Literally this is all I want. If the currently logged in faction balance passes 53/47, you sit in a queue as the majority. If the number of unique accounts for a given faction in the last 30 days passes 55/45, disable character creation for the majority.
Let world PvP be an actual expectation, rather than a naive hope.
Concerned about the game becoming unplayable because you are the 1%? Not anymore.
Worried about the outdoor world becoming boring because you haven’t seen the opposing faction in half a year? Nope.
That sounds pretty awful, imo. Imagine never being able to login, because of faction imbalance.
But, I do like the idea of having relatively balanced factions on pvp servers, because I think that’s a lot more fun and lively than single-faction servers.
This did not work when it was tried on pservers. It only caused frustration.
The only workable solution was to give the lower side BROKEN incentives or to actually balance the classes and reduce faction racial diversity(aka paladins having access to both factions seals, etc.). If given the option people will segregate themselves into places that give them the advantageous position, even if it’s just a perceived advantage.
As I said, “naive” is a very apt description of this viewpoint. People seriously think faction imbalance causes open world PvP to die, as though the entire population of one faction is on the realm at the same time and all grouped together to target the entire population of the other faction.
Faction imbalance is the result of open world PvP dying. Not the cause.
I could appreciate your point of view if the mere existence of Grobbulus didn’t outright disprove it. One of the only servers with any sense of faction balance - world PvP everywhere.
While I get there is some relativity to this argument. There is a large difference. Here on official vanilla we have MULTIPLE servers to choose from.
Personally, I would like to see a faction queue hit at 60:40 and then any players on the dominant faction have free transfers to servers that need that said faction for balance.
If a horde is 60% of a server, they simply don’t allow more horde to transfer.
HOWEVER - saying all this, none of it is needed if Blizzard simply STOPS ALLOWING TRANSFERS. Servers naturally balance out and are usually playable until server transfers open.
Also, if you don’t like world pvp at ALL times, and you think killing lowbies is griefing, please just play on a pve server. It saves EVERYONE issues.
I think this is only partially true in modern Classic. With how prevalent coordination tools like Discord and Reddit are, a lot of the “randomness” of server populations is influenced. Stalagg 2019, for example, started off nearly 2.5:1 in favor of Horde and of course got much worse over time. Even without transfers, people just manually rerolled to other servers when they saw the writing on the wall. Transfers of course accelerated this dramatically, but it happens regardless unless properly enforced.
Could make login servers faction specific, then combine 1 horde and 1 alliance, rotate them every few months like GW does with WvW. Or better yet just pick your realm every time you log in.
A majority of players that roll on pvp servers likely do it for the off chance of world pvp occuring organically. That said this is a world of individuals. Some individuals roll on pvp servers because they feel they have no choice, or friends have compelled them to do so and maybe they personally do not like pvp outside of sanctioned battle grounds.
Its hard to herd them. Humans by nature tend to take the easy route to their own personal level of success. If you restrict that easy route humans will simply choose the next easiest route. This is the rule, and of course there are exceptions.
One thing I liked, that the devs and com council have already mentioned, was adding incentivization into the game that could result in 50-50 pvp servers.
What was talked about was rewards and perks that would be granted to minority factions on pvp servers. These perks would increase depending on proximity to a 50-50 balance. And if 50-50 is achieved both factions get a perk that incentivizes maintaining that 50-50 balance.
Given that the literal only difference between a PvE server and a PvP server is the forced world PvP flag, I personally don’t really care what any other made up reasons people have are.
They tried this in retail with War Mode and it did not work even a little bit. It doesn’t work in pservers either unless the bonuses are absurdly overpowered.
I’m referring to the relevant vanilla servers. This hasn’t really been a thing outside of various server that offer different playstyles. 99% of the time it simply 1 launch a single pvp server for all regions. Warmane is about the only one that comes to close to what you are referring and these servers all offer different rulesets and is primarily catering to wotlk along with other new versions of wow.