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  1. #81
    World PvP outside the World PVP zone isn't going to be a huge focus, especially with how one sided most PvP realms are.
    To provide a truly epic world PvP experience, the number of players and the amount of faction members allowed in the zone won’t be capped.
    Not the former but the latter announcement is good overall. However:

    Unless countermeasures are taken, even the realm groups formed cross-realm will become more and more imbalanced over time in horde/alliance ratio, like their individual PvP realms did.

    There is one way to solve that *permanently*. First, understand the problem:

    WoW PvP realms have what physical real-world engineering calls an uncontrolled positive feedback loop.

    Once one faction starts getting outnumbered, there is unfortunately still more incentive to switch to the overpopulated faction side (more playable than dying realm sides), escalating the imbalance further. An imbalance of 1.2:1 to often becomes 2:1, then 3:1, then 4:1, and so on. Thus WoW has many PvP realms with such as a 10+:1 ratio of horde to alliance, or other extreme imbalances which developed over time.

    But uncontrolled feedback loops are solved all the time in mechanical and electrical engineering. Such can be *permanently* fixed by adding negative feedback stabilization.

    For example, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FEEDBACK.html :

    "The wild behavior of positive loops - a veritable death wish - must be controlled by negative loops. This control is essential for a system to maintain itself in the course of time. [...]

    [With negative feedback stabilization] there is tight control; the system oscillates [closely] around an ideal equilibrium that it never attains. A thermostat or a water tank equipped with a float are simple examples of regulation by negative feedback."
    Unless Blizzard adds negative feedback stabilization, methods like connected realms will only help partially and temporarily at faction balance, for they don't solve the root problem.

    ------------

    It can be solved, however.

    Let's first illustrate for a hypothetical new PvP realm, starting at around an even 50/50 faction ratio. How could Blizzard make that faction ratio stay approximately balanced continuously, even throughout many months or years to come? By doing this: Have a server computer monitor the average number of players of each faction actively playing in the past month, on a realm or a set of connected realms. Choosing an appropriate value of X, the faction side there with Y% lower population gets a X*Y% bonus to the gain rate of honor, reputation, experience, gold, and/or items in drops.

    So, for instance, if a 3% overpopulation on one side occurs, the bonus to the other side is small but enough that a few people switch over because of it. Constantly the horde/alliance ratio bounces around 50/50. Sometimes it is 51/50, but then it self corrects back to 50/50, or maybe it overshoots to 50/52, but it never gets to 90/10 or the like, as it is in relatively stable equilibrium. To use an analogy, it becomes like a ball bouncing around in a canyon instead of one about to fall off the tip of a pyramid, like science textbooks illustrate the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium.

    The beauty of that is nobody is absolutely forced to switch to the underpopulated faction side (if they greatly don't want to), but those who do so will be exactly those who mind doing so least.

    Some individuals would switch at a 2% bonus; some wouldn't switch at less than a 20% or higher bonus, but the ones who switch at the 2% bonus are those who fix the ratio for others, so it never gets to needing a 20% or higher bonus. By "switch," I often mean actually just which faction someone creating a new alt or new character decides to choose, although faction/realm change services could be discounted when moving towards an underpopulated faction side on a realm.

    What about a realm which isn't new, which isn't starting at near even faction ratio? That is a worse situation, but implementation with initially a low value of X, gradually increased, could gently fix faction imbalance on any PvP realm over time. That would be in combination with some more connected realms and some discounted or free realm/faction transfers to appropriate destinations, but the negative feedback incentive system is the most critical part for, once a near-even faction ratio is obtained, making it stay approximately balanced forever.

    ------------

    This proposal is superior to a commonly proposed suboptimal idea: The closest that most people come to thinking of a lasting faction-imbalance countermeasure is an unnecessarily heavy-handed crude method like stopping all creation of new characters on (and all transfers to) overpopulated faction sides on some realms, but no individual needs to so lose choice entirely. See above.

    My hopes here are almost none, since Blizzard's suggestions forum was deleted and communication to developers has been going towards simple 140-character Twitter remarks and TLDR, which doesn't allow thought at a deep enough level. But Blizzard could save a lot of future trouble.
    Last edited by varkar; 2013-11-10 at 04:21 AM.

  2. #82
    People are working on a side project to update the old Warcraft games to run on modern versions of Windows.
    Can someone clarify this for me..

    Does this mean they are updating the old graphics or what?
    Last edited by TYLES; 2013-11-10 at 04:32 AM.

  3. #83
    Quote Originally Posted by TYLES View Post
    Can someone clarify this for me..

    Does this mean they are updating the old graphics or what?
    Updating the old Warcraft games to work properly on modern OS , like what GoG does for its games.

    Edit:

    Rest in peace "Your soundcard works perrrrrrrfectly!"

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by peggleftw View Post
    they did say they liked adding in new dungeons in cata/wotlk with new raid tiers, but it sucked going from having 6 5mans to do, to being funneled into just 2 new heroics, so upping the difficulty could be a could change, but wont that fuck over newly dinger characters late in the expac?
    Not if their new character scaling system gets finished. Itll do all the scaling for them, so that even with good gear, they can make the instances relevant/challenging.

  4. #84
    celestian dragons what kind of question is it? How to kill the lore for make more monney?

  5. #85
    Do you know where I can find the videos and transcripts (liveblogs) of previous BlizzCon conventions [Q&A sessions and panels]?

    I need 2005 and 2007 , thanks for all

  6. #86
    One question missing from this recap is who the final boss will be. Unless Blizzard was trolling, they did confirm the final boss will be Grom Hellscream

  7. #87
    What about removing the real id/battle tag friend cap?

  8. #88
    Oh man, this is too funny. I love that they've compiled such a nice list of "intentions" they didn't include.

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