“Outnumbered factions will have limited or no access to large swaths of TBC content unless blizzard directly intervenes to prevent it” You mean like guilds holding the gate opening hostage on horde side so they can get 9+ Scarab lords? theres no way to kill META gameplay. People have a specific way of playing and they will continue to do it as a majority; you cant stop it you have to work with it or risk losing money / Players. I may not like that we’re delaying gates but it makes sense; this is a museum and we have a chance to actually fix a number that wasnt in our control before so we will take control and abuse it like most humans do when given control of something. Bar them removing faction’s and racial diff in TBC theres no way to fix this issue.
Private servers also embraced changes and had properly balanced factions or rewards for playing as the underdog faction.
I was talking about Classic, not TBC. Yes, there are some rewards for capturing towers in Auchindun, but the rewards (beyond some rep from daily quests) are a few percent extra damage in the open world, not in raids, BGs, dungeons, or Arenas. So it is a thing, but not nearly so big a thing as you might make it out to be.
Well yes and no. Private servers did have sensible changes like respawn rate, spawn location randomized for some key nodes and herbs, and adjustments to make raid encounters a bit more difficult. Some even toned down on world buffs.
But I don’t recall Nostalrius or Kronos having to do anything specific rewards for the underdog faction because there were only 2 PvP servers so people had no choice to play on them. I think also people were less meta driven as they are now.
Pirate servers also are not a representative sample of the player base as a whole. Yes, Nostalrius had 10k people, making it incredibly large for one of the pirate servers, but a lot of the WoW playerbase, to say nothing of the general public, didn’t even hear about it until it was shut down. Compare that to Classic, which was actively marketed, to draw in more people. So there was some self-selection going on, as well.
its not that they were less meta driven; I used to watch skarm and be like “Oh thats just PS” till i put it in practice in retail and now my guild jokes that “What papa skarm says Goes for you warriors!”
With private servers its run by fans who care about the game, QoL, and if they did some ‘changes’, It was actually beneficial. Like I remember seeing one that added a bare-bones version of Transmogging into Classic.
Classic, and Blizz rn are just a shell of its former self. the GMs don’t exist, there’s only 1 guy whos the mouthpiece of Blizzard telling us news and changes, there’s no love at all or care from management about Classic WoW even if they pushed real hard on promoting it. They just want money right now and subs than fixing things and then they’ll kill it, saying it was an absolute failure and move on to their next money venture while asking themselves ‘how did this fail?’ without realizing it was themselves who shot themselves in the foot and bled out. It’s the Activision way of doing things.
Strongly disagree. Changes TBC is DOA.
Good point, actually. I guess you are right.
But although I see your point on PvP Servers being an issue themselves, I think that Blizzard could address some issues that TBC have by making the Alliance more attractive. Giving paladins on both sides the same seals would be honestly a minor adjustment with considerable positive effect for Alliance and no effect at all on the Horde.
It is undeniable that Horde has the upper hand in PvP and PvE in TBC and I am afraid that the servers imbalance reaches a point that it is unplayable for one faction. Especially if Blizzard decides to go more mega servers again with layers upon layers…
Nothing to oppose because you’re absolutely right. Our server is dead for the Alliance because of opened transfers and lack of GAF when considering transfers. The entire Alliance faction just slowly disappeared, so now I live in the “Horde wins” timeline.
No changes works for core gameplay and quality of life stuff, but there’s some management to be done to curate the kind of experience people are looking for. Banning the LFG add-on was a good version of curation, for example, and I think a little bit of brainpower can keep the game fresh long enough for people to get over the initial frustration of WPvP in leveling zones long enough to enjoy it later.
It’s like they don’t actually like PvP servers but are holding fast to them by way of a sunk cost fallacy.
There was so much propaganda surrounding PvP servers being the authentic vanilla experience that it sounds like a lot of PvE players got conned into rolling PvP and are now paying the piper.
The problem is we can already see a version of the game where Blizzard tried adding incentives to make the Alliance more attractive to PvP crowds: Retail. They literally can’t bribe Alliance to turn on War Mode in numbers anywhere close to Horde numbers. Meanwhile the populations, in terms of factions, are split roughly 50/50 on retail.
At the same time, Mercenary mode had all incentives removed, because too many Horde were using it.
But going back to what Blizzard could do to try and control population on PvP servers, the problem you’re immediately going to run into is people complaining that they can’t play with their friends because their friends are Horde, but Blizzard says that Horde character creation is locked until more Alliance show up. Or faction-specific queues to log in? I’m sure that will go over well.
What methods would you suggest? Knowing, of course, that the forums erupt in furious anger when the weekly maintenance lasts more than an hour, to say nothing of the horror of having a 10 minute queue to log in, or… well, you get the idea. What would you suggest Blizzard do? Not ‘they should think of something’. Actual, concrete ideas. What do you think they should do? And are you willing to be on the ‘losing’ side of those decisions, if Blizzard locks you out because too many people are on your faction at the moment?
I don’t know why people make this claim. PVP in WoW is fine, and even something you could focus on in a similar fashion to a PVP only game.
Hyperbole is boring and stupid.
How did faction imbalance produce “extremely toxic metas that affect both PVP and PVE servers”?
Those open world objectives are not “large swathes of content.” 
Any other brain busters?
Then don’t launch TBC, if it is going to be broken in it’s original form THEN don’t launch it at all. The idea that TBC should launch with only the changes that you want is absurd and clearly a bad decision.
Community problems cannot be solved with game design changes.
The problems that Classic has are approximately 99% because of the community, and it is the responsibility of us, the community, to fix them; not Blizzard.
If Classic has taught us anything it’s that people really don’t care as much about faction balance as you’d think. Westfall, Skeram, Heartseeker, Stalagg, Incendius all MASSIVELY faction imbalanced and I don’t see hardly anyone complaining. As long as Activision adds mercenary mode in TBC, I don’t see faction balance as an issue at all.
Rolling Alliance and want to play on the mega-Alliance server? Make sure to find out which server all the Alliance are going. There will definitely be at least 1 heartseeker 90%+ Alliance server come TBC.
Activision doesn’t care about faction balance. Players don’t care about faction balance. They will add Mercenary mode when 90% of forum posts are people complaining that they can’t play the game they are paying for.
Inb4 Alliance RPers shill that “hurr durr u went horde u deserve 2 hour long queues til you quit the game haha FOR THE ALLIANCE!” Brainlets shilling down game-saving ideas are worse than #nochangers.
I am confused.
It’s almost like these forums don’t represent the actual playerbase in the slightest.
What’s confusing? There is already a massive problem for Horde that has caused many casual players to quit. They can’t play the BG they want to. Activision has been silent about this issue, but when every forum post is “ADD MERCENARY MODE NOW” come TBC they definitely will. They’d be losing money not to. It’ll be added in the first 2 months of TBC.