A lot of servers are suffering from huge faction imbalance and it seems like Blizzard isn’t taking any measures towards this, even though some small fixes would help greatly.
When opening Free character migration, why open it for both factions? This just leads to people in the minor faction uses this function when they get griefed and then it snowballs… If horde is the major faction, then open horde migration only to servers that are in need of hordes.
Now when layering disappears. For example, if a server has 10 000 spots, open 5k ally spots and 5k horde spots at the same time on the server. This will lead to a much longer queue for one faction, but it will also lead to people in the major faction uses the free migration and balancing numbers out. And most importantly, everyone will have a better game experience while on the server.
How would you control this dynamically? Not saying it’s not possible, just asking how would you do it. Say there’s a realm with 1000 horde players and 2000 alliance. You open migrations to horde, they start coming… you cap it at 2000? But server still could use more users. You open alliance too, but maybe horde players keep coming. Do you implement a queue that can close at any moment?
In PvE realms you can have characters in both factions. Queues are for accounts, not characters or factions.
Let’s suppose you change the system so you choose a faction when you log in in such realms. You log in, wait, start playing with one faction. Then you want to change character but have to go back to the end of the line?
At PvE realms you can get griefed for resources through both factions, it doesn’t really matter. Alliance or horde, they are basicly the same, with the exception that you can communicate with one of them.
It would be impossible to do it perfect, but it would surely be better than how it is now. They could have control over the numbers and state that they will lock it when they think it’s more balanced.
Anyhow, I think solution 2 is good and should be possible to implement on PvP realms.
And regarding battlegrounds, what about them? It’s cross realm BG from start.
It doesn’t need to be 50/50. You can have a 40/60 maximum threshold for example. Anything beyond that is just unplayable for the smaller faction and less enjoyable for the bigger one.
Personally I think your method is terribly inconvenient and clunky. I’d rather they went for indirect incentives like boosting rested bonus generation when the population ratio reaches a certain threshold.
We don’t know what they’re going to do, but battlegroups put PvE players with PvE players. And you still have to balance global population, which is the same thing even if easier.
The exact ratio you aim for doesn’t matter. You still have to put in place a method, regardless.
This is quite reasonable. It wouldn’t fix balance issues since the larger faction has few incentives to transfer, but at least it wouldn’t make things worse. The downside is that it would prevent the smaller faction from being able to get away from queues. That I think is why Blizzard isn’t offering faction specific transfers.
This is a hard solution and it would obviously work. It would also be incredibly disruptive. Guilds on the larger faction would be unable to raid for example as queues are 10 hours long for them. That I think would cause players to quit Classic much more than it would cause mass transfers to happen.
Because if you’re trying to reduce the realm population opening a migration which most people will refuse because it will put them at a perceived disadvantage is pointless?
Regardless what anyone says, the vast majority of players are still looking for the path of least resistance to consume their content.
They want to be on the dominant faction where they can (mostly) farm and quest in peace while being able to crush the other faction in world PvP.
Faction balancing server transfers barely have any effect on population.
It seems that we’ll be left to our own devices once more, since I can’t think of any effective solutions this late into the game. But it is what it is.
One method could be having faction specific queue times. If the server population is somewhat balanced in ratio and not exceeding the threshold then both factions will have queue times, else the one with more people will have it.
The best solution would be to not implement cross-server BGs.
Sure, they may have been a thing in 1.12, but if you implement them now, the dominant faction on any server gets to reap the benefits of outnumbering the opposition, while paying little to none of the downsides, such as extended BG queues.
I believe blade and soul has a similar solution to that problem.
Lets be honest tho. Blizz classic crew is pretty lazy or lack the means to do anything. The support is pretty bad as well compared to what it used to be