Blizzard on the State of TBC Servers

[rrayy]

That whole "What if you don’t want to be on a balanced realm and at some point, specifically elected to move to a realm where your faction is in the majority?" thing they did when they sharded everyone together with War Mode. I play on Kel'Thuzad which is probably 90% Alliance but because I play in War Mode I get Horde flown in from all sorts of other servers and we're outnumbered on our server were we should have a 10 to 1 advantage. Guess they don't care about that on live.

LOL you shouldn't have a 10 to one challenge. It should be as close as you can get to 1 to 1. The fact that you want it 10 to 1 means you don;t even want to PVP in the first place.

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I wish they'd stop using "MAH NAME" as an excuse to not merge servers. It's so incredibly unimportant.

Speak for yourself. For many players name is important.

[alexchaos]

Was hoping for them opening free transfers from dead realms due to their free transfers. Currently on Netherwind horde there's on average 10 players online at a time even during peak time. How is that considered playable?

[shise]

I will say this. I would not be surprised if people start going back to Private servers. Specially after everything that happened in the middle of last year. People don't wanna play for multiple reasons. Faction inbalance, The Lawsuit, the game just being boring. SoM is interesting, but it doesn't feel any different then classic was. It's just harder at the end. I loved classic when it first came out. But the botting has gotten out of control. And blizz wont do anything about the botting because they give MONEY. It's sad.. I love TBC. But with everyone quitting due to multiple reasons, it's hard to play. =/ At the end of the day.. Blizzard just wants money, and the failure of Classic is their own fault.

I honestly doubt that anyone stopped playing because of the lawsuit at all. It might have been a factor, but surely not the reason.

You have far worse products such as tobacco, everyone knows how bad and even killer it can be, yet many keep smoking for no real reason.

About private servers, who knows. But I´d always rather pay for the real thing, even if just TBCC, knowing that your pixels are secured... none will wipe them the next morning. Rendering your progress useless.

[Kralljin]

While it certainly is a player created issue, i blame Blizzard however for essentially allowing these mega servers to happen.

Due to Layering, there is essentially no downside to ever roll on a Mega Server, there will never be a queue and you have access to a huge pool of players.
These huge servers should've been locked for Transfer, so that at least one can foster a handful of realms with a large playersize, rather than what seems to be now turning into essentially two mega servers.

Gehennas EU recently up to having 3 Layers consistently, because Horde players keep transferring to this the realm from other Servers - Why is this Server still not locked?

Sure, one can bring the "money" argument, but i doubt that's a smart call considering not every player is willing to transfer and then just quits, which means you're losing out on the monthly sub of quite a few players.

[delus]

No comment on the state of retail servers.

[Cosmic Janitor]

The simple reality is that they need to lock the servers to stop people from transfering/joining if they actually care about the faction balance. If they don't and the people actually don't then we should probably all stop pretending this whole faction and server community bullshit matters.

[hydrium]

There is no financial incentive for them to fix the problem.

Faction imbalance is $$$$.

[exsanguinate]

tl;dr: we won't do sh*t, give us your money.

[crusadernero]

Was hoping for them opening free transfers from dead realms due to their free transfers. Currently on Netherwind horde there's on average 10 players online at a time even during peak time. How is that considered playable?

I logged on my Orc Warlock couple of weeks ago in BC classic, cant remember the server name right now. Anyway - I was alone in Org and with UC and TB there were 8 total players on the big horde cities. I mean, EIGHT. God damn thats almost worse than classic ear realms lol.

[Ielenia]

If Blizzard was smart, they would have put caps on the server populations, or incentivized faction changing with buffs to the minority faction much much earlier in game development. Imagine if the minority faction gained +1% extra damage in PvP/PvE for every percentage point difference in the number of active characters per faction? A 60H/40A server would see all alliance toons buffed by 20%. That's a complete madhouse of design. I love it.

Blizzard did that already, with Wintergrasp during early WotLK: the side with participants would get buffs varying in strength according to how much they were outnumbered.

And, of course, the players exploited that for maximum profits to win Wintergrasp until Blizzard said "enough" and limited Wintergrasp participation.

[mcnally86]

"You think you do, but you don't" - Famous words from Blizzard.

Yea, but in this case it is other players telling me what server I have to play on to support their economy or PVP or whatever. The same people advocating to blizz that I have less choices were the kids that invited you over to their house and yelled at you when you did not play with their toys the way they wanted.

[Primohastat]

We aren’t trying to stop smaller servers from becoming even smaller, and we aren’t trying to prevent so-called “megaservers” from forming. We are simply trying to give players who want to move an easy option to do so. It’s not perfect or complete, but it’s a relief valve.

BULLSHIT!
Easy option was developed for example by some guys from Sweden back in 2011 in a game called Minecraft. Pick realm, log in. THAT'S EASY OPTION!

“Merging” servers is actually something that WoW has almost never done, and the reason for this is simple; we don’t like the idea of someone losing their unique name on a realm, and this is doubly true for classic where your identity in the community is a major aspect of the game.

BULLSHIT!
Naming issue was resolved back in 2010 with addition of battle.net app. You can see that in Diablo 3 where you can have a account named BiGdIcK#1337 and name all your characters "Conan", "Legolas" or "Uther". All other players can do the same and there is no conflict at all.
If my real name is Simon, I don't feel that my freedom is invaded because there are probably millions of other people named Simon out there. Such a lame excuse by Blizzard...

Is this appropriate for WoW Classic? In doing this, we are essentially overriding your realm identity and forcibly causing you to merge with another, wholly unknown (to you) realm and community.

BULLSHIT!
Primo: It's been years since people are building communities based on external tools like Discord. How disconnected you need to be to not be aware of that?
Secundo: If whole realm is merged with another, you are not losing anything because everyone is there! You are not merging one account or one guild with another realm. You are merging REALMS! If anything, it gives more opportunities for fun play and new cool interactions between players.

What happens in several months when the population of this new more-balanced realm starts to again (and likely inevitably) skew towards one faction or the other? Do we then connect the already connected realms to yet another realm with the inverse population skew? In such a scenario, you could easily see a never-ending cycle of continuously connecting realms to “chase” that balance, and of course, each time we connect a set of realms, it further dilutes the original realms’ ecosystem and communities.

BUUULSHIT!
I'm not playing "realm". I'm playing my character first. Then I might play with my friends or people from my discord. This dilluting original ecosystem and community is pure LIE.

Obviously, there are many, many other proposed solutions that we’ve seen from players as well as from our colleagues, but using just this one example you can likely see how difficult this is to work through, and how even a seemingly simple solution can be fraught with peril if not carefully considered.

Yes, there are many many other proposed solutions and you Blizzard decided to use one insultingly stupid example to discard them all. Well done.

Lastly, we also wanted to float the idea and acknowledge that this issue might just be too big for forum discussion.

BULLSHIT!
What are they trying to invent here? No live chat, no Blizzcon panel is big enough for such discussion. Internet forum is the best, fastest, cheapest and most convenient option. Only forum allows thousands of players to provide their feedback and is easy to track for all the sides. What's next? Meeting one on one? One dev with one player?

Seriously, this Aggrend is ridiculous. Even if he/she is like 2 years in the company, he/she should know by now what tech they got and what can and should be done.

[marzix]

It seems like the Lore solved this issue with WoW permamently. Remove the factions. Just put everyone together like we have to do every single expansion since launch. It's an outdated idea to separate factions at all at this point. It also solves pvp queues when it just throws people together. When I see a short plate wearer, unless I am really paying attention to it, I can't tell if it's a gnome or goblin at first glance. It doesn't matter and is moot at this point when I fight alongside them to beat the bad guys in the expansion.

[giantspider]

they have to implement some kind of dynamic servers, it will be futureproof for classic/tbc and maybe newer classic versions - trasnfers are like cheat-fix
currently playing firemaw is like super experience Im consuming game, I wanna play more more and more, while playing some medium pop server (low medium-declaining towards low) is boring as hell

[Ragedaug]

The simple reality is that they need to lock the servers to stop people from transfering/joining if they actually care about the faction balance. If they don't and the people actually don't then we should probably all stop pretending this whole faction and server community bullshit matters.

They don't care about faction balance. They said as much in the blue post. They care about players having the experience they want. And players don't want faction balance. When players are given the choice, they move to servers that are wildly out of balance.

So locking players to a server they don't want to play on only ensures more players quit sooner.

[Peacemoon]

this prevents one part of the problem. massive majority can still happen when the minor faction continues to bleed off that server.

additionally you might get issues when a guild/group of players decides to transfer to a realm that's almost at the suggested treshold. halfway through the transfers the server stops accepting transfers and you'll have a torn apart group of players.

worst case: all of them quit because some of them just wasted their money

I would say these are complications but not things you couldn’t resolve.

Yes minority factions might bleed people, but there ways of making it work. Lock factions off if they have 60%+ realm population. Only let people make new characters there if they already have max level characters on there.

If a realm faction ends up with below 40% then make that realm-faction free to transfer to. Make faction transfers on that realm free if you switch the smaller side. Make race changes and name changes free if you are less than 40% of the realm population.

There are plenty of incentives and locks Blizzard could do to help nudge people towards better balanced realms, but the truth is they don’t want to do any of this. They would rather just sit on their hands and let ‘nature take its course’ and ‘not intervene’. Yes that is ideologically pure in one regard, but if you are the caretaker of these servers, it is a dereliction of responsibilities.

Now look at FF14 - they are having an issue with server congestion and have actually stopped selling the game to new customers and stopped advertising it. Can you imagine Blizzard doing that? If a server is full you cannot make new characters on it - period.

Blizzard has managed to create a market for where you play, with people paying real money to move there characters around. Just step back and think about that. Not only are you paying to play, you’re also paying to put your character on a desired server. “I want to be a on a high population server where my faction is winning” - it’s just another form of pay to win. The only winner though is Blizzard. As players flow and move between servers, paying for the privilege, Blizzard wins everytime.

No wonder Blizzard has to choose their words carefully when replying to this - they have to tip toe around the obvious solutions without incriminating themselves.

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They don't care about faction balance. They said as much in the blue post. They care about players having the experience they want. And players don't want faction balance. When players are given the choice, they move to servers that are wildly out of balance.

So locking players to a server they don't want to play on only ensures more players quit sooner.

This just comes down to the fact players aren’t interested in the faction system when all they just want to do is play with others. You could make 100% Horde and 100% Alliance servers, and as long as you can still PvP in battlegrounds, most people would be pretty happy.

Because if you play on a server where 80% of the realm is the other faction, you are basically playing on a server where you can’t play with or communicate with 80% of the population, which for a multiplayer game, is very bad.

[Pendragon]

they introduced things like layers/sharding/etc. To address problems like this.

wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

[schwank05]

I think they should just allow free character transfers so people can move about freely and find a server that works. I for one would love to be on a higher pop server so I have people to play with for alts. I love raid logging and all, but want to gear up my alts as well.

[crewskater]

One thing they could do is allow transferring between PVP and PVE servers. Not being able to summon for raids is a huge pain. Seems like everyone on the megaservers are basically PVEers.

[Orwell7]

It's FOOKIN hilarious that they need to post garbage like these posts, while, for example, Everquest 2 had a system where if there were more players in a given zone than the limit, it fired up NEW INSTANCES OF THAT ZONE and that zone only.

You could right-click and even select which instance you want to be in, and it just ported you there.

Absolutely garbage company.