Blizzard on the State of TBC Servers

[Val the Moofia Boss]

“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.

The unstated reasons why Blizzard doesn't merge servers: it'd create bad headlines. "WoW is merging servers! WoW's population is declining!", when Blizzard has spent the last 7 years insisting that they have record breaking numbers. Also, Blizzard makes money off of server transfers, basically selling a fix to problems they won't fix for free (despite being paid a $15 monthly sub).

Just one more proof that nowadays the concept of a game being faction-spllited doesn't work anymore.

I think a two faction setup (Horde vs Alliance) makes it too easy for the faction balance to snowball in one direction or another. I think you need at least three factions (1v1v1, as in DAOC or GW2 or ESO). If one faction is dominating, that's okay because the other two factions will unite against that one. Hibernia was the least popular faction in DAOC, but that was okay because they'd team up with whoever was in 2nd place. This especially notable given that DAOC had straight up different classes for each faction, whereas in WoW everyone plays the same with the only difference being racials, which are usually negligible.

If the WoW classic dev team created a playable Scourge faction with Northrend as their home continent, the faction imbalance situation could be mitigated. Even if you had a server with an extreme 50/25/25 population split along Horde/Alliance/Scourge, I don't think Ally and Scourge players would be so eager to jump ship.

[ElDoorO]

The unstated reasons why Blizzard doesn't merge servers: it'd create bad headlines. "WoW is merging servers! WoW's population is declining!", when Blizzard has spent the last 7 years insisting that they have record breaking numbers. Also, Blizzard makes money off of server transfers, basically selling a fix to problems they won't fix for free (despite being paid a $15 monthly sub).



I think a two faction setup (Horde vs Alliance) makes it too easy for the faction balance to snowball in one direction or another. I think you need at least three factions (1v1v1, as in DAOC or GW2 or ESO). If one faction is dominating, that's okay because the other two factions will unite against that one. Hibernia was the least popular faction in DAOC, but that was okay because they'd team up with whoever was in 2nd place. This especially notable given that DAOC had straight up different classes for each faction, whereas in WoW everyone plays the same with the only difference being racials, which are usually negligible.

If the WoW classic dev team created a playable Scourge faction with Northrend as their home continent, the faction imbalance situation could be mitigated. Even if you had a server with an extreme 50/25/25 population split along Horde/Alliance/Scourge, I don't think Ally and Scourge players would be so eager to jump ship.

You're not wrong, they do make money -- but it's only profitable for so long because some people decide they don't want to xfer or they can't afford to xfer. Eventually you can't hide it anymore. If your actions directly hurt the health of the game, or inaction in this particular case, heads may roll -- especially if you knew better.

The game may still be very profitable but I imagine they would rather the game be slightly less than very profitable than barely profitable. A little pain now to save a lot of pain later.

Although Ghostcrawler basically said "git gud or quit" back in Cata so maybe they are willing to lose more people in large quantities again. Or maybe they forgot their lesson.

[DesmondCreighton]

Lopsided servers aren't such a problem for Blizzard when not fixing the issue only makes them more money, don't know why they pretend like they care. Literally hate them, so far gone from the company I thought they were as a kid.

[Relapses]

Man I love how there's like 37 different "obvious" solutions to the problems in TBCC and the only constant is that Blizzard is fucking retarded for not implementing all 37 of them yesterday.

[Toppy]

Man I love how there's like 37 different "obvious" solutions to the problems in TBCC and the only constant is that Blizzard is fucking retarded for not implementing all 37 of them yesterday.

Many of the solutions are obvious, its just that the reasons they DONT implement them are motivated by greed.

You're implication that the fixes aren't obvious because if they were blizzard would do them, is dumb.

[Relapses]

Many of the solutions are obvious, its just that the reasons they DONT implement them are motivated by greed.

You're implication that the fixes aren't obvious because if they were blizzard would do them, is dumb.

Even if Blizzard made all server transfers free it wouldn't change the problem that they're trying to address in this blue post. The issue is entirely social and if you've been reading the blue posts on this matter, they're trying to consider all angles with their solutions so as to not unintentionally make the situation even worse. Greed has nothing to do with this. If Blizzard were greedy they wouldn't be asking for help figuring out solutions. Calling the developers names or accusing them of being greedy is completely pointless.

[javierdsv]

They could simply launch a VERY public poll (maybe even showing up in-game) with this question:
"Would you be willing to be requested to change your character name, in exchange of balancing factions on servers by merging them?"

And that's it, stop assuming they know what people want.

[tomten]

wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

So...what was the reason then, mr all knowing god with insight into blizzards doings?

[Jastall]

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.

That's really my takeaway as well. I mean sure Blizzard doesn't stop transfers to big servers because $- but they make $ because people are willing to pay in the first place. Because those playing PvE don't give a rat's ass about faction and just want as big of a player pool as possible, and what people do open world PvP are more often than not looking to steamroll the opposition rather than have balanced fights anyway, else they'd be in Battlegrounds. Same reason PvE players flock to Horde-heavy servers in retail really. The faction system really is far more hindrance than help at this stage of the game if you ask me.

[Beet]

Why would they even offer free transfers if this was true? Or did you miss that part (and all the other times they've done this over the years)?

Because at some point the money gained from transfers doesn’t make up for the loss of people cancelling their subs due to bad servers.

[Boddhi]

add the fact that some people are paying hundreds of $ just to move many characters

Blizz: Guys trust us we really really want to do something to improve the server balance situation but the universe just does not let us!

[cozzri]

speak for yourself i don’t want to lose my name

They can certainly allow players to have the same name on a server; your battle tag being the unique identifier. Countless other games and services work in this way. This is 100% about the money.

[giantspider]

What is the benefit of balanced factions?
If there were 3 servers:
gehennas 20k horde 0 ally
earthshaker 0 horde 20k ally
firemaw 10k horde 10k ally
where would u play?
I would play horde on gehennas and ally on earthshaker

there are only 2 bad thing about unbalanced servers
1- someone who doesnt know how to check which faction to play on specyfic server
2- some server was balanced and then start to polarise to certain faction and its not ur faction

WOW servers always tended to be polarised on specyfic faction on realms for example (2 mega severs from old days)
stormscale was always 99% horde
outland was always 99 % ally

serious problem is that we have a lot of servers which low/medium(low) pop and faction balance is like not even a problem there, u just cant find ppl to play with on those servers on both factions if it was 70H to 30A with 50k ppl it would be better than 50:50 with 1k
merge those servers or create some virtual connectons between them so they act like a single server - it would fix todays problem and future if there is wotlk - tbc servers will be even less pop and ppl would be more split - this would prevent it for classic, tbc, wotlk and maybe more

[7eventyOne]

So, where do we go from here? Well, I think that’s where you come in. What we’d like to see now is some more suggestions from you with your ideas of how we could improve this situation and ideally, we can have some back and forth here to discuss them.

People have been telling their ideas for a very long time and all that had to be said about the issue has already been posted on their forums. And it is incredibly stupid to ask for more "ideas" where part of your vocation is to solve problems like these. It is kind of hypocritical as this "council" seems to be.

But keep giving them your wisdom, they are listening, they really do but they absolutely do not care about it.

[Ragedaug]

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.

I'd agree with that. Even if you are comparing a 50/50 mega-server, you still have half the population to group and guild with from what you would have in a full horde or full alliance mega-server. So even disregarding PVP, it makes sense for players to move to wildly out-of-balance servers.

The other unintended consequence, is that we have some pretty bad writing/new lore. They have to think of new reasons each xpac for the players to be "mad" at each other to provide the basis for why the two factions are constantly trying to murder each other.

- - - Updated - - -

But keep giving them your wisdom, they are listening, they really do but they absolutely do not care about it.

That's kinda an asinine statement. They obviously do care. Even if it's just the money & greed that they care about, they won't make any of that if they drive all the players away. So even greedy corporate overlords know they have to make their product in such a way that people will voluntarily exchange their money for it.

The problem is who are they listening to, and what conclusions are they making. To that end, I don't have any excuses to make for them. But the best thing players who want them to improve the game can do is to provide well thought out feedback to try to move yourself to the top of the list of people they are listening to.

It may not help, but the other options are just to come to the internet forums and whine about it, which I think helps even less, or quit the game, which won't necessarily get them to listen to you, but if enough people quit (which is what I think happened), they'll start listening to whoever is left.

[fohpo]

I think a two faction setup (Horde vs Alliance) makes it too easy for the faction balance to snowball in one direction or another. I think you need at least three factions (1v1v1, as in DAOC or GW2 or ESO).

Won’t work, look at NW.

[Pendragon]

So...what was the reason then, mr all knowing god with insight into blizzards doings?

Well mr clueless, the stated reason was to reduce over-crowding in popular/quest areas and for server stability. It had nothing to do with faction balance because from day 1 it did not balance anything faction related. Fact.

[Machismo]

Here's the reality, the vast majority of players don't actually want a balanced server. the servers are so unbalanced as a direct result of "player freedom." In the end, it basically turns them all into PvE servers. People want to be on the winning side, no matter how unbalanced it may be. Blizzard won't fix it, because they have no incentive to fix it. Some of us left the game when people started abandoning servers, but most people simply transferred, and moved on with their lives. Blizzard profited from it.

TBCC exists, because it generates revenue with almost no effort on the part of Blizzard. They won't lift a finger to do anything, other than give lip service, and say, "We hear you."

[Kralljin]

Here's the reality, the vast majority of players don't actually want a balanced server. the servers are so unbalanced as a direct result of "player freedom."

I am not fully convinced of this argument because it pretty much ignores a crucial factor: Population of your own faction.

If nobody wanted to play on a balanced server, then we wouldn't see this domino effect of:
Server X becomes imbalanced
Minority faction abandons X and transfers to another balanced Server Y
Y now becomes imbalanced
The minority faction of Y starts to leave
Next Server becomes imbalanced
And the cycle continues

If the majority actually wanted to play on a PvE in all but name, then this process would've happened far quicker, because nobody would have transferred to a Server where the enemy faction still exists, yet if that didn't happen, then more and more servers couldn't become imbalanced due to transfers.

It also completely disregards the death of very lopsided servers, there have been a ton of Servers that have been massively favored by one faction, yet died nonetheless.

I think the main culprit is just the total population of a faction on a given Server, because that truly impacts the ability to play the game.
I was on a not so populated server (Which also died despite being Horde dominated for the enterity of TBC), the problem is that when you struggle to find people for basically anything, it's becomes pretty apparant why people transferred.

Ironically, i believe that how TBC changed the game bears part of the blame.
In Classic, you didn't really need a tank specced player for 5man dungeons, a Warrior was completely sufficient.
In TBC, you need a tank specced player with Tank gear, else the run becomes a total pain, especially heroics destroy any non tank (disregarding threat issues).
Bonus points: If you want a smooth run, you need a prot Pally.

In Classic, the requirements towards any raid comp were pretty minimal, bring a bunch of pure classes + Warriors, there is only one viable Tank class (which also happens to be the most popular one and didn't even need a complete new set of gear) and the vast majority of hybrids are healer anyway.
In TBC, you need specific hybrids for a good comp, you'd always want a Prot Pally and so forth, healers are also massively split up due to hybrids being more viable.

In Classic, all you needed in PvP was time and due to less populated servers being less competitive, the Brackets were usually not that big, i got to R11 despite still working the 40h/week, i could've even gotten R13 if i wanted to without adjusting my schedule.
Of course, bracketstacking helped here out massively, but still, you played the game with other people and received rewards for it, the basic loop of the game was intact.

In TBC, due to Arena, you now need
1. find mates that play a class / spec that fit yours to build a decent comp (and comp is a huge factor in TBC)
2. find mates that are roughly on the same skill level as you
3. find mates that can roughly play around the same time as you (because pushing rating takes a few hours)

Also, if you want to reroll because you've failed to build any decent comp, you need to engage in the massive honor grind again, which is probably something around 80h-100h.
Disregarding that you're also weeks / months behind on Arena points if you didn't play consistently with the Alt you're now rerolling.

All these factors make it very difficult to find players to play Arena with unless you can draw on a huge playerpool.

It really needs to be noted that during Classic, we already saw this phenomenon, however there it was primarily caused by Phase 2 launch, but it was with TBC where it derailed within a few months.

[Machismo]

I am not fully convinced of this argument because it pretty much ignores a crucial factor: Population of your own faction.

If nobody wanted to play on a balanced server, then we wouldn't see this domino effect of:
Server X becomes imbalanced
Minority faction abandons X and transfers to another balanced Server Y
Y now becomes imbalanced
The minority faction of Y starts to leave
Next Server becomes imbalanced
And the cycle continues

If the majority actually wanted to play on a PvE in all but name, then this process would've happened far quicker, because nobody would have transferred to a Server where the enemy faction still exists, yet if that didn't happen, then more and more servers couldn't become imbalanced due to transfers.

It also completely disregards the death of very lopsided servers, there have been a ton of Servers that have been massively favored by one faction, yet died nonetheless.

I think the main culprit is just the total population of a faction on a given Server, because that truly impacts the ability to play the game.
I was on a not so populated server (Which also died despite being Horde dominated for the enterity of TBC), the problem is that when you struggle to find people for basically anything, it's becomes pretty apparant why people transferred.

Ironically, i believe that how TBC changed the game bears part of the blame.
In Classic, you didn't really need a tank specced player for 5man dungeons, a Warrior was completely sufficient.
In TBC, you need a tank specced player with Tank gear, else the run becomes a total pain, especially heroics destroy any non tank (disregarding threat issues).
Bonus points: If you want a smooth run, you need a prot Pally.

In Classic, the requirements towards any raid comp were pretty minimal, bring a bunch of pure classes + Warriors, there is only one viable Tank class (which also happens to be the most popular one and didn't even need a complete new set of gear) and the vast majority of hybrids are healer anyway.
In TBC, you need specific hybrids for a good comp, you'd always want a Prot Pally and so forth, healers are also massively split up due to hybrids being more viable.

In Classic, all you needed in PvP was time and due to less populated servers being less competitive, the Brackets were usually not that big, i got to R11 despite still working the 40h/week, i could've even gotten R13 if i wanted to without adjusting my schedule.
Of course, bracketstacking helped here out massively, but still, you played the game with other people and received rewards for it, the basic loop of the game was intact.

In TBC, due to Arena, you now need
1. find mates that play a class / spec that fit yours to build a decent comp (and comp is a huge factor in TBC)
2. find mates that are roughly on the same skill level as you
3. find mates that can roughly play around the same time as you (because pushing rating takes a few hours)

Also, if you want to reroll because you've failed to build any decent comp, you need to engage in the massive honor grind again, which is probably something around 80h-100h.
Disregarding that you're also weeks / months behind on Arena points if you didn't play consistently with the Alt you're now rerolling.

All these factors make it very difficult to find players to play Arena with unless you can draw on a huge playerpool.

It really needs to be noted that during Classic, we already saw this phenomenon, where it was primarily caused by Phase 2 launch, but it was with TBC where it derailed within a few months.

The issue is that private servers did better when it was a PvP server, so that's what people continued to do in Classic. They are fine with ganking poor bastards, but don't want "actual pvp."

the issue with server imbalance is much like that of private server stability and population. Once the floodgates finally open, it happens extremely quickly. a 55:45 server can turn into a 70:30 server in a real hurry.