Hi everyone, I guess at this point noticed that war mode is always unbalanced in the amount of people playing on a faction or another. I assume that this issue is trying to get fixed, because this causes that a faction has significantly more players than the another, causing players to disable war mode by desmotivation at getting killed several times, affecting the amount of total players even more. I think that is related to players that use raids o groups with crossed realms to get assaults or get rare mobs killed. Maybe increasing the versatility stat of horde/alliance when they are getting surpassed in numbers based in amount of players on the another faction, increasing further the amount of rewards to increase participation even more, or another ideas can make the âwar modeâ more attractive.
This was actually fixed in 8.1. Blizzard probably thinks itâs still fixed, not having realized how 8.2 and 8.3 content broke the balancing mechanisms.
Make sure all the incentives go to Alliance just because. Letâs not give the Horde anything for their trouble. They bring trouble upon themselves for free.
Also, we donât know what PvP is going to be like in SL yet. Not unlike Leg, it still seems to be a PvE-centric expansion.
Blizz doesnt careâŚ
Horde outnumber Alliance, deal with it. I do⌠Yeah it sucks for certain things, but I get by.
In my own personal observation (which has little or no merit) is that PVPers tend to play whatever faction most of the streamers play. I hate to admit it, but I think it is true that they are influencers. I especially noticed this when Reckful was playing, everyone followed him whatever he did. I think if blizz did something to convince a few top PVP streamers to play alliance, more PVPers would switch to alliance as well.
The weekly quest âAgainst Overwhelming Oddsâ was blizzardâs attempt at âfixingâ this issue. It kind of worked at the time.
Back when it was possible to get reasonably accurate wow population statistics from 3rd party sites, the pop split horde-to-alliance max level characters was nearly 50-50 with horde ahead by 2-4%. However, as everyone has seen there are way more players who choose to turn on War Mode with Horde than Alliance.
People can argue for all sorts of technical âsolutionsâ but at the end of the day its a demographic problem. You have 2 fairly equal base populations but significantly more people in 1 population chose to do an activity than the other group.
Muddying the waters is that players can have both horde and alliance characters and may even actively play both but only chose to do pvp with horde. Why? Possibly because they perceive horde to be better at pvp? True or not that perception is part of the issue.
How do you solve a demographic and perception problem? Itâs a human problem not a network load-balancer problem.
You are incorrect.
Max level characters were about 55H:45A at the beginning of 8.0. The ratio in war mode appeared to be about the same. However, the Horde numerical advantage caused the marginal war mode Alliance players to turn it off or unsubscribe entirely. By the end of 8.0, Alliance was ridiculously outnumbered in war mode - at least 10:1 - and overall max level character unbalance was worsening as well, at about 60H:40A.
In 8.1, differential quest rewards and the AOO quest were introduced. These successfully helped to rebalance war mode; there may still have been more Horde, but no longer many times as many Horde. In addition, the max level character unbalance fell, back to about 55H:45A.
In 8.2 additional CTA quests made AOO ineffective for balancing, and the unbalance appears to have gotten worse again, though there havenât been reliable statistics.
Itâs not a demographic problem and technical solutions do work. The only problem is that Blizzard doesnât actually understand the technical solutions well enough to keep from breaking them.
I hate the fact that on Oceanic servers, the balance is thrown in the opposite direction. Alliance outnumber Horde, yet the Alliance continue to get the war mode buff. Should be the other way around.
The AOO never worked well. The quest entices Alliance to turn on Warmode long enough to get the kills and the reward and then they turn it off. What is really needed is for more Alliance to turn Warmode on and keep it on because they realize that world pvp by itself is enjoyable and they donât need an intrinsic reward to induce temporary compliance.
And why donât more alliance turn on warmode and keep it on and make that how they normally play wow? You need to understand that before throwing âtechnical solutionsâ that might help for a month before things go back to the way they were
Basically the only way to âbalanceâ is to force horde out of WM while enticing Alliance to turn on WM by providing an incentive .
It kinda worked in 8.1 because the AOO reward outweighed the benefit of the old zone CTA which effectively âbalancedâ the nos.But when CTAâs got spread to more zones with the added benefit of getting more âvisionsâ in WM, Horde found an incentive to be back in WM.
You donât understand what the problem was nor how the fix worked.
The problem was not just that the initial war mode imbalance caused Alliance PVP players to turn off war mode and unsubscribe. The problem was also that the imbalance got so bad that the Horde PVE players turned war mode on just to get the 10% bonus without any real risk of PVP.
The purpose of AOO was to drive those Horde PVE players out of war mode by making the risk of PVP appreciable for Horde in war mode, just as it already was for Alliance in war mode. Ion specifically stated this one of one his periodic interviews at the beginning of 8.1.
AOO obviously worked well, since the proportion of Horde to Alliance in war mode dropped steeply after its introduction, to the point that by the middle of 8.1, it was low enough for AOO to turn off more than it was on.
They did. In fact, so many Alliance turned war mode on to do their day to day quests that not only did the war mode population ratio improve, but the total war mode population increased, too, as Ion said at the end of 8.1. What you need to do is understand the facts before evaluating how the solutions worked.
Exactly. AOO worked in 8.1 because Alliance war mode players were incentivized to kill 25 Horde per week, and the Horde were only incentivized to kill 10 Alliance, which compensated for the then much higher amount of Horde in war mode.
AOO basically quit working in 8.2 because the CTA quests incentivized the same 35 kills for both Alliance and Horde players. That made AOO irrelevant since youâd get AOO done anyway when you did the CTA quests, so the Alliance no longer got more kills per war mode player.
As a result, the imbalance was restored to the point where itâs now as bad as it was at the end of 8.0.
The same is true on NA RP servers: Alliance outnumber Horde so badly that I decided to experiment and bring my fresh 120 alliance hunter (with like 50k health) on Moon Guard to Mechagon. In an hour of sitting in town, I saw a grand total of three horde players, and none of them even bothered to target me, let alone get a literally free kill.
A lot of the imbalance is perception. Other than the usual Nazjatar Mezz vs Newhome fight it is VERY rare to see fights higher than 10v10 and even these are rare.
In most cases there are in fact 10 available players from the under-dog faction that âcouldâ band together and fight back, however, I generally find that whoever is perceived as the underdog then self-reinforces this perception and they all stop trying. They quiver in hiding or duck out to other shards without ever fighting and so the larger function just runs free.
Most people donât want even fights, they want to crush with no risk and treat committing to combat in a computer game like they are risking their life in some RL war or something.
And using those same methods it was clear that they lumped in all players even alts. So you werenât getting anything accurately.
Sharding doesnât help either. Itâs super frustrating to get resharded multiple times or have reinforcements come help to even up the fight only for them or you to end up in different shards from the opponents you were fighting.
Thatâs also why the argument of âPvP solutions to PvP problemsâ when it comes to zone lockdown, griefing, etc doesnât actually work since sharding really screws with the ability to fight back.
Youâve got to dance with the players you brought or sharded with. Itâs a crapshoot for sure on whether you have good players on your side or enough of them to control the shard or at least fight back. Perfect parity will never exist.
Iâm not sure sharding can be changed now. Blizzard has a hard time putting 80 players in an instanced BG without lag. Iâm sure theyâre trying to optimize the system for the next expansion, weâll see.