By underpopulation, let’s set the arbitrary ratio to anything below 2 to 1 balance(33%). As a long time player, I have always seen servers decaying on one side, especially on PVP realms, after ratio moves beyond certain point. People login less and less, sometimes good guilds switching factions. It becomes unstoppable, since there is no incentive to play for underdog faction. World PVP is hell, Auction House is emptier, raid rosters are not reliable, you name it.
I propose a series of significant buffs to the underdog faction;
+1 loot from each dungeon boss once a day(to prevent pure enchanting mats farming). Maybe more for level appropriate groups
+1 loot from each raid boss
Increased damage against world bosses(a reasonable amount)
Faster honor gain
Faster leveling speed(even something between 10% to 20% can make third char leveling tolerable)
Buffs should be deactivated once balance comes back to a reasonable ratio like %40 to %60. What do you think?
I doubt that this will be sufficient as incentive.
This process, once underway, has been like a sudden panic on many servers in recent years. It often happened within a couple of weeks.
And people who like and / or cope with playing underdog, usually have a certain, not too widespread mindset.
It may slow down things a bit early on though.
The only thing that will help is, sadly, to restrict new character creation for players not yet having a character on a realm, if the player population on one side is outside of certain boundaries. Unpopular, I know.
That kind of restriction would only backfire. Sometimes people go to servers or start game where their friends are. Anything that negatively affects the top dog would feel unfair. But giving significant things-even if they may not stop the panic, would greatly encourage revitalization efforts. Of course these should be deactivated for the first couple months of patch release, so world first challenges wouldn’t be affected. But if there is a choice between starting in a 75% side with no buffs to gameplay and to 25% side with great buffs and love for the faction, for most people choice would be clear. People are paying 20 Euro for a leveling addon that is slightly faster than free ones. Entire gold selling business is based on limited loot drops. It might be blueprint for fixing some aspects of Classic edition of the WoW.
This undeserved rightoussness is nauseating. REAL WOW PLAYERS. Give me a break. How about you delete all of your addons, play the game and show us you playing the real thing? Addons literally transform the game in every way, away from Vanilla. Real WoW didn’t have World Buff meta, try to find a NAXX group that is not a boost and accepts you without 15 buffs booned. Real WoW didn’t have coordinating discord groups who decides which players reach Rank 14. What you play currently is Vanilla cosplay at best. Only graphics and damage/health numbers stay the same. Rest is not Vanilla.
But even when I was still raiding (I’m currently not) in Classic or TBC Classic, I’ve never had more than a single digit number of addons installed at any given time. Let alone th 50+ you were assuming earlier
And two of them were Gatherer and Questie, true. I admit to being guilty of using Questie… At the moment I’m using zero addons. Not raiding or farming, just doing a little leveling. What would I need addons for? I don’t even bother updating them.
Now I do not define myself as the average WoW player. But I’m here to play Classic. Something which Blizzard has told us we could do here. I’m fine with new content. As long as the base game is still Classic.
They told us, they’d try to keep the classic feeling in SoD. Well, they’ve utterly failed. Again.
