So ive briefly looked through these posts for this suggestion and i dont see it so im going to shoot my shot.
Why arent we using battlegroups? All you need to do is take a server that has a bad horde/alliance ratio and put them into a battlegroup with another server with the same ratio but with just the opposite faction being favored with population.
In other words if we took a server that is horde dominated and put it into a battlegroup with another server that is alliance dominated, the queues should be even.
I know horde are going to have longer queue times either way. But if we did this alliance would wait a bit longer and horde would wait a bit less, in theory.
Maybe im wrong. Please someone tell me that there is a downside that im not seeing here.
Im sorry but you are horribly mistaken if you believe that it is unbalanced to that extent.
Imagine trying to have a constructive conversation about solutions without having people spam worthless responses like “go to retail” or “reroll”.
Yeah its difficult to.
there is a battlegroup for US, and another for OCE as stated.
What queue you are seeing now is the average of the US realms already.
An extreme - and improbable - solution is the removal of access of Horde from PVE realms to BGs. That would decrease the horde count and even up queues some. The horde on the PVE realms may not be happy though.
Saying that the current group of US servers are considered a battlegroup is misleading. Im purposing 5-6 servers in each group. There are so many variables and enough servers to work with here that i just cant imagine it being impossible to at least IMPROVE.
And i havent even brought up the fact that alliance are inherently given the ability to premade while horde cannot. This fact alone is why something needs to be done.
you’re either proposing scapegoating or you’re not very clear on how stacking variables work.
let’s imagine we group US into 3 batches…
if batch A has 5% extra horde, Batch B has 50% extra horde and batch C has 10% extra Alliance, the batching is pretty bad. because if you average them out, assuming equal size you get about 15% extra horde.
this means your batches can be about 15% extra horde (same as the giant all-in-one) or you will reduce YOUR queue by forcing someone else in a batch much higher than 15%. We can call this batch the scapegoat batch. They have much more than 15% extra horde so the majority of population doesnt deal with an imbalance.
Do you understand that really imbalanced things reach the most stability when they’re all combined together? STABLE and BALANCED are not the same thing, but you really really dont want to balance them at the expense of stability. unless you’re prepared to pick a few horde realms and cut them off.
edit: turn off AV on Herod and queues will go down. Merge US with OCE and queues will go up. Split USE and USW and queues will go up in one and down in the other.
Okay im starting to understand this better. Thank you.
My hope i guess was to just get a conversation started on ideas for possible solutions, however im starting to think that this one is maybe unfixable.
Maybe some incentive to play alliance? But as Ginzo said pure population balance isnt the problem… Its just the fact that level 60 alliance players are pvping more than horde.
yup
Numerically it’s fairly straight forward…if you un-average things, you move them away from each other.
Now on the topic at hand…queues are caused by a bottleneck of horde players.
queue moving speed is determined by average pace of a game. so if the games are twice as fast, the same # of players would experience half the time in queue. this is why in retail they introduced resources as a game ending method around wolk or cata. Games only lasted about 15-20minutes so queues popped faster.
the simple and previously accomplished method is the Merc system which will end queues altogether. tech to do it already exists, it’s been done in last raiding tier in retail. Other MMOs like rift did it with great success.
softer Countermeasures would involve reworking the PVP rewards, removing the honor from AV to where people dont go there for the Rank race at all or simply adding a Call-To-Arms system as previously done elsewhere.
edit: i support the merc system. it is a hard countermeasure. if they want to do something, might as well do the thing that works.
So pve servers? LOL or just fix the underlying reason for huge horde overpopulation on pvp servers. Yep, Horde OP racial traits. I mean come on, folks did not pick Horde on PVP servers because they are cute.