Moving 40 “jimmies” versus moving a 40-man group of them is the same disruption. You’re still moving 40 people to a new layer to preserve layer integrity.
In that same 160v160 scenario, a load balancer should be balancing the load, or breaking into 2x 160 object sets. If it’s attacking load balance piecemeal? No wonder they have issues.
That’s because Aggrend recently made a Twitter post of “Horde just can’t organize on their layer properly”…while full well knowing that their design choices were causing problems.
Blizz has a habit of hiring liars and gaslighters in recent years.
He’s right though - Horde haven’t been as notoriously exploitative of layer tech. It still happens though, but the underlying question is whether players should be exploiting tech to maintain advantage or just able to play the game using the tools in game.
Their system moved Horde involuntarily between layers, spreading the population too thin to effectively deal with the sheer size of the Alliance population. That’s not “something you can organize via Discord”, that’s poor design that favors the larger faction.
The larger faction exists because of tools like Discord coordinating larger guilds/communities across games. I can’t help you address actual problems if you just want to stay mad at one person. We have the ability to go alliance, to start communities, to learn how the systems work (and exploit them) roughly equally. All that is true.
The alternative is a small number of layers containing all the horde players and a bunch of layers that have no horde because the alliance is overflowing. Whether thats a better or more desirable outcome, im not sure. Its really hard to predict the types of emergent gameplay that evolves around such a strange system.
Id say having the lead dev go to Twitter saying “lol, organize better, Horde” while knowingly having systems that randomly move players between layers mid fight while factions are also universally unbalanced due to other poor design choices…is probably not the best look.
Huh. Keep spinning them down! I’ll take a more connected play session if it means getting tossed around once in a while. Sounds like they will spin down when I’m offline anyway. Why make the experience worse just because of one moment of inconvenience here and there?
How does Discord stop Horde from being involuntarily moved between layers mid battle because of the population difference in factions?
Do you think these arguments through?
That’s not what that indicates at all. Maybe horde are just getting ganked more often.
Lone Wolf has a majority Horde but Horde are often lagging behind Alliance… but sometimes they’re not. Alliance are often ganking the bridge between the middle and eastern parts of the zone and filling up the bar, but if Horde have a group outside Astranaar ganking they can fill up faster.
Lone Wolf is not majority Horde. Alliance creation is locked, Horde’s isn’t.
I try to think them through, yes. I’m glad we’re focused on a specific problem now.
You need to coordinate multiple 40 person raids early and start stuffing the layer with as many Horde as possible. Once you establish a foothold, you effectively choke the layer and the new individuals who would try to reinforce Alliance are pushed to other layers (or are unable to gather in sufficient force to claim it). He outright described the priority structure to you: 1) Be in a group, 2) Be in combat, 3) Stuff the layer so the load balancer is forced to start moving people outside of your cluster groups.
The best way to do this is with an external communication and community management platform like Discord.
Similarly, Discord is used to create Premade Epic Battleground raids, despite the game tools being designed for groups only. It’s not a unique occurence where it’s used to create these coordinated external software attacks (which in my opinion, is strictly and technically a form of hacking–hacking that Blizzard refuses to action with some kind of “Boys will be Boys” logic).
Lone Wolf is, or was as of some number of days ago (so presumably still this way at level 25) literally majority Horde.
Aggrend, the big boss, the head honcho, the man with all of the data, has said that the population is 51.7% Horde and 48.3% Alliance on Lone Wolf.
L-ratio.
So, the horde are going to wait 3+ hours to automatically lose? Also, how is the mechanics between the faction bosses so different? Why are Horde gimped by getting rooted in place and Alliance get to stack/attack freely. You’re actually going to destroy the ashenvale event with this change because people cannot spend all day waiting on an event.
Gonna also highlight some points that others brought up…. The next time you all create a PvP event, make the horde/alliance clash with each other. There should be all out war for objectives. Not a Zerg fest where you rarely see each other then the only time you would see each other is when the event ends.
Alliance has been locked since week one on Lone Wolf. Horde has never been locked.
There are currently no accurate population trackers for the server, but you can get a good idea by factions being locked/unlocked. Not sure where you get the idea that “Horde was the larger faction up until a few days ago” as there is ZERO ability to track that outside of what I mentioned above.
Alliance is the larger faction on nearly every server for SoD because of the terrible design choices favoring them.
I think there are much better solutions that could have been implemented here.
Rather than slow battles so much, introduce a “wrap-up” phase after the battle in which all layers wait for all to be finished until they can start ramp-up
At the outset of the ramp-up phase calculate a goal number. Let’s say 1000 when Ashenvale has a pop (across all layers) of 200 people. Let’s say in that case each kill gives 1. Dynamically boost each kill’s contribution by the increase/decrease in player count at the time of each kill. Say pop goes up to 300, now each kill only adds 0.66, or it drops to 100 people, now each kill adds 2. This would avoid any jump-backs or outright stalls, smoothing the progression (even if sometimes it’s more or less for an individual kill). This would also help keep the progress smooth across all time zones.
For a layer to overpopulate I can only see it happening if people log in or join a group. The first should not be an issue, as new logins I presume are put into low pop or new layers. For group joining, you could check if the target layer has room and if not warn the player they will not immediately be joining their group’s layer due to capacity. Then treat them as priority shifts if space becomes available.
For shutting down layers you should use a similar system to another MMO out there … give players an UI element warning that the layer is closing in X minutes, with a button to be shifted out pre-emptively. This would allow players to be forewarned and opt to shift at a time when they are safe.
Assuming he actually said this, Aggrend is also a liar so I would take his “trust me bro” claims with a grain of salt. It also doesn’t make sense as only Alliance are locked for character creation but Horde isn’t. That runs a bit contrary to this “trust me bro” claim.
Really hoping for a hotfix on at least the rep gained.
Tweets look like they’re from two weeks ago so maybe they’re not correct now? Just launch-day data and Horde fell off?
It could be that on average the Horde are logged on more, thus Pop balance in real time is in the Horde’s favor. There are probably more Alliance raid logging and chilling on the server, causing the lock, but they are not online enough to tip the scales in the Alliance’s favor.
EDIT: This is a real thing that Alliance will join PvP servers and raid log instead of PvP.