Massive migration from Alliance to Horde

[GringoD]

And besides that, I am not the 1% nor the wannabe 1% so I don't need to follow others like a sheep...

You'll be unaffected if you don't try to raid somewhat seriously.
As soon as you do, and especially if you happen to be the recruiter for your group, you'll realize that the urge to switch has nothing to do with being a fuzzy wooly. It's more like you're inhabiting an oasis in the process of drying up that happens to be in viewing distance of a water park.

[cface]

I am fine on Outland and Maelstrom as Alliance. Both healthy servers, nice communities, many PVPers, more than solid PVEers. What more do you want? And besides that, I am not the 1% nor the wannabe 1% so I don't need to follow others like a sheep...

I'm on maelstrom and silvermoon, and get the feeling it's like my reallife job that's on the country side, we treat each other like we're stuck with each other, sorta like how realms was back in vanilla. All the toxic threads I've seen, I have barely had any such groups when pugging.
And even in mythic raids where clearly one guy is not pulling his weight, he doesn't get instabenched and create this nervous atmosphere for the team, we're stuck with him and guess what, he actually improved.

There is also a price when you can pick and choose like people are machines that needs to perform or else. The one thing I do miss, is how incredible many guilds there are on hordes, so it's easier to find one that suits your schedule. Only top realms on alliance gets to do that

[Kumorii]

Why would you say that?

If the buff goes to the faction that is has less numbers, and is proportional in power to the disparity, then then incentive would always be for people to try to get the faction balance to 50/50, and once it is there, there would be very little incentive for people to switch. So you'd never have "the opposite problem"

Without such an incentive, being imbalanced favours the side that has more players, which results in the imbalance getting worse.

Why would people try and get 50/50? People switch to the faction they have most advantages from. Players will never try and get 50/50 split, most people won't care about it. Only if they get an advantage or not.

If it's more advantageous to be alliance because of extra stuff people will migrate there. Which will in turn swing the pendulum... then you need incentive to go horde again and the cycle repeats.

Only way to prevent that from happening is having almost real time update on the splits and rewards which isn't feasible. You can try and have dynamic rewards but that would be difficult to balance since the reward need to be significant enough to warrant a transfer. How would you balance the reward so that it changes depending on current split but still enough to warrant the right number of transfers? I don't think you can do that. If you think it's possible I guess we just disagree.

until someone presents a detailed solution that explains it thoroughly on how it's supposed to be that accurately take in player behaviour I will be skeptical about it. Saying "give them incentive" isn't a solution...it's a goal.

[Raelbo]

Why would people try and get 50/50?

Because if it's not 50/50, the less populous side gets a buff, which encourages people to switch. And the further the balance moves from 50/50, the greater that buff gets.

People switch to the faction they have most advantages from. Players will never try and get 50/50 split, most people won't care about it. Only if they get an advantage or not.

Exactly. Currently people switch to the more populous side because they get advantages from doing so. That is a recipe for an unstable system. Hence the need for a stabilizing force that gives players a significant advantage for choosing the (numerically) weaker side.

If it's more advantageous to be alliance because of extra stuff people will migrate there. Which will in turn swing the pendulum... then you need incentive to go horde again and the cycle repeats.

True. But I am not advocating for that. I was agreeing with @Accendor who was suggesting something like the "against all odds" buff that is used for warmode but applied to raiding.

Only way to prevent that from happening is having almost real time update on the splits and rewards which isn't feasible. You can try and have dynamic rewards but that would be difficult to balance since the reward need to be significant enough to warrant a transfer. How would you balance the reward so that it changes depending on current split but still enough to warrant the right number of transfers? I don't think you can do that. If you think it's possible I guess we just disagree.

Control Theory describes the math. I am not saying that I can do that math myself (not anymore at least) but I do know that the theory exists. Essentially if you play around with a couple of variables and use history, you can achieve a damped response that will head towards a steady-state equilibrium.

A workable system would be something along these lines:

• Calculate the imbalance between the factions across a region based on giving each faction a score similar what a site like wowprogress or raiderIO generates based on weekly progress.
• Apply a weighted average over the last 6-10 weeks (where the oldest scores count the least) and apply a bonus based on that score.
• Tune the bonus if necessary

When a new tier drops, week 1, there will be no bonus. But starting with week 2 there will be a bonus based on the imbalance from week 1. But it will still be relatively weak, since most of the weeks that are being averaged for will still be zero.
This may entice some guilds to switch, which starts to affect the imbalance in week 2 and starts limiting the bonus. If too few guilds are switching, the imbalance remains high, and the bonus starts ramping up. At some points guilds will start moving, the imbalance will reduce and the bonus will start to get less.

After some time, the two sides will be pretty well balanced and no one will have an incentive to move. But whenever there is movement, then the bonus will re-appear, encouraging someone to switch sides and restore balance.

[Marrilaife]

What more do you want?

To actually clear mythic raids in a timely manner and not be stuck there for months or never clearing. To be able to do m+ above the level required for a weekly. Can you do this? I would bet you're probably one of those that only pugs hc raids and weekly chest m+ so "everything's fine".