With population distribution woes omnipresent in the vast majority of realms across all regions, I would really like to see Blizzard make an effort to guide population distribution in a healthier direction. I think that locking mega realms has been a fantastic first major step, but there are two problems with this:
It does absolutely nothing to address faction imbalance (maybe even exacerbates it), which is arguably even more pervasive and damaging to the experience than just raw server population problems.
It’s not exactly an “organic” way to promote better population distribution. Locking mega realms doesn’t really add anything to the game other than the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing population distribution will eventually be better. It doesn’t counterbalance the immediate cost of player freedom with a benefit that feels good immediately. All this to say, you’re forcing gradual balance rather than encouraging or incentivizing it.
The Main Idea
On PvP realms, when the faction distribution goes outside of the acceptable level of imbalance, give all players in the minority faction an optional (can be disabled like Joyous Journeys), PvP-only buff in all non-instanced areas, which stacks dynamically based on the severity of the imbalance. Basically the same concept as Tenacity in OG Wrath Wintergrasp. Extremely important caveats highlighted for emphasis.
For example:
(These are all placeholder numbers which of course could be adjusted)
Each stack gives players +3% damage to enemy players and -7% damage taken from enemy players.
This effect can stack up to 10 times for a total of +30% damage dealt and -70% damage taken in non-instanced PvP.
This effect, of course, would be calculated multiplicatively with Resilience. Meaning, hypothetically, someone with 50% damage reduction from Resilience and 70% damage reduction from 10 stacks of this buff would effectively have 85% damage reduction total.
Stacks (rounded to the nearest whole number) might be calculated something like this:
stacks = majority population / minority population
Some Secondary Suggestions
( These could actually be quite important for my main suggestion to really have the effect we want. )
Make realm locks faction-specific. Players should be free to roll new characters on, or transfer to the minority faction of any PvP realm, until the minority faction is also too large and needs to be locked as well. So for example, if the current “lock population” is 20,000 per realm, it might instead be 10,000 per faction. This way, locking realms will inherently encourage faction balance, on top of stopping them from becoming too large in a general sense.
Announce the situation very clearly, maybe with an in-game notice. Offer free transfers away from the realm(s) in question for both factions, but especially the minority faction, to give them one more chance to jump ship. Then, after some time, lock outbound transfers for the minority faction indefinitely, but keep them open for the majority faction.
Maybe allow free faction changes from majority faction to minority faction, but lock it vice-versa.
Yes, the buff would be quite extreme at max stacks, but I feel strongly that it would need to be, not only to make the game reasonably playable for a minority faction that’s outnumbered more than 10:1 (and often many times that), but also to very quickly attract players to the minority faction.
I’ve experienced what it’s like to play on faction outnumbered this severely when I played a few characters on Whitemane. Even at around 1,000 players reported on Ironforge.pro, the game would still have been playable if our groups weren’t corpse camped into utter submission. It was only when it became basically impossible to do anything without being slaughtered by the Horde that the Alliance truly died and the game became literally unplayable.
A buff like this would enable players (probably even low-level players in some cases) to survive the trip to a dungeon, or to defend themselves while questing even when outnumbered. It would also potentially prevent the absolute death of small, struggling factions, which means that a server might not actually be irreversibly doomed to single factionhood at a certain level of imbalance.
It’s a step backwards.
It’s just proof that Blizzard doesn’t care about spending resources on Classic.
It is the laziest non-solution they could have done to fix the queue issue and they care so little that they leave it in months after the queue issue resolved itself preventing players from rejoining their friends.
The idea you are proposing has been proposed to death, they should have done this, giving an incentive to minority faction/server, before even releasing classic years ago.
It’s basic population control and they didn’t do their due diligence because they simply don’t care enough about Classic to have more than the strict minimum amount of resources put into it to just ensure that it runs worse than good private servers but better than bad private servers, which is to say, a ridiculously low bar to reach.
TL;DR
The author suggests that Blizzard should guide population distribution on PvP realms by giving players in the minority faction an optional PvP-only buff in non-instanced areas, which would stack dynamically based on the severity of the faction imbalance. This would help to make the game reasonably playable for a minority faction that’s outnumbered, and would attract players to the minority faction. The author also suggests making realm locks faction-specific, announcing the situation clearly, and offering free transfers away from the realm for both factions. Additionally, the author suggests allowing free faction changes from majority faction to minority faction, but locking it vice-versa. The buff would potentially prevent the absolute death of small, struggling factions and make it easier for players to survive while questing or in dungeons.
I’m curious, do you think Warmode would be necessary because the minority faction could sort of “force” imbalanced PvP against the majority faction? Because for that problem, I have a few thoughts:
The buff would pose a major problem for the majority faction only when they massively outnumber the minority faction, which means that it would probably be relatively uncommon for the majority faction player(s) to have to deal with it. Remember that layers are still a thing that will affect the frequency of it.
In fairness, this is a lot more about giving some kind of advantage to the minority faction players, since their constant reality is being on the receiving end of imbalanced PvP. This would serve to give them a fighting chance to survive, not even to thrive.
That’s kinda one of the points. Not really a main one, but yeah – the majority faction would have to deal with some ensuing chaos, which would naturally lead to some of them leaving. And that would be a good thing! I would guess that most of those would leave because they just don’t care for PvP in general, so having to face it ever would be a problem for them. In that case, good! It’s a PvP realm, and people who don’t want PvP should ideally be playing on realms that were specifically designated for their playstyles.
Also, of course remember that since this would be a dynamic buff, it wouldn’t be permanent. The moment the factions balanced out a bit, the chaos of the situation would disappear. There would be short-term chaos/discomfort, but this would probably balance the population quickly, which is much better than the long-term discomfort of only having one or two PvP realms in the whole world with decent faction balance.
Yes that’s exactly it. It’s part of the reason so many servers are one sided. People simply do not want the inconvenience of world pvp, but they also wanted to keep their options open for transfers for guild recruitment.
Blizzard removing the restriction to transfer from pve to pvp came too late and realm balance suffered as a result.
I remember when we first came to classic right before tbc launch. A lot of us wanted to play on Mankrik, but because of the restriction, a lot of our guild from private server scene/discord would not come with us if it wasn’t on a pvp server, simply because it reduces their options in the future.
So we picked a severely imbalanced pvp server at the time Skeram (rip), since it was kind of the best compromise for everyone.
I feel like people are too ingrained now to force transfers.
To be fair, I think the reality of what you’re talking about is actually that people 1. hate being curbstomped with absolutely no chance of winning and 2. when given the choice, will tend to insulate themselves from that kind of situation as much as possible.
At least among people who played on PvP realms back in the day, it was never my impression that people didn’t find (at least occasional) PvP fun, by and large. I know some people absolutely hate it, but I have strong doubts that so many realms are one-sided because everyone dislikes PvP. I think it’s more just that they value guaranteed playability more than likely balance. After all, PvP can be miserable if the enemy is abusive. And if your faction starts to shrink, that experience becomes more and more common.
I see what you mean, and I definitely think it would upset a lot of people at least at first and for a while after. And I think that Blizzard has cultivated this mindset themselves, which is extremely unfortunate, because it destroyed certain parts of the game that were meant to be centerpieces of the experience.
That being said, there are certain other things that have been too deeply ingrained in people for a long time, which were suddenly taken away.
I don’t know, man! I don’t think it will happen, but I think it can. People could, and did say that about other things that ended up actually happening. I think this suggestion, while not perfect, would DEFINITELY work, which makes it an attractive possibility.
I like your ideas I’ve seen similar ones before too.
I guess the question is, is there even a point anymore?
When I joined this game in 2019 I knew that one of the main attractions for me was World PVP and I got it (the other reasons were server community and the social aspect, I go those things too for a time). Not only that but I found a ton of like-minded people who wanted the same thing. Something which I honestly thought did not exist anymore and I thought I was alone in caring about this aspect, and even these forums today would say I was, but I know now that is not true.
With that being said I think a desire for faction balance and world PVP is a niche.
Right now finding people who want this is like finding a needle in a big haystack.
The hay in the stack is people who play for these reasons: Enjoy gearing, perfecting playing their class and downing content, and like to have easy-to-form groups whenever they can log on. PVP is either a love of the instanced type or not a concern at all.
The needle is the niche, that often likes sometimes like that stuff too, but also likes faction balance on realms and world PVP.
There used to be more needles. When you really like something you connect with others who are the same. Even on these forums, there are quite a few I used to chat with who were like-minded “needles”, and we would have similar discussions on how to fix this like this thread is. Most of those people are gone so topics like this don’t happen much anymore.
Of the ones who I have stayed in touch with almost everyone has taken one of these paths: 1. Quit the game and moved on to other things. 2. Gone to the one specific server where faction balance is still a thing 3. Played SoM and some are now playing Era. In fact, if you go to the Wow Classic General forum right now you can find a lot more wpvp talk.
Now if Blizzard did things as you suggest would some of these people who left come back? I don’t know. Would they fit with the “hay” that’s so prevalent now? I don’t know.
I think what you say would be worth trying, but I genuinely think that the vast majority who play Wrath Classic do not care as long as they can get their gear and fast groups.
I do very much think that the servers are as they are today because the population made them that way as the majority only cares about what they care about, and in that respect, the players did create the servers as they are, and at the same time, they did drive the “niche players” away.
I’ve considered this idea too. I think it’s strong. But the real issue is post wotlk the open world is dead. There is no open world pvp to bring back.
Wintergrasp is instanced. With ports, flying, wormhole, summon stones the only place you see a group of the faction is Infront of instances summoning.
I see what you mean, but I look at it very differently, and I wonder if you might change your mind on it with this perspective:
I think probably most people desire and value faction balance to some degree – not necessarily that they want to actively PvP – but they at least value the aesthetic of sharing an open world with an enemy faction. Even on PvE realms, the game feels so empty if the only unfriendly characters in the world are NPCs. I believe very strongly that (even non-PvP) players enjoy faction balance, but they just value guaranteed playability the most.
I think that the one-sidedness of the population is both cause and effect here. You see constant horror stories of people who had to spend money to transfer to a different realm, and then that realm dies, and their guild all quits the game. I think a lot of people choose to play a one-sided experience because there’s the fear that every realm is eventually doomed to that fate and they don’t want to take the chance of being on the losing side of it.
Honestly, I think people are mostly just jaded. There are a lot of extremely vocal doomers who treat everything with a confident edginess. It’s almost like bullying. The idea that you feel awful inside, so try to make other people feel awful inside. I don’t think the way you see people talk openly is actually a good indication of the way most people feel.
Trying not to write an essay here, you make some good points. And I’d definitely agree that at least some of the people who loved balance and PvP were probably driven away. I do think some would come back, but even if they didn’t, at least everyone still here would get to enjoy balance on PvP servers! They could choose their servers without the looming fear of the balance tipping and being stranded on a dead faction.
I appreciate you writing this out, but I think your main idea is more of a fantasy than a realistic preventive solution.
Additionally, a preventive measure works only before what you are trying to prevent happens. At this point we need to restore the realm population balance before we think about a preventive measure.
Your secondary idea would be a great one before the implementation of faction change.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any democratic way to restore the realm population balance at this point. I believe the only remaining option which is way less than ideal is to force transfers.
Yeah, I wouldn’t totally disagree with that. Though I think this would probably encourage a lot of people to seek out PvP when a buff is active, and I think that type of interaction might “stick” even after the buff is gone.
Well, it’s definitely not preventative, being that my suggestion would only kick in after the bad thing happens. And do you really think that such an insane buff wouldn’t immediately attract players to a dead faction?? O.o I think this would balance one-sided servers very quickly (albeit somewhat messily).
Meh. Somehow I feel like it’s way less likely for Blizzard to ever forcibly uproot huge numbers of players than to strongly coax them. This suggestion would actually be a middleground.
I do like your ideas and that’s why I put a like on your OP.
I’d be pretty happy to see things done to where the game became more enjoyable to me, I was able to find like-minded people again with ease, and the servers became more fun again. I’m sure these things would lead me to play a lot more.
So I’ll definitely “support” your ideas, but at the same time did want to say what I said.
Okay, putting aside the fictional part about your suggestion, I don’t think it will resolve the issue we have at the moment.
What you are suggesting only affects WPvP. WPvP for the most part died when fly mounts made their way to the game. I honestly can’t see people leaving their mega realms for smaller realms for the incentive of having a an edge in WPvP but risking their chances to find groups and guild for PVE content.
Fantasy wise it sounds fun though. How about test casing it in Whitemane?! I still have a few alliance toons in there and the server is 99.6%H vs 0.04% alliance.
I think enough people would flock to dead factions to trigger a cascading effect. You’d probably have a handful of PvP troublemakers and people who are just genuinely curious make characters or transfer to try it out. People in PvP gear would be monstrously powerful, especially in groups. I could see groups of friends or even entire guilds transferring to wage war against the enemy capitals like the Spartans in 300. After all, think about how much people love twinking! They literally just want to easily mow people down in battlegrounds. Imagine doing that in an overpopulated faction’s capital cities with no queue times and virtually no upper limit to how many enemies you can take on at once.
And I think that would generate a lot of excitement and ultimately accomplish 2 main things:
The dead factions on mega servers would instantly be sparked again. They might be small at first, but at the very least, there would be some activity with PvP raids, people leveling up, using the auction house, etc.
It would be possible to exist on these servers. A population can definitely die without being killed, but I think being helplessly outnumbered in PvP is easily the biggest factor on PvP realms. I think the main reason people flock to single-faction realms is that they’re afraid of the potential outcome of balanced realms. If you remove that fear, that’s one huge barrier gone.
I genuinely think that this buff would spawn a new playstyle where people basically hop to dead factions to enjoy “twink” PvP until there were no massively imbalanced PvP realms left.
Well hey, isn’t that literally the most important thing when we’re talking about improving a video game?
And yeah, I would love that. I have a bunch of toons there still too. And really, if Blizzard ever did this, I think they’d have to try it out one or two realms at a time for sure. I’m not a huge PvP player myself, but I still enjoy world PvP a lot, and this would attract me to play on dead factions.
I would love if there was a way to find some good wpvp like this. I can always go to Horde cities in the game right now but its impossible to find groups of people who want to go with me. With tenacity in the game bloodthirsty pvpers wouldn’t be so dependant on the nonexistent pvp community to have fun.
With regards to a tenacity-like buff, while it sounds good on paper, I think execution wouldn’t really play out like you expect.
First off, you couldn’t base stacks on server population, otherwise you’re gonna run the risk of someone being out in the world questing coming up against a raid boss with a chip on their shoulder. You’d need to stack based on the number of enemy players currently around the player on the majority faction, while still somehow taking into account the overall server population balance to somehow consider how much backup they could get. This makes your simple calculation a lot more complex, because the situation is nuanced. Unless it’s your intent to, say, have every Horde player on a massively Alliance dominated server just be a raid boss… in which case I don’t think that’s going to be any fun for anybody except griefers. If your intent is to annoy people into changing factions, I suspect you won’t achieve the result you’re looking for here.
Second off, assuming the minority faction isn’t intent on abusing their new found power, the scenario you propose of just getting into the darn raid instance without getting destroyed will actually be rather successful. However, this really speaks to the root of the problem… people don’t really care about PvP, at least until they do. The whole reason this mess came about in the first place, to my understanding, is that Phase 2 happened in Vanilla Classic, one faction “won”, and everybody did what they had to do in order to carry on doing PvE and did their PvP in instanced areas.
Honestly, I think world PvP as a free-form concept is just dead… it doesn’t work. Unless you can enforce population balance limits and also force people to play, you’re just going to have this natural progression of players moving to the stronger side. Every single world pvp based game I’ve ever participated in has gone this same route. It turns out people don’t wanna get dumped on while trying to something else.
Even consider that experiment they did in retail for a while in BfA (not actually sure if it’s still going on) where they offered super rewards for doing content in War Mode to give incentive to the under populated faction. It turned out nobody cared, faction balance didn’t change, it just meant that Alliance got super fast leveling and extra PvP rewards every week, lol.
So until people actually genuinely care about PvP (versus propping it up as a bragging right), this is just a problem that can’t be solved. Every time folks feel the slightest bit of adversity, they’re going to go elsewhere, because they don’t actually want to PvP. War Mode is probably the best solution you can hope for, so the people who actually want to do World PvP can opt into it if/when they want to and try to build a community around that.
Your other suggestions are good though. They don’t solve the problem, but they mitigate things for the poor schmucks caught up in all this. One thing to note though…
Fundamentally I agree with this, but if a server is locked it’s because it’s full on player count. There’s not a separate server running to handle load per faction. So if a server is locked, allowing people to transfer in on the majority faction makes the problem worse for both factions.
Blizzard would have to pursue cross-realm zones and other retail-esque load balancing solutions to mitigate this… which again, frankly, I’m fine with. Because the player base has shown by majority action that they just don’t care about world pvp.
Finally, one last thing…
Make a single, ultra exclusive server that is dedicated solely to world PvP. Faction limits would be very strictly enforced and any character not “actively played” for 30 days will get “parked”. Parked players don’t lose their character and progress; however, they will be prioritized to the bottom of the priority queue. Anybody who genuinely wants to embrace and experience world PvP can play there.
Hey Tubbly! Glad to see you in my thread. I’m going to warn you now, our conversation might end up being insanely long per post!
In my proposed idea, the stacks would be capped to a maximum of 10.
As I said to someone else earlier in the thread, that is kinda the point. The buff I’m suggesting is meant to be quite drastic when fully stacked.
It’s actually really funny you say it, because when I’ve talked about this idea to people in voice chats, “becoming a raid boss” is actually one of the terms I’ve used from time to time.
I was quite meticulous in deciding the specific details of my suggestion. I think the buff would need to be:
Based on population disparity
Extremely powerful
Capped at a certain point to avoid completely breaking the game
Stacked to its full power until faction populations start approaching some semblance of balance (in my suggestion, 9:1)
I feel quite strongly that removing any of these aspects of the buff would completely neuter its potential to quickly and effectively fix faction imbalance.
Well, let me start off by saying, yes, the idea is to give the minority faction the power to survive at the very least, which is an extremely important aspect of keeping the game playable. But also to give them the power to cause trouble if (or more realistically, when) they want to.
I suppose that somehow calculating the stacks based on “local variables” like how many nearby enemies there are could work, but at the end of the day it just seems way more complicated than it needs to be. The outcome would basically be the same when players decided they wanted to storm capital cities. Taking away the power of the buff when it’s only one on one seems like it would be a bit inconsistent with the idea here, but also, it would take away some incentive for the minority players. And let’s remember that the entire point of this is to attract players to dead factions. That’s why the freedom to cause trouble would be pivotal.
If I’m understanding you correctly, I agree with you completely. To me, it seems that the crux of the faction imbalance issue is that people naturally value the playability of a game far more than pretty much anything else. It can be extremely frustrating if you’re just trying to quest, or maybe run a dungeon and you literally, physically cannot get to where you want to go or accomplish some goal because enemy players are relentlessly camping you.
Now I wonder if you would agree with me on these things:
As I said earlier to someone else, I think that there’s a lot of fear looming over people’s heads when it comes to population distribution. There have been a lot of examples, highly/hotly discussed situations, where faction imbalance forced people into choosing between spending a lot of money to transfer to a playable realm, or abandoning their characters to spend a lot of time rerolling them, or ultimately just quitting the game. I think that a huge number of people are convinced that absolutely every realm is doomed to eventual single factionhood, which is one of, if not the biggest reason why gigantic, single-factions realms exist in the first place.
Barring fears of ^that^ situation, I think that people actually do value faction balance. I would bet that probably most people put a decent bit of value into the aesthetic of sharing a game world with some significant number of enemy players. It’s so much less interesting when NPCs are the only unfriendly characters in the game.
I vehemently disagree with the idea that players genuinely prefer things the way they are now (not saying you said it). I think they simply chose what was the lesser of two evils in their minds, which was to avoid a situation where the game becomes absolutely, or even relatively unplayable.
Do you mean idealistically, or just in practice? Because I’d strongly disagree with you if you mean to say that people don’t want/enjoy it in principle.
It’s not necessarily true. Grobbulus is still here years later, after all. Though I’d agree with you that this tends to be the way things go in PvP populations. That’s why I’m here though! I want to see Blizzard nudge the population into the right direction. Fun, balanced PvP servers don’t have to be like unicorns in practice if proper population distribution was enforced.
Honestly, I think this actually just illustrates the principles of my suggestion even more! The thing about PvP is that, beyond the initial decision to roll on a PvP server, it’s not something that players should have the power to refuse unless they’re in their own territory. This new-age idea that you need a player’s consent before you kill them seems to have done more harm to world PvP than any good in my opinion.
The solution to the problem isn’t to try and encourage people to make a conscious decision to expose themselves to danger. After all, these factions are dead specifically because that’s something virtually no one wants to do in the heat of the moment unless it favors them. The solution is to empower the dead faction to force themselves onto the majority faction. War isn’t about consent.
I definitely disagree with the first sentence here, and ironically, my suggestion is basically just the application of your second sentence as a solution.
Though once again I want to note that I don’t think it’s that people don’t want to PvP. I think it’s they perceive adversity as the slippery slope that leads to their (somewhat irrational) fears of dead factions. Grobbulus is categorical proof that you don’t need to play on a single-faction server for the game to be playable. If you applied the peace of mind we have on this realm to every PvP realm, I’m quite certain people would be far less skittish when faced with adversity.
Here’s the first time I disagree with you absolutely. I loathe War Mode. Not only do I despise how “unclassic” it feels (I really like more rigid structure in the game), I think it’s basically the nail in the world PvP coffin for the vast majority of the playerbase.
War mode definitely doesn’t encourage more PvP to happen. While it might enable factions to coexist artificially, I don’t view a “Toggle PvE Server” button as a genuine solution to imbalance.
Yeah, I know the gist of how the servers work. I maybe should’ve explained a bit more thoroughly, but I didn’t want to detract from the main point any more than I already had. I actually wrote a decent bit more, but decided to cut out several paragraphs because I figured I could just address them when they came up!
Yes, my idea for making server locks faction-specific would at first involve allowing the cumulative population to increase even after it was already deemed to be too high, but:
I proposed this with the “main idea” in mind, so any sudden influx of population to the minority faction would immediately start causing some chaos for the majority faction and spark the chain reaction.
Servers are locked when they’re vaguely deemed to be “too full”, but not necessarily when they’re technically full. If the buff and the faction-specific server locks were implemented simultaneously it would probably incur some queue times in some situations, but I think that would probably only contribute to solving the problem.
One particular way you might implement this without causing more problems is by starting the minority faction off with a low cap at first. Let’s say 1,000 players. Then maybe as the majority faction gradually shrinks, the minority faction’s cap can progressively increase until they’re both balanced. Right now the largest server shows a population of 32,000, but it was over 37,000 at its peak. Certainly there’s some wiggle room to allow 1,000 inbound transfers! Injecting minority players into these single-faction realms is of paramount importance for this idea to work.
I love that suggestion. I'd play on one of those realms in a heart beat!
Not really a main one, but yeah – the majority faction would have to deal with some ensuing chaos, which would naturally lead to some of them leaving. And that would be a good thing! I would guess that most of those would leave because they just don’t care for PvP in general, so having to face it ever would be a problem for them. In that case, good! It’s a PvP realm, and people who don’t want PvP should ideally be playing on realms that were specifically designated for their playstyles.
I don’t think it will happen, but I think it can. People could, and did say that about other things that ended up actually happening. I think this suggestion, while not perfect, would DEFINITELY work, which makes it an attractive possibility.
