A blue post from the wow community forum on this subject reads:
One thing I will ask you to keep in mind however is that we generally prefer to avoid any solution that would force players to do anything they don’t want to do
And this is the precisely the problem. You give the players too much freedom and they take it and run with it. Everyone wants the edge in world pvp, no one wants to be on a 100%-their-faction server. I think we can all see what this led to.
It’s your game and you have to put your foot down somewhere. You make the rules, not us. If a server is 60/40 split, consider limiting or stopping transfers off for the 40, and incentivizing transfers to that server for the 40. and/or incentivizing transfers off for the 60.
Obviously the servers are now too far gone for this to work, but whatever you decide to do going forward, remember that
One thing I will ask you to keep in mind however is that we generally prefer to avoid any solution that would force players to do anything they don’t want to do
is not a viable strategy. We were bad and deserve to be punished. Your only mistake was not punishing us sooner.
The only solution that will ever work is implementing faction specific queues and offering free faction transfers from the dominant side. Realistically, that’s the only way you can ensure a healthy faction balance on pvp servers. I doubt that will ever happen.
Not true; for example, I quite like it when there’s no wPvP to be had. I may be the only one, but it’s unlikely.
As for solutions, if you have an “easy solution” of some kind, ask yourself the following:
In what ways could players be screwed over by your solution? (e.g. not being able to play with friends or on the server/faction they want)
Would you be willing to be one of the players screwed over in that way if your solution were to be implemented? Or are you assuming that only others would be adversely affected?
What a load of garbage. This right here shows how absolutely ignorant they are. Does Blizzard actually think people WANT to pay to transfer??
They are literally FORCING players to transfer because if they stay they know their server/faction will die because Blizzard won’t do jack-all to prevent it.
I was of course referring to PvP servers where faction imbalance plays a much larger role than on PvE servers; I don’t doubt there is less concern about this issue from the PvE server players
Actually, probably… My guild voted to transfer from Heartseeker to Benediction. A lot of other guilds did the same. We weren’t forced. I paid for 2 toons to move. Many folks paid for more than that.
As long as this is PvP servers only it could work. But then again, people don’t want to leave their friends, so you’re still forcing someone to play in a way that they don’t want.
Yep im gonna reply as if im on the council (so no snark) as I hope Blizz peeks out to the tbc general reads the non-council replies as they only have 3 or so representatives for this side of the game.
But I agree that this is a player made issue, but this was also an avoidable administration nightmare. This problem is when you do go all “laissez -faire” and hands off with the game, don’t moderate and things start rapidly de-stabilizing.
1 sided faction servers never should of happened. We can get layers, queues, but what about server locks? Some servers needed a lock badly during this period of free transfers as some players love ‘small’ server and community vibes (Grobbulus, mainly due to player mentality and RP) while others want population and player choices over community (Bene).
What should of been done with the free transfers was allow people to transfer, but limit the choices (if you wanna transfer to any server, pay for a normal transfer) and incentivize people to transfer to medium pop (5k players) or if theyre PVP, to go PVE than the PVP megaservers with 15k+. Especially players on the smaller faction. Servers with 15k+ players is way too huge.
But at this point I believe with the smaller servers, connections are gonna have to happen as we have more empty/dead servers than active. Leave the bigger servers alone (Bene, Grobb, Faerlina, Whitemane) and make one of the remaining 1k player servers into a connections server. Classic should of never had extra servers than the originals on launch as it was obvious that the ‘tourists’ and those who did not like the game would leave by October-November 2019. People should of weathered the queues as even with the possibility of WOTLK Classic, we wont reach that population boom like we did with Classic launch.
tl;dr: We past the point of no return for many servers. Servers/faction locks should be in now for the bigger servers. Smaller dead servers should be connected. And no matter what you do at this point, some players will be mad and get split apart if they dont act ASAP, but it’s something that cannot be avoided now.
But I don’t know that I agree here. IMO, it’s too far gone to fix. Just merge all the servers. With layering, you really don’t need more than one server of each type for each coast. For people who want smaller communities, they can leave the RP servers out of this. At this point, most people are probably willing to sacrifice server community to be able to log in a get stuff done in a timely manner. I know it’s not what this game is supposed to be about, but it’s where we are.
I really like the paragraph where Aggrend talks about the 60/40 where 20% of the server population is unhappy and god-forbid they open Free transfers to those 20% because it will ruin the experience for the 80%.
This conveniently ignores that the 20% can already PAY to transfer off and ruin the experience for the 80%, and that the transfer cost is WAY less of a barrier than he seems to be implying (as proven by history).
It seems like we have 2 camps on this forum. The add restrictions to support server health crowd, and the let things freely evolve as they will crowd. Blizzards current solution which is neither properly restrictive, nor fully FREE flowing make no one happy.
Its getting painfully difficult to not look at short-term profit motives (rather than game health) being a factor here.
I was on a previously healthy server which and dipped to less than 5 active players. That pretty badly affected by ability to “play the game”. I was “forced” to transfer, and ironically had to change my character name. I transferred to a server that died way faster than anyone expected, and now I’m again not able to play the game without being “forced” to transfer again.
It’s not like Blizzard didn’t have an active roll in this. They removed queues and allowed free and paid transfers to “mega” servers.
I’m not saying this is an “easy” solve, but they are already failing me and other players like me in their stated objectives.
I guess they feel like, since they didn’t directly cause your problem, they didn’t “force” you to do anything and that it’s all the fault of your fellow players. And I think that’s where the problem is. If they do nothing, they can say it’s the players who made choices that may have adversely affected other players. Once they actually do something, then someone unhappy with what they do can blame Blizzard directly, and they seem to want to avoid that.
However, because of that, they’ve painted themselves into a corner. Right now, there are no actual good solutions to the problem. All Blizzard can do is pick the one that’s the least bad. IMO, the least bad solution is to connect all the realms besides the RP ones.
Blizzard’s actions since Classic launch>
1 - Underestimates the number of classic players and open fewer servers than demand;
Results in Queues;
2 - Open a random number of servers, offer free transfers;
Results in Community fragmentation;
3 - Then, add layers on original few servers to stop queues;
4 - Then let the random number of servers slowly withering, never take an action;
5 - Sells a overpriced automated character transfer ($25 where could be $1 symbolic).
Always had access to all data generated.
Players>
Simply try to play the game with no access to real data on servers, only some hints from external tools or ingame investigation.
So blizzard is the semi driver on a straight road with cruise control on who sees a toddler standing in the road 100 meters down the road (plenty of time to stop) and their lawyers defense is that because they didn’t physically take any new action they are justified in their CHOICE to take no action and run the toddler over?
They can’t be perfect. I wouldn’t hold this against them
Probably better than every server having a 10k queue.
This was fine the first few months. After they removed them, they should have stayed off. Yeah, I know we got the pandemic surge, but those people should have been offered free transfers to other servers. If they had done this, we might be in a better place. This one I completely blame them for.
This is one them as well. They seem to always wait until a problem gets extreme before they do anything. Then when they do, it’s always a solution that would have been fine when people were first talking about the issue, but is now too little to really fix anything.
I’m kind of torn on this. Originally, they had to manually transfer character data from one physical server to another, so it made sense to charge. But now, it’s clearly just another source of revenue. They say it’s about “maintaining server communities”, but they don’t really do anything else it takes to to that.
While I think transfers should stay in the game, they should rework the process. How about this. You can transfer for free every six months. If you want a shorter window, you have to pay a higher price depending on how long it’s been since you last transferred. If it’s been five months, a transfer can be $10. If it’s only been a month, the transfer is $50. This would let people move, but also make it so people aren’t quite as quick to server hop.