Add hard population caps and add an incentive to being on the faction being dominated.
It’s that simple.
Now you’re probably thinking “well what can they give that’s not OP but worth it?” and the answer from me would be “idk, I’m not a game dev” but if I were and I had to spitball an idea I would suggest a daily that gives bonus honor and badges.
If you’re on a faction that’s dominating by more than a 40-60 ratio, then the daily isn’t available to you but would be available for the faction being dominated. If the faction ratio on said realm is 40-60 / 45-55 / 50-50 then the daily is available to both factions.
A reward for playing on a faction balanced server.
Edit:
I think this is a better solution then a hard cap. Also I would like to add if they hypothetically did do something like this, I would like to see free transfers from dominated faction realms to not-dominated faction realms; you shouldn’t have to pay money to fix the problem.
“Oh sorry friend, we’re on Benediction. You can’t create a character here so you can’t play with us. Enjoy Earthfury!”
Why? That’s the server type that the players enjoy. Players enjoy being the dominant faction and having little to no population of the opposing faction.
If you don’t like that gameplay, then you have Grobbulus.
hard population caps for guild’s that transfer or people wanting to join their friends… or just about half a dozen other reasons is the worst idea this side of the world.
No one is forcing you to play on any of those servers. There are plenty of healthy 2000-5000 person servers that are flourishing, and having lots of fun.
Just isolate Benediction from the rest of us. Tired of queueing for BGs against premades from that place (probably people who are paying for carries) every time.
Did something happen? Why am I agreeing with you so much the last few days?
I’ve been reminded time and time again that this is an MMO. Now some peeps are saying… it’s an MMO, but too much MMO is bad. Everyone who decides to play on a megaserver knows what they’re getting into.
I think the issue isn’t the megaservers as much as the (some of it fair) resentment that Blizz doesn’t have a solution for all the people still lingering on formerly healthy but now dead and dying servers other than “re-roll or pay for transfer.”
Reroll, or transfer has been the fix on servers since transfers became a thing on retail like 15 years ago. Thats the way it is. If anyone expects any different that havent payed attention to the game historically.
But if they do this, they will make less money, Laissez-faire at its finest, they sit back and roll in the money, because people are having a $h1t experience, on this very far off imbalanced servers, that they have to pay in to move to a more fairly populated server. Noone is happy about this imbalance issue that blizz profits off of.
WotLK classic will be the same thing, 99% 1 faction, and pvp servers will essentially becomes pve servers, atleast for the dominant faction, if that is the case why even bother rolling on a pvp server? go to a pve server. It happened in Vanilla classic, now TBC classic, what makes you think it wont happen a 3rd time? Blizzard just sits and profits off of this, that is the reason they refuse to mitigate the issue. Money talks, BS walks. Blizzard doesnt care about offering a quality gaming experience anymore, they just want rake in as much profits as they can, with minimal work.
But presumably you would agree there was in the past some expectation there would be some population controls and incentives to be on smaller servers, and with the layering and other fixes Blizz has effectively taken away most of the downsides to going mega.
That IS a significant change, and now a lot of folks are stranded who would have never expected to be based on past performance.
Players want to play with other players so they can have a robust economy and choices for guilds/groups. The fact that this game isn’t just two or three big megaservers 17 years later is a mystery.
Or put another way, in the past small-mid servers expected at least some new population joining to offset some of the xfer out / players quitting, at least for the short and medium term.
Private Servers have tried this for YEARS. I’ve seen them give alliance 300% experience, 200% reputation, free epic flying AND dual spec. And guess what? Horde is 85% of the server.
Retail added the XP bonus for warmode that sees Alliance get 20% XP because of the imbalance. It has not helped the skewed balance and this won’t help I am afraid either.
Server balance, by and large, is a community created issue and not something that can simply be programmed away. Not without pissing off a bunch of people who are getting moved.
When people flock to mega servers because they perceive it as healthy, or because some content creator says it’s the best, or reddit goes on its tangents about how OP racial abilities of one side over another are, then this occurs.
A cap would be sensible, but what do you set that at that won’t make people mad? That is a next to impossible task.
The solution is for each player to make decisions for themselves. Which we know won’t happen. So, we deal with it and hope the realm we rolled on does not become a ghost town.
TL:DR - Population inbalance is 95% community caused.