Unbalanced realms - maybe players like it?

[huffwin]

we dont have to many people on the realm that I play..

[Manabomb]

Actually, they are not giving people a way out, or trying to correct it.
I play on EU-Darksorrow, everybody knows it at least 90% alliance(I believe its closer to 98).
Blizzard gave alliance free transfers from some of the biggest EU alliance realms to darksorrow, and when we made forum posts asking them to not make it even worse, they just told us we were wrong and the realm wasn't imbalanced.

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Locking high pop realms would cause a problems when new players can't play on the same server as their friends.
Real PvPers seem to want balanced realms, cowards do not..

Finally, I want to know which server alliance only does 2v1, i miss that fair PvP...

Wait, you talk about wpvp and cowards, then talk about "fair pvp". Be more contradictory.

OT: People don't want to wpvp because wpvp is boring, broken and not balanced upon. The only pvp that's mattered since tbc is arena, battlegrounds and now rbgs, you know. Fair pvp.


*DISCLAIMER* As far as you can get in the game's current systems

[Neyze]

As a player of an unbalanced realm, I can say no, no I do not like it. It is a shame I have a level 82 priest on horde that I will not touch because the horde side of the server is dead.

[Maniac2]

So, why actually trying about balancing? If players want unbalanced (for majority its actually PvE realm), let them be.

[Enosh]

why the hell would I (or many others) want to play on a balanced realm?
the way wow is set up being on a full balanced realm vs a full one sided realm just means that the balanced one has a 50% less players to play with, contribute to the economy, farm materials and rare stuff to put them on the AH etc, the one sided one 90+% of the population is available to play with, that's a lot more people meaning a lot more guild with different raid times, days and attitudes making finding something for everyone easier, lot more people to do pve and pvp content with etc

unless you really care about world pvp I don't see any benefit to being on a full balanced realm vs a full one sided one
well except if you choose the wrong side

stealth edit: I guess being on a balanced realm means you can roll a character of a different faction there without being in ghost town but since heirlooms were made cross realm that one kinda flew out the window

[Barkloud]

From vanilla through cata the realm tichondrius was balanced close to 50/50. Then the bastard expansion MOP came out and in less than 90 days the realm was completely unplayable. Today there is barely any alliance. Nice way of extorting money blizzard. I am glad you fired GC. Get rid of Tom Chilton would be another good start.

The game still has a ton of challenges and I read this morning that Blizzard is going to start fixing the game by nerfing elemental shaman. Apparently casting the super powerful lightning bolt on the move is a problem. You go Blizzard!

[Maniac2]

why the hell would I (or many others) want to play on a balanced realm?
the way wow is set up being on a full balanced realm vs a full one sided realm just means that the balanced one has a 50% less players to play with, contribute to the economy, farm materials and rare stuff to put them on the AH etc, the one sided one 90+% of the population is available to play with, that's a lot more people meaning a lot more guild with different raid times, days and attitudes making finding something for everyone easier, lot more people to do pve and pvp content with etc

unless you really care about world pvp I don't see any benefit to being on a full balanced realm vs a full one sided one
well except if you choose the wrong side

Since you talk about PvE stuff, ofc you are not interested in balanced realm.
But here people talk a lot about balancing, I guess they are pvpers wanting world pvp. And world pvp wont happen again, it was only interesting in vanilla, since they had nothing else to do back then, contrary to todays wow.

[Gurushock]

For me I kinda like have a sum-what even server most the time. The only time I hate it is when I'm farming and there are a lot of people out, but that's not ever a big deal 99% of the time for me.

I mostly pve, but I take part in a good share of pvp, mostly world pvp.

[LookingGlass]

If a PvP server is 50/50, whomever is more passive or less-skilled in world PvP will eventually leave the server.

World PvP is a romantic idea, but it would require Blizzard to actually put effort into solving a few REALLY big, hard-to-solve problems.



It'd require dynamic faction balance across servers, dynamic population control within zones, player queues... So to make it work, you have to basically turn a zone into a battleground and people would queue to enter a battleground that has no win condition.

[tuxedospoon]

I can see no advantages in playing on a balanced realm if you're not a world PvP freak. That's basically why people choose one-sided ones, so lots of realms end up unbalanced.

Things will stay the same until Blizzard provides any benefit for players of balanced realms. This is unlikely to happen though; WoW is not at all about world PvP. Just deal with it.

[Deleted]

The timeless isle ordos sacrifice thing really makes PVP realm factions show their true face. The amount of rage induced when people get killed by their own faction, when normally they wouldn't get killed by anyone because the opposing faction is dead, is hilarious. It's funny enough when people log over to the opposing faction to bitch about how they've been killed by the faction that they outnumber by 5 to 10 times.

Honestly, I don't find being on the smaller faction on my server that bad. There's just three major downsides imo, which to some degree you can deal with: 1) The AH is garbage, you can make a lot of gold there but not spend it on a lot, 2) it is terrible for raid recruitment, especially if you are a top 1000 guild and 3) densely packed places like timeless isle will result in a lot of ganking.

While I don't think that people switch factions for safety from world PVP, I think a lot of people enjoy and abuse faction imbalance. Timeless isle really is the prime example - if you kill a rare, there's a 90% chance you'll end up dead if you don't wait for the pack to scatter. Once you do the same at 3am, no one will touch you in fear of being killed back.

Not everyone is lucky enough to run around with full heroic gear, which basically means PVP immunity on TI, that includes all of your alts normally. I feel bad for those people. Meanwhile, all the ones killing my 87's leveling on TI end up on vkos and will surely meet me again in the future, not on timeless isle, on fairer terms.

Edit: Forgot to say it. Faction balance is a dream anyway. Servers will always end up with a dominating faction, it is just a matter of time. 90%+ of servers are imbalanced. Once they connect servers the trends will continue.

[Vaelorian]

Unbalanced servers, how do they come to be?

People do not want to be on an unbalanced server

But they do want to be on the winning side. So when you start out on a server and either horde or alliance wins a bit more then the other faction, people slowly will transfer to the better side. This and if a guild on the other side is far better at PvE then there are guilds on your current faction, you might consider transferring. When this happens over a period of time, it creates a snowball effect. People will go to the other side simply to remain on their "home server (which is stupid because you cannot communicate (unless realID) nor even play with people you used to play with on the other faction)" because they are used to the server name.

So it becomes less and less desirable to be on the losing side of the server.

Then we have the other major drawbacks apart from PVP. The empty AH. Less and less progression. Less and less guilds. Ultimately it is also less fun for the other side.

There used to be a time when you knew some of the opposing faction. You knew which guild was progressing without looking at a website like wowprogress. You knew if certain players were good from certain guilds. That time has come and gone and not just due to server imbalance ofc.

I am not sure why Blizzard is so weird about merging servers even with Xrealm or connected servers. I mean if my side was so imbalanced, I would as a player want the other side to be "buffed" with players from that faction so I can have fun again. Blizzard seems not to want to fix that problem.

Perhaps they do want people to pay for their transfer. Long have I thought that they weren't that type of company since it is ultimately destructive to their own game to just let it up to the players. I mean you can leave it up to the players where they want to go with their characters. But it is your responsibility as a company to try balancing the servers aswell. So that there aren't any differences in factions that are more imbalanced then 60/40%.

I keep to the believe that people who say "I love being on a dead realm" should play a different game. This was (yes was) a MMORPG. It slowly turns into a single player game with the option to play with other people. Why are they letting that happen? WoW used to be all about cooperation. Guilds were important. It was imo due to this forced cooperation that over time the game became so popular. So imo you cannot answer this questions with: Blizzard wants to catar to these single players simply because there is more money coming from them. I do not believe that at all. Sure short term. But also due to this short term thinking they will keep losing subs.

Oh well... I guess after a 100 million people played WoW, the well of people wanting to play WoW is drying up and they want to get every dollar they can get their hands on before it falls apart.

[Saffa]

Blizz do not care if you like a low or high population realm. It is there game and they want all realms to be fairly highly populated so you have problems doing quests when leveling because that is part of 'the mmo' experience'.

[Normie]

I think......it's so they can merge horde heavy servers with ally heavy servers. Could be wrong though :P

Blizzard will absolutely not be merging PvP servers to balance populations. If they did the populations would migrate until the merged server was unbalanced again. PvP servers do not stay balanced, ever. The natural state of a PvP server is one faction hugely outnumbering the other.

Blizzard will not be merging RP servers to balance populations, either, because all RP servers are moderately Alliance-heavy (60-70%).

I imagine that if there are non-RP PvE servers that can be made more balanced by merges, Blizzard might do that.

[tss]

Do players enjoy imbalanced realms? Well, one thing's for sure, the majority of people on that server like it. Hey, it's like democracy!

[Vaelorian]

Do players enjoy imbalanced realms? Well, one thing's for sure, the majority of people on that server like it. Hey, it's like democracy!

How do you figure that? Because they are still there?

So because they are still there you assume they are very happy to be on an unbalanced realm?

You don't figure they are still there because they have a nice guild or a lot of friends (since their side is populated).

The people on the other side who are not so well off are happy to be there? Yeah some of them are I am sure. I have seen people posting on the official forums that they enjoy their deadrealm so they can solo play this game a lot better and farm whatever they want without interruption. That is true.

You figure that goes for everyone on that side? You don't think that a lot of those people don't want to pay Blizzard for a transfer? Or maybe they won't go out of loyalty to their remaining friends and also simply don't know what it could be like on a more populated server?

[Doktor Faustus]

Shattered Hand EU used to be fairly evenly balanced, but now the Horde are about 95% of the total players.

I have a Druid on the Alliance side, and when I dinged 90 I calculated it would cost me 20,000 g to gem/enchant my gear.

I will happily slay x-realm Alliance on my Horde characters, but will not attack a SH Alliance out of pity.

However, I have immense fun with my Druid trolling the Horde - especially people farming Zandalari Warbingers.

[adorich]

I can see no advantages in playing on a balanced realm if you're not a world PvP freak. That's basically why people choose one-sided ones, so lots of realms end up unbalanced.

Things will stay the same until Blizzard provides any benefit for players of balanced realms. This is unlikely to happen though; WoW is not at all about world PvP. Just deal with it.

The advantage of a balanced realm is that you actually have players to pvp against.

Someone mentioned Smolderthorn earlier. About a year ago there was a thread on the official forums begging Blizzard to do something. When I created an alt and searched /who there were like 34 players online total.

It's easy to say "just deal with it," but how do players actually do that without re-rolling or going to another server (which doesn't fix the problem)?

[corebit]

The advantage of a balanced realm is that you actually have players to pvp against.

Someone mentioned Smolderthorn earlier. About a year ago there was a thread on the official forums begging Blizzard to do something. When I created an alt and searched /who there were like 34 players online total.

It's easy to say "just deal with it," but how do players actually do that without re-rolling or going to another server (which doesn't fix the problem)?

Most people don't care about world PVP anymore since it doesn't reward you with anything, and since it's only about whoever has the biggest zerg. Instanced PVP is what WoW is all about, where it doesn't matter if your server is imbalanced like Illidan.

Then Blizzard designs things like Timeless Isle where it is only worth going if you belong to the majority faction. Then they design things like Censer of Eternal Agony to let people gank their own faction since they know most of their servers are imbalanced as hell anyways.

After designing half-assed measures like the Wintergrasp Tenacity and Tol-barad Queuing system and not getting the results they wanted, Blizzard just gave up in trying to balance the factions across the servers.

In fact, imbalanced servers actually give Blizzard tons of money in the form of paid server transfers. They like it this way.

[tuxedospoon]

It's easy to say "just deal with it," but how do players actually do that without re-rolling or going to another server (which doesn't fix the problem)?

I say "just deal with it" cause there are currently no game mechanics to keep servers balanced. Moreover, devs show no interest in implementing any. Well, should they? How many players are actually eager to have somebody to regularly PvP against outside of BGs and arenas?