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.