Faction Imbalance: Blizzard is Outsmarting Us

Absolutely not, maybe you’re not familiar with corporations but that’s not how it works. CEO is designated by the major stakeholders and will be fired if they feel like they’re not getting enough cash. Even if you created this business from scratch, you can get fired, unless you personally have over 51% of the stakes which gives you executive control. Incorporation separates the humans from the company, creating another “person” entirely. Management have objectives, they get fat bonuses, stakeholders suck the money and call the shots.

L.O.L. hope you’re kidding man. Diablo Micro-transaction Immortal? D3 real money auction? The recent esport scam funded by players with toy sales? Silencing people on social media and submitting to China?

I actually installed retail by mistake and holy cow this game looked like a freaking casino man.

Breaking news: 15 years ago Blizz is nowhere near nowadays Blizz. Things might be changing, only time will tell.

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I think your tin foil hat is on too tight.
Blizzard (even before Vivendi purchased Activation and created Activision-Blizzard - renamed from Vivendi games - which both Blizzard and Activision are under so no Blizzard is not a subsidiary of Activision but Sister companies ) has NEVER in the 15 yrs of WoW done anything that stops players from choosing which faction they want to play or punishing those that choose dominate factions on PvP servers.

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Actually that’s exactly how it works.

Let’s stop acting like a massive corporation doing something a tiny bit crooked to make money is some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. It’s not out of the realm of possibility or even normalcy.

If you think they didn’t know what would happen when they opened up free transfers, then you need to consider how a multi-billion dollar company works. Decisions are not made lightly or without thought of the consequences.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are trying to set up more paid transfers. They could have a host of reasons for the decisions they made. The issue is that they aren’t communicating them. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable to consider the OP’s theory a possibility.

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It won’t happen.

During wod most serious PvPers went Alliance, and their sycophants followed. Horde had insta-queues, Alliance had 30 minute queues.

There were many threads on the forum complaining about the situation. Some suggested that lots of Alliance would go Horde to get shorter queues. That didn’t happen.

Instead they finally gave us merc mode.

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what do you mean they are not communicating them ? they have specifically stated that they were doing the transfers from high to low pop servers to help alleviate queues.
What part of that is them not communicating ?

While we’re on the subject of conspiracies, anyone think Classic WoW was made as some kind of dummy experimental project/testing grounds, it’s main purpose for making retail better? Wasn’t there going to be changes in retail to try and give more character to the classes again? That’s a very classic feel.

We figured this out 14 1/2 years ago.

They did not communicate why they decided to wreck population balance intentionally. Yes, they knew that would happen with free transfers. The question is why did they let it? What aspect did they consider to be more important than balance? That is what they need to communicate.

because in 15 yrs of WoW they have stated time and again that they will never force players to play a specific faction. It didn’t need saying.

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That seems like clear communication to me. If you choose not to believe them, it’s your problem.

Blizzard opened up transfers to alleviate queue times. The fact that people used it to further screw up PvP servers (anybody who thinks the server populations weren’t already screwing themselves up is a little naive, to say the least) is irrelevant.

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I guess I’ll repeat myself just for you. They communicated what they did and the proximal purpose. They did not communicate the reasoning behind that decision. They knew it would wreck balance but decided to do it anyway. So what they ought to share with the community (if they don’t want this theory to seem plausible) is what exactly they thought was more important than not wrecking balance.

It’s not irrelevant because it was known to be the most likely reaction by people. If you give lots of people an easy way out, many will take it. You can’t really blame people for taking the path of least resistance. Why should they care that they left behind a wrecked server? At least they are having fun now. That’s what it’s all about. So yes, you can blame blizz for making balance even worse.

The fact that the servers were already bad does not justify making them worse. I’m not sure what your point there is. If anything it actually supports the OP’s theory.

What about this requires more explanation? The reasoning behind the decision is as follows:

  1. Too many people trying to log in to a server at the same time results in extended queues.
  2. Moving some of these people to another server will alleviate the queue times.

Now, as to the other point, either Blizzard wrecked the balance or the balance was already wrecked.

If they needed an easy way out, it’s clear that factions were already imbalanced and people were having a lousy time anyway. Free transfers did nothing that wasn’t happening anyway.

It does, however, mean that the fact had no bearing on their method of alleviating extended queue times. The servers were imbalanced before and after the transfers, and people were having a lousy time before and after.

Since nothing changed in that regard except the amount of people who were surprised by the inevitable, it’s irrelevant to the question of queue times.