Exactly. These checks and balances should have been thought through by Blizzard from the very beginning. On top of that they exacerbate it by doing stupid things like allowing transfers to dominate faction servers. Any idiot could see what was about to happen. Do they not care because of their short term profits? I mean, I just don’t get it.
3 Likes
- Faction balance / server issue
- Releasing a nerfed BT
- Arena participation / honor grind being way too long
- Xfer cooldown / PVE > PVP xfers
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I think its a mixture of they are driven by short term profit gains and just gross mismanagement across the board from the the entire team at Blizzard HQ. Most if not all is a product of the choices they made, with the reduction in key components any major MMO is going to need if it wishes to avoid falling into pitfalls left and right.
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lack of customer support for many game related issues, most things are automated now to cut down on costs.
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lack of quality assurance done with anything they roll out to the servers be it live or PTR. Case in point PTR being down for so long all because of a massive game breaking bug that crashes anyone within combat log range of someone casting a spell that doesn’t have a target(Rain of Fire, Volley, Tranquility. Just to name a few). Could have been caught in internal testing if they, you know did internal testing.
Those are just two major glaring issues that just add to the mess they are in. Which is why we have so many bots running rampant across the servers only made worse because of the level 58 boost they offer. If they actually had customer service staff(GM’s) like they used to have back in the day, the botting issue wouldn’t be as bad as it currently is.
They need to stop thinking short term profits and more at the long term as its only making a bad situation worse, as we are dealing with dead/dying servers all because of faction imbalance issues. That could have been avoided by having a system in place that locks character creation for any faction when the +/- ratio leaves the acceptable range. Sure that means people that want to play together might not be able to or have to spend time looking for a server that they could all play on together. But it would have helped in avoiding the current major issue that is running rampant.
For me the key issues they need to address if they want to keep the server populations from declining any more are:
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Fixing the faction imbalance issue across the board
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Releasing raid content in pre-nerfed states(but with any fixes that were needed due to bugs or broken game design) as pre-nerfed states would make for more player engagement as content is somewhat challenging if you look up guides and the like. Only nerfing existing raid content when the next phase of raiding content drops. If nerfs have to be done due to attrition then they have to be done well and not like what they did with SSC/TK
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Bots and Gold sellers/buyers need to be addressed as they are killing the economies in different ways depending on the servers.
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Merging dying servers to make a stable balanced server or merge them into already stable servers, but keeping in mind faction balance. Ties into point 1.
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Adding customer support staff to handle player issues/GM’s to monitor servers and handle tickets like they used to.
2 Likes
BT isn’t nerfed. But I agree with the rest.
wtf dude? what kinda response is that. People want answers and he told us something is coming yet you just flat out try to blast him. Take a chill pill
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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.
2 Likes
Just give up on anything beyond getting the population on the same realms.
Free Transfers for anyone not on the mega realms should be step 1.
Pretending that Blizz cares about anything else, is a waste of time.
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Stuff like this is a great idea. I don’t know how likely it is to happen, but even something like extra loot from dungeons for the lower pop or something like that (similar to ally war box) would at least be a nice gesture. It would probably take something more extreme like your suggestion to make a significant chang though
I think the purpose of the community council is to offer YOUR ideas, not to represent us.
They apparently took a cross-selection of players to have a more focused discussion. If you collect the feedback from the general community, you’ll eventually propose retail garbage.
Provide YOUR opinion. If you have nothing to offer, step down.
2 Likes
I’m pretty familiar with both the new and the old EULA (and the Terms of Use that was replaced by the new EULA), and I’ve never seen this rule. Would love if you could point it out to me.
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I very strongly agree that incentives of some sort are needed to maintain server balance (most important for pvp servers). Players are too well informed to randomly distribute the way they did in vanilla. I believe many would respond to in-game incentives. If blizzard can run with suggestions like yours that actually enhance the in-game experience (without changing the overall meta), I think some players who have quit would actually return.
I like the tenancy buff idea. I for one would probably play on the minority faction of one of the mega servers just to world pvp if there was such a mechanic.
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Yeah, I firmly believe the crux of the problem to be that there is only incentive to leave and none to stay for the underdog faction. Temporary free server transfers exacerbate this problem without guardrails to limit the type of transfers involved.
As we’ve all seen now, just leaving it as is means all pvp servers will turn into a pve server in the end but without anyone to play against, only with. And that feels pretty stale for a game that’s based on faction rivalry and world pvp.
Edit: To add, if blizzard cannot figure out a way to balance out populations well enough for PvP servers then WotlK will be very stale as well. It will absolutely start with Sunwell dailies and then bleed off into Wotlk classic if they do decide to release it. Can guarantee people will quit if they are underdog in a lopsided mega server by then as they already are currently doing now.
3 Likes
Layers allowed for people to skip the que. If they wouldn’t have added layers, the population would have spread out better, and more servers would be alive right now.
Layers were and continue to be bad for the game.
8 Likes
Just merge all servers to one pve, one pvp … and turn on layers. Get over trying to make some “no changes” experience…
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Nah but imo its their fault for creating a system that allows it, you cannot just expect the player to make the right choice.
I see how having different realms help create a feeling of community but after 15 years the lesson we learned is that it doesn’t work well with a faction system, either you regulate it or just make a unique mega server with warmode.
Please please please bring up the changes we need for people to participate in pvp. The current system blizzard tried to implement has done nothing but drive players away from battlegrounds and arenas. We need easy (cheap) access to starting gear and honor should be much faster to acquire. Get rid of ridiculous things like the engineering belt and net in arena. No one will miss them.
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Correct.
And now it’s too late, so remove the transfer cost for a month and let us merge the realms ourselves.
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Can you ask Blizzard to look into the lack of Serpent-Coil Braid drops?
Is it possible the last patch broke their early fix, and it is no longer dropping?
#nochanges when it suits you.
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Could you bring up the honor grind? Would be nice if they could buff honor gains or do something to help.
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