A complete lockout, such as blocking character creation for an overcrowded server, is problematic.
Suppose a new player joins the game. All his friends have been playing for weeks, and are on the same server playing on the side of the dominant faction. The faction is actually a little TOO dominant, and there’s a lockout in effect. This prevents the new player from even making a character that could play with his friends. There’s a few things that could happen next:
New player plays by himself on a new server without the ability to interact with his friends who are playing the same game. A patently idiotic resolution which all but guarantees the new player will never renew his subscription.
All his friends have to start over from scratch again on a new server/faction, effectively abandoning their collective pprogress. Blocking 1 person failed to account for how people are related to each other, and the ripple effect discontents numerous players. In this case the medicine is worse than the disease it was supposed to cure.
The friend group splits, some of them rerolling for the new friend, others not. In other words, the group of friends got broken apart.
Sometimes people have good reasons for making characters that work against the interest of faction balance or server capacity, and in those cases the individual reasons need to win out over the group interest. However, there are also cases where people DON’T have such good reasons, but they still create characters against the group interest. For these latter players, something softer could be done to nudge them. For example, a preferential faction-login-queue is one example of something that could have this effect. People with strong reasons for owning characters that work against the group balance will tough it out, but players with weak reasons will consider bailing. Soft nudging minimizes the harm of the corrective actions, such that only people who are able to absorb the change will actually take the corrective action.
We don’t need 50:50 ratios, so it’s not like a solution needs to be deployed to every server. I think even 60:40 is a fine ratio between the factions. Such a corrective measure would only be worthwhile for cases where there is an extreme imbalance, and should be taken away once it looks like it’s accomplished all it’s going to accomplish, even if it didn’t get all the way to the “acceptable” range.
If you want fraction based queues, you are going to need to provide free transfers to the majority faction because you cannot expect them to reroll to the opposite faction and do 1-60 all over again.
And frankly, forcing people to transfer with queues is way more disruptive than locking character creation on a faction. People will have to uproot from their current server.
If you were one of the first few on your server and are now stuck in a faction based queue, it’s not your fault at all. Why should you be punished?
You’re not forcing them to play on another server. You’re preventing them from playing on the server they’re established from. You’re removing choice rather than increasing choice and incentivizing the move.
No blocking people from creating new characters would be dumb. Blizzard shouldn’t have offered transfers off the server from the overpopulated side. It was a no brainier.
Yes, you are. You are preventing them from playing the game to force them to move. It’s basically uproot or don’t play.
You still haven’t answer why it’s more disruptive for a new player to not be allowed to play a faction on an imbalance server.
The only scenario where it’s bad is that if the guy has friends on an imbalanced server on the majority faction - he can either wait out the block or have his friends transfer out to the new server he is on.
GW2 has a great way of dealing with this: they have an “Outnumbered” buff distributed faction-wide. In GW2’s case, it’s in World vs World areas but in WoW it can simply be server or zone-wide on PvP servers.
If the opposing faction outnumbers yours on a given server (or in a given zone based on how they wanna set it up) you get a buff to even things out a bit. You’ll still be gimped, but less gimped. If the numbers switch (or even out) the buff either flips sides or disappears completely.
Solves the problem, doesn’t stop people from playing what they wanna play. Didn’t AV have a similar buff?
I don’t know why there’s any secrecy behind the population. It should just be shown on the character creation screen to give people an idea of what to expect. Going in blind has never helped a server, and there’s eventually some sort of outside interference, like the mods and websites that keep an active count on population anyway. Is Blizzard scared people will just join the faction with the most people? That has never been my priority, and I personally prefer to play for the underdog.
Also, speaking of mods, I’ve never understood why Blizzard just doesn’t do it themselves.
I don’t know why there’s any secrecy behind the population.
Because showing people the exact population is a very poor idea.
Let’s imagine that each server shows a ratio for Alliance vs Horde. There are some players who will see that a server is 3:2 and decide to roll on the under dog faction for the challenge and abundance of WPvP, but the far more likely scenario is people will see the imbalance and avoid the underdog faction outright thereby contributing to worse faction imbalance.
An even worse possible scenario is that maybe 3 or 4 out of 40 servers will show with a perfect 1:1 population. Players will instinctively flock to these over all others for the promise of balanced factions. This would undermine other servers severely.
Consider how harmful it is to just show the general population level of Low-Medium-High-Full. Low server have a very bad stigma attached to them because they are perceived as “dead.”
Honestly, Blizzard has been trying to help you guys all along. There needs to be some player responsibility as well to sort this mess out.
Blizzard added new realms to assist in reducing queue times, they opened free transfers to these new realms to make it easier for players to move without having to restart.
Can you really blame members of a faction from leaving when they are so severely outnumbered that they cannot even level without being constantly attacked?
It is not ALL up to Blizzard to sort this out. Some of you are going to have to take the plunge and either move or re-roll to the other faction in order to balance it out. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with realms that are so severely out of balance that, in realty, nobody is going to be able to effectively earn honor when it is implemented.
It’s important to know whether or not a server has a population or not, just as it’s important to know if a server needs more people on one side or the other. “What if’s” don’t help the situation.
No you can still play. You just have to wait longer before you do so… or you screenshare and have your idle computer sit in the queue for you.
Locking character creation is actually wholesale preventing players from being able to play there. It’s really disruptive if all you want is to play with a friend or your guild for example.
No it isn’t. You can always play on another server or the other faction.
If you absolutely insist on playing that faction on that server, just wait until the block is lifted - if Blizzzard wants to be helpful they can allow you to level on another server while you wait and transfer your character in when the block lifts.
If you understand human nature you’ll understand they aren’t really what-if scenarios but more like what would actually happen.
We are seeing one of them play out right now with I think Stalagg? Whichever one is 80% Horde. The Alliance is fleeing the realm in droves because of the bad imbalance, which was initially only around 60-40 according to census.