this is sort of a hindsight topic since the damage is done, and i made a thread back in September also detailing concerns here in Flamelash in regards to a doomed playerbase, and i’m wondering if this could have been prevented or if Blizzard simply doesn’t care about PvP servers turning into PvE servers due to lack of opposition for the majority faction.
we know Blizzard knows overpopulation is a bad thing considering they closed off the first realms and opened dozens of other ones to help spread the load of players, but we also know that faction imbalance isn’t healthy either, and i’m wondering why Blizzard didn’t step in to help remedy it.
even now with refugees from Flamelash transferring to other realms, they’re now also inadvertently causing imbalance to the servers they are migrating to and Blizzard doesn’t care about the impact made, Earthshaker was a balanced realm, now it’s not, and perhaps in the future all the inconvenienced Horde players will similarly transfer to another realm and the whole domino effect of constantly fluctuating power balances will persist for some time until each realm is positively devoid of balance altogether.
is a 50/50~ balance the ideal and is faction balance even worth it? if it is, then why was there no support for the minority factions? why is there no incentive given for players to join the minority over the majority? when you allowed transfers to happen on these realms, did Blizzard know they inadvertently turned a PvP realm into a PvE one? why allow character creation for majority factions to begin with? all of this only helps to ostracize the minority from playing.
naturally the damage is being done by player behavior, but i feel it should’ve been Blizzard’s job to help regulate balance because i do feel that is the best way a realm can be experienced.
Even if all factions were perfectly balanced Alliance players will still complain because as a whole they just aren’t as PvP oriented as the Horde (the problem mysteriously vanishes when they dominate the server however).
Perfect balance is impossible and there’s no real way to fix the current imbalance issue without either A) forcing Alliance players to transfer to low Alliance pop servers to balance out the servers (virtually impossible) or B) forcing Horde players to transfer to Alliance.
nothing, ultimately i want player behavior to dictate how realms look like, i’m just opening discussion whether or not faction balance is actually important for PvP realms in regards to AQ coming up and WPvP, and if that balance is worth pursuing.
not micro manage, but i’m wondering how people think about balance, and if it’s important for the longevity of Classic.
this isn’t just a Alliance specific complaint, but the complaints will shift to different issues, Horde won’t be 20-man camping the flight path in a major city on a balanced server for instance, Alliance won’t have the complaint of nobody to play with, which are social issues rather than gameplay ones.
Blizzard could have slowed this down considerably by being very careful with non-faction specific transfers. If those universal transfers had been turned off the moment the queues went down to a couple hours we probably wouldn’t be in this situation yet. The process as a whole is player driven so it will always happen. Completely open transfers just make it way faster than it would be otherwise.
Now it’s kind of too late though for many servers. There is no reversing a server like Flamelash without some complex server merging to put together all the Alliance that it needs. The least bad thing to do now is to let everyone escape.
If a PVP server gets to the point where one faction is camping the other factions major cities then IMO it is that factions server.
Isn’t that what a PVP server is supposed to mean? Player vs Player, if the Alliance ,for example, overwhelmed the Horde so bad that they can just sit in Orgrimmar then wouldnt you agree that it’s an Alliance server? Now it also means that it would become a mostly PVE server after that, but to say that one faction beating the other faction in a PVP server shouldnt be possible is just agaisnt the very definition of PVP in my opinion atleast.
Also the thing about balance is, you cant garantee it. You can have 2500 Alliance vs 2500 Horde on one server. In theory there’s a balance there right? But in practice, the players on Alliance side might only have 30% of active world pvpers while the Horde can have 60%. That would be a 2:1 ratio even though the server is “balanced”.
it’s the only balance that can be mandated by Blizzard because you can’t really enforce player activities, when i say balance i literally just mean the rudimentary number of players because just having the numbers alone will be a deterrence to some of the stuff that took place that caused so many people to just leave outright.
As i explained in the rest of the post, the number of players does not equate to any sort of balance.
People left because they rolled in a PVP server without actually knowing what a PVP server was. Maybe you can argue that was blizzards fault, maybe there shouldve been more PVE realms at launch. I will agree with that.
but the number of players on Alliance side does dictate whatever Horde is allowed to do, if there’s several hundred players in Ironforge, then you’ve already discouraged players from running to the opposing faction’s city for Honor grinding by camping the Flight Master, that’s only something people do because of a lack of population so it’s easier to get away with those practices.
those are equal conditions, which is a balance, having majority in numbers already enables you to engage in PvP more, naturally Alliance players are going to avoid PvP when they show up in lower numbers, Horde players do the exact same thing, does that mean Horde players don’t want to play on a PvP realm because they know they have no chance fighting 1v10? why the double standard?
people left because they didn’t want to sit in the ruins of a dying server, you say this as if Horde players WOULDN’T want to transfer if the tables were turned.
people independent from their factions don’t sign up for PvP because they WANT to exclusively get corpse camped, ideally they also want to fight back and actually partake in PvP rather than just being the recipient.
Any imbalance is obviously deliberate from blizz. They could have forced balance but didn’t. They could have forced lower pop but didn’t. Therefore this just how it’s meant to be, and different realms offer different challenges. Quitter types are better off on pve realms.
There will be lot of mono faction servers, especialy if blizzard decide to implement tools to give us faction balance. Horde players will have to decide to live on alliance empty realms or reroll alliance at some point.
why not? are we talking about Blizzard the indie company here? aren’t we paying monthly fees for a 15 year old game so they can do exactly that?
this doesn’t have to be manual labor, Blizzard obviously has the data on population on either faction, it goes past a certain threshold the option for a faction becomes grayed out and unavailable at that time for people who haven’t already gotten a character on that faction already on that particular realm.
i don’t know what kind of framework or features they need to implement that, but that doesn’t sound like dark magic to me.
You wish… if they still were an indie they probably would be a lot more flexible.
No, you are paying for access to Retail. And that access gives you Classic as a perk.
People are treating Classic as if its the centre of the Universe… its not. Its a perk for paying for access to World of Warcraft.
But it does. Everything is automated these days and so is Classic. They can’t make small course changes because that is not how it works.
Issues have to be taken through the management structure until it reaches a point where important decisions can be made. Until then it gets the automated treatment and the standard fixes.
No, not dark magic. But months and millions at the very least. And for that to happen a lot of meetings are needed and a very good sales pitch.
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cool, so we agree that it shouldn’t have to require a human touch to make this work, thanks for being on the same page.
let’s be honest, if Blizzard can release Classic 15 years after Vanilla, then months is chump change, same goes for “millions” as if Blizzard isn’t flushing millions down the toilet as we speak with ventures like OWL.
From what I read on forums it looks like most people do not care as historically most PVP servers also turned into mono-factioned realms so for them it´s another “no changes” feature.
I would personally want to see some preventive actions taken by Blizzard, but since I am really the minority, there is nothing I can do and I will just watch the servers die.
