Then what would your solution to the issue be? Because it can’t be Blizz forcing people to play where they don’t want to. That just results in quitting entirely and makes the issue worse.
The only feasible solution is people playing with like-minded individuals, but the thing about that is people quit all the time. There is not a ton of new blood in the game. So you don’t get new people joining up, and those joining up are likely to choose the biggest realms over the smaller ones for the same reason someone who wants a smaller realm chooses a bigger realm regardless. Safety from people leaving the game or leaving the realm.
That to me just reads that there isn’t a big enough community that wants a medium or small realm that also consistently plays the game to support it. Something an MMO needs to be able to continue.
Either way, if people choose to just organize themselves into mega realms as has happened on both retail, classic, and season of mastery. It will continue to just happen… so the likely outcome from Blizz as was previously stated in this post is to do nothing. Results will end up being the same of everyone moving to the 4 or so mega realms. Except by doing nothing they get to make money.
Step 1. Allow each faction to form a PVP mega-server through paid transfers (or free ones, it doesn’t really matter).
Step 2. When the servers are sufficiently large and single-faction, link the two largest servers together and force all players onto a single layer.
Step 3. Declare that they will now have a massive world PVP event, to the death. The losing server will be destroyed, and all its characters deleted.
This will not solve the problem, but I will be very entertained for a short time.
You’re right. There is no right answer, because the problem is actually one of player perception and not server health. It’s very difficult to persuade people what the real cause is for their perceived problems, or what the solution is. Because people get caught by their feelings, and don’t really want to deal with reality as it actually is.
I can kind of see your point. Ultimately, it is a player made problem.
That said, Blizzard should have really done more to make sure the players can’t make the problem. I can see why they wouldn’t have done this back in the day, but now, we’ve already seen how these things shake out.
But, you can’t change the past. All you can do is implement the best out of all bad choices. From what they said on the thread in the community forum, they’re also open to adding in incentives for Alliance. So here’s what I propose
One, connect all the realms. At this point, they’ve run out the vast majority of the Classic purists with stuff like paid boosts. So connect all the realms except for the RP ones. Offer the people who want smaller communities a free transfer to those realms. For anybody on PvP realms who doesn’t want to deal with PvP, offer them free transfers to the PvE realm of their choice
Two, offer Alliance increase experience gain on PvP servers. Say, 50% more exp. Then, when they get to max level, Alliance also gets 50% more gold for everything. Completing quest, killing mobs, vendoring items, everything. Do this and gradually decrease the bonuses until you reach 50/50.
Three, offer Alliance only free transfers from PvE to PvP. While I don’t think this would be very many people, it’s at least something.
There’s no silver bullet, but this would be something that I think would help a lot.
It’s not really. That’s a simplistic analysis of a complex problem. It could be said it’s a problem some players made that many players who didn’t make the problem are abandoned to suffer the consequences of
Since PVP is all within the BGs now, why not lock creation on a given server to only one faction, and move all the faction’s toons to another server which is locked to that faction.
That way people can’t get caught on a ‘dying faction’, and everyone wins.
/s
Unless Blizz starts connecting servers together, faction imbalance is basically “The players did it” network effects.