You sure? Most of the time I hear complaining about balance, its usually people stuck on sh*tty servers like Skeram due to balancing issues. As the server culture there was not good at all and caused a lot of people to leave and transfer off.
These servers used to be pretty balanced at launch, but the server attracted a ton of toxic trihard sweaty bois which normal people didn’t like and transferred off. Or we have the situation of mega guilds who thought the server was bad because of the inbalance they caused and move to another server and mess/sh-t up.
Grobbulus is feeling that rn with some of the big guilds splitting or top players transferring off as…surprise! it’s an RP-PVP server and lots of players aren’t super serious with ranking and pvp compared to other servers like Whitemane or Herod.
Yes, because the hallmark of healthy servers is people mass transferring to and from them in search of…you guessed it…balance, leaving tons of dead and lopsided servers in the process as people scramble around forcing Blizzard to lock transfers.
There has 100% without a shadow of a doubt been horde casual players that got 60, wanted to play BGs, got bored of sitting in long queues, and unsubscribed. This number will only grow when every server is 90H:10A, and 1 or 2 Alliance dominated mega-servers.
I’m not saying the servers are healthy. I’m saying that people aren’t quitting in droves because one faction dominated their server. If they were, the servers I listed wouldn’t exist. All the players would have server transferred off/rerolled. Activision has not made 1 single post regarding server faction balance. They won’t acknowledge it as a problem, let alone find a viable fix for it. They will simply add Mercenary mode as a bandaid fix in TBC, and that will be that.
You base this 90% on absolutely nothing, first of all. For example, the Horde cave in AV gets moved back in TBC and suddenly Alliance dominates the bg again and queue times drastically change because of it. Anyway, Blizz can’t force people to play a faction, and whatever players choose…they choose. And live with the consequences of that choice. Retail has put in place very convenience imaginable, including this Mercenary mode and yet is a pale shadow of what it was once in the unquestionable matter of subs.
TBC means TBC. It’s that simple. They’re not going to invalidate your faction choice just for a matter of convenience. There is literally 0% chance it’ll be in TBC. Blizz has done nothing like that with Classic, and won’t do it with any of their future museum pieces.
Imma stop you right there. You simply cannot look at how Classic has unfolded and honestly come to the conclusion that people don’t care about faction balance. P2 was an absolute poop storm that highlighted the faction balance as a MAJOR concern for players that forced Blizzard to release BGs much earlier than intended. P2 was probably the point in Classic’s lifetime that lost the most subs.
Then in the following months, more than a couple servers died overnight when one faction mass transferred off. Ask yourself why an entire faction would transfer off a server and then tell me people don’t care about faction balance.
I initially rolled on Stalagg Alliance server. About 3 weeks after release, data came out suggesting that our server was 85A:15H. I joined classic almost exclusively for the phase2 PvP, and seeing that my phase2 experience would probably be bad there, I rerolled on a near 50:50 server, Faerlina. So in that instance, for a single phase of Classic, I did care.
Everyone else on Stalagg however? They didn’t want to be dominated on Stalagg. They wanted to dominate on Heartseeker. Free transfers became available and our server immediately died. They didn’t care that Heartseeker was 80%+ one faction, as long as it was their faction.
People can say that faction balance is very important to them, but as long as they can find a raid and get decent BG queues, most won’t quit even if their server is heavily imbalanced.
I see your point and agree that people only tend to care when they are the outnumbered faction, but WoW is not a healthy game when the game is 90:10 a single faction, and we all know this is what TBC will be unless Blizzard intervenes.
You know how many ‘Classic is DOA if Blizz doesn’t do this’ threads there were before Classic launched? They all turned out to be nonsense. Just like this thread.
Millions of people are enjoying the game. A handful of qqers live on this forum. Reality.
And you defining authenticity as ‘a problem’ immediately invalidates your argument. It’s not a problem, it’s how the game was…and that’s the entire point of Classic. The actual problem is you trying to apply Current WoW mentality and solutions to a 15 year old time capsule.
You’re right that no changes is bad for TBC. You’re also right that server issues create a lot of the problems in classic. They had a near perfect solution for it: layers. But people complained and cried about them for some reason. No idea why. They’re just short sighted I guess and hate cheap consumables.
Some people are in favor of the original server size for vanilla. This would also be a mistake. We’d have many abandoned realms. We have realms that are currently being abandoned, even despite having mega servers. Mega servers make it much easier to find guilds to play with. tiny servers are always a dead end for people looking to see content.
I can say with a fair amount of certainty that if the drums stacking thing isn’t fixed, I just won’t raid in tbc.
Likewise, if horde is vastly more populated than alliance and bg queus are super long, I probably just won’t play at all.
Finally, ret gear has no resilience for the honor gear, season 1 gear, and season 2 gear. This was eventually fixed but not retroactively for those sets, and I’d rather not viciously suck via no resilience for 2 full seasons again.
Finally, though this one won’t benefit me all that much, I must concede that alliance ret paladins get kind of screwed by horde having seal of blood, and horde prot pallies could use the boost from the dot ranking seal as well.
All 4 of those things can, should, or even arguably NEED to result in changes for tbc classic.
Oh, I see. YOUR changes are good. Person x changes are bad. And person y’s changes are some good some bad. And the 7,433,692 other opinions on possible and ‘necessary’ changes from 7,433,692 different players are all good…and bad. And Blizz should sift through them all and try to appease everyone. They’ve been doing that for 15 years and it’s worked wonders for the current game. But what about those players who just want an authentic experience of an old game that no longer exists? Screw them I guess. It’s not like Classic was made to create that very experience.
Look, Blizzard has been listening to the wrong people since this game was created. A very vocal minority who obsess over things that don’t matter. The current WoW has what 1/10th the population it once had? You know…back before most of these conveniences and ‘balances’ were put in place. It’s almost like the VAST majority of players don’t nitpick over every little thing. And designing the game around trying to appease that min/max mentality sucked the rpg elements out of the game, the community means nothing, choice and freedom are gone. And so are millions of players. And for what? So (no offense) posters like yourself can move directly on to the next day’s complaint. What happens to WoW as a result? It’s been turned more into an interactive calculator than a video game that players play for gasp fun.
Just so we’re clear, I actually am trying to advocate for an authentic experience. That’s why I am against megaservers, and was for the Lotus changes when they had to be made because of megaservers. Because megaservers ruined the authentic experience and Black Lotus somewhat restored it.
But recreating the code does not recreate the experience. And while we all understand that the original experience can never be recreated identically, there are still aspects that are worth attempting to preserve, even if it means deviating from the original code.
Two very important things must be preserved however they can be in order to recreate an experience that actually works according to how the game was originally designed: server populations and faction balance. If either of those two things are broken, we’ve already seen the damage that it causes to the rest of the game. Allowing it to happen again in TBC is just stupid.