I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this no matter what people may think. It’s unfortunate but ultimately it’s a difficult thing to manage and honestly it feels like it may have needed a more hands on approach from you guys.
What’s happened so far is in the past though, nothing we can do to change how it got to where we are now. Hopefully some ideas can come of this though.
I think whatever option(s) are being thought about, would it be possible to poll the classic community with maybe a survey or something?
A couple of ideas thrown around that I’ve read or some even discussed previously:
Make the lower pop faction on a server incentivized to “want” to play on that server. Yeah, you’ve got a lower pop, but you get “this”.
- Part of the problem though is determining what “this” would be. Some have suggested for world pvp specifically an HP buff where you can handle your own better against several enemies, though I see issues with this as a solo player and would feel unfair when not being ganged up on.
- Another suggestion is items/gold/rewards incentives, similar to the suggestion of increasing ally honor gains (because horde is majority and alliance queues were quick, but now we have horde v horde)
- And one other suggestion that we’ve discussed is an xp boost. I think this would be the better choice personally of any rewards based or player buff incentive. Basically you could make it as drastic as 100% if super low pop and adjust to a certain level as the server may get more balanced, or give it a flat rate of say 25 or 50% or something which allows the minority faction to always enjoy an xp boost.
Cap factions at 40/60 or 35/65, where the majority faction can no longer create characters or transfer to that realm. With something like this you’d have to be careful because you wouldn’t want people to be “locked out” of playing with their friends. A way around that is maybe if you reach the desired cap, transfers/creations remain open for x number of days before locking. Then you could display the populations on the realm list as “Full”.
Open up free transfers “to” the minority, and “from” the majority only. Across the board on any server that is med to high to full (low pop maybe just free transfers either side?). This would allow players to shift the population as they see fit, maybe they see an opportunity on another realm or they hate dealing with something on theirs and they want to move.
- alternatively free transfers could just be completely opened up for say 2 weeks (With advanced notice) for players to move and shift around, while only preventing transfers to majority faction. Still lets people sort it out as they see fit, but more freedom.
Lastly, although this may go away from the original intention (never mind the fact that we’ve kinda steered away from authenticity on several counts), open up cross realm play (or connected realms) where you can join people’s groups and play with them or play with your own server. Helps people find groups, raiders, pvpers, and removes the need to shift around server to server or only reside on the megaserver because that’s where everyone else is.
Honestly, I think free transfers or some form of making it better for all players is the least that can be done, considering the amount of money that people have spent on transfering 1 or many characters to a different realm, only to end up on a dead realm because everyone transfered off of it a month or 2 later.
I’m sure there’s many other ways to look at it too, just throwing those out there. Ultimately this problem will continue throughout TBC, and I can assure you that if it’s not at least somewhat improved in unspeakable future endeavors, it will be a problem then too. If I recall there’s a very specific event that revolves around faction pop…
P.S. Open up Netherwind transfers “from”, it’s dead and there’s still people stuck there holding out hope 