Ah, login queues. So the solution is to tell people they can’t log in and play anymore.
Why do you think this would make people change faction rather than look for another game where they are permitted to play?
You mean, the GM is given the privilege of moving his entire guild whether they want to be moved or not? That’s scary.
Guilds do not move from dominant faction to minority. It’s the other way around. An Alliance player who belonged to the community I was in had his guild move to Horde on another server.
Well the alternative is for blizzard to lock server/ factions to try to even out servers but the players would have a hissy fit because they don’t like being told where/ how to play a game. So yeah you don’t touch it.
I honestly dont think this will fix it. You might see a slight population increase, but I think the majority will not transfer to a server that is dominated by the opposing faction. Forcibly transferring people from one faction is a huge no no.
Restricting creating characters on a dominate faction might also help, not much but a little.
Question to the OP. Why haven’t you transferred off Herod?
Your problem is over-representation of horde, and you actually have had opportunities for free transfers off Herod and you didn’t. Why not?
Just going through your suggestions:
-opening transfers to the dominant faction only won’t make people leave. As evidenced by you, the person whose idea this is, not leaving Herod when you could.
-pve to PvP transfers. You acknowledge the main argument against and dismiss it as being different from your opinion. I agree that the gains of leveling on a pve server are pretty marginal at this point, but blizzard disagrees and always has.
-faction changes is a pretty radical shift away from classic, but even if we ignored that, the same problem as point one comes up… Are there really so many people on the ‘winning’ side that would rather leave to have a ‘fair’ fight? Not likely, because they’re all still on Herod hording it up when they could have left.
-the queues idea has some potential, but I think it would be hard to get the thresholds right and I would worry about its impacts on aspects outside of PvP.
-free game play for alliance on horde dominant servers sounds great. I’ll make an alliance toon on Herod if it means I can keep playing my Tauren druid on Bene but for free. See how quickly that didn’t make sense?
Faction balance is up to the players. If Blizzard tried to somehow force balance, it would go over like, well, any other time Blizzard has tried to force gameplay to go in a certain direction.
PvP servers have always been unbalanced. They always will be unbalanced. But, once Battlegrounds are released, there will be an option for people who want ‘fair’ PvP. Otherwise? Embrace the suck.
I stayed on Herod because the servers they offered transfers to seemed to have the same balance issues. The only issue Blizzard was looking to solve was overall population, and they took no care to direct transferring players in a way that would even remotely provide an opportunity for balance on either Herod, or the new servers.
I think the challenges are very solvable, and worth the short term inconvenience.
Please re-read what I wrote, specifically: “…lvl 60 Alliance…” There would need to be reasonable restrictions in place to prevent abuse. The point was to simply suggest a possible incentive, with less concern about the exact implementation.
No one is suggesting to “force gameplay to go in a certain direction.” This is strictly at an account level and has absolutely nothing to do with gameplay.
Nothing has ever been attempted to manage faction balance in retail or Classic, and it’s resulted in a complete dumpster fire. Not sure how making an effort to manage balance could possibly make anything worse considering we’re already at rock bottom.
Spoken by someone who’s apparently never been on a highly imbalanced PvP server. Post a video showing someone “fighting smarter, not harder” when they can’t stick their head out of a safe zone without being surrounded be 10 people from the other faction.
The best anyone could hope for in your scenario is sneaking in a kill before getting steamrolled by 10 people, and then getting camped until they logged or took res sickness. Is that your idea of playing “smart?” Because that’s the reality of what would happen.
No, I wasn’t, and I don’t think you’re comprehending how relying on player-lead initiatives to fix balance is virtually impossible. There needs to be a framework in place to actively manage balance.
The servers they offered transfers to have the same balance issues. Some are even more imbalanced. Please explain why you think transferring from one imbalanced server to another imbalanced server would have helped.
We’re talking about a handful of servers that are incredibly disproportionate. Herod, Heartseeker and a few more. Make it a one-way transfer between both. I don’t advocate for full balance, there’s only a couple servers at play here.
Okay smart guy, how do you zone in BRD when there are 20 allies waiting just for you, every day, 24-7. Let me know what’s the smart thing to do.
I feel like 90% of those saying this have absolutely no clue nor never played on such servers.
I don’t think you’re comprehending how removing player choice is not a part of the solution, nor that offering worthless “incentives” that players feel have no value is either.
For all your platitudes, you didn’t want to change faction. You didn’t want to change server. You still don’t, and you won’t.
These “solutions” are always contingent on a very large number of other players choosing to “take one for the team”.
World PVP never was, and never will be “balanced.”
Different people play the game at different times of the day and in different zones of the game. Your anecdotal experience of getting 5v1 at some particular time of day on some particular server does not represent the “balance” of the game as a whole.
There have been plenty of times where I try to get into BRM and there is maybe 100 Alliance killing every horde that enters. At other times, there may be 100 Horde doing the same thing. Same with any place else in the game.
Unless Blizzard literally teleported players around the map, or prevented people from logging in, until they were “balanced” this just isn’t possible and probably not desirable either.
TL;DR Not everyone is participating in WPVP in the exact same place at the exact same time. This is fine and does not accurately indicate if there is an imbalance or not.
I feel that people pick what they want and always will. If I was to make any suggestion it would be that upon picking a server from the list it had a clear total of unique players on the server out of whatever the max is vs just telling us “high” or whatever, and that it also told us how many unique accounts were attached to each faction, and then set server rules that they may not have more than say 20% higher faction population for one side and lock it at that point. This would allow people to pick a server that maybe had better balance and guide people to servers that actually need alliance/horde respectively. Too late for the ones in play, but if they continue with free transfers and then take this type of information into account as you suggested, we would likely see balance within a year on all but the most popular servers.
But at the end of the day, one side is called the Horde and them outnumbering us isn’t that big of a deal to me in the end. I survived it 15 years ago, I’ll survive it again, especially next week when they start getting penalized for ganking.
I’m not proposing that anyone’s choice be removed, and I’m not sure why you’re getting so confused and making things up. To take away someone’s choice would mean to not let them play on the server or faction they wanted, which nothing I’ve said even comes close to.
Changing factions isn’t an option (via a transfer service). I would have had to delete or abandon a character I put weeks of /played time into.
I didn’t want to change servers because the new servers had the same faction imbalance issues as the one I was currently on. Pretty sure I’ve covered this multiple times now.
There are many people who aren’t tied to a faction or server. Give them the opportunity to move to a place where they could actually help, instead of just thoughtlessly dumping them into a newly created server with the same problems as the original one.
It might have something to do with the fact that you are either delusional or dishonest here. No one is going to choose to leave the faction they wanted to be on or the server they chose.
Everyone is tied to a faction or server. They have invested many hours in that server and chosen that faction deliberately. They are not looking to help you get better faction balance by their own personal sacrifice.
Almost all of us got queued in the weeks after launch. I don’t know anyone who quit over it. I do know many who took the free transfer. Not sure what you’re basing your opinion off of when we literally just went through a massive queue period, and got through it alright.
You do realize that thousands and thousands of people took the free transfers that were offered, right? Lol… Just stop.