That isn’t a “wall” of text
That work of art is a MAZE!!!
Well played.
More bold and italicized text for extra LULz next time
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Can do!
Do you like my syntactic sugar?
This is the longest forum post I have ever seen here
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So someone who plays alliance on a server that’s severely lopsided towards horde can just be an unstoppable ganker?
Haha I will endeavour to keep our discussions more focused. So with that in mind, please understand that if I don’t reply to something specifically, it just means that I didn’t feel it was as important to the overall response I’m looking to craft. If we both respond to everything, we might just blow up the forums 
With regards to the buff, this is the key piece that I think won’t turn out like you want it it to. Your expectation (reinforced by subsequent statements in your response) is that folks who get crushed by someone with that buff will migrate over to the opposite faction to either get that buff themselves, or not have to deal with that.
I don’t think that expectation is realistic. I mean, that exact same approach didn’t really change anything with regards to Wintergrasp, did it? Nobody got demolished by someone in that battleground and rerolled/transfered… they just complained about it on the forums. It didn’t even really do anything to address win-rates in WG, because you can only be in so many places at once so having more people still tended to win out. All it really provided was a reason for the minority faction to actually go to Wintergrasp, making sure the event still actually happened.
Being a raid boss will be fun for the folks who have it, it will be annoying for the folks who don’t. If we were playing a game designed around that kind of asymmetrical balance, which absolutely could be fun in its own right, I think it would be fine, but to all of a sudden have a raid boss introduced into your PvP server that has effectively become a PvE server is probably not going to be fun for folks.
So however you want to calculate this, and whatever restrictions you want to put on this buff, I just don’t think it’s going to work the way you’re hoping it will.
I’m saying in practice. The idea of a PvP server where you could get jumped at any moment is a lot of fun. Look at games like Escape from Tarkov. It’s a rush! However, persistent, faction-based games that try to put this into practice always have a tendency to fail. People tend to gravitate towards the winning side… they just do. Some games offer a mitigation to this with either soft or hard resets to the world state to mix things up but WoW doesn’t. The investment in your character, and the competing ideas of organized group activities vs. open world, always on PvP interfering with that, tend to get old.
What I mean here is you have two camps of people. Those who rolled on a PvP server because they really love World PvP and that’s the core focus of the game for them, and those who rolled on a PvP server because there’s this idea that PvP servers are for “real WoW players”. The former should be supported and given an opportunity to have that experience, but the latter kind of mucked it up because they want the posterity of having a character on a PvP server without the actual PvP.
There’s an assumed posterity promoted by a lot of people regarding PvP servers, which I find laughable because a lot of those same people have also made an effort to be on PvP servers that are effectively PvE servers.
I never said War Mode was Classic… I very much agree with you here. However, what I am saying is that what Classic set out to be, in terms of World PvP, just didn’t work. It didn’t really work back then past initial launch and it really doesn’t work now. Most of the players just don’t want that kind of experience day to day.
War Mode is the only way to really have some kind of World PvP, because people can opt in, but either way without it, World PvP dies. Every time.
In BFA, War Mode encouraged World PvP by offering incentives (such as increased XP and gear rewards), and the reward was greater for the minority faction. To an extend it worked, I certainly did more World PvP than I had ever done in a long time, but then I lost interest (just as I did in actual classic) because I’m not a die hard World PvP player. I make no pretenses of this, I play on a PvE server 
The bottom line is this. The majority of WoW Classic players have demonstrated, through consistent action, that they aren’t really interested in PvP servers. There is no real value in trying to force this, just accept what it is. Instead, advocate for your own dedicated and maintained World PvP server with a separate/modified ruleset to make it work.
Some off the cuff suggestions that make no pretense of actually being good, but are just intended to be thought provoking and incite discussion…
- Complete server reset every 3 months.
- Experience gains are significantly increased, resulting in much faster leveling speeds.
- All zones except those housing capital cities can be captured by a faction.
- Bosses in dungeons and raids no longer reward gear directly. Instead, they reward a token for that item which must be exchanged at a vendor in a town for that zone in order to obtain the item. This vendor is only accessible when that town/zone is under your faction’s control.
- There should be more than one but no less than four of these vendors, world wide.
- [Unsure] The difficulty of raid bosses should be somewhat reduced. The challenge should be in the PvP, not in the PvE.
- [Unsure] Randomly assigned factions? Potentially being able to join a faction as a full 5-man party?
Plus the previously mentioned expectations that faction balance will be strongly enforced and players who are inactive will “give up their spot.”
This is just some random suggestions I thought of… but really, all it does is speak to the fact that World of Warcraft was a game with PvP ideals that didn’t really work out beyond passing interest or griefing for most players. For those of you who love World PvP, you should have a space where that matters and is the central focus of the game instead of it being an afterthought.
I’m just gonna cut my thoughts regarding the servers since this is long enough. I think you get my point in that there is nuance there so it makes it hard to just faction specific lock. Unless they maybe take whatever the server hard-cap is and just make each faction hard-cap at half that. Unfortunately the ship has sailed on a lot of servers in that regard.
I cut a few other responses I had as well. A lot of this feels like it should be a beer chat/pod cast 
Massive wall of text incoming. Sorry!
Wintergrasp is only a small, discrete aspect of the overarching game though. I don’t expect people to care enough about winning or losing Wintergrasp to actually move to a different realm. My proposal wouldn’t only exist in a small, compartmentalized aspect of the game like this. In fact, the scope of my suggestion is basically the opposite of Tenacity in Wintergrasp, because Tenacity exists only in one instanced area, whereas this buff would exist in all non-instanced areas.
Anyways, by your own admission earlier, you said:
It turns out people don’t wanna get dumped on while trying to do something else.
It’s been mentioned several times in this thread already that people want to specifically avoid PvP. I think that perspective is somewhat incorrect, or at least very highly flawed, but at the very least, you and a couple others have already nodded to the idea that being killed in PvP is a massive deterrent for some people. I think this buff would have at least some effect in that area. And that’s only a secondary goal of my suggestion. The primary one is to kick start dead factions, which I think this would absolutely do.
That’s part of the idea. I hesitate to call it a “punishment” for people who flocked to a single faction realm, because that’s not the goal at all. But indeed, something I want to see happen is for the negative consequences of bad decisions made by the masses to fall at least in part on the people who made them.
As things are now, Blizzard has actually freed the masses from the consequences of their actions, but those consequences haven’t been removed – They’ve simply been diverted from the parties responsible to the innocent bystanders (see: Layering).
Before layering, overcrowding was one of the natural forces that didn’t necessarily “cap” the population, but it at least provided a long list of negative consequences that deterred people from making the problem worse. Now those consequences have been artificially diverted entirely onto the low-level players and minority faction, all so that the majority can comfortably continue to make decisions that destroy the experience for everyone.
Blizzard has virtually guaranteed a ubiquitous imbalance. We need something to equalize it.
Does this go to say that you think Blizzard shouldn’t intervene? The fact that the masses tend toward a certain state doesn’t mean that state is preferable. After all, that’s why rules and laws exist. Clearly, the game was intended to have some semblance of faction balance. And clearly, having at least roughly balanced PvP is a very popular idea.
You’re right that WoW doesn’t have any mechanism in place to subvert the tendencies of the masses, But that’s specifically why I’m here. 
I want there to be.
Oh, I totally agree with you here, especially the last bit.
My problem in all of this is that Blizzard allows people to turn a flawed perspective into a reality that the overwhelming majority of players are forced to adhere to. To me, it truly feels like a situation where weak parents are afraid to discipline their children and the outcome is that no one is happy. I want to see the WoW team reclaim their game and make realm types matter again.
Oh sorry, I could’ve worded that better. I didn’t mean to use the word “classic” in the sense of “WoW Classic”. I think maybe “inauthentic” would be a better word. Or “sterile”. I just mean how it feels antithetical to the design philosophy of a game where player conflict is a cornerstone. Both in WoW Classic and in Retail.
This is the thing that really puzzles me, and maybe it’s an area where we won’t be able to help but to butt heads. What exactly is it about War Mode that makes you think it’s the only option? The way I see it, there is always an “opt-in point”. In Classic, in descending order of severity/absoluteness:
Attacking another player → Intentionally flagging oneself for PvP → Playing in an enemy zone → Playing in a contested zone → Rolling on a PvP server
These are all PvP opt-in points, and the issue is that people think some of them aren’t. A big reason for this is that players have “abused” or otherwise circumvented the game’s mechanics. It seems to me like War Mode is essentially no different from intentionally flagging oneself for PvP in Classic, except it has some minor rewards attached to it.
The difference between Classic and Retail in this aspect is that at least one degree of PvP opt-in is virtually permanent in Classic, and I think that choice should matter.
In a certain sense, yes, but what I meant is that it doesn’t suddenly make people think “Now I want to world PvP.” I think War Mode is a failure of a system because the incentives it offers (if the goal is more PvP) aren’t directly related to world PvP. In other words, it doesn’t make world PvP more fun – It simply dangles an unrelated carrot in front of you to lure you into a situation where world PvP can happen.
My suggestion exists in stark contrast to this problem. Even if it’s one-sided in most cases, it would genuinely make people want to PvP solely for the sake of PvP, which is something that Warmode doesn’t do, at least during the last time I played Retail in late Legion.
Here’s an important detail I maybe should’ve made clear a lot sooner – I fully understand that PvP isn’t nearly as popular as the global population distribution might suggest at first glance. That being said, I fully welcome a future where this suggestion is implemented, and the majority of the player population shifts dramatically over to PvE realms instead.
PvP might not be pervasively loved within the playerbase, and that’s fine. What’s not fine is that it’s virtually impossible for people to seek out a specific experience that this game was designed from the ground up to offer, only because a bunch of squatters have “liberated” PvP realms for their own selfish purposes.
No offense, but the idea of a “super PvP realm” just seems superfluous and a bit ridiculous to me… PvP realms should be places where players can expect to find faction conflict in principle. If the playerbase tends towards a PvE playstyle on realms which are explicitly designated as PvP realms, then Blizzard needs to nudge the population in the right direction to preserve the very experience that their game was purpose built to deliver.
If people aren’t interested in PvP, they shouldn’t roll on PvP realms. If Blizzard would grow a backbone and implement some measure to revive dead factions and genuinely encourage PvP for the sake of PvP, the global population would (perhaps quickly) organize itself into the correct categories and the realms would finally make sense again.
I vehemently disagree with the idea of a ““real”” PvP server, but I’d have to agree that my suggestion isn’t something that should be implemented globally all at once. Ideally, they’d implement this on one realm to start off and go from there once they see how players react to it.
I’m sure you can tell, but I’d personally LOVE to do podcasts. I love discussing stuff, especially with other people who are obsessively long-winded like I am. I especially love hearing other peoples’ thoughts and opinions if they’ve given their ideas a lot of thought.
But yeah… I blame my absurdly verbose responses on severe ADHD.
I’m a bit disconnected from this conversation since my last response was two-weeks ago. I’m probably not going to go into big detail here, but I did read your entire post!
Honestly, the major problem here is that you want to change expectations based on what your ideal scenario is. For you, PvP should be about PvP… and I agree with you. However, that’s not what it has become and there’s a whole lot of people playing within the bounds of the current ruleset who probably would not enjoy what you’re proposing.
For you, your stance is “Well tough, you rolled on a PvP server.”, but you’re promoting something that’s never been in the game before and will disrupt a lot of people. The end result of such a change will ultimately give you the very thing you’ve labeled as silly… a PvP super server, one where the only people on it are people who actually want World PvP, on all the time. Unfortunately, the cost will be everybody else (and they vastly outnumber you) who will either have to reroll or pay for a transfer.
Blizzard is already under a lot of fire for how they’re handling server balancing and that people don’t have a choice except to transfer if they don’t like their server situation. While I believe Blizzard could have taken steps so that we didn’t end up here, the bottom line is that everything has gone in a player driven direction that Blizzard has allowed. However, if Blizzard drops a change that disrupts the status quo and the only mitigation is to either suck it up or transfer, that’s going to end poorly.
As I said, there are a whole lot of people who like PvP, but not a lot of people who like always on PvP. This is why Battlegrounds (and War Mode) work. When folks are out questing, maybe they want that PvP experience, but since Raiding is a large part of WoW culture and people organize themselves into scheduled windows of time to do that as a team, World PvP can greatly disrupt this.
If WoW were different, if you could reroll to the other faction easily to balance, or if a faction transfer were free, then your change would actually be fine. But WoW is a game of time investment, and choosing wrong, or making a choice based on current information that then suddenly changes is not going to go down as well as you think.
Your ideas aren’t bad, they’re just not compatible with the current state of the game and you can’t reasonably expect to force that change on the player base. It too has to be an opt-in experience that people choose to pursue. There’s simply no other way around it. It’s not ideal that what PvP means in WoW has been changed from what you would like it to be, but that’s just how things are.
I would argue that it’s not just an ideal scenario for me. The servers listed as PvP realms should in fact be places where people can fine decent PvP. I totally understand what you mean about this being disruptive for the people who have commandeered the realms, but at the end of the day, I cannot abide the whims of people who are very consciously playing the game in a way that was never intended.
Much in the same way that I didn’t suddenly think that the dungeon carry “meta” was okay, just because it became the default way for lazy people to “play” the game. That was another way that people fell into an “incorrect” path of least resistance, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be disrupted!
- No, when I crudely referred to your idea as a “super PvP realm”, what I meant was that we shouldn’t add sub-categories to the realm types that already exist. PvP realms should be for PvP. There’s no need for a new category called "Real PvP" if the WoW team would simply force some meaning back into the regular server designations that already exist.
- Like I said before, I would guess that most people would value a balanced environment to play in even if it meant some occasional PvP. Just as long as they didn’t have the fear of eventual single factionhood looming over their heads. This change would either guarantee factions balance, or at the very least it would keep the game playable for dead factions.
- Honestly, I don’t mind one bit if this triggered a mass shift in the places the global population call home. I’ve said so explicitly.
I remember a time when opting in once and having it always on outside of your own faction-controlled zones was a good thing. Battlegrounds aren’t a replacement for faction balance, and War Mode is a paltry attempt at making world PvP more interesting/fun…
Part of the fun of world PvP is that you relinquish your ability to consent in a lot of situations the moment you roll on a PvP server. I believe very strongly that these servers are one-sided because people fear their faction dying. Remove that problem and I think even the casual players would enjoy balanced PvP.
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Especially in Classic, choices should matter, and choosing a specific realm type is an important aspect of that. Undermining the importance of choice with the new-age design philosophy of “you can change your mind at any time” seems very anti-Classic to me, and also quite anti-gratifying in a genre that is designed entirely around making meaningful choices and investments.
As things are now, one of the most loved aspects of WoW has been destroyed by the selfish complacency of the players, and especially the WoW team’s reluctance to step in and guide that complacency in a more constructive direction. We’ve already seen entire realms that peaked at tens of thousands of players die out because the playerbase is more than capable of migrating on a whim. I see no reason why causing more migration (especially with proper tools/resources in place like free transfers to facilitate) isn’t a perfectly reasonable price to pay to see the game regain one of its most important aspects.
Except that this is a way that’s intended. There’s nothing saying you have to PvP at all. In fact, what you’re proposing is a change to the way PvP is intended. It’s pretty easy to argue that “winning the server” is a possible, and supported outcome of legacy WoW PvP. You want to offer a different experience, one that I don’t think is inherently bad, but to force it on the rest of the player base is the problem here. Which is why it belongs as something on a different server that players can opt into if they so choose.
I don’t think anybody could legitimately have anything against Blizzard taking active steps to balance populations by merging servers. Queue times not withstanding, that’s playing the game as it was intended. Anybody who is on a PvP server that was one-sided and then has more people on it can’t really complain because that’s the life they chose.
That’s not what you’re proposing though. You’re suggesting that Blizzard create an environment where one person on the minority faction can become so grossly overpowered that it will irritate people into self-balancing… at their own expense, no less. This is where what you’re after falls apart.
Like, let’s be real, this is all hypothetical anyway, but for a suggestion like this to gain any real traction, you have to consider the actual, tangible impact it will have… especially in the space between where we are now and the idealistic destination you want to arrive at. What you ultimately want, balanced pvp populations, is a good thing. How you want to get there is kinda crazypants.
Sure, but I’m not positing that PvP realms were only intended for people who want to PvP all the time. I’m positing that they were not intended to be home for only one faction, or to be overwhelmingly imbalanced.
I don’t think so. In WoW, I see pervasive and deliberate intention for balance in its design. It was intended for the world to be populated and feel “real”. It was intended for the world to be shared by opposing factions of players who are unfriendly with one another. It was specifically designed to be balanced in PvP across factions.
The ultimate goal of my suggestion is to encourage that balance to flourish. Or in the worst-case scenario, to at least make the game artificially balanced enough so the majority faction can’t make the game literally unplayable for the minority faction.
Yeah, I agree. Though that solution only actually works for smaller servers, where this problem is arguably less of an issue. They’ve already stated that mega servers are not a path they’re willing to move forward with, which means that the solution must be dynamic and scale as appropriate.
I’d agree with you that this is where my idea falls apart if the goal was to ensure maximal comfort for everyone. But that’s almost the opposite of the goal. What I want is:
- Disrupt the permanence and immunity of overwhelmingly dominant factions
- Make the game playable and even a lot more fun for people on the helplessly outnumbered factions
- Strongly encourage the population to distribute itself more evenly and in line with the way the game was intended to be.
I think my idea would be terrible for keeping the status quo and making WoW a comfy game for people who don’t like PvP. But I think it would be excellent for achieving these goals I’ve outlined.
Haha, I definitely can’t disagree with you there. I know it’s outlandish for sure. Though outlandish problems sometimes require outlandish solutions. The problem has gotten so bad that the solutions (if they exist at all) will need to have some teeth. We’ve seen almost 2 decades of proof that half-measures amount to almost nothing. At the very least, this idea would not only guarantee ideal balance (or at least more ideal), it would create some very interesting and fun gameplay where it didn’t exist before.
Replying 18 days later?
Really, if it weren’t for the fact that the eventual outcome of what you’re after here results in the players incurring additional financial cost, I wouldn’t really care.
It’d be like Blizzard saying, “Anybody playing a Draenei Shaman with a character name that starts with A now has to pay an additional $1 per month in subscription fees.” Then, when people complain, “We told you that service fees were subject to change, you agreed to this when you signed up.”
Anyway, you do you. I’ve said all I needed to say here and don’t really want to dive back in. The time has passed on this one for me. Good luck to you!
Yeah, I’ve been disappearing from the forums lately because of work and other general life business. At the least I appreciate the conversation!
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