Hey Sixx! Thank you for a lot of the extra time you put into trying to make this game a more enjoyable experience for everyone. I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while and I decided to just throw it out here in this thread to get it out of my head. A lot of players are indicating server balance is the primary issue and I would have to agree. Here is my proposed solution for the situation. (Sorry its rather lengthy)
I think the devs need to implement two things to solve this for the long term:
(TLDR) freemium based server transfers and open world tenacity for the smaller faction.
This suggestion probably goes against guideline one and three, but I think through experience we’ve found a problem this large won’t be solved by something as simple as temporary free server transfers.
Premise: I’ve tried to come up with something that I believe would be a good ROI for blizzard as players are quitting rather than transferring and tbh I don’t blame them. $25 dollars for one toon for what is essentially an automated script feels like highway robbery. Add in alts and this can easily scale out of control just to be able to enjoy the game again.
Freemium based server transfers: This would, in my mind, take the form of an in-game immigrations npc who would accept currency based tender that can be found by playing the game: gold, heroic badges, honor points, arena points, etc. (if they want to expand to retail: azerite from bfa, or whatever new currency for systems grind they come up with). This would incentive players who do not like the idea of using the wow store to move their toons and would be a decent return for blizzard because it would encourage in game activity. We would keep the $25 transfer as an option for individuals who want to pay for not having to grind the currency. Tying it to in game currency that’s not gold would also hopefully bring more people back into doing things like heroics and bgs because it has value added again.
Open world tenacity: A general health buff that scales based off the proportion of populations between the two factions. For me the only individuals that matter are max leveled toons and perhaps average item level in order to determine the strength of the tenacity the smaller faction receives.
Tenacity is needed for one primary reason: there needs to be an incentive for the smaller faction to remain on their server. Imagine for a moment all the times you are trying to run into SSC as the smaller faction and then imagine doing that with perhaps 5x the health pool (for example: numbers obviously would need testing). Then imagine doing that with 4-5 of your friends with 5x the health pool and you can have a decent chance of fighting back/through. This would make open world so much more interesting again. Now the overpopulated faction would need to rally their comrades to get rid of that one nasty rogue ganking ppl at throne of kiljaedan because of tenacity. And that rogue will be having a BLAST! Much emergent gameplay will be had and it could be really fun. And if a player gets frustrated by that one rogue ganking them with tenacity…they have a freemium option to leave. It would apply to doing quests/world bosses/farming as those are all the elements for which population faction balance matters the most.
This leaves room for one more piece of information that would help tie it all together. At the server selection screen the level of tenacity a faction has needs to be visible somewhere. That way a player can decide to deal with high amounts of tenacity or join them and subsequently balance out the server population wise. A tenacity ratio would allow Blizzard to continue to obfuscate the actual population values while simultaneously throwing the wow gaming community a bone by helping us know what we are getting ourselves into when we transfer or make a new toon on a new server.
This ended up being a lot longer than I expected, but thanks for reading if you made it this far.