Blizzard's magnificent strategy of scrambling to put out fires instead of preventing them has led to yet another problem with server health.
This data is already quite old having been released in WoWhead and Census's report two Sunday's ago. However, the Census addon had been broken as collateral damage in a patch directed at breaking LFG addons. As a result there was much doubt as to whether these figures were really accurate.
But the issue became real for me last night as we attempted to organize a PvP raid on Stalagg. Despite sending layer scouts in before forming the main raid we were unable to find more than 10 Aliiance in all of Hillsbrad, STV, Westfall, Goldshire, and Stormwind combined; all this during the prime hours of 9-10PM server. It was sad to say the least.
My guess is we'll see Faction-exclusive transfers. Populations must continue to decline in order for Blizzard to hit their layering switch-off deadline.
Wow, that's horrible dude. I saw people talking about this on Reddit and the Blizzard Forums as well but I didn't realize how significant it was. I agree, transfers should have been faction-exclusive at least to start.Lendryn wrote: ↑4 years agoBut the issue became real for me last night as we attempted to organize a PvP raid on Stalagg. Despite sending layer scouts in before forming the main raid we were unable to find more than 10 Aliiance in all of Hillsbrad, STV, Westfall, Goldshire, and Stormwind combined; all this during the prime hours of 9-10PM server. It was sad to say the least.
I was worried about this as well.
You wouldn't happen to have a chart like that for EU as well?
These charts are waaay off. I guarantee Atiesh is well over 80% alliance.
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Sounds about right. The server I'm on is horde-dominated and, based on the sever discord, there were definitely a lot of Alliance contemplating jumping ship after the server transfers were announced last week.
Only thing I can think to fix this is to offer faction-specific transfers onto unbalanced servers, but with some kind of added incentive. Warhammer Online did something kind of like this (if I remember correctly) where if you rolled a new character on the underpopulated faction you'd get an experience bonus or something similar until the faction balance was closer to neutral. I think they also eventually put hard caps on the factions, so like you couldn't make a new character of the overpopulated faction if the game had determined the faction population was too skewed.
But I dunno if that's necessarily a great idea either, since having an incentive like bonus exp or money is going to screw with the flow of the game and the economy. If you give them something outside the game like a few days of free subs, people would make a junk underpopulated-faction character, get their free sub days, then go back to whatever their actual main server is. Only way around that I can think of is either setting a minimum level limit to transfer your character or something, since I'd guess nobody's going to exile their level 50 character just for some free game. But then again, maybe they would! Or maybe it's not a great idea to inject a 10% population boost of level 50+ characters onto a server's faction overnight!
So, I dunno, I'm going to assume that they'll either do nothing about faction imbalance (most likely) or at some point put unincentivized faction-specific transfers in, but I can't think there are going to be that many people willing to transfer off a server overpopulated in their favor to one that's not just for the good of that server.
Hell yeah Grobb sitting at almost 50/50!
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I thought about advocating for this, but then realized that people would just make tons of level 1 opposite-faction characters that they'd never use in order to get the server back into fake balance so they could create characters of the faction that they actually want to play.
Faction-specific login queues might work if they trigger off of the number of characters of each faction currently playing... so if a server is currently 60% alliance and 40% horde, you could log into a horde character immediately, or you could wait 45 minutes to log onto an alliance character.
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You can't make horde and alliance on the same server bro.Black Monarch wrote: ↑4 years agoI thought about advocating for this, but then realized that people would just make tons of level 1 opposite-faction characters that they'd never use in order to get the server back into fake balance so they could create characters of the faction that they actually want to play.
Faction-specific login queues might work if they trigger off of the number of characters of each faction currently playing... so if a server is currently 60% alliance and 40% horde, you could log into a horde character immediately, or you could wait 45 minutes to log onto an alliance character.
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That's pretty significant.
I'm curious if anyone knows total horde vs. alliance numbers if you total players from all realms? Is it close to 50:50?
Supposedly the balance was about 50/50 worldwide across all types of servers. PVP servers skew Horde, PVE servers skew alliance, but in total the numbers came out to around 50/50.
Keep in mind that the API that was being used to collect these numbers was disabled weeks ago. These census numbers are becoming less accurate by the day as time goes on, players stop playing, players transfer servers, etc. These are at best a loose window at what things looked like a couple of weeks ago. From what I understand the census sites all rely on people manually uploading configuration files from their game clients now, which means there is very little census input compared to what we had weeks ago.
They'll be fine. Itll just create underdog communities like how a lot of private servers were.
Yeah. I see a lot of complaints elsewhere about how unfair it is to be on an unbalanced server, how much blizzard sucks for screwing them over, etc. But really while there are some things that could potentially be done to resolve this, faction imbalances are kind of unavoidable. At some point the game is what it is and you gotta adapt to the world. We gotta make due with what we got. Not everybody gets to be superman in this game.
And as I say this, here is what I see on my other screen in the Tanaris Inn
Hunt or be hunted. If you're gonna be hunted, keep your head on a swivel and be aware of your surroundings. The ganks are coming.
Except for the name
Allow me to refute my own point here.
Being on a PVP server fucking sucks when the faction balance is this bad. There really isn't a solution for it either, people are going to play what they're going to play. But man, every time I step foot outside to quest it's instant 5v1, everywhere, in all zones.
I'm not sure on the latest census data, but I'm guessing Yojamba is either relatively balanced or horde skewed in my favour, because I haven't really had any ganking troubles that are noteworthy. Also haven't really witnessed horde ganking alliance either. Maybe Oceanic servers are more chill?
Not that I haven't been killed, or killed others, but ganking (gang killing) is a rarity. Also nearly every skull just cruises by on their mount, I'm not worth honor - this may change in phase 2 though.
Edit: well shit according to the census website it's 2:1 alliance dominated. Well I guess the Oceanic alliance guys are just more chill. I leveled alongside many alliance last night in southern STV. No PvP occurred.
Lvl 60
Lvl 35
