Blizzard's logic on Connected Realms

[wildemu]

"Most people on PvP realms like having a faction advantage and choose their server or move to servers specifically for that reason, which makes evening it out fairly difficult. There also tends to be a faction imbalance on PvP vs. PvE realms, where PvP realms tend to be Horde heavy and PvE tend to be Alliance heavy. So when we connect a few low-pop PvP realms together it's somewhat likely to only be able to be matching imbalanced realms with imbalanced realms. Considering the desire for a faction advantage, even if we did achieve a balance I'm honestly not sure how long it would last. In any case, with Connected Realms both sides will be getting more players, and bringing up the amount of people on each realm is the goal."

Blizzard seems off with the subscriber's thinking on joining a pvp realm. Most people just want to join the pvp side that isn't dead, not because they want to have the faction advantage. I'm pretty confident that if they were to poll the subscriber base, that an overwhelming majority would want balanced realms.

They are really dropping the ball on this technology when it could be utilized to revive world pvp/activities.

[babo7000]

It's how they have to word it, what he means is,

'We understand a lot of servers are unbalanced, but there is only so much we can do to fix it without drastically changing realms and servers. Wait and be happy with whatever we do'.

They can't openly admit this a big problem, because then they would be put in a position where fixing it becomes top priority. And they always prefer the second option players have (faction/server change)

[Deleted]

How would you balance pvp realms when almost all of them are horde-heavy?

[Azrile]

How would you balance pvp realms when almost all of them are horde-heavy?

Exactly, probably 95% of pvp servers are horde favored.

I do have to laugh at the wording of his comment. Basically he was saying that a lot of people rolled on a pvp server mainly because they knew it was lopsided in their favor... and that suddenly balancing the server might be a bad thing. But just a year ago, they were saying the opposite thing about people who said they chose a low population server because it was low pop. From a design standpoint, I would think having the big pvp servers being 20-1 in favor of horde breaks the purpose of the server more than wanting to play on a low population server.

[Kebren]

Most people just want to join the pvp side that isn't dead, not because they want to have the faction advantage. I'm pretty confident that if they were to poll the subscriber base, that an overwhelming majority would want balanced realms.

I would have to disagree. At least some what a server with a faction advantange. I played on a PVP server for most of Cataclysm and I specifically picked that server because it was an Alliance heavy server. Since MoP however, it has largely swapped to an Horde populated server. I'm at a point where I'm just going to pony up the cash and move the remaining characters off the server.

Theres a reason while realms like Illidan-US are popular. They have something like 99-1 faction ratios.

[Yummy]

How isn't it accurate? Players caused faction balance to slip with faction change service. Balancing realms will be short lived as it will lean in favor to whichever side has the best guilds. Players would rather be on the faction with an advantage than be on a balanced realm.

[Asmekiel]

Players caused the faction imbalance themselves over the years. It's not Blizzards fault, nor should they change it. It was, is and should always be the players choice to be on a faction-balanced realm or one which has a lot more players in one faction than the other. This also goes for realm population by the way.
Blizzard shouldn't force players to play on another realm than which they prefer, we don't have a massive realmlist for nothing.

[Baracuda]

How would you balance pvp realms when almost all of them are horde-heavy?

Free transfers from full alliance dominated pvp servers like Ravencrest. Not just to ONE or TWO servers, ANY server with low alliance ratio.

[Darkstrike]

Free transfers from full alliance dominated pvp servers like Ravencrest. Not just to ONE or TWO servers, ANY server with low alliance ratio.

no ty , we dont like dead servers

[MoanaLisa]

Personally I think it's more the point that if they did put in a big effort to faction-balance realms and actually got to a rough parity--which I don't think they can do given the number of Horde players in PVP--but let's imagine that they could, it would just slide out of balance again. There's really no point to doing it if a year later it slides back to the way it was.

If the overall balance between Horde and Alliance is really that far off across all servers then there's really no point to making it a huge concern since they can never solve the problem. So do what they can and go from there.

[championknight]

Players caused the faction imbalance themselves over the years. It's not Blizzards fault, nor should they change it. It was, is and should always be the players choice to be on a faction-balanced realm or one which has a lot more players in one faction than the other. This also goes for realm population by the way.
Blizzard shouldn't force players to play on another realm than which they prefer, we don't have a massive realmlist for nothing.

Blizzard started it by allowing faction transfers, then it just snowballed from there as the limitations got removed over time (now its just your money that is limiting it)

If they won't put in a transfer limit on a high pop server, then whatever balancing they do is of course going to be for naught sooner or later

[Aquamonkey]

They could offer free faction changes to the less populated faction on those servers, with like a 1 month grace period to undo it.

[JimPaladin]

Personally I think it's more the point that if they did put in a big effort to faction-balance realms and actually got to a rough parity--which I don't think they can do given the number of Horde players in PVP--but let's imagine that they could, it would just slide out of balance again. There's really no point to doing it if a year later it slides back to the way it was.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Even if they do manage to somehow balance it (which isn't really possible, but ignoring that fact) it would just end up becoming one-sided again before too long.

People will act just like sheep. They'll see one of the factions get a realm first in a raid or see one faction has the highest rated arena team and they'll just flock right over to the "winning" side. What's worse is that it only gets worse as more people leave to one faction, because people will go for the larger faction anyways, meaning more and more people will side on one faction which just means more and more people are going to join the faction as they join the server to begin with.

It's an uncontrollable slope that nothing short of Blizzard giving people home-brew lobotomies to make them stop acting like such jump-the-ship cunts will fix.

[Zeek Daniels]

i dont know how much world pvp goes on but im pretty sure it isnt in huge numbers per server in single locations. Yea you may have 10 or so horde attacking the ally vendors with only 2 or 3 ally trying to defend but thats not gonna change much when servers get merged. Maybe in the days of wintergrasp and tol barad this would be an issue of unbalancing servers. But since theres no huge world pvp area i dont see a problem.

[JimPaladin]

To add to my post-

It would actually be very cool if they opened up a few realms that were "balanced" realms, i.e., factions are kept "locked" so that not too many more people can join either one, so that way the factions are kept fairly equal.

[wildemu]

To add to my post-

It would actually be very cool if they opened up a few realms that were "balanced" realms, i.e., factions are kept "locked" so that not too many more people can join either one, so that way the factions are kept fairly equal.

I love this idea, it is brilliant.

[Asmekiel]

Blizzard started it by allowing faction transfers, then it just snowballed from there as the limitations got removed over time (now its just your money that is limiting it)

If they won't put in a transfer limit on a high pop server, then whatever balancing they do is of course going to be for naught sooner or later

Doesn't that show exactly that it's the players that want it? If the majority of players wanted faction balance, they would've transferred to balanced realms (or stayed there) instead of moving away from them and making the imbalance worse.

[championknight]

Doesn't that show exactly that it's the players that want it? If the majority of players wanted faction balance, they would've transferred to balanced realms (or stayed there) instead of moving away from them and making the imbalance worse.

Blizzard has the power to decide if we should have some features which may not be always be good for the game. In this case they gave in to the players who wanted it (I didn't support this) and chaos ensued. Now we have the huge problems of many dead realms that Virtual realms only seem to be a bandaid fix again

Now imagine if players were to ask if they could instantly teleport to anywhere from anywhere just by typing in a coordinates. Would this be good for the game or would it cause some serious issues like 'dead zones'?

You can't decide what each and every player will do, hence sometimes its best to keep their options limited

[MoanaLisa]

Blizzard has the power to decide if we should have some features which may not be always be good for the game. In this case they gave in to the players who wanted it (I didn't support this) and chaos ensued. Now we have the huge problems of many dead realms that Virtual realms only seem to be a bandaid fix again

Now imagine if players were to ask if they could instantly teleport to anywhere from anywhere just by typing in a coordinates. Would this be good for the game or would it cause some serious issues like 'dead zones'?

You can't decide what each and every player will do, hence sometimes its best to keep their options limited

I don't know that it matters really. If you take all the PVP realms and merge them into one realm and the faction balance is much more than 60H-40A, you'll never ever be able to fix it. Transfers don't matter. Nothing does. I don't know what the real numbers would be but given the number of very heavily populated PVP servers that are Horde dominated it might be a lot more than 60-40. I don't think it's true that across the whole population of PVP realms added together the H-A balance is 50-50 which would be something like a precondition for achieving even a rough balance.

[vesseblah]

Doesn't that show exactly that it's the players that want it? If the majority of players wanted faction balance, they would've transferred to balanced realms (or stayed there) instead of moving away from them and making the imbalance worse.

What players want and what is best for the game doesn't always meet. This is one such great example.