Connected Realms and Faction Balance
Unfortunately it's not possible to solve faction balance completely. I expect many of you have heard us say this before, but there are way more Horde overall on European PvP realms than Alliance. On EU PvE realms it's the other way around, Alliance outnumber Horde. Short of forcing people to faction change (which is not a realistic option), there will always be faction imbalance to a certain degree.
However, when choosing which realms to connect, we picked ones that improved the situation wherever possible. And in Warlords of Draenor, the PvP zone will make use of cross-realm technology to ensure there will be a good faction balance there to help with the PvP objectives.
First of all, other than paid faction changes (20 euros or so lol) there are no incentives from your side to improve the situation at all. In fact, doing nothing only generated more revenue for you guys due to paid faction changes, where the outnumbered faction simply joined the winning team.
Actually we have a great incentive to improve the situation: player happiness. If that isn't taken into account, we actually lose revenue. This is why we offer free character migrations for people on realms with queues, and if the realm is heavily imbalanced in favour of a particular faction, we tailor the FCM to ease that imbalance.
So what could be done to somewhat solve the problem or flatten such an inbalance? Well, you could offer free faction changes. Other games have done that, you could do it. You have the tech to switch races in the blink of an eye. So there's no excuse not to offer it. While of course, for some realms where you have distributions like 1 : 10 you might want to offer a bit more than just a free faction change. Because, who would want to switch to the helplessly outnumbered faction anyway? But maybe a mount, or a pet (you are good a creating that stuff and selling it for 5-20 bucks anyway) or maybe some recruit a friend benefits. There are possibilities. There are things Blizzard could do.
We've experimented with this before, and found that people are reluctant to move without their friends, guilds, etc. Plus, as it was mentioned above, no one wants to be the first one to move because they don't want to run the risk of ending up on the minority side. I personally don't think any kind of incentive like you mentioned would be enough to persuade a significant number of players to change faction, be disconnected from at least some of their network of friends, and potentially put them in a weaker position than before from a PvP standpoint.
Having said that, we developed Connected Realms technology to help with low population realms, and we'll continue to look into ways to help with faction imbalance. (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Trial of the Gladiator
From what I've seen and read, Blizzard are alternating days for more people to participate in arena and RBGS, so there will be more ques for both during them days, when it is not arena day, there will be skirmishes which i believe the community has been asking for, for a while now. I personally like this idea, as it means i can level up alts for pvp and just leave them in their competitive pvp gear whilst i get the chance to Gear my main. Personally i found it boring and tedious gearing up 3-8 alts and this change means i can be competitive on all of them. I see this change working positivity as it will stop win trading and make pvp competitive and fun once again.
From what we know right now I believe alternate days is indeed the current plan.
Everyone, please continue giving your thoughts on this feature but remember that the system is still in the works as we take on board your feedback, so try to keep it constructive
EU blue does not deny Arena ladders canceled (atleast he did not say thing about it), but US blue says that thay have no plans to cancel it.
I'm sorry if my post was confusing. As Lore said, we have no plans to remove the current Arena ladder. (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)