Sharding with WM on - Faction imbalance

Community General Discussion
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Disclaimer: This ISN’T alliance only problem but as an alliance player, I’ll write this post from my own point of view.

I really don’t understand how Blizzard designed the shard system when the goal was to improve the gaming experience and not destroy it!

I do think that a similar technology should exist to distribute players populations in the game but the execution of the current system is just bad.

Faction imbalance is probably a hard problem to solve, I mean you can’t force players to change faction and even if Blizzard were to bring racials more closer together many players wouldn’t spend the money to transfers when it costs like €30 per character.

How are you supposed to do WPvP when you are outnumbered? what’s the point of having a 30% buff when you get destroyed? I get that the idea is to give players an incentive to turn on WM but it doesn’t solve anything, in fact, I thought that the quest “Against Overwhelming Odds” and the increase to the buff was meant to be temporary solution but from my experience it doesn’t really work.

Nazjatar:

The horde are controlling everything, we didn’t even take a single War Supply Chest in Nazjatar! not to mention trying to do the Battle for Nazjatar, we barely hold 1 flag when they control everything else.

Here are some images from one of the battles I’ve done today:

  1. https://imgur.com/OScWlyA
  2. https://imgur.com/fDWlMDM
  3. https://imgur.com/Rspq7rF

Now on top of all of this there was insane lag… so not only you are outnumbered but you can’t even use any of your abilities due to the massive lag as if server can’t even handle the load and I checked the latency was about ~60ms both in home and world.

Mechagon:

In Mechgon you can’t do any of the objectives, especially things that you need to kill like rares, the horde are just all over the place so I do the PvP quests by picking up the chests and then the only way for me to complete the remaining quests is to turn off WM which is unfortunate.

Here is another image from Mechagon: https://imgur.com/GzAUNkC

Open World

Another problem which I encountered with sharding is few days ago a Druid and a Rogue ganked one of my alts in Nazjatar so I tried to log to my main and give them a fair fight but I couldn’t because I was on a different shard so I couldn’t see them and this probably has nothing to do with Nazjatar specifically but can happen anywhere else.

I already wrote a similar post about it and since then there were two hotfixes that tried to solve the problem and in practice it’s like nothing is done.

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Premade group tool’s + sharding tech trying to balance the zone’s player base(also even the number of A:H odds), meanwhile the servers go bonkers cause of the farm raid’s(from premade group) in the zone = very poor WM ON experience.

Yes it is a problem and needs fixing for wpvp in WM ON i completely agree.Players will always try to go with the least amount of effort/time for the rewards,and everyone talks about balance but none actually want it.The design team should keep that in mind.

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scrap sharding. it dont work. admit it and move on.

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Blizzard could use sharding to force even shards of equal alliance and horde players but I think the problem is much larger than that. There are simply not enough alliance warmode players to balance out shards.

If a 30 percent bonus is not enough to entice alliance players to play with warmode on then nothing is. When Blizzard introduced the warmode bonus, it worked then for alliance because Zuldazar and Boralus have more zones and varying terrain where you have a chance to rome around without getting killed too much.

Mechagon is a very small and congested zone, with not many places to hide if you are alliance with warmode on. With Natzjatar there are more places to hide but it is still compact plus there are more mobs.

Blizzard could try to either have more npcs in alliance areas to help out the lack of alliance warmode players or try to make the shards smaller to help balance it out. I am not sure at this point if they raised the warmode bonus to 50 percent alliance players would even turn it on.

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Well if possible they could try to balance it out as far as possible, and once the amount of players from the outnumbered faction run out then the overpopulating faction will simply have to accept being in shards with zero opponents. Congrats on the free % bonus, shame that you can’t complete any pvp quests or experience any pvp.

That’s assuming of course that the shard tech allows for such fine balancing.

I might also add that I think the pvp quests they added (kill 25 players ones) are probably exaggerating the problem. If nothing else I’m rather tired of being treated a like a quest mob. It’s not even fun to do them for the same reason.

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It’s very confusing. I’m in the RP shard so huge number of Alliance compared with Horde. Pop on a Warmode Horde char, head to Nazjatar, can’t do much as Alliance are attacking the base in huge numbers. So I swap to an alliance char also RP shard but different realm, and huge numbers of Horde are attacking the Alliance base. Eh??? Same supposed sharding yet two completely different numbers of players around. In theory if both ‘raids’ were playing in the same shard/space there would be some balance but for some reason they weren’t.

If at the very least they gave places like Rustbolt better sanctuary status such as with Dalaran…guards that would one shot for instance, players on both sides might be able to do some content without the huge pendulum swings from gankfest one side to gankfest on the other.

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In BfA zones, each player is on one of many normal or RP zone shards. Your RP shards are populated from region RP realms, but players can be on either shard type via cross shard groups.

Faction balance will vary from shard to shard. Individual realms and their faction balance are not relevant in War Mode, it’s region normal and RP WM on population that matters, because excess of one faction are shunted to single faction overflow shards. The more region normal/RP imbalance there is, the more of those overflow shards there will be.

I’m surprised shards work as well as they do, what with all that’s constantly going on; cross shard groups forming/disbanding, natural player distribution in zone/subzone, zone features/events affecting player subzone distribution, players entering/leaving zones, players joining/leaving instances, logging in/out. A lot going on. I feel outnumbered some of the time, sometimes even-ish, sometimes outnumberer. Never one of these all the time. Variety I like.

Player distribution, etc. means imbalance can happen anywhere in a zone, so to create perfect balance, every individual area of the zone would have to be force 50/50 balanced. That would cause a sharp increase in players appearing and disappearing to maintain that area’s balance. Plus, who says your ‘allies’ will help anyway, in which case the area is still imbalanced even with 50/50.

I suspect the zone shards are balanced the way they are, to make War Mode a sufficient challenge, a hard mode. Being outnumbered is a challenge that’s for sure, but rewarding to overcome and shift balance of power to your faction, even if temporary. As outnumberer, you get the benefits, but may be challenged. But also, making shards stricter in their zone balancing, or less strict, could make the WM experience worse. Stricter = more players appearing/disappearing to fill slots in the shard, bad. Less strict = excessive imbalance, bad. The way it is now = happy medium.

Single faction overflow shards are the biggest problem. Then you have zero enemies, no WPvP, free bonus, no challenge. Bringing region faction balance closer is all that can be done to reduce the overflow shards. How else to do that without incentives for outnumbered. In a way that doesn’t cause new problems for a section of players. It was working okay until patch, then back to 30% bonus and I assume more overflow shards. I presume things will settle back to ‘normal’.

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I do get the theory behind it but in practice it just doesn’t seem to be working as intended when it always seems to shard in a few vs a huge number nomatter where people are. Unless of course the intention is to always have one side be facerolled.

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honestly i’ve never seen a single time, sharding provided a balanced environment.

Right now, I’m in the middle of a nazjatar battle and alliance outnumber horde 10 to 1.

Same thing happened a while back with horde outnumbering alliance 10 to 1. It’s never EVER balanced.

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Had it once, it was very fun Battle of Nazjatar, not just for winning but because it started out as a back and forth untill we managed to gain enough assassins and eventually took a good lead! It timed out even. No gankign at Fps or towns, just fights at and in the immediate area of the flags. All my other wins depsite people claiming it’s fun to win when forced the to go LFG raid, boring as hell. If they removed the event I wouldn’t bat an eye. I wouldn’t care at all, it’s either overwhelm the Horde with a zerg raid or be overwhelmed on your own shard for me.

But yeah 0 times I ever saw mechagon or any other shard in 8.2 balanced. They were not even close. It’s gotten to the point going to my daily mechagon visit I dread it, “How much will I be outnumbered now…”. 9 out of 10 times I don’t even fight 1vs1 anymore since I know if I fight back I get jumped by a locust swarm of Horde to save their buddy. Most people I can’t help because they are attacked 5vs1 for example, helping them just give the Horde players an extra free kill.

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I’m impressed. I’ve never been in a shard where alliance holds a flag at all. Most of the few WM on alliance seem to prefer sitting in town when the Battle is on and the few who are trying to take the flags don’t communicate so we have no chance of meeting at the same flag at the same time.
I turned off WM the other day as I needed to do some quests and was fed up with a horde raid vs me wherever I went and was amazed at the number of alliance who were running around questing etc.

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Well. you missed the 2 shards i’ve been in today. alliance held all the flags and they outnumbered us 10 to 1.

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To be fair I haven’t been playing today … was watching cricket. But I’ve never been in an alliance dominated shard and would really love to find out what it feels like.

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I have a question what’s an mvp on the forums is it like a gm or a beta tester?

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It’s boring either way. Being in a dominated or dominating shard feels not so great.

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You’re probably right, but I’d like a chance to find out :wink:

I’m just an ordinary player, but I was made an mvp on the customer support forums as, generally, I can answer stuff for other players having problems when there aren’t blues around such as at night, so people can get back to playing more quickly. I also show up as green on the other forums though there are specific community greens who post here.

This is a description of what community mvps do, though it’s pretty much what CS mvps do too:

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Only reason we could barely hold it is we were a group of friends. :wink:

I turned off WM the other day as I needed to do some quests and was fed up with a horde raid vs me wherever I went and was amazed at the number of alliance who were running around questing etc.

atm, I do what I have to with WM on and then turn it off.

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Come join any of the realms in the RP shard and your wish will become true!..on second thoughts, please don’t, we’ve already got 3 times as many Alliance there lol :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well today we won but the horde were so many it was like they were using lag hacks. Reminds me of ashran where it was so laggy they almost got me but i waited on a mushroom thingy to get it all loaded out.

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