So I came up with this solution entirely by my own brain and not by listening to the one they call Asmongold.
sarcastic nerd laugh
“Dynamic Faction Queue” ^TM
Limit the number of Horde (and alliance) allowed on a server at a time, that way you give the Alliance a fighting chance, the Horde will have to form pugs to hunt for honor etc.
If you’re already dynamically spawning resources and NPC’s, why not dynamically adjust the player pool?
Or just ughh… bring layering back and put layerchange cd on it… kicks rock and whistles
I don’t know, maybe because resources and NPC’s don’t pay a monthly fee to play the game. How would this even fix anything? Just because there would be an equal % of players of each faction, doesnt mean an equal amount of players of each faction online would participate in PVP. You could even be locking the players that WOULD participate in the PVP in a queue.
This honestly might be one of the worst ideas i’ve ever heard.
The problem is that there are literally no other solutions.
Only a minority of minorities would faction change knowing what awaits them as of now.
Even if you did open up free/paid server/faction transfers, you’re not going to see people attempting to fix the issue.
Honestly you’d just have the opposite. Humans like the path of least resistance, the outnumbered faction on any server would just move away.
I don’t know, Kaizem. You say people pay a monthly fee to play the game, but have you tried playing the game as the minority on a 70:30 server? Gl playing anything.
With regards to you, Doolist, if you sincerely think that even if the playerbase was given the tools to fix this themselves, that they would, that my friend is true shortsightedness.
Seems like we have a retail player here, with the same self-serving agenda as the OP.
Good to know.
Who the hell said anything about “even if the player base was given the tools” on and on and on?
I never said that. So what the f are you talking about?
I just said the suggestions themselves, as they are, in the OP’s post, are some of the laziest suggestions one can think of. Which they are.
What kind of magical pill did you take today? So to provide feedback, one must come up with better ideas? Is that how it is? Where is that rule posted, can you provide a link?
A terrible change won’t make things better, even though it is a change. You’re just trading bad things for other bad things.
Is calling someone a retail player supposed to be an insult? I’ve played this game for quite a long time chief, and regardless of whether I’ve played more Vanilla than you or not, if I didn’t value Classic’s design philosophy, I wouldn’t have levelled to 60, geared up, established myself in a social community, and now be concerned about the health of the game.
I’m talking about there not being any other solution, asking people politely to transfer isn’t going to work, and you’ve already admitted to not having any ideas of your own, so what dog have you in this race? I wonder if you refer to these ideas as self serving because you yourself do not yet have to deal with the repercussions of faction disparity?
So you’re saying that a change that would provide a healthy gameplay experience for those currently playing the game is a change for the sake of change? You would suggest leaving the game as it is?
I do not believe that you need to provide an answer of your own in order to critique the input of others, and it’s inarguably not even our job as the playerbase to solve an issue created by Blizzard themselves.
However, trawling the forums and calling other people “retail players” (as if we didn’t all play retail at some point, even if that was retail Vanilla), and attempting to discredit others is far from productive.
Except I do. Alliance is dominating most of the time on the server. Have to let the tag fall off before going above ground in UC every damn time it’s up, it’s very annoying. But it’s part of the game. I can’t even run to Scholo without a gank squad camping the bulwark. You can also forget about world farming spots.
It’s still part of the game, not everything is supposed to be handed to you on a silver platter. If you want that, go to retail.
As for why the suggestions in the OP are lazy and self-serving, it is obvious to one who can use their head normally but ok I’ll explain it to you. Seems like you need an explanation.
The amount of people unable to even play would grow by an incredible amount. But it would inevitably get rid of that “uneven pesky WPvP” that’s getting in his way.
Layers speeds up the growth of a server economy, and leads to much faster inflation. I’ll just assume you know the basic concept of inflation at least.
It also leads to BoEs and other rare world drops or for example the crusader formula becoming less rare since they’re not as competed for by both factions when they can just hop in their own layers as they did before, questing becomes easier, and gathering professions benefits from all of this as well since there are 2x, 3x, 4x and so on, times the resources of a single layer as well as less competition in each layer for them.
Basically it makes it easier to play. Accept the challenge. Crybaby.
We can get one thing out of the way immediately, I’ve been a diehard advocate of killing layering ever since Classic’s release, and have gone out of my way to state my displeasure at the idea of them returning in numerous other threads.
You say that having a 50:50 or 45:55 faction ratio would not improve the quality of gameplay for everyone involved, I’m curious as to why you think it wouldn’t, please elaborate.
I too personally do not particularly care about the faction imbalance. I have been happily raid logging and doing the occasional lasher farming in an instanced area where population does not affect me, however my personal views are not relevant. This situation as it stands is a detriment to the health of the game, regardless of how you or I feel. You appear to merely have assumed my personal stance, along with my status as a “retail player”.
You go on to comment about the number of people unable to play growing should something like a dynamic faction queue be implemented, but it’s not any different to telling people to reroll. Not every player enjoys a 70:30 split where attempting to land at any given flight point results in chain camping for upwards of 30 minutes; this is not “uneven pesky WPvP” which you seem to have quoted from somewhere, this is miserable for everybody involved.
I never claimed that. I’m saying you’ll have people locked out and become unable to play because the server wouldn’t let them in due to the “dynamic queues” as explained in the OP’s suggestion.
That’s just an indirect way to force people to switch server. The problem is having allowed the establishment of social networks on servers already.
How is that any different from just them moving people arbitrarily on their own? The hatred from the players wouldn’t really be much different.
You literally just went down on record saying that it wouldn’t, offering no further explanation.
Yes you’ll have people locked out, but I propose to you a question.
What seems like a better solution? Asking people to please move server of their own volition, hoping sheer goodwill alone across potentially hundreds of thousands of players to fix this issue of its own accord.
Or
Proposing a situation to the player base, IE, a queue time for a dominant faction, and thus allowing them to make their own decision as to whether or not they deem the occasional inconvenience worth their time.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, it IS an indirect way to force people to switch server. Just like asking them to transfer, or angrily yelling at people to reroll.
The difference is, those two other options don’t work. People will hate it, but again, you’ve already said you yourself cannot think of another option. This is the real world, nobody is going to die if they sit in a queue.
The other “option” is you allow the servers to stagnate, you can already see the motions in Horde leaving ZT en masse to avoid disparity. Before too long PvP servers will all consist of one faction and at that point it’ll be too late. This is what I was referring to as shortsighted in my original post. This isn’t about coloured pixels on the backgrounds of avatars, this is about common sense and logic, as you mentioned prior. We all know what the problem is, Blizzard cocked up, what we need now is an answer before things become irreparable.
I never said it wouldn’t. It doesn’t count as gameplay if you’re not in the game, you know? But for those inside the game, of course it would get better. But that’s only for those inside the game.
Depending on the “dynamic” parameters set in the queue, if you’d need 1 horde for 1 alliance, or if the queue kicks in every player difference of 100 or so on, you’d still need both factions to log in at the same times and grow it slowly. How would you also regulate the people logging out? What if one faction have more people logging out than the other within an hour, and thus there’s still unbalanced factions at those times?
You haven’t given it enough time. You seem oblivious to what frustration that builds up over time can make people do. It takes time though.
An example of this effect is the tank shortage. An abnormal amount of people rolled dps instead of healers or tanks, and most notably the tank shortage.
This has had an effect already, and will continue to affect a lot of people, to make their own alts with the intention of tanking on them. People balance this out on their own, because the frustration serves as a motivation.
However, it takes time. I’m not talking about a day. I’m not talking about a week. I mean several months, if not a year.
Allowing people to transfer should queues prove too troublesome, and then logging in on a new server with less imbalance is a pretty reasonable way to resume gameplay.
With regards to parameters, I am not a game designer. They would undoubtedly require careful consideration and execution, however I can say with relative confidence that if people are being driven away from the game in its current state, you’d be hard pressed to make things worse even given the extreme worst circumstances of the implementation of such a system.
You say I haven’t given it enough time, but what you seem oblivious to is the fact that this is a game. Why should players be driven to such extreme frustration that they either reach wits end and attempt to correct an issue that they played no part in themself, or simply quit?
You cannot compare a situation like this to the tank shortage. At least with a tank shortage, players can participate in the game world, even if it means they sometimes struggle to find dungeon groups. You expect hundreds of thousands of other people to just tolerate the sheer tedium of not even being able to leave their own capital just because you and I as two individuals can? There is a line to be drawn between “grow a pair and fight back” and unreasonable. That is quite frankly unreasonable.
God forbid a frustration induced “solution” take a year to come to pass, with the rate that content is currently being sped along at, Naxx might be out before then, however that’s a topic for another thread.
Source for this? What’s the comparison to the influx of players? What did you imagine was the expectation when creating classic servers?
They always expected a certain amount of people would quit because it doesn’t fit the people’s habit of being exposed to instant gratification.
They also want people back to retail, you know? That’s where they earn most of their microtransactions.
Look around you. Yeah, forums are not a good indicator of public perception, I would love to be able to see a figure myself, but alas, Blizzard killed Census addons early on.
You think it an unreasonable assessment when you have servers like Shazzrah? Like Zandalarian Tribe where Horde and Alliance players alike are rallying for better faction balance? Where players are actively transferring off of it due to gameplay experience? Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it’s fine, but it doesn’t look like it, and it’s not hard to see why.
With regards to the latter statement, we’re all unfortunately doomed if that is the case, perhaps we’ll all be “retail players” before too long, or maybe we’ll all return to the private servers where the bulk of this movement all began.
Yeah… How can I compare a situation like the tank shortage where people are motivated to level up an alt to 60 simply to rid themselves of the frustration, to a situation where people will eventually choose to either reroll, transfer to another server or swap faction because they don’t get their “needs” met on their current server…
How can I…
Oh wait, I just did.
Because players had a choice in what class they selected. Players did not have a choice in choosing a server only for it to be one of the servers that ended up being massively skewed in favour of one faction.