Faction Imbalances, over population, under population, so many issues across the board. Honestly, it’s past time for WoW to transition from specific servers loosely daisy chained together to full out Mega Servers and automatically sharding players together.
Take away the ability to pick a specific server from player hands and throw all players into the same pool.
Is it going to fix overall faction imbalance? Of course not, but it will at least be a step in the right direction. Toss in an RP toggle like Warmode for those who want to shard with other RPers.
If anything, there are several well documented videos on server imbalances, queue times, etc. that show just how unstable that illusion of choice is for communities and how quickly servers can blot or wither, factions can go from balanced to drastically imbalanced, etc when players have choice. Especially when you start bringing influencers into the mix.
WoW needs to evolve and move forward and while it is doing so slowly on the in game aspects its past time that the server architecture and idea of server lists be re-considered.
EDIT: Also, can’t segregate players based on a server (Ragnaros, Quel’thanos, etc) if there are no specific servers.
Specific servers cause more problems than they are worth.
I agree with the premise somewhat. And it’s not just wow, either; so many Games with servers and factions go from stable and fun to everyone and their dog transferring to “greener pastures” until it’s the only grass left in the valley.
I don’t know the technical side of it, though, so I can’t comment on what should be done there. But I am sick of players in games teamstacking any chance they get.
Rift simply had the shards something you can right-click on your portrait and jump your toon between. A quick loading screen and you were on a different server.
Aion just added layers dynamically. when x players were on, a new page was created.
Outside wow, this problem was solved many times in many ways.
That would be a massive update to the database. Our names are the table key. They’d have to restructure it into a compound key and all the foreign keys in tables that use it.
It would be forced if they did a mega server - because otherwise if two people with the same name dont want a surname, one would be forced to change their name.