I don’t think CRBG’s main goal was to combat the faction imbalance back in vanilla although it did help in that problem. Back in vanilla, on many medium/low pop servers, the BGs queue just never pop up outside of weekend peak hours. So unless you are in the more populated servers, for many people in many vanilla servers back then, BGs was effectively a non-existent feature because each individual servers didn’t have a population to support them.
Blizzard has the ability to prevent all the issues which could lead to the “need” of cross-realm anything and they’re able to do it from the very start.
Just don’t open dozens of ghost town servers for no reason.
I feel like there’s almost zero chance we get the perfect amount of servers, and faction balance. They really have no way in knowing how many people are gonna stick around till level 60, where people are gonna roll. Will a large portion of players re-roll to play on a streamers realm etc. are they gonna have anything in place to try and combat faction imbalances? Maybe they wont allow characters to be created on a faction if there’s a huge imbalance. I really don’t know if there’s any practical solutions to it, and we know how they feel about merging servers.
I’m sure this is the kind of stuff they’re really trying hard to get right though.
Hmm small problem with your theory. CRBGs do work.
Faction imbalance is a thing because every part of the game that is not PvP is improved by it…
Also raiding is a bigger part of the game than PvP, and Raiding is improved by having massively imbalanced servers. Hence why most of the faction stacking happened due to raiding. From BC through MoP Horde had better raiding racials this caused all the top guilds to go Horde. Then anyone who wanted to raid seriously switched Horde so they could attempt to get into those guilds. Once they finally balanced the racials back in WoD/Legion they didn’t make Alliance better so you were not incentivised to switch. However then its still better to be Horde since you have a larger talent pool to choose from, which means if you want to raid its easier to find a Horde guild than an Alliance guild cause there are more of them. This is a problem that will not be fixed and you will see Faction Imbalance creep in over time.
What CRBGs did is minimize the damage this caused to the heavier faction on any given realm by taking Horde heavy realms and Mixing them with Alliance Heavy realms.
Server merges have been considered and they have always been rejected for numerous reasons.
Funny thing is if you are super against CRBG you should actually be heavily in favor of Sharding at launch since that will minimize the damage to server populations which is alleviated by CRBG.
having cross realm bgs will not destroy the community, this in no way shall stop wpvp.100% in favor of cross server bgs
Except that the general consensus for Vanilla is Alliance = PVE and Horde = PvP.
This is why the typical PvP server (most not all) were reasonably balanced.
The realms with Q problems were overwhelmingly PvE realms.
Maybe the solution could be something like…
Realm management as best as humanly possible.
CRBG active for the 10 to 59 PvP brackets of AB & WSG.
And possibly if sure need, CRBG for some PvE realms if absolutely nothing else works.
CRBG should be the last possible option blizzard should consider.
Great. CRBG’s are the worstest.
So what happens when you
- are on a low pop server?
- are on a badly unbalanced server?
- are on a server were one faction dominates?
What then? Should we
- force server transfers?
- incentivize server transfers?
- tell people “lulz ur server is garbo” and do nothing?
I see OP has zero solutions to what are the obvious problems that caused the creation of CRBG’s in the first place. All the durm and strang is meaningless until someone actually creates a solution to all these issues.
Read up a few posts, the UP only presents the problem and the results of it; nothing more.
This is why we have the dialog, so that we can solve the problems in a better way.
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Classic isn’t going to have blood elves, the main thing that caused horde overpopulation.
Also does not have superior horde PvE, it’s actually considered the opposite for PvE because alliance has blessing of salvation; the best PVE buff in game.
Hode is however considered superior for PvP.
Alliance is also better at organized PvP.
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It probably was a major reason since faction imbalance was a massive problem.
Hmmm. Faction balance. Xrbg’s. Long ques. You guys sure the problem isn’t just player choice? No matter how balanced the factions are. You still need players to que. You still need two seperate pools of players willing to que from their respective factions.
Isn’t this the crux of the real problem? Maybe we should use the forums to organize the best times to que? Oh wait. This won’t be a problem until it’s a problem. Lol. Carry on.
What they could do is to send everyone who queues into a BG and they are converted to a random faction (race change in appearance only, not in abilities), they are sorted by ilvl, they make the BG’s perfectly symmetrical so you are surrounded by people who might be horde or alliance but they appear to you to be in your faction, and then they disable chat so you never figure out that they’ve mixed things up and also because they don’t want you communicating because BG’s are now simply the midfield scrum and a dps/hps grind and there are no strategic objectives or anything messy like that, so there’s no teamwork required either.
There – all our wishes of balance and insta-queue are solved! You could even do ilvl scaling but make it so that when you inspect people it looks like they have the same ilvl as you even if they’ve twinked out and you’re naked, the twink will wonder where all the twinks came from and the naked people will pat themselves on the back for starting a new trend.
#becarefulwhatyouwishfor 
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That’s kinda like the mercenary system… that’s so non-authentic and community breaking that it’s not even funny…
How about we just wait in Q for a little while and duel outside Org / IF and have a good time when we get into the BG?
Something I noticed when the CRBG’s opened up… The quality of PVP went down the toilet… On BG 9, the quality of PVP in the Battle grounds (NOT ARENA) was worse than the local server… The competition was weak and pathetic, and the players on both sides were almost always defeatist always crying about everything…
Local server BG’s were very different tho, people were fierce and cunning and actually cared about winning… With the ultra fast Q’s of TBC that in all honesty were not really that ultra fast… I went from waiting on average 9 or 10 min… down to 5 to 7 min… The quality of the PVP went into the toilet IMO because no longer did people care about winning when they could simply hop into the next BG.
I think the local community helps to preserve integrity and morality, as well as provide the players with those rivalries that existed before CRBG…
I am 100% willing to wait in Q for good PVP… But what’s the use of waiting in a short Q for garbage PVP where I just mow down the competition? That’s not really fun.
Post CRBG the only way to find a decent challenge is another pre-made, you’re certainly never going to find that on a regular with a pug or VS a pug…
It’s kinda funny…
(At least I hope you recognize it as sarcasm.)
BG’s are a strange animal, tbh. I think in the ideal world you would have mostly pre-mades where a guild would all queue together and all be on voice chat and be facing another mostly pre-made to fight against, with similar coordination and such. Pugs would be minimal, like maybe 10% of the total people there, and they would be lost and wondering why nobody is typing in chat because most were talking in voice chat and not paying attention to text.
But isn’t that sort of thing actually difficult to pull off? I mean, the queue system seems deliberately designed to not allow full premade queues, and getting more than 20 or 25 into a 40m/side BG all from one group was tough from what I hear.
I remember in Cataclysm when my PvE guild was able to queue for BG’s and face off against each other. We’d have teams on separate Vent channels and someone monitoring to make sure people weren’t cheating to listen in (and they always were, but it was still fun). That was fun, but it wasn’t really a rivalry like you might get if you developed a guild vs guild BG event.
Was that possible? I imagine they tried to not do that because they were concerned about win-trading for R14 and exploits like that. I can’t help but think that the whole ranking system was a problem – titles, mounts, probably the first “achievements” before there was achievement points.
Of course, it’s tough to develop competition if you don’t keep score. Not an easy needle to thread.
From what I understand no change that Blizzard has ever made has actually fixed that problem… I hear that the cheating is just better hidden now…
I am told and cannot confirm first hand that the cheating NEAR the top is actually the problem, where as there is cheating at the Rank 1 level, but it’s less common than the Galdiator level now days…
Back when I was serious about Arena in Wrath there was a little cheating, but it was actually fairly un-common… Typically people who cheated were abusing the system some how and bugs with the system to get free wins… Not sure how that took place I just heard about it.
I hear now that win trading is not terribly common, but piloting is the thing now… People apparently pay another player to play their character… How blizzard does not detect this is beyond me… I mean, hell your IP address is kinda a dead ringer for “This guy’s rating jumped 400 points in a day and he’s at a different IP”
That should be the tip-off that really sets the anti-cheating in motion…
Back in Vanilla if some one on the server was account sharing it was really obvious because we knew how every player played who was common in the BG… Everyone has their own style, and with the local community that was very easy to detect…
I heard there was one guy that was doing it, who was trying to get to rank 14… I know I saw his character in the BG but he was not his normal self… I reported it as any one should.
Low and behold that guy did get the booter by the in game GM because I was apparently not the only one that took notice.
Wow, that sounds amazing. Something I never have experienced myself.
I hope you get that back. I’m not sure I’m cut out for it, but if I get that far I’m sure I’ll be hooked.
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I remember I leveled my rogue and wanted to PvP on it. 30 minute waits were common.
Cross-realm existed for a reason: Players are finite. We all had the same arguments on live when cross-realm dungeons were added with the dungeon finder, when raid finder became a thing, when cross-realm zones became a thing, when intentionally grouping with players from other servers became a thing… At some point it needs to click that you just can’t group with people who aren’t online. That’s why so much is pushed to that cross-server concept. You can’t put 80 people together into AV if there’s only 50 total online queuing.
I hope so, because it’s what got me hooked on WoW PvP…
After CRBG, the only way you ever got to see it again was in arena above 2k; only then did you start to see some of the familiar faces…
And that’s the problem now, the only way to enjoy the community aspect of modern WoW PvP is at the top…
That right there actually makes it hard to get invested into the game on a personal level, and the average player in the modern game will never experience that joy.
That’s why the local server community is so darn awesome.
This begs the question; can the server community support a healthy PvP community locally again or is this just never going to take place again?