There are too many Horde, and not enough Alliance on PvP servers. Here’s what should be done immediately to fix it:
Login queues for the dominant faction (in most cases, Horde), and no queues for the minority faction.
While the dominant faction is waiting in queue, offer a free faction change option.
Queues work. They work very well. History has proven that. Any time the ratio becomes worse than 55:45 among active lvl 60s, start up the queues. People will only put up with 1-2 hr waits every night for so long before they take the faction change offer.
The faction change, of course, would need to be able to change all the player’s characters on the server. I think the investment for Blizzard to develop this functionality would be well worth it, as balanced servers = happier players = stronger incentive to stay subbed.
Blizzard: You sank years of time into developing Classic. Don’t let PvP servers go down the toilet because you couldn’t get a handle on something as simple as faction balance. It’s a very solvable problem, and I hope you care enough about the integrity of your game to do better here. Don’t repeat the mistakes that lead to retail becoming what it is today.
I know this sounds crazy but why don’t they just move players from lesser populated faction wise to one single one.
IE: Server A has 100 Horde/50 Alliance, Server B has 50 Horde/100 Alliance… why not just move the alliance/horde to the respective lesser faction. Or even it out to 75/75.
Because you can’t force people to move. People choose the server for a variety of reasons and forcing someone to move means they could possibly quit and the problem isn’t solved.
There may be a solution, there may not be one but forced transfers are not it
About the only way to do this without leaving horde in a queue is to have a main layer with relatively balanced ratios then have a second layer full of basically overflow of horde.
Just create faction specific population caps in addition to the overall server population cap.
For example, if the server supports 5000 concurrent players, you can set it up such that each faction has a separate population cap (and corresponding queue) of 2500.
Suddenly the horde are in a much longer queue (if there is a queue).
You could even make the faction caps larger than half of the total server cap, which allows SOME imbalance, but not unlimited imbalance.
Of course all of this could only work if it were done basically right now. Wait a few weeks, and the larger servers won’t even have significant queues.
It will help immediately if the dominant faction practices self control. Get a reputation as a server that is fostering an environment to grow the unpopulated faction.
So simple that it took them 15 years to come up with warmode. Which is nothing more than making every server a pve server.
They still have to entice the cowardly alliance with free epics and honor to flag up long enough to get their free epic.
If it’s so simple why can’t it be fixed 15 years later? The only way to truly “fix” it is remove the faction barrier which is causing it in the first place.
The problem is player choice. Players will not be forced to play something they don’t want to. Limiting player choice is what really changed the game into what it is today.
Choices are a good thing in an mmo.
So you think your idea implementing a faction cap and just not letting the dominant faction log in at all would create less complaining than logging in and having no targets? Seriously?
Open up transfers to everyone on the unbalanced servers. Let the players decide whether they want balanced realms or not. Even have a one-way transfer so that they can move to a PvE server, if they wish.
Let the players decide their fate, and we will see whether people truly wish for ‘fair and balanced’ world PvP, or if they wish to be on the winning side.
Implementing a cap after balance via forced transfer, yes.
Otherwise capping before just makes a queue for the dominant faction and open transfers allowing players to determine the movement will result in no balance.
Except you know they will never force players to transfer servers. Nor should they.
The only way your idea would work is if they had a time machine and could go back and implement faction caps before they opened up name reservations.
The only thing they could realistically do at this point is to reinstate layers on the realms with the worst imbalance, faction balance those, and leave the overflow of the dominant faction with no PvP targets.
Any other option relies on players being willing to transfer to or from these servers and that’s realistically not going to happen in large enough numbers to matter.
Will they ever? Ya I agree with you, but should they? IF The community wants balance, it’s the only way I see it. Again, the player base doesn’t want it.
I agree.
There’s not a nice way of fixing it. Only one that is definitive is forced.
enabling free faction changes for imbalanced servers on the dominant faction or merging servers to balance out the ratios seems like the most effective course of action