Grobbulus will be the next one-faction realm

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Grobbulus has been roughly 62:38 in terms of Alliance:Horde population balance.

I predict that this will fall to 75:25 or worse within the next three months. By phase four, we may be 90:10.

The most immediate culprit is daily quests. Fly one lap around Skettis – Spy will pick up at least 50 Alliance players. You’ll see perhaps fifteen Horde at most. The Alliance have the run of things and they know it, so they gank freely, driving the Horde away.

Up until this week, the game has had very few daily quests. A cooking and a fishing daily, some dungeon dailies, and a few small-scale pvp objectives. Skettis and Ogri’la are different. They pay more gold than the profession quests and have a lower barrier to entry. They have long-term reputation rewards which further encourages players to return. They concentrate all players into a finite farming space. They are the perfect catalyst to exacerbate the existing faction imbalance, driving the smaller faction to frustration.

We know that being the underdog faction on pvp realms causes a slippery slope situation. Very few people like to play while outnumbered two to one. We’ve seen it happen on multiple realms such as Skeram already. 66:33 is the magic number – a supermajority – where population imbalance becomes too overwhelming for the minority faction to put up any significant fight.

The Grobbulus Alliance, emboldened by their number-backed victories, will continue to camp the daily zones. A few Horde will trickle off – either leaving the game entirely, or transferring to Horde-dominated realms.

As this gulf grows wider, more and more players will become frustrated and either quit or transfer off. This exacerbates the issue, eventually leading to a mass exodus of players on the losing side. A 62:38 spread will cause some players to leave, leading to a 66:33 spread which causes more to leave, then 70:30 which is even more unbearable, and so on and so forth until we’re left with a /who of less than 50 players.

The problem is self-reinforcing, and the daily quests are a far stronger catalyst than summoning stones or spirit towers.

I don’t blame the Alliance on Grobbulus as a whole for this happening. It is a pvp realm, and I cannot fault players for engaging in pvp in what should be a pvp hotspot. I greatly enjoyed the early days of Classic when we were 50:50. I blame the fact that Blizzard allows – and even subtly encourages via paid transfers – for this sort of thing to happen. It’s within their power to take corrective action. They likely will not. Money talks, and transfers are money.

Grobbulus will be an Alliance-only realm soon.

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Hang in there friend. Those of us on dead servers sounded the alarm first, now even those on mega servers are having a negative experience. Either these monkeys will finally do something or the game will implode and die. I don’t know how many more complaints they need to see before doing something.

Pretty much the entirety of my server’s pop went to your server as alliance. It seems it has ruined both of our experiences.

Open a ticket in game and tell them they are ruining the game and that server balance is the issue. Encourage your guilds to do the same and to spam here with posts.

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Why? All the Alliance already transfered to Benediction

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People hate X-Realm, but things like this is why it became a thing

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How would Grobb feel about an extra 600 or so Alliance from DD

Cause there is good indication that might happen soon…

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They started the xfer sale right along with P2 launch.
Nothing subtle about it.

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Grobb, and all other lopsided servers, needs to be faction locked. For Grobb, only Horde should be able to create or transfer characters here.

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This is the way. Lock servers and merge or offer free xfers to or off those servers and decrease the number of available realms

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I thought I would play more in phase 2. Outside of raids, I’m still logged because Dailys aren’t possible on my realm. It is what it is,maybe I thought I did but I didn’t

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its always funny seeing grobbs faction be so alliance dominated yet horde run the gauntlet on world bosses every week and almost every raid/dungeon entrance you got a ton of horde and very little alliance. However the daily quest thing you brought up is very true. Would love to see a faction lock on grobb so only horde can come here; way too many alliance transfers coming lately

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Ran into quite a few new faces over the weekend, seems a lot are xferring from Faerilina.

Please go to another server, preferably one that could use more Alliance.

Thank you in advance if you heed this request

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RIP Grobb. used to be an amazing server

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About 1,200 alliance transfered from Fairbanks to Grobbulus over the last couple months.

Go check out Fairbanks population now lol. It’s a domino effect.

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If only their was another version of this game to tell us how this all plays out.

Oh wait this all happened in retail years and years ago.

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God I hope so.

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Can confirm. I’ve been able to complete the dailies but out there or in Shattrath there is a sea of blue nameplates and hardly any Horde.

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That would require Blizzard to actually be hands-on with Classic. Impossible.

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This seems like such an easy issue to resolve through use of faction specific queues that allow for a 10-15% margin of difference.

Blizz should offer free transfers for some period of 3-4 weeks to allow people the opportunity to balance out without significant charges. Paid transfers after the initial period would be fine.

I would say it’s mind boggling that this continues to occur after years of the same reoccurring issue but it appears to be on par for the modern day Blizz attitude.

The idea that it’s a player made issue infers that the player base has some sort of centralized decision making for how to respond. This is obviously not the case… PVP servers can be a lot of fun but not when they’re allowed to tilt into oblivion.

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Factional queues should have been a thing from the very beginning, to curb the issue before it began. Alas.

My personal prediction is this:

Blizzard likely deliberately allows the issue to happen, because it leads to more paid transfers, which leads to more realms becoming imbalanced, leading to more paid transfers. At this point, fixing the issue would likely lead to a net decrease in revenue, which looks bad to upper management.

However, this sort of factional transfer cannot continue forever. Eventually things will stabilize, with most realms being entrenched and thoroughly dominated by one faction, and perhaps a small handful of 50:50ish realms that managed to survive long enough to avoid being destabilized by mass exoduses from other realms.

At that point, transfer revenue will dry up anyway. And while the game will still probably be profitable, we all know what corporate executives tend to think when they see an IP that is [profitable, but declining].

Even if they do something like xrealm phasing (or w/e the term is, I don’t play retail) to “fix” the issue, the writing is on the wall. And a lot of people (myself included) hate xrealm anyway because it kills realm identity.

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