Do realm population proportions matter?

[njorde]

Thinking of hopping in again after a long exodus. Although, I used to really like WPvP, primarily because it's unfair, but also because it was more personal - it was fun knowing if you kill this guy, he might camp you next time he sees you or tell his guild, etc. But I won't go on one of those rants. I imagine this is, for the most part, dead with X-realm, but I still hope to do a little bit of WPvP even if it's just making friends in major cities. So comes the question.

Does the opposite faction on your server effect your gameplay anymore? How?

[Doctor]

Does the opposite faction on your server effect your gameplay anymore? How?

I can't give specific details, but things are still one-sided on most servers. The only thing I can really suggest is to check out the realmpop website and find a server with as close to a 1:1 ally/horde ratio as possible (thankfully you can sort that way) if you want to find a server with an "even" amount of WPvP. You might want to hold off until at least 6.0 hits if you want to jump back in, otherwise you might have to re-learn how to play twice. Good luck either way!

[BenBos]

Solved in WOD.

Blizzard will make the new open world PvP zone in WOD cross server. To make it work they integrate an instance of 100/100 into the open world zone of WOD without loading screens, so people are not even aware they are in an instance.

Since the overall ratio is something 52/48 in favor of Horde, this will unable them to regroup servers for that open world PvP and so balance the thing.

BTW: 100 vs 100 worked perfectly in Wintergrasp during the last year of WotLK (no lag), but this thime the open world zone will be cross server regrouped. It appears to me the fight will just go on 24/7 that way. Of course this CRZ driven technology opens up new "open world" fights as everything is filled up. You could have 50 open world fights on going. Groups will not be split of course, but Blizzard could limit the Raid members to lower than 40 to balance things out.

For the moment this new mechanic is only used for the new open world PvP zone of WOD.


So for WOD and its only open world PvP zone the server effect has no longer any meaning. But for lower content of course it still relies on individual CRZ tools per world zone (so you have to look at the overall regrouped CRZ's in PvP Realms).

Any way, it is only a matter of time before you reach that 50/50 balance overall as CRZ crossing is very dynamic and can be changed instantly by Blizzard.


EDIT/ The only things that matters for individual servers after WOD to me is the ECONOMY. Because that depends on the success of connected Realms to feed the Auction Houses. I think Blizzard will seek balance in the number of Horde/Allaince per GROUP of connected Realms, so one side has not a big advantage to the other side (I think they should strive to a resonable 60/40 bracket or 70/30 at the most extreme for the economy balance.).

[Redecle]

It does matter, just hopefully Blizzard would also realize this.
Been planning on coming back after a year break for WoD, it seems to have a bunch of nice features incoming,
but before i was enjoying a nearly empty server less than 400 players around 200 per faction.
Evenly balanced and with so few players, rares were available and respawns rate in general was enough not to get stuck waiting on stuff.

Now doing some research after connected realms are mostly in place i would be returning to alliance on connected server with 7k players.
Out of which 6000 are horde and only 1000 alliance. 6:1 ratio doesn't sound tempting at all and makes me seriously reconsider, cause transferring 11 chars would be costing over 200 euros doesn't make sense to return and then pay even more to get to play enjoyably.
7k players would mean AH actually has stuff in it and cities could be populated, but the minus side is also respawns, rares and anything else practical out in the world.
But the bigger problem is the current ratio, with no flying in WoD even on an empty server the wpvp could have been barely tolerable level. This setup would mean just a huge time sink to get leveling or anything done outside cities, cause let's face it people either enjoy or hate the ganking while questing. Mount Hyjal or old Dark Portal are good examples, Mount Hyjal even more so, it was multiple times faster to level even in Vashj'ir than Hyjal even still during MoP (not just Cata), because of the 90s hanging in Hyjal, imagine that in a WoD zone that all the level 100s would even be in regularly not just to specifically gank.

[ComputerNerd]

It does matter, just hopefully Blizzard would also realize this.
Been planning on coming back after a year break for WoD, it seems to have a bunch of nice features incoming,
but before i was enjoying a nearly empty server less than 400 players around 200 per faction.
Evenly balanced and with so few players, rares were available and respawns rate in general was enough not to get stuck waiting on stuff.

Now doing some research after connected realms are mostly in place i would be returning to alliance on connected server with 7k players.
Out of which 6000 are horde and only 1000 alliance. 6:1 ratio doesn't sound tempting at all and makes me seriously reconsider, cause transferring 11 chars would be costing over 200 euros doesn't make sense to return and then pay even more to get to play enjoyably.
7k players would mean AH actually has stuff in it and cities could be populated, but the minus side is also respawns, rares and anything else practical out in the world.
But the bigger problem is the current ratio, with no flying in WoD even on an empty server the wpvp could have been barely tolerable level. This setup would mean just a huge time sink to get leveling or anything done outside cities.

And how do you suggest blizzard "fix it" ?
Artificial caps on numbers of characters etc of various factions is only going to drive players away.
The primary reason IMO is the community.
In some battlegroups there are huge differences in how the factions approach certain content, particularly PvP.

The community is responsible for most of these issues, something players simply opt to ignore as its more "fun" to criticise blizzard than to face the mirror and realise that we are a part of the problem instead.

[Redecle]

Well there's nothing to fix for say the low pop servers anymore cause the streamline is connected servers.
Not that they need a fix, both have their positive impacts. As I said more players is usually richer economy and more stuff in the AH and more buyers if you manage to farm something, specially now since AH is becoming united thing. Minus is of course the rares and respawning in the world. But rare hunting is not even something every players does, usually you see the same faces doing the loops daily. For quest mobs to respawn, well we have to see what Blizzard has in store for the improved questing since they are moving towards more of the adventuring and discovering than static quest grind.

My main point was anyways the server faction balance problem.
If you look at EU all server balance for example it's nearly 50-50, it actually is like 52-48 for alliance.
There was a link to a page on another thread that measures it, of course it wasn't entirely accurate, but gives a rough estimate that the factions in general are in balance.
Now look at my connected realm group Dragonmaw / Spinebreaker / Haomarush / Vashj / Stormreaver.
It has 6 realms, which before around 2 had even balance, even though they were very low pop.
And then it was mashed with 2 horde balanced quite low pop servers and then on top of that Stormreaver was mashed in which was 23 H : 1 A balance and had 5k players.
And that was the end of it, apparently there are no plans to throw in an alliance favored server with similar but opposite ratio like Grim Batol alone would have been to balance that out, of course some other server group got that balance, even though it's highly unlikely even they aren't balanced because of the following reason.
Of course there's a reason to this which is quite clear, they cannot connect PVP and PVE servers. And what do you know.. most of the horde overgrown servers are PVP and most alliance overgrown servers are PVE. Wonder why and what has caused this separation in the first place, there are nearly half as many pvp horde as there are alliance, rough numbers in EU show 160k pvp horde and 90k alliance, yet the wpvp is forced down our throats, that leaves only solution for alliance who don't want that to pay up and move to PVE or horde and this situation just grows worse and worse. Maybe faction switch has something to do with imbalanced racials that are now supposedly to go away or BG objective imbalances, but it took 9 years to get to this point so starting to work it out might be a little late now.

I'm still considering to come back cause there are a lot of tempting features and changes in WoD, but this new server balance worries me that i'm stuck on leveling characters on much longer timespan regardless of faster quest leveling, but because of new Mount Hyjal when more and more opposite faction members reach 100 and get bored and go back to their ways of harassing lower level progression. World pvp zones at max level such as Timeless Isle are fun to compete as is ranked and bg pvp even though you're not the best you still have a theoretical chance, but players who don't make it in those out of frustration or out of just plain evil turn stuff into Hyjal or Hellfire. That's how it's been since TBC and that's the most irritating part of the game. I love playing alts it gives me more stuff to do and not waste my time to feel superior over people that have no chance against a higher level player, but the pain to get to play them is to go through that same moronic behavior 10 times over, stuff that's just a waste of my game time. And another point that has an effect to this, the horde side has huge bg queue times where as alliance side it's nearly instant. Leading more and more horde to search their pvp or "pvp" somewhere else. That ain't the source it's just a effect of the imbalance in factions, the source is deeper it lays with the racials or bg layouts or something like that deep with in the game system that's overlooked. Specially since on the top scale all realm types pvp,pve,rp the factions are nearly even, so it's not that the other faction is more interesting, it lays in the mechanics.

If it's just about racials, we'll see soon enough, eventhough i highly doubt it's going to cause any sort of big movement from faction to another after racials are balanced. People who've leveled 12 alts to a faction aren't going to voluntarily be paying 200+ euros to transfer factions for shorter queues since the racials are balanced and equal. Only way i see after the connected realms are done is to offer free faction change from horde to alliance and still within a quota, 1 or 2 players don't matter but huge guilds can make a big shifts so it needs to be monitored. And make it clear and visible this is to going to help your queue times, since there aren't that big other performance benefits on being a particular faction, other than convenience.

And it doesn't have to be 50-50 balance cause there's always people paying and moving around, but when the ratio is something like 6:1 and you know it's going to take you 9 hours to do a zone while the other side does it in 20 minutes, it leaves you with 3 options, play at 5am only when no ones around, switch factions and be part of the problem or stop playing. I've done them all, early on when i had 1-2 chars i paid and switched around, when i had 11 i stopped paying and played at 5 am instead, when that wasn't possible anymore i stopped playing.

[Enosh]

Does the opposite faction on your server effect your gameplay anymore? How?

yes, the more of them there is the less of the server population I can interact and play with limiting my pool for pugs and limiting guild options since there is less of them

heavily unbalanced servers ftw

[Huntermyth]

ofcourse the opposing faction effects my gameplay, even if they don't realize.

i play on a server that is %95 alliance %5 horde and as you can see from my signature, i play for the red team. now world pvp isn't an issue, i can deal with most if not all of them 1 by 1. i occasionally run to my corpse ofcourse but that is not my point.

auction house ( will be fixed with wod ) ---> being on the dead part of the realm means you can't rely on ah and since trade chat is dead, no random groups ( not that i need but you get the idea ) or basically nothing is reliable from your own realm. oqueue is godsent, i agree, but i miss the basic lfm xyz on trade chat.

resource nodes ---> on a high pop realm, you expect to have some competition over resources, especially when a new raid tier is up etc. even the ghost iron ore is abundant in everywhere you go, alliance bots are extremely crowded here since their shit will not be interrupted by the opposing faction. plus, when i report someone via right clicking their portrait, i get disconnected ( my suspicious alter ego says it is intentional ) so i don't even bother anymore.