Thoughts about the Wintergrasp/Tol Barad situation

[Zervziel]

Must say I really like it. Our server is pretty heavy on the Alliance side and for awhile the only times the Horde could even claim WG was to wait til late at night and then we'd claim it and run VoA as fast as we could before the Alliance woke up and steamrolled it with sheer numbers again. I remember have 20 tenacity in one battle. I've been on my server ever since it was activate so I remember when the Horde and Alliance population was about equal. The battle was more equal then and more fun. Now with this, numbers are no longer the deciding factor, it's actual skill and cooperation and guess what? The Horde has made up for lost time. Heck the best battle are when both the Horde and the Alliance bring their A-Teams and are evenly matched in numbers. Those are FUN!

[Braven]

meh q earlier wotlk is over anyway

[feigning]

e: if server balance is over a certain threshold you should not be able to roll a character or transfer to the imbalanced faction. It's pretty stupid that this limitation isn't already in place.

That is a terrible idea. Players shouldn't be punished for wanting to play with friends just because a server is imbalanced.

I'd prefer seeing actual incentives for rolling to a new server. Say, offer free transfers, faction or server, to players more often than is currently being done. In addition, so that the people transferring have some kind of reason to be doing so, offer some kind of unique item, be it a title or some nifty vanity item.

I am a player on a very imbalanced server. I have characters on both sides, my main being on the under populated faction. I'd love it if Blizzard did something to help with population imbalance, I really would. The Wintergrasp/Tol Barad change isn't it though. I can no longer experience Wintergrasp if I am on a horde character as Wintergrasp usually consists of one or two Alliance on my server. With Tenacity it was at least fun being the underdog as I could steam roll a dozen or more horde and still be going strong. Now it's just a dead zone like any other, with no incentive to be going.

The thing is, limiting a faction will not remedy this problem. I feel that would hurt the server more than anything, as the person trying to make a character obviously wants to play a specific faction and cannot do so on their chosen server. So why would they stick around?

[drbutcher]

I don't believe that the "solution" they found will stay.It is very very bad.The only reason that people haven't started QQing that much yet is because noone cares about wintergrasp atm .But what will happen with TB?

Why the solution is bad you might ask?

1) Take silvermoon-EU as an example.Server has amost zero hordes and is one of the most populated if not the most in ally.Who will queue 1st?Most of the players will not have a chance to join the battle of months.

2) In low populated servers you might end up doing 2vs2 or 3vs3 battles.I don't find this funny.

The only reason tenacity was a fail ,was because it didn't increase vehicles damage.I don't understand why blizzard never did/tried that.How many times you have killed everyone with your 20 tenacity around you then you go get your siege engine and while you are trying to bring down the wall you are sourounded by 100 opponents.Make vehicles damage scale with tenacity.

Like every BG wintergrap has objectives.You can't win by killing people.You need to bring the walls down.Same thing goes while you are on defense.Make cannons scale with tenacity both in health and damage.

[azulesmar]

I don't consider the current implementation a solution because now on my server the horde will always have TB and the alliance will never have it. Before it was the alliance that generally won it due to overwhelming numbers but what you've created is the same unbalance just giving 90% less people the chance to play part of what they are paying for it's not their fault the realm is unbalanced I rolled alliance on day one of wow's release and you are telling me i have to transfer server/faction to be able to do what i want to do in a game im paying for? I say hell no to that blizzard needs to find a new solution.

[Obsession]

I don't feel they did this to punish any side; they did it to try and offer incentive for people to play on the lower population side of a server. Most pvp servers are largely imbalanced and this can help that. If Alliance on Mal'ganis want to sign up for Tol'barad or Wintergrasp it takes them a second to get in, horde might not even get in; it is one of the very few downsides to being on the higher population side.

I can tell you that if this is really their intention, it is working well. I know of a couple people that have transferred to Alliance on my server because they know the long queue times on horde as well as the WG/TB imbalance will make honor farming and possibly even rated BGs a nightmare. Baby steps, I guess. Hopefully they can back it up with free faction changes.


People going on about how this is a bad idea: The only reason tenacity didn't work is because you would still die in a 6 second HoJ with 20 tenacity in full Relentless. If you got silenced you would still die. Vehicles didn't take less damage from resilience on the player, and the health overall did not scale with damage. It had nothing to do with how much damage siege vehicles did if you only have 15-20 people against 2 raid groups; you would never make it to the wall.

The only way to make it fair, which half of you people complain about when your class "gets nerfed" or "is underpowered" is to make it 1v1 all of the time. That means faction change or server transfer if you want to play.



The only way to actually cause server balance is to start limiting what the higher population can do; or create a +10% damage/healing/health buff for the opposite side. Guess which one will happen first.

[kerwyn]

That is a terrible idea. Players shouldn't be punished for wanting to play with friends just because a server is imbalanced.

Exempt recruit-a-friend. Do not exempt server transfers. Those, combined with faction transfer, are the main reason that a lot of servers are in this mess.

[Obsession]

Exempt recruit-a-friend. Do not exempt server transfers. Those, combined with faction transfer, are the main reason that a lot of servers are in this mess.

This sounds like an awful idea; limiting guilds recruitment because of the imbalance

[azulesmar]

This sounds like an awful idea; limiting guilds recruitment because of the imbalance

Interesting concept. I personally have never considered recruiting for my guild off server.

[kerwyn]

This sounds like an awful idea; limiting guilds recruitment because of the imbalance

Most of the guilds in that situation don't need to recruit off server. Would a horde guild on Mal'ganis ever need to look elsewhere for recruits?

[noremac]

My main reason for playing on an imbalanced server on the outnumbering faction is that Mal'Ganis Horde are, by statistics, some of the best raiders in the game. I am sure that most of you will call me dumb for just basing that off some ranking on WoWProgress but I mean the numbers don't really lie. Sure Mal'Ganis also has many bad players, if you play there you would know that, but there are also enough good players to make the overall quality of the player base on the realm higher than any others. Also I like the fact that the server has one of the highest populations, if not the highest population of any other server out there... making it always easy to form PUG groups, do old instances for achievements or mounts, and other stuff like that... and having around 20,000 level 80's that are just Horde on the server really makes that easy to do.

But then if you look at a realm like Cho'gall, it is almost as unbalanced as Mal'Ganis but there are only 3 guilds there that have 25 man heroic Lich King kills, and overall there is less progression on the server compared to Mal'Ganis, however it has almost the same ratio of Horde to Alliance. So on a realm like that I would see no point in being so unbalanced because there are no benefits to being Horde on that realm versus any other realm.

It may just be me but personally I enjoy the game more if I know that I am playing with better quality players, that wont suck while forming PUG's, or know how to PvP, etc. So why should I be punished just because I prefer to play with good players? I am guessing many of the other people on Mal'Ganis Horde feel the same way... sure there are just some really bad players on this realm that came over from other realms just to get carried... but those are few and far between if you are smart in picking people to join your groups.

[Maggoo]

After the changes were implemented, the alliance on our server actually started to win during the day time, now the win chance is roughly 50/50 rather than being camped in the GY after 5 min. This change was needed, only downside is you aren't always guaranteed to get in.