have an idea how this could be mitigated?
not massively. i have mentioned the faction capping from WAR many times over the last decade in forums, and im sure that blizz were not unaware of WAR. im fairly sure a lot of the ideas for WG came from the city attacks that were meant to be a thing in WAR, so they should have known about faction caps to keep balance. also, WAR was going to be the big competition to WotLK, so they knew about WAR.
force-ably moving people would be wrong and would be too problematic for all the reasons you listed. faction capping should have been done at the start of classic before imbalance ever became an issue.
what they should do is:
faction cap any existing servers, to stop them getting even more out of hand. a server might be able to handle a 70/30 imbalance, if maybe 40% of the higher side never actually pvped, or maybe they leave classic. this means that not now, but in the future there might be a better balance.
any new servers created should be capped around 50%~. 55%~ tops.
the problem is that blizzard dont seem that great at closing the barn door before the horse has bolted. SO many times over the last 5 years they have implemented things that go wrong fairly quickly, then they need to do a work around āfixā when all it needed was just a bit of forethought and the blatant issues could have been avoided. 1 current example is the HoA. essences have been brought in because of how badly the HoA was designed for 8.0.
and its the same here. you can look at nearly any BfA server, and a lot of them have faction imbalance. did anyone really think such imbalance would not happen with classic? no. at least not among the players. hence, faction capping should have been implemented before classic was released.
but as you said, we are here now, and there is no easy fix now the horse has already bolted all we can do is to try stop the problem getting worse, especially when(if?) there is a dropoff of classic players that make some servers not as viable as they currently are.
That actually sounds like a potentially viable solution. And I hope itās one Blizzard are considering - thanks for talking it through with me, instead of throwing a fit like a lot of posts I see on the forums I honestly didnāt know Warhammer: Age of Reckoning had a faction cap system - and from what youāve said, I assume it worked?
Personally, I think capping could be dangerous and cause backlash. But then, so will server imbalance. Which one works out the least bad for Blizzard? Iāve not got the data to say. But youāve certainly sold me on the idea of a faction cap. Though, that said, I would probably set it at a max ratio of 40-60. 20% looks bad on paper, but in terms of PvP? That boils down to a 4v5 fight in a perfect statistical world.
unfortunately the cynic in me is long past giving blizzard the benefit of the doubt, especially when it comes to matters that could be foreseen so easily
lol thats grand. most people have more in common than not. you could agree with 90% of things, but depending on how you handle that 10% you dont agree on, you could miss out on working with someone who could help you with other issues you have. plus, whats the point of bad blood in general. your points were also rational, and thus able to invite my suggestions. the closed minded rants elsewhere on these forums dont allow that back and forth of ideas growing to become a solution.
well, i wouldnāt quite say that. WAR crashed and burned as i recall. i tried to access it about 4-5 years ago and it dont exist. i remember the profession system was needlessly painful. as in proper pain. but i remember the human city looked so nice. but then again, its nearly 12 years ago. i cant remember much of it. i have a few flashes of been a priest of sigmar, and the rogue type character. but it was probably doomed before it started. some of the major āspecsā were not available on release, iirc like one of the orcs (black orc?) and the dwarf slayers, even though the slayers were in the cinematic! almost like WoD one might argue, with a ton of the preplanned content missing! but i dont think it was due to population imbalance. just no population! lol
yeah, you dont want it too stringent, but also not too far. 40-60 could be fine, like you said its only a 4-5 scenario, and even on pvp servers, not 100% of players are pvping 100% of the time!
Iāve filled in a bug report in game. Hopefully if they get lots of reports that people canāt even do a simple /who on one character, they might revert the change.
there is no company in the world that want to made publickly aviable data that they are loosing customers en masse daily just 3 weeks after they launched new product.
I honestly didnāt know Warhammer: Age of Reckoning had a faction cap system - and from what youāve said, I assume it worked?