Nobody really cares about PvP servers either. People got over what is called ‘world pvp’ in vanilla when they realised its just a bunch of neckbeards trying to make themselves feel better. Blizzard says ‘when theres a pvp problem, theres a pvp solution’. Thats false, theres a transfer solution, and they either transferred to another PvP server where their faction was dominant, or to a PvE server.
Its the main reason there aren’t any PvP servers or real world PvP in retail anymore. Its just used for greifing, not for meaningful pvp.
If people really cared about world PvP, they’d transfer to another pvp server where their faction isn’t dominant. They don’t, because they don’t care about world PVP. They care about griefing other players and just overall being pricks.
My point wasn’t people cared because they wanted world pvp it was the minority faction on a pvp server can’t have any of the world because they are grossly out numbered.
It’s not even the minority faction cares about pvp it’s just they don’t to die 3-5 times trying to zone into a raid or when Isle is out trying to do dailies.
World pvp is a meme, it’s just the frustration people get dealing with being the minority, which was why I referenced pve servers as less frustrated because you can’t kill the minority faction going into SSC because they can’t be flagged so they don’t need to make 4 death runs.
To Sixxfury, hello and thank you for crowdsourcing.
My main desire would just be better communication about a timeline. We recently learned about the arena season ending, but we know nothing about the phase 3 launch. There are some speculations, but it would be nice to have a concrete answer. Would also be nice to know a rough guideline for for future phases, especially with phase 5 being a catchup phase and phase 6 being timegated around the island opening.
Scrambling hopelessly to have a shot at playing is not an organized choice. It doesn’t look like the majority of people are happy with the server states. Also, who’s to say that they would have moved if they knew a real solution was being formulated?
Sorry but you’re just talking hot air over here right now about the imbalance of factions and the effect it has on pve servers. Yes its not as bad as pvp servers because you can’t grief and just troll people trying to raid.
But on pve servers the faction that is heavily out numbered never gets the enjoy the benefits of any of the zone’s pvp based objectives. Want to go farm the dungeons in Auchindoun to get some spirit shards for cheap potions or some gear? Well if you’re in the minority faction that never has control of the bone wastes, guess what? No farming for you, along with the zone wide buff that people can enjoy while farming or leveling. This applies to every zone that has a buff for whatever faction controls the pvp objectives.
It may seem small on its face but it’s an advantage that one faction will always enjoy and make things easier on them over the faction that is underpopulated. Would you want to stay on a server where the imbalance is so great that you never can take advantage of some of the features that were brought into TBC with the pvp objectives for most of the zones? Which then has a snowballing effect on having less players farming stuff, which leads to inflated prices on the AH for goods for that faction. That is if those people are lucky enough to be able to farm in said spots and not over-ran by players from the opposing faction. Faction imbalance still has a knock on effect on pve servers that will and does drive people away.
I’m literally proving your point wrong that faction imbalance in pve servers is an issue as well. Just because on pve servers you don’t have to worry about being griefed, doesn’t mean that the imbalance isn’t an issue. At least on my server alliance is the dominant faction by a very very wide margin, there are some horde that actually play and raid. There are some number of horde players that are just alliance alts, so the pvp objectives can be flipped at times for the quests to be done by alliance players.
We’ve seen some new horde transfer into the server, most likely being chased away from other servers and looking for a new home. They’ll have to struggle with all the good farming spots in Outlands being camped by alliance players. Which again has a knock on effect on the economy for them and makes the game less fun, as they have to spend more time to farm gold or materials for raiding and crafting.
To think faction imbalance only causes issues on pvp servers is flat out wrong. Just wait if we ever see Wrath and then Wintergrasp is going to be locked down for one faction the entire time.
Hmm I guess time for you to eat crow. Cleary by your own words no one should care about faction imbalance on a pve server. Right? Or are you going to walk that back now?
No one is moving the goal posts, I just replied to your latest reply. Or should I just tag all of them to clutter up a post? Point is you think that faction imbalance isn’t a big issue on pve servers, well it is a big issue. Might not be as big as it is on pvp servers, but still an issue that can drive players away.
Sure they can quest, level and raid without fear of being griefed on a pve server. But they still have to deal with the other side of that coin. I would say that other side is just as bad, since it forces them into spending more gold on consumes and crafting items. Or spending more time than they have to farm up gold or materials. You have walked back your remarks but still are clinging to its not a big deal, just because people can’t get griefed while trying to do things in-game.
Correction they can still be griefed on a pve server, I remember in the early days of classic there was a horde rogue running around in Westfall and just killing the Defias Traitor npc you had to escort as part of the Defias Botherhood chain quest. So you can still grief players of the other faction easily, just takes some “creative” thinking.
Yea I’ve read all of the posts in this thread yours included, because you are just brushing off the imbalance issue off as World pvp is a “meme”. People aren’t just worried about the World pvp aspect of the servers that are dealing with imbalance issues, that is just one part of the problem.
While saying pve servers are less frustrating just because you can’t grief the smaller faction. As if that is the only issue that would arise from an imbalanced pve server. You are only looking at one very small aspect of what goes wrong with an imbalanced server and ignoring everything else that comes along with it.
No I’m not, in other threads I’m even saying that world pvp is a meme just like I said in this thread, I agree it’s the smallest aspect of why people leave servers.
I have said this a lot, the best resource in this game is players and the minority faction leaves mostly because of that.
Then perhaps going forward you should pick and choose your wording better so you can avoid having to back track when you get challenged on bad takes. Because you’ve had pretty much nothing but bad takes so far in this thread.
World pvp is pretty hard to do “correctly” because there is no real checks in place to keep the server population between the two factions at a nice equilibrium. Which has lead to just the current issue we are having with servers being dead or dying and then having mega servers. That issue is worse on pvp servers and they should put into action a limit to the +/- difference between the two factions. Since people trying to level, farm, quest or just do dungeons/raids have to deal with roaming groups of people looking to just screw over people. It can happen on pve servers with a faction imbalance, but not to the extent on pvp servers. The issues a pve server has with faction imbalance are mainly on the other side of the faction imbalance coin, which the pvp server also shares.
The big problem is a good amount of people that roll on pvp servers do it for one thing, to just grief and steam roll people with mass numbers. So they look for servers that favor that with the faction they wish to play as. All of it has a snowballing effect and just keeps growing bigger and bigger, until we reach where we are today. Servers dying or dead and mega servers.
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.
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.
lack of customer support for many game related issues, most things are automated now to cut down on costs.
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:
Fixing the faction imbalance issue across the board
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
Bots and Gold sellers/buyers need to be addressed as they are killing the economies in different ways depending on the servers.
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.
Adding customer support staff to handle player issues/GM’s to monitor servers and handle tickets like they used to.