If TBC becomes a thing, Blizzard needs to make "change" to prevent faction imbalance

[Flurryfang]

As an alliance player I can't wait to do Halaa battles against in a 1-20 disadvantage, that was the effective disadvantage when Honor was added on our realm (Classic). We (Alliance) hid in our main cities for like 5-6 weeks before it had calmed down enough to venture outside in small groups, if we were a group of 5 or 10 alliance players who wanted to do some world pvp or farm materials we would get swarmed by two full raids (not joking) within 10 minutes of landing somewhere. The Alliance ships? Forget about it, there was always a full raid on them for weeks on end. Raid Molten Core? Prepare for 30 minutes just to get from the enterance of BRM to the instance portal. Doing Stratholme? Running from Lights Hope to the instance took longer than actually doing the instance, yes I timed it.

Realm balance is extremely important, it's always been important... it's why cross realm BGs were added- to give a better game experience. Faction balance on realms NEEDS the same monitoring, if a realm reaches 40%-60% split is okay... 30%-70% ...eh, no. Some Classic realms are now 95%-5% and basically just PvE realms.

Well, first of all, just play PVE servers like the rest of us. Then the imbalance does not really hit you at all.

And also, even if the servers are balanced, it still does not stop 40 players from getting together and stomp people in specific areas. Just look at how streamers since the dawn of time have been able to gather large amount of players on nearly any server and do big things with them. Making the servers balanced will not create Tarren mill-vs-Southshore all over the place, it requires the players want to do it in the first place.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

I honestly don't understand how people think Blizzard can control faction imbalance. Short of forcing people to play one faction if the other gets ''too full" or making every race available for any faction it's literally not possible. People can scream 'racials' all they want but at the end of the day it's based of what people like to play and more people tend to like one side more than the other. That's just how it is. It's part of the game because at the end of the day its an mmoRPG and people are drawn to certain stories/aspects/cultures/lore.

Oh this is easy, set the pop limit of a realm to 5000 accounts with at least 1 lvl 60 on the realm (or 70 for TBC).
Aim is to have no bigger split than 2000/3000 (40%-60%). If there's 3000 online accounts with a lvl 60 horde... no other horde can log on- regardless of level. You'll end up in a "faction queue" and your faction has a week to transfer for free.

Example.
Laughing Skull, EU, TBC realm has 2000 alliance players and 4000 horde players. Blizzard wants to get at 1000 of the horde players on to a different realm, so they open realm transfers for all horde players on the realm for a short period. If There are 3000 online horde players no others can get on, meaning 1000 people stay in queues, hoping for someone to log off ...or they can move realms.

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Well, first of all, just play PVE servers like the rest of us. Then the imbalance does not really hit you at all.

And also, even if the servers are balanced, it still does not stop 40 players from getting together and stomp people in specific areas. Just look at how streamers since the dawn of time have been able to gather large amount of players on nearly any server and do big things with them. Making the servers balanced will not create Tarren mill-vs-Southshore all over the place, it requires the players want to do it in the first place.

Oh I wanted to play on a PvE realm, but the guild didn't feel the same way.

[erifwodahs]

Just add faction qs. If you want to play horde on a horde sided server that bad then you can sit in a q.

Faction qs would piss more people off than it would do good. Why? Because there are more horde players. So you would have to force Que on most of the players.
Everyone mentioning racials, how many people do you personally know who have swapped faction for racials? I don't know any. I know some who swapped because there were more horde on their server tho. But in comparison on how many people I know vs how many people have swapped due to racials would be very tiny %. If anyone was swapping for those reasons - do they also swap to FOTM? Because that has way bigger impact than a race.

[Flurryfang]

Oh this is easy, set the pop limit of a realm to 5000 accounts with at least 1 lvl 60 on the realm (or 70 for TBC).
Aim is to have no bigger split than 2000/3000 (40%-60%). If there's 3000 online accounts with a lvl 60 horde... no other horde can log on- regardless of level. You'll end up in a "faction queue" and your faction has a week to transfer for free.

Example.
Laughing Skull, EU, TBC realm has 2000 alliance players and 4000 horde players. Blizzard wants to get at 1000 of the horde players on to a different realm, so they open realm transfers for all horde players on the realm for a short period. If There are 3000 online horde players no others can get on, meaning 1000 people stay in queues, hoping for someone to log off ...or they can move realms.

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Oh I wanted to play on a PvE realm, but the guild didn't feel the same way.

If TBC-Classic becomes a thing, try to persuade them again. TBC is a very excellent expansion, if you want to still do PVP on a PVE serve, since 3 of the zones have active PVP areas, which a surprising amount of people actually fight for in the months of expansion launch.

It gives a great opportunity to do some big raid-vs-raid battles, or just a good chance to stomp some people who are trying to sneak in a PVP quest or 2 xD

[Ragedaug]

Does faction balance even really matter on retail? Also not suggesting they are going to fix it but this thought process is sort of flawed. Just because one version of the game has the same problem that's not addressed, doesn't mean they won't with another. Look at how premades in AV were addressed in classic. There are premades in retail right? But they decided to go through and fix it in classic because it actually means more than what it does on retail.

I think if anything, Retail proved Blizzard doesn't have the ability to fix the situation, because it's caused by player agency. We got War Mode, and with it, completely eliminate folks who don't want to PVP, but happened to be on PVP servers for whatever reason. So with only players wanting world PVP set to War Mode, and sharding tech allowing Blizzard to bring these folks together across realms, it didn't take long for the Alliance to see there are more Horde players interested in PVP than Alliance players, which caused the Alliance players to just stop flagging War Mode.

I'm sure racials have something to do with it, but I suspect the main reason is that players who play games to fight other players are more attracted to the Horde, and players who play to play the map in a fantasy environment are more attracted to the Alliance. We see the same in Classic. Higher percentage of PVE server players roll Alliance than PVP server players, who are more likely to roll Horde.

The only thing I could think Blizzard could do would be set War Mode factions to blue and red, and when you flag for War Mode, you alternate between blue team and red team, so racial faction is irreverent. Of course that completely breaks Orcs vs Humans, so it will never happen. That said, I don't see a way they could ever faction balance world PVP given their current constraints.

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Realm balance is extremely important, it's always been important... it's why cross realm BGs were added- to give a better game experience. Faction balance on realms NEEDS the same monitoring, if a realm reaches 40%-60% split is okay... 30%-70% ...eh, no. Some Classic realms are now 95%-5% and basically just PvE realms.

To me, this is a big take away. I believe back 15 years ago, Vanilla and TBC servers were quite a bit more balanced than servers today, so players tend to jump to "Blizzard did the thing which caused the imbalance, and now WPVP is dead". But from Classic we can see players are just more sophisticated today and are more quickly jumping to the faction imbalanced servers than they did in yesteryear.

[SkagenRora]

That sounds good until X player comes along with friends already playing Alliance toons on said server, and Blizz says to X player 'you can only make horde here'.

Faction populations are never going to be balanced and any attempt by Blizz to police it isn't going to end well.

Never had any IRL friends that i play WoW with, Only found friends on the server after joining it, So this is argument is not something i can relate to or consider when i come up with my own things.

[munkeyinorbit]

And I did acknowledge in the OP that faction imbalance cannot be combated as a whole. And of course, it is player driven. But to repeat once more, we aren't talking about a "minor" 65-35 faction imbalance. If left unchanged the data we have available shows us that every single server ends up as a single faction in a very short amount of time, drastically and permanently changing the way the game is experienced for both factions. I am not aiming to perfectly balance the factions, but this one relatively minor change will single handed remove a huge incentive for PvE guilds to reroll to horde.

And yes, faction locks are most likely needed as well. What do you believe will go down better with the players: Faction locks or every single server being Flamelash-EU?

If you used even a dash of common sense every single server being Flamelash-EU is the preferred option. People don't want balance when it comes to world PvP and for organised PvP balance means nothing. SO the preferred option is unbalanced factions. Who gives a shit about the few people having a cry about unbalance when the vast majority of people support it.

[Synical123]

Faction qs would piss more people off than it would do good. Why? Because there are more horde players. So you would have to force Que on most of the players.
Everyone mentioning racials, how many people do you personally know who have swapped faction for racials? I don't know any. I know some who swapped because there were more horde on their server tho. But in comparison on how many people I know vs how many people have swapped due to racials would be very tiny %. If anyone was swapping for those reasons - do they also swap to FOTM? Because that has way bigger impact than a race.

Lol wtf are you on about. Faction qs would 100% fix the problem, full stop. And idk how familiar you are with people who play wow, but they will sit in qs no problem because of how stubborn they are.

Look at the situation now in classic. People keep transferring over to a couple servers to dog pile even though it’s always full and they sit in the qs willingly.

I’m not suggesting put in the qs until it’s 50/50 but never let it get to a point where it’s remotely close to a 70/30 or so.

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If you used even a dash of common sense every single server being Flamelash-EU is the preferred option. People don't want balance when it comes to world PvP and for organised PvP balance means nothing. SO the preferred option is unbalanced factions. Who gives a shit about the few people having a cry about unbalance when the vast majority of people support it.

Holy fuck how dumb do you have to be to come up with this conclusion. I’m sorry but if you think like this your opinion on what to do to help games should be completely ignored.

[Beefhammer]

There definitely could have been some changes made to classic. Dwarf priest fear ward comes to mind.

But then it would have been classic if all priests had it now. That was the point. To make certain classes, races, class/race combos stand out. You want the fear ward? Roll a Dwarf.

[Nak88]

Nope. We want the original TBC. You wanted #NoChanges Classic, so you'll also have #NoChanges TBC.

[erifwodahs]

Lol wtf are you on about. Faction qs would 100% fix the problem, full stop. And idk how familiar you are with people who play wow, but they will sit in qs no problem because of how stubborn they are.

Look at the situation now in classic. People keep transferring over to a couple servers to dog pile even though it’s always full and they sit in the qs willingly.

I’m not suggesting put in the qs until it’s 50/50 but never let it get to a point where it’s remotely close to a 70/30 or so.

How putting more than half of you player base into a que is a fix? Is it a fix for alliance? Yes. Is it a fix for most players? Certainly not. It's like not letting pupils to study in universities because you need to maintain 60/40 balance even tho you have enough space, so you are punishing the majority. "You can't play the game because you are not special" wtf dude. Many would rather quit than faction change = cummunity suffers as whole.

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Nope. We want the original TBC. You wanted #NoChanges Classic, so you'll also have #NoChanges TBC.

Agreed. TBC is something that a lot of players want to play and who did not want anything to do with classic. Let us have it. Worst case scenario is a merc. mode if the que times are above x in bgs. But 15mins que time is nothing. It has way better pvp system so it does not matter if you don't play 14 hrs a day.

[freddy090909]

I don't see why faction imbalance is a problem, personally. It is good for PvE (larger pool of players), and I'm sure there's other ways the problem could be solved in PvP (it's not like arena really cares about faction balance).

[Synical123]

How putting more than half of you player base into a que is a fix? Is it a fix for alliance? Yes. Is it a fix for most players? Certainly not. It's like not letting pupils to study in universities because you need to maintain 60/40 balance even tho you have enough space, so you are punishing the majority. "You can't play the game because you are not special" wtf dude. Many would rather quit than faction change = cummunity suffers as whole.

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Agreed. TBC is something that a lot of players want to play and who did not want anything to do with classic. Let us have it. Worst case scenario is a merc. mode if the que times are above x in bgs. But 15mins que time is nothing. It has way better pvp system so it does not matter if you don't play 14 hrs a day.

More than half of your player base in qs? I’m sorry but do you understand what qs are? LOL. It would be more like 10% if that.

If a server had a massive imbalance of 70/30 and you wanted to keep it slightly balanced at like 60/40 you would only need to put a little over 10 people in a q, not every single one of the horde. Jesus Christ

And I’m not saying you do this to make the horde reroll, I’m saying you just put them into a q on really imbalanced servers so that the servers aren’t fuckin trash like 80/20 horde where no one wants to play alliance so they just xfer off and it makes dead servers.

This literally JUST happened in classic dude. Horde did exactly what you are saying on stallag. Said the same shit you’re saying. All the alliance left. Now the server is a horde ghost town. It’s not just to make the game playable for alliance it’s to make the game playable period. If everyone on ally leaves, good luck opening up Sunwell

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I don't see why faction imbalance is a problem, personally. It is good for PvE (larger pool of players), and I'm sure there's other ways the problem could be solved in PvP (it's not like arena really cares about faction balance).

In world pvp, there’s nothing you can do besides something like faction qs. Pve has its consequences as no one will want to roll the lesser faction, on a high pop server, and not be able to find groups.

In world on a pvp server it can make the game LITERALLY unplayable for the lesser faction. You won’t be able to open up a raid tier with only one faction doing dailies.

It’s a massive problem

[MiiiMiii]

Your suggestions are all reasonable but some of us simply don't trust modern Blizzard. It's not logic based, the changes Classic has done were all decent, but it's emotionally based.

[Ermelloth]

If Horde population on certain realms is way beyond 40-60, just lock additional Horde character creation on that realm and forbid transfer or faction change to Horde on same realm.

At the same moment, give an option of free server migration to other realm where there is a Horde minority and where the realm needs more Horde characters (if such exist).

Also a possibility.

[MoanaLisa]

The reason that servers get to be unbalanced is that the vast majority of players don't want to do world PVP on a "balanced" server. There are no minor tweaks that will change that.

[Synical123]

The reason that servers get to be unbalanced is that the vast majority of players don't want to do world PVP on a "balanced" server. There are no minor tweaks that will change that.

Factions qs. Fixed

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Factions qs. Fixed

That won't convince more people to roll Alliance, it'll just spread the Horde imbalance across more servers.

[Naraga]

The reason that servers get to be unbalanced is that the vast majority of players don't want to do world PVP on a "balanced" server. There are no minor tweaks that will change that.

Not sure where people get this idea from.

People don't want to be on the weak side themselves so they pick the stronger side compounding the issue. But they would really want 50-50.

[Akibaboy]

Other people*

So you've always made the choice to play on the underpopulated faction and low pop servers to do your part to rectify the problem then right?