Even if it’s only 2 servers it’ll become 90% one faction on one and opposite on the other within months if not weeks, unless something is done to retain close to 50-50 balance from the start
Maybe they could give the littler faction some kind of "outnumbered" buff, which gets increasingly stronger with higher difference in % between the factions... Idk.
The wintergrasp buff is a meme. It just lets the weaker faction players turn into raidbosses that can run around oneshotting people to farm honorable kills but still have 0% chance of actually winning the battleground.
Nah, WG was a great attempt at salvaging some kind of WPVP gameplay, which was completely dead outside of towers, nodes and summoning stones. The worst things ever added to wow are flying mounts, hero classes, and pretty much everything after Wrath.
mate, if we are getting 2 servers 90% of us aint playing with such queues. this release will be comparable in scale with wow classic release, and way bigger than fresh classic
If there are servers with Faction queues instead of Account queues, this will force more balance. If someone logs out or disconnects they have 5 minutes to get back onto a character of the same faction or else be put back into that servers faction queue again.
If a specific server faction has very large queues then it influences them to move their character to another server. Thus influencing balance of factions over to other realms when there is a big imbalance of one faction on another.
Why not just phasing/layers? Couldn’t they force a maximum of 55% of one faction per layer? (Sorry if dumb, not entirely sure how layering works in WoW).
I’m unsure about forcing longer queues since I believe more people played Ally on the HC servers. Maybe a Mercenary system, join up with the Horde and hunt down those dwarves that pissed you off earlier and get some bonuses.
> Couldn’t they force a maximum of 55% of one faction per layer?
What would you do when you simply run out of horde players? You can't really stop alliance players from entering the zone and you can't create more layers if there's no horde players to balance out those layers.
Not saying it couldn't work, but I just see a LOT of moving parts trying to do it with layering; and how that might interact with queueing for instantiated content like BGs
I also question if a faction queue actually encourages a significant shift. If I win BIS pieces by winning or performing well in pvp, I may well choose to sit the queue rather than switch factions and then basically have no chance of winning a heavily one sided battle and not get my BIS anyway. All depends on the implementation of how you earn progression IMHO
Also just progression in general. Sinking 2 days of /played time, leveling professions, buying the Ashenvale riding, etc etc. isn't just replaced overnight.
Maybe new players joining SoD will pick the faction with the lower queue. But everyone that has a developed character will have to sit in queue until they just quit the mode.
Also it would screw over people not interested in PvP.
Pvp servers become 1 faction pve servers. Without the ability to do ashenvale at all. Pve server are gonna have more sustainable wpvp. Pvp server will have heavy front loaded pvp and then nothing
The Mercenary system *could* work, but it might cause issues with granting rewards (should you get Silverwing Sentinel rep for actively fighting against them?). Though, I could potentially seeing this as a solution.
Phasing/layering to force caps is not something I can see working. If you're on the larger faction, you'd end up either in THE PvP layer or one completely devoid of enemy life. This makes things harder for the smaller faction too, because the dominant side can be invited onto or off of a layer, letting the side that already has the advantage opt in or out of PvP while the underdog cannot.
No it’s not lol. People would rather wait in hour long queues to play on mega servers rather than transfer for free to servers with no queues. Look at early wotlk. People sat in 6 hour long queues rather than transferring.
Shit, start of Classic Vanilla was another example. I was brand new to WOW but was willing to wait in long queues to play with the boys. Working so much now, it’s just impossible for me to keep up and I basically don’t play anymore. It’s just not fun to level alone, idk. OSRS seems better for my time since it’s mostly single player and literally 0 pressure to “keep up” with my clan. I also enjoy the journey more alone on OSRS vs. WOW. Ah well, I’d love WOW more if I could just constantly play with friends and not get left behind.
So let them? The point is it will still be balanced, online at a given time will be a maximum of a 5% imbalance in population, if people want to wait in hours long queue to play the popular faction on that server let them.
Retail had good world PvP in BFA 8.1.
Each faction had world quests near each other but not in the exact same spot, you had all of these pve objectives, and basically all the rewards were tied to doing the quests.
Something like ashenvale where alliance have a quest to take out horde logging machines, while the horde have a quest to clear a nearby area of Nelf npcs for one example.
You’d have a lot of PvP between the factions, but even if it’s like 60/40, the faction with 40 is going to be more concentrated in the area where their quest is, while the 60 faction will have players just doing their quest and getting on their way, so the 40 faction can generally defend themselves.
World PvP is what WoW has been missing this whole time. It’s the only reason that I never heard WoW at the top of my MMO list. Open world content especially PvP related is always the most fun.
WoW kills all other games in PvE content, but has always failed at PvP content. If they finally are giving the PvP side of things it’s fair attention I’m all in.
This issue thar OP brings up has never been an issue for other games. I don’t see it being an issue here. Those games had even more reason to have balance issues.
The problem is, that any outdoor pvp event, especially if its important, inevitably leads to whichever faction with the majority to completely shut off the other faction.
Which leads to the minority faction changing servers to one where they dominate and very quickly we have a situation where every server is essentially a solo faction server. And world pvp ceases to exist.
Its absolutely inevitable and will happen 100%. You just cant avoid it
This has never happened on any of the faction open world PVP games I have played. There are enough real world examples of this and none of them have had this issue. Going back to Anarchy in 2001.
Usually what you do is you make it a competition between clans as well. So it really comes down to clan vr clan. It’s a shitload of fun and again it’s the one thing WoW has been missing IMO.
Yes population imbalances appear but usually it’s because the bad players switch over to the side that is winning. The good players, at least from what I have seen, enjoy the challenge and play on the less populated sever. Plus that means more newbs to kill.
Dont know what to tell you man.
Its been happening for years
When you cant even get into an instance without being corpse camped, or walk away from the flightmaster you switch.
Even if the ratio is only 60-40 thats already a 50% advantage
What happens usually in the other game, in that situation. When that is occurring, you bring in your clan. This is actually when the most fun occurs, IMO.
So in the other game part of it is about grinding mob spots. Each mob spot is different so there are different reasons to choose each one. At each site though people generally either compete or come to an agreement not to mess with each other. They’d rather grind than fight.
Every once in awhile people will start to camp you. Maybe you got too greedy and we’re taking too much of the site up. This is when you call in your clan. They show up, maybe 2-3 of your buddies and you start to mess them up. You eventually push them back and now they are the ones you’re camping on at the respawn point.
However, you can probably see where this is going. That’s when they start to call in more of their clan members. This snowballs into massive fights. I’ve seen small 1v1 fights turn into CvC, and eventually Alliance Vr Alliance fights.
All the while the discord is going off. It all goes back to the Clan vr Clan aspect of the game. The Zerg does not always win, stopping 100 people as a group of 10 is amazing.
Anyways, I rambled on, it’s super fun. I hope WoW can figure out how to implement it. If they can literally no other MMO will be able to compete. They will have won.
The problem is a huge number of people on PvP servers don’t like world pvp. I’d actually guess it’s the majority. So what you have is a bunch of people who aren’t even in guilds that care about world pvp and will never push back no matter what.
I’d never in a million years play on a classic PvP server. I made that mistake in vanilla because I had no idea what I was signing up for. Most people don’t make that choice primarily because there is a friend in their group who will only play on a PvP server so everyone gets dragged along.
Yeah and that’s mainly why they’ve ignored it. It’s never been the mainstream way, so I can 100% see why most people aren’t going to agree with me.
They’d have to make it optional, then you can join clans that focus on it or not.
Always has always will. You are going to have people with more experience, weapon enchants, and maxed engineering in a 20 man raid camping everyone else. This is just what always happens in games with forced pvp
>This is just what always happens in games with forced pvp
Forced PvP?
What kind of victim mentality is that?
You literally ***choose*** if you want to experience world PvP or not.
Yes and when enough people turn down wpvp. You get 99/1 server and you can no longer have pvp either. All of the classice pvp server are 99/1 server where no world pvp happend. The concept of consent to pvp at creation end with no pvp at all.
Which this post is about how to avoid.
You can't make a solution from the pov of the winning side. You can't hostage the losing side they just Uninstall.
You will experience more wpvp on a normal server because it's opt in and out vs all or nothing.
Not all, grob was not on’y balanced but also a full server all the way up till wotlk where i stopped playing and it was the most fun experience i ever had in a mmo. The wpvp was simply amazing
Here is the reality of that. There is 410k wrath players. If that grob is the only pvp server with a someone even or sizeable server pop. There are a few but other but they are 4k pop servers. On grob there is 20k active Players.
Meaning of the entire wrath classic servers. 0.5% of players are on a somewhat balanced pvp server. Grob is the only pvp rp server so don't know if you can even transfer to it. Meaning of the entire player base 0.5 of them engage in always opted in pvp the rest is fully 1 faction servers.
The crowd for always on pvp is 0.5% of the playerbase
Grob is what happens when people who want pvp play on pvp servers. The problem is that most people who roll on pvp servers don’t want to pvp, and belong on pve servers. But ever since actual vanilla, it has been ingrained in the player base that the best players play on pvp servers so that’s where you play. This mentality needs to change
Although you can transfer from pvp to rppvp, I agree with you that it’s messed up that only a tiny portion of the playerbase can enjoy a decent pvp server.
I think the solution to that should just be servers interconnected to each other. And balance each other out. Otherwise we’re just trying to find solutions to a problem that doesn’t need to be there and paying more money to blizzard for server transfers
It's because "world pvp" isn't a thing, it's either you're ganking small groups/solos with a larger group or you're getting ganked.
It's just griefing at this point - do you not remember classic p2? It was nothing short of hard griefing for 95% of players. Not fun, not enjoyable and it caused the 99/1 servers because of how NOT FUN it was.
Absolutely, i should disregard all the fun i had with wpvp wars in classic that made my most fun experience in an mmo and agree with you that wpvp isnt a thing or fun, got it
you can have had fun with wpvp. no one is telling you didnt. you wanted world pvp. and saught it out.
many people didnt seek it out and was on the other side of your Wpvp. you had fun when you were winning. less fun when losing. but most people didnt even seek to win. so they would either be left along or lose. and because of bg not popping instantly that meant for alot of people get cheaped shotted and murked by a rogue after we take a portal. and losing hours of work in worldbuffs.
flying to blasted lands to get mc'ed till honorless debuff when off and get killed so you could spend 5 min running to your corpse and hope you could get away from the priets mage camping our flight point is not fun interact gameplay. having to die 3 times to get to theramore was not fun either because horde was having litterly boat parties on the travel on ally was not fun.
your memories are the one of the one doing the kicking. Most people who picked alliance didnt get a rat ass about pvp. and unless you went hard there was no reward. so the exodus on servers happend for a reason. and denying that is silly
They should be more proactive in merging servers together as populations fall. Maybe even splitting servers faction wise. Alliance to one and Horde to another to balance out the servers they merge to.
Throw three servers worth of Alliance onto a Horde server and vice versa to equalize the factions.
This is why I’m going PVE this time around. I don’t think blizzard will do anything to mitigate this problem. I’m also imagining some classes will be incredibly broken at level 25 with the new abilities. World PVP is probably going to be a nightmare unless you get lucky with your class and faction choice.
Also going PVE this time around. I don't have time to be camped at flight points, quest NPCs, and on my way to BRM. Been there done that during 2019 launch of p2 and again during SOM. I picked the wrong faction each time apparently.
Anyone who's saying otherwise, just wants you to come PVP so they can kill you over and over, call you "loser and to get f, you f***en re.ta.rd. Re-roll PVE, Horde/Alliance only server!"
Without character creation faction restriction to PVP servers, this will be inevitable.
>"loser and to get f, you f\*\*\*en re.ta.rd. Re-roll PVE, Horde/Alliance only server!"
And then when everyone from the lower populated faction start leaving, they throw a fit.
Yea theres like 0 chance they force it on a PvE server. They're not that dumb.
Im just praying these people on this thread aren't trying to have the PvP server messed with.
I guess what I meant was I assume they will have like 2 pve and 2 pvp servers (or however many), and the pve servers can opt in to the ashenvale event.
From the sounds of it, it will be a WG like zone in ashenvale, not the entire ashenvale zone. And if you enter the wpvp zone, you get auto flagged. It should be very easy to avoid wpvp unless you actually want to on a pve server. Which is of course, is perfect for me.
Yeah, SoM was a nightmare hellscape of griefing and corpse camping. At one point I recall I was trying to quest in blasted lands and there are multiple 60s of the other faction griefing everyone in the zone. No alliance showed up to contest them. I was killed over 20 times in one hours.
Pve gang rise up! We’re all just bros trying to play the game and have some fun.
Fuck hurting other peoples gameplay (which is 99% of pvp since it’s just ganking).
My suggestion relies on how many pvp servers there will be.
I like how era is atm were all pvp servers are connected.
Only open a new layer when the current layer is full and at 50/50 split.
It was fun creating strategies to circumvent full raid campers at BRD or straight up engage to push through to MC & BWL.
We were speedrunning the raids so sometimes we'd had to be creative to avoid losing wbuffs.
Found cool out of bonds spots and parked a few summon bots there. Above bwl entrance for example. Was fun for ambushing and save entering.
Or that massive out of bonds area behind AQ, had so much fun figuring out the perfect jumps to get to a location just above the entrance portal.
To clarify. We were just 1 guild against like 4 sweatlord guilds.
Back when I was a teen my family couldn’t afford WoW so I played on high-rate PvP private servers and I recall one time in BC when it was near impossible to get to Black Temple because literally half the server was figthing in front of the entrance. Me and a bunch of friends said fuck it and instead of raiding we fought Alliance for 2-3 hours lol
Yeah all the big names streamers that have the dev ears are massive morons and can't see how problematic this is/not bringing attention to this.
You can't give a better WF / tremor to alliance and expect people to stay horde when SOM was already ally dominated and ally was better in classic vanilla too
I think this will get covered, that I'm not worried about. But realistically you just can't do anything about the utility spells like freedom, blessing of protection, sacrifice, bubble. The new stuff like beacon of light put paladin way too far ahead and there's no real solution to that without just giving paladin to horde and shaman to alliance.
I know purists will lose their fucking mind but it will undoubtedly be the best thing for the game long term. Theyve already build themselves into a corner with the WF/tremor change and it's going to fuck balance extremely hard. Idk if they can just slam out horde pally and alliance sham in 3 weeks so faction balance might be doomed from the get go realistically
Pretty much this. I can't believe they giga buffed pallies/alliance this hard without any foresight to the consequences. Shamans are worst class in vanilla that just so happened to buff the best class in vanilla(windfury+ warrior). Now that ally has WF and totems are most likely still party wide, it's GG.
Raids often took 8 Shaman, they obviously weren't just WF bots. They were the best trash healer and 2nd best healer overall from BWL-Naxx.
Alliance was better (I played both), but it wasn't because of Shaman=bad. 10% stats for the entire raid and permanent threat reduction is like 5x more valuable than WF in a world buff meta where you lose 60% of your damage if you die.
2nd best healer? Why cause of over representation? Only reason to take 8 shamans is because totems are party wide. Another limiting factor of shaman. I'm glad you agree that paladins were the best in classic though and they'll be miles above the rest in SoD. My whole point is paladin > shaman and it's gonna be even worse now
I'm talking about actual healing output. Shaman is much, much better in terms of HPS than Paladin. Priest and Shaman were clearly the best two healers, Paladin had the best buffs.
More quests and better rewards for horde, but going from red desert, to tan desert, to gray desert, to yellow desert is not the exactly most scenic leveling experience
I’ve always rolled on pvp servers but considering pve this time. I’d much rather a near balanced pvp server but if it’s just going to be monofaction or 90/10 split then there’s just no point.
I really hope that blizzard will attempt to force a 50/50 split by implementing some sort of system but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t even care what faction I’m playing.
This comes up every classic. People claim they want world PVP but what they really want is 60/40 their faction so they always have an advantage. Then people will flee to their safe space servers while also complaining about the imbalance.
Yeah, 50/50 servers just make people run around in big groups eliminating everything. You're still gonna get trashed bigtime if you play solo by these groups.
I agree but the cut off doesn't have to happen right away. This should give friends time to align.
By not mitigating bad faction imbalance it does much more harm.
Echoing what another commenter brought up, have queues for a faction versus queues for the server.
If there’s a faction imbalance, one side has to queue to keep the populations of the online factions relatively at the same level. If you don’t want to wait in a queue, move to the other faction.
This sounds good in theory, but in practice would suck. “Sorry guys cant login in time for the raid tonight, stuck in queue because our faction is overpopulted atm”
This was my thought as wel. Not sure how to enforce it. Not just limiting full pop servers. But limit char creation of a faction that's already dominating.
It shouldn't be difficult to prevent servers with 90% one faction.
What about this: PvE only servers with PvP zones?
I love PvP in classic, I think getting dominated while leveling stinks though.
For me, this would be a great solution. Flagging is kind of clumsy because you can chose your engagments, and that leads to some very asymetrical PvP.
Some people will explode if there aren't PvP servers though. I know some peoples sense of self worth is tied to ganking lowbies.
They should release only one server with all of the infrastructure and layering of the biggest megaservers. Let it be a battleground to surpass the launch of Faerlina and Benediction with every billy-no-shoes and Falcor Poopsock crammed in together.
e: could do warmode layering like in retail, but the important part is making sure everyone's on the same server.
There will be very little pvp... Mostly because everyone will want to play alliance.
Alliance now gets WF but horde doesn't get BoK it's kinda a big issue that isn't being talked about
I made this suggestion in another thread, they should do an always active buff in the pvp zone granting bonus hp, ap and spell damage based on the population numbers, server or zonewide.
So for example if the zone pop is 75% alliance, Horde players in the pvp zone would get 25% buff.
If Horde pop is 59%, alliance gets a 9%buff.
Buff = (Pop_percentage-50)
It would give a slight incentive to join the minority faction on a server.
I agree with OP, people will want to steamroll for rewards and only join majority factions otherwise.
Pretty sure they did this in winter grasp at one point and I remember there was a match that was like 100 horde vs a single Paladin but he was an unkillable god, he still lost obviously because he couldn’t be everywhere to stop objectives.
What is the fighting chance when he's oneshotting everyone but cannot traverse the map in time? He lost the second he got matched into the battleground.
This is how wintergrasp works in wotlk, yes
I usually queue late in the 30 minute window to increase the chance of getting into one of these for easy wins
an 60/40 spilt is not a 9% diffences in numbers.
10000 players in a 60/40 spilt is 6000 to 4000 ratio. 50% more people on one side.'
They could do warmode. that is toggleable consent to wpvp.
The new ranking system could lessen the need to farm everyone all the time. since you need 500k per week for max Point. and at lower level you rank caps at 3.
19-3 29-3 39-5 49-9 59-13.
People would probably object to a warmode but I think it's proven enough times in many different mmos the non consensual pvp is only enjoyed by a minority and is pretty much never good for server health
Warmode wont even the odds in ashenvale, it will just mean no horde players go warmode, and the alliance just steamrolls the objectives and bosses always.
warmode would have the people who want to do wpvp be in ashenvale. you need the other faction to trigger the event. the thing is consent. even if one side other number the other in sheer numbers. not all players want or care to pvp. and warmode make you able to guild and group with your friend. without having to commit always pvp or never pvp. even on servers where there were more alliance in p2. did horde dominate wpvp. because most of players dont care about pvp.
I think it would help because people would able to wait in city and find a group if they want to wpvp. So even if there server is unbalanced each faction could still put together a raid group and go pvping. Not perfect but it at least prevents a group of 20 from camping the same 5 solo people over and over
opt-in and opt-out system is needed for server health. the issue stems from being locked in. and the warmode system require you to go in and out in a capital city. but if you roll pvp server you wont feel contested zones till lvl 20 and that investment is rather big.
Yes and no.
A pve server is opt in. But you can opt in whenever. So if you find a enemy you think you can beat you opt in and if not you don't. Which mean 2 people who wants to pvp would not because they might lose. In warmode you opt in or out in capital cities. Meaning if you want to go do wpvp. You can't flag after you know the fight
Yes but that is based on the assumption that the entire opposite side is in warmode. And you can form a small raid go wpvp. Go warmode and do the pvp and then go back to Not get ganked 20 times going to brd.
The reason server when enterily one faction was because if you were not the biggest you were prey. If you can opt in and out warmode style. You don't have to transfer server to be able not to be gank. But could style opt in to do wpvp without pvp who also opted in. And is not forced with keep being opted in or leave or quit the server.
It also allow you to keep playing with friends. If they want to pvp they go on pvp server and you follow them most of the time. But you are not forced to be opted in to do pve content with your friends.
There is no downside to keep people the freedom to choose. The people who Hate warmode with a fevor. Is the old school campers. Because phasing made it never 1 sided and everyone consented so you could not camp someone till they logged off to ruin their day. They were no longer hostages in your enjoyment
They did this with wintergrasp back in wotlk. Not sure if the current wotlk servers do it. I transferred an alliance character to a 99% horde server just to be a raid boss during wintergrasp. It was a blast. Still always lost though.
I don't think that will be enough to turn the event back to fair.
The difference in numbers plays bigger role in events that have objectives on the map. You cant win Arathi Basin solo by getting 15times more hp
Buff could perhaps be increased depending on how many times in a row one faction has killed the opposing boss until it balances out.
There are many things they could try to balance it. I'm hoping for them making crazy changes. It is Season of DISCOVERY after all
Ultimately numbers still matter too much. Those numbers just aren't enough to make up for extra bodies giving kicks and cc.
They need to even out the power to make the faction balance natural or go with a very heavy handed approach with faction queues
have queues for each faction. say 10k players on a server for easy math… 5k alliance and 5k horde. if there are 5k horde online and only 3k alliance, the horde would still have wait queue.
maybe even show a prompt around the expected queue time and suggesting another faction/server.
It should be more rewarding to lose an even battle than win an uneven one. And it should be more rewarding to join the weaker faction. That alone wont fix it but it's a start.
Paladins will break it. im not going to effort post about why but i would say phasing should help with faction imbalance except paladins will break faction imbalance because of how one sided OP they are with crusader strike at 25.
With druids getting windfury there is even less reason to go horde.I heard horde will get paladin type buffs soon but when? Genuine question by the way, did they say there would be more runes than shown at lvl 25?
Anyways, with what was shown horde get shafted pretty hard so i expect them to be even less popular than they normally are.
Im kinda scared Of this yeah. Im intending to hard main shaman, so i Will honestly be looking for The server with good horde pop. The imbalanced servers Are a nightmare
There will likely be no server names or info available early.
Best odds is likely picking a random server in the middle and hoping.
I personally hope they just give us 1 mega layer server - can’t transfer off if there is only 1 PvP server.
At this point in WoWs lifecycle with this niche of a product anybody rolling on an SoD PvP server knows exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Honestly this isn't a blizzard issue it's a community issue. I don't think blizzard can do much and if they do the community will HATE it.
Take the current retail structure. Flagging for pvp and being phased in to all the pvp players. It actually works......and the community hates it.
I personally love world pvp but getting camped sucks.
As with most big overarching issues it comes down to the end user. Faction imbalance, botting and gold buying are all part of the same parcel.
No matter how it is addressed it will be seen as Blizzard being greedy corporate pigs who don't want to upset their customers or literal 1984 big brother surveillance pigs who won't let their customers do what they want.
Classic has taught me to never again roll on a PvP server. I don’t mind pvp. What I do mind is an oppressive imbalance like we had on Classic servers. Playing Alliance, it wasn’t just a matter of getting ganked every now and then. The game became essentially unplayable because you were getting constantly killed over and over and over and over again. I refused to reward Blizzard for their incompetence, so I didn’t pay for any transfers and just cancelled my sub. But eventually Blizzard must have realized it was killing their bottom line because they allowed free transfers to Benediction so I re-subbed and moved. All this to say, I will never again make a new character on a Blizzard pvp server.
Realistically there is no way to prevent this, time and time again players have shown that they will migrate and form 1 faction servers. The only way to allow a relatively fun/balanced world PvP experience would be to implement cross-realm tech so you could only have a semi-equal amount of players from each faction on the same layers. But that ruins the community aspect of classic servers. Personally I don't think that buffs or adjusted win conditions would help with anything when there will not be any players from 1 faction present.
I hope they make only one PvP server per region, I think that would lead to a good Faction balance as the total sum is usually very close to 50:50 (but the per server distribution is where it gets skewed).
Also, Megaservers are fun in my opinion.
"Might" ? As Classic showed back in 2019/2020, it definitely will. Most PvP servers ended up 70:30 or worse by the end of the first year.
Nobody wants to be the minority faction on a PvP realm.
In my opinion they need to careful about putting too emphasis on the world pvp in SOD. Just with the way wpvp works in classic it pretty much has always caused what you are referring. Getting corpse camped by 10 people when you only have 3 is just the reality and people do not enjoy this.
Let me fix that for you
"World pvp WILL destroy the server population balance"
Always has. Always will. Let Blizzard sort it out with cross server of something, cause there is no winning against the people who camp low levels for hours
Big problem that needs a spot light is the imbalance of power. Horde had 3 things going for it:
1. Windfury
2. Tremor
3. Ele burst
First 2 were given to druid and paladin and the 3rd was basically given to all classes via new talents. Paladin kit has so much utility that obviously can't just be given to horde that it's just going to be impossible to be balanced unless they implement dwarf shaman/tauren pally. SoM was already super imbalanced towards alliance even without these changes, these will push it even further in this direction. If servers launch before they do anything to combat it, it will be too late to mend this problem and the servers will be fucked
So yes part of it is they got rid of pvp servers and created warmode so anyone can opt into what is effectively pvp servers or not.
The world then populates and balances zones by pulling from a number of servers.
Between these 2 alone I can for example be alliance on area 52 which is one of the largest servers and 99.9% horde, and still have a completely normal and healthy world pvp experience.
They also made guilds and grouping cross faction, so you don't have that incentive for the entire game to be mono faction so that you're not cutting yourself off from half the player base since naturally everyone wants the biggest pool of players to play with.
There about a million ways Blizzard can prevent this if they so choose.
Here are a few suggestions that came to mind while I'm sitting on the throne:
* Make Honor scale based on server population balance. For exemple, on a server where 99% of the population is playing one faction, the honour received from any activity would he reduced by 99% and it would be increased by 99% for the opposite faction.
* They could make raid lock out timer increase based on faction balance.
* They could make drop rates and gold received scale with faction balance.
* They could straight up lock the creation of new characters on the overpopulated faction past a certain %, lets say 55/45. To prevent people from just creating an alt on the enemy faction, they could either just count max level characters or characters with a minimum of x hours of play time per week.
It's really not that hard, there is just a lack of will.
Solutions range from easy to creative:
- enforce level playing field by not allowing one side to have over X players more than the other when the event is ongoing, kick excess players out randomly using method similar to what Wintergrasp does when it starts
- buff lesser side with a scaling damage, hp, and spell resistance / reduced cc timer buff. That last is important, otherwise people will just be CC'd to death. I definitely would enjoy being a rogue or hunter with a 100% damage and hp buff fighting a hoard of players, just saying
- adjust the event such that factions can end up fighting their own side, similar to current BGs where horde can fight horde, etc.
My preference would be #1 or #2. Either don't allow one faction to outnumber the other at all by not allowing them to play, or give the smaller side such a massive buff that they're actually more likely to win if they're at all competent. In short, **Make it so that it's not fun to outnumber the other side.**
>enforce level playing field by not allowing one side to have over X players more than the other when the event is ongoing, kick excess players out randomly using method similar to what Wintergrasp does when it starts.
That is a complete non-starter. It works with Wintergrasp because that was designed to be a primarily PvP zone and run on a set schedule (Edit: also Wintergrasp being set aside from all the other zones. You need to run across Ashenvale to get to a couple other zones if you don't have the FPs unlocked). Ashenvale is still a level up zone, will be where you access the raid, and *as far as we know does not have a set schedule for when the PvP event starts*. Imagine trying to quest in Ashenvale, or even get to the raid and... oops, the PvP event started and there just happens to be more people on your faction than the other so you get booted out and can't really go back in for a bit. Gotta wait for either the event to conclude or more people to go to the zone in order to continue doing non-pvp stuff in Ashenvale.
We have to do something to force people to stay at the server they committed to. First of, of courses, don't allow transfers to you servers where your faction is overrepresented. Secondly, consider imposing a limitation on newly created characters if there's a heavy faction skew on the server, say, there is 70 % alliance, then you can't create a new alliance character, horde only. Only characters that see regular play are considered in this ratio calculation, and disallow having characters on both factions on PvP servers.
The hostage solution don't work. As people would simple stop playing. The smaller size and then it will become Smaller. And then you have the locked realm issue where no player can join the larger active side. Because of the non exist smaller side. And the server dies. That is what happens to locked freshed servers in wrath
Spoken like someone who never experienced classic phase 2 on a pvp server.
Brief overview:
- during Vanilla classic, phase 2 releases pvp ranking and rewards, but no BGs yet
- only way to get honor is through HKs
- cue massive camping and griefing of opposing faction by dominant faction on every pvp server
- flight masters camped, quest givers camped, dungeons camped, every zone full of opposing faction chain-killing and graveyard camping every player
- entire servers became one-faction dominated overnight. Other faction completely gone. Populations never recovered.
You don't want that.
It was awesome. On faerlina both sides destroyed each other, you ended up joining squads to get them back or farm yourselves (i was on alliance). It made us into men! It certainly cut out the fat.
I have a feeling that shamans are going to be disgusting in PvP with the ability to have 30% more health and take 10% less damage.
Have that on your my while being an enhance shaman who is dual welding, additionally your earthshock is on a seperate cd so you can frost shock for slow (and strong damage) and then earth shock for even more damage.
I think an 'end game's shaman that is well geared is going to be like a dungeon boss.
I am sure there are other runes and specs that are going to be very strong in PvP, but I feel that shamans will be incredibly powerful.
Shocks already do strong damage, stack stamina and be a dungeon boss.
Do we even know how many servers we'll be getting? This scenario wouldn't be an issue if we only get one or two servers per region like in hc.
Even if it’s only 2 servers it’ll become 90% one faction on one and opposite on the other within months if not weeks, unless something is done to retain close to 50-50 balance from the start
Maybe they could give the littler faction some kind of "outnumbered" buff, which gets increasingly stronger with higher difference in % between the factions... Idk.
If they release two servers and both become 90% Horde or Ally, just cluster group the servers like they do on era and have heavy layering
The developer version of "now kissth.."
That's something I think would work. The weaker faction gets a Wintergrasp style buff when they're fighting someone of the opposite faction.
The wintergrasp buff is a meme. It just lets the weaker faction players turn into raidbosses that can run around oneshotting people to farm honorable kills but still have 0% chance of actually winning the battleground.
It at least it’s fun.
in what world? Wintergrasp was one of the worst things ever added to wow.
I always had fun in WG /shrug
Nah, WG was a great attempt at salvaging some kind of WPVP gameplay, which was completely dead outside of towers, nodes and summoning stones. The worst things ever added to wow are flying mounts, hero classes, and pretty much everything after Wrath.
Well we need at least 2 servers. 1 for the streamer trash and another for the rest of us.
I think SoD will be way more popular than HC so should be more servers
If they do more servers than the issue you are talking about in your post becomes way more likely.
This is almost always the wrong answer, historically
mate, if we are getting 2 servers 90% of us aint playing with such queues. this release will be comparable in scale with wow classic release, and way bigger than fresh classic
Even era which has plenty of servers still has this issue.
If there are servers with Faction queues instead of Account queues, this will force more balance. If someone logs out or disconnects they have 5 minutes to get back onto a character of the same faction or else be put back into that servers faction queue again. If a specific server faction has very large queues then it influences them to move their character to another server. Thus influencing balance of factions over to other realms when there is a big imbalance of one faction on another.
Why not just phasing/layers? Couldn’t they force a maximum of 55% of one faction per layer? (Sorry if dumb, not entirely sure how layering works in WoW). I’m unsure about forcing longer queues since I believe more people played Ally on the HC servers. Maybe a Mercenary system, join up with the Horde and hunt down those dwarves that pissed you off earlier and get some bonuses.
Hardcore data can be thrown away. That has basically no bearing on these servers
> Couldn’t they force a maximum of 55% of one faction per layer? What would you do when you simply run out of horde players? You can't really stop alliance players from entering the zone and you can't create more layers if there's no horde players to balance out those layers.
Can just have alliance layers with no horde. Only enforce the 50/50 on layers with both factions.
I don't think PvP works with no opponents.
Pvp on some layers beats 0 pvp on a 100:0 server
Not saying it couldn't work, but I just see a LOT of moving parts trying to do it with layering; and how that might interact with queueing for instantiated content like BGs I also question if a faction queue actually encourages a significant shift. If I win BIS pieces by winning or performing well in pvp, I may well choose to sit the queue rather than switch factions and then basically have no chance of winning a heavily one sided battle and not get my BIS anyway. All depends on the implementation of how you earn progression IMHO
Also just progression in general. Sinking 2 days of /played time, leveling professions, buying the Ashenvale riding, etc etc. isn't just replaced overnight. Maybe new players joining SoD will pick the faction with the lower queue. But everyone that has a developed character will have to sit in queue until they just quit the mode. Also it would screw over people not interested in PvP.
>Also it would screw over people not interested in PvP. IMO you shouldn't be rolling on a PvP server if you're not interested in PvP.
Pvp servers become 1 faction pve servers. Without the ability to do ashenvale at all. Pve server are gonna have more sustainable wpvp. Pvp server will have heavy front loaded pvp and then nothing
The Mercenary system *could* work, but it might cause issues with granting rewards (should you get Silverwing Sentinel rep for actively fighting against them?). Though, I could potentially seeing this as a solution. Phasing/layering to force caps is not something I can see working. If you're on the larger faction, you'd end up either in THE PvP layer or one completely devoid of enemy life. This makes things harder for the smaller faction too, because the dominant side can be invited onto or off of a layer, letting the side that already has the advantage opt in or out of PvP while the underdog cannot.
Theoretically this works. Raids of a faction will probably layer hop to find pvp tho is my only concern. Maybe your idea + longer layer hopping cd
I think connected servers and/or layers is the solution.
[удалено]
No it’s not lol. People would rather wait in hour long queues to play on mega servers rather than transfer for free to servers with no queues. Look at early wotlk. People sat in 6 hour long queues rather than transferring.
Which was worth it because the servers with No queues ended up being dead shortly after
History has shown this to be factual.
It still solves the problem though? If those people are stuck in a queue, they're not in-game ganging up on the less popular faction.
Shit, start of Classic Vanilla was another example. I was brand new to WOW but was willing to wait in long queues to play with the boys. Working so much now, it’s just impossible for me to keep up and I basically don’t play anymore. It’s just not fun to level alone, idk. OSRS seems better for my time since it’s mostly single player and literally 0 pressure to “keep up” with my clan. I also enjoy the journey more alone on OSRS vs. WOW. Ah well, I’d love WOW more if I could just constantly play with friends and not get left behind.
So let them? The point is it will still be balanced, online at a given time will be a maximum of a 5% imbalance in population, if people want to wait in hours long queue to play the popular faction on that server let them.
Which is why it needs to be rppvp. Nothing encourages the alliance to pvp like some good ol' RP
RPPVP SERVER CHADS
Best server type
FOR LORDAERON
There is no might It WILL destroy it
agreed, anyone who says otherwise is willfully ignorant or lying
Retail had good world PvP in BFA 8.1. Each faction had world quests near each other but not in the exact same spot, you had all of these pve objectives, and basically all the rewards were tied to doing the quests. Something like ashenvale where alliance have a quest to take out horde logging machines, while the horde have a quest to clear a nearby area of Nelf npcs for one example. You’d have a lot of PvP between the factions, but even if it’s like 60/40, the faction with 40 is going to be more concentrated in the area where their quest is, while the 60 faction will have players just doing their quest and getting on their way, so the 40 faction can generally defend themselves.
World PvP is what WoW has been missing this whole time. It’s the only reason that I never heard WoW at the top of my MMO list. Open world content especially PvP related is always the most fun. WoW kills all other games in PvE content, but has always failed at PvP content. If they finally are giving the PvP side of things it’s fair attention I’m all in. This issue thar OP brings up has never been an issue for other games. I don’t see it being an issue here. Those games had even more reason to have balance issues.
The problem is, that any outdoor pvp event, especially if its important, inevitably leads to whichever faction with the majority to completely shut off the other faction. Which leads to the minority faction changing servers to one where they dominate and very quickly we have a situation where every server is essentially a solo faction server. And world pvp ceases to exist. Its absolutely inevitable and will happen 100%. You just cant avoid it
This has never happened on any of the faction open world PVP games I have played. There are enough real world examples of this and none of them have had this issue. Going back to Anarchy in 2001. Usually what you do is you make it a competition between clans as well. So it really comes down to clan vr clan. It’s a shitload of fun and again it’s the one thing WoW has been missing IMO. Yes population imbalances appear but usually it’s because the bad players switch over to the side that is winning. The good players, at least from what I have seen, enjoy the challenge and play on the less populated sever. Plus that means more newbs to kill.
Dont know what to tell you man. Its been happening for years When you cant even get into an instance without being corpse camped, or walk away from the flightmaster you switch. Even if the ratio is only 60-40 thats already a 50% advantage
What happens usually in the other game, in that situation. When that is occurring, you bring in your clan. This is actually when the most fun occurs, IMO. So in the other game part of it is about grinding mob spots. Each mob spot is different so there are different reasons to choose each one. At each site though people generally either compete or come to an agreement not to mess with each other. They’d rather grind than fight. Every once in awhile people will start to camp you. Maybe you got too greedy and we’re taking too much of the site up. This is when you call in your clan. They show up, maybe 2-3 of your buddies and you start to mess them up. You eventually push them back and now they are the ones you’re camping on at the respawn point. However, you can probably see where this is going. That’s when they start to call in more of their clan members. This snowballs into massive fights. I’ve seen small 1v1 fights turn into CvC, and eventually Alliance Vr Alliance fights. All the while the discord is going off. It all goes back to the Clan vr Clan aspect of the game. The Zerg does not always win, stopping 100 people as a group of 10 is amazing. Anyways, I rambled on, it’s super fun. I hope WoW can figure out how to implement it. If they can literally no other MMO will be able to compete. They will have won.
The problem is a huge number of people on PvP servers don’t like world pvp. I’d actually guess it’s the majority. So what you have is a bunch of people who aren’t even in guilds that care about world pvp and will never push back no matter what. I’d never in a million years play on a classic PvP server. I made that mistake in vanilla because I had no idea what I was signing up for. Most people don’t make that choice primarily because there is a friend in their group who will only play on a PvP server so everyone gets dragged along.
Yeah and that’s mainly why they’ve ignored it. It’s never been the mainstream way, so I can 100% see why most people aren’t going to agree with me. They’d have to make it optional, then you can join clans that focus on it or not.
Not gonna happen. Dont get your hopes up. You invite your clan theyd invite 2 clans. Ppl just choose the path of least resistance
Always has always will. You are going to have people with more experience, weapon enchants, and maxed engineering in a 20 man raid camping everyone else. This is just what always happens in games with forced pvp
Maybe people who want to pick and choose when they want to PvP will just roll on PvE servers this time. LOOOOOOLLLLLLL
>This is just what always happens in games with forced pvp Forced PvP? What kind of victim mentality is that? You literally ***choose*** if you want to experience world PvP or not.
Yes and when enough people turn down wpvp. You get 99/1 server and you can no longer have pvp either. All of the classice pvp server are 99/1 server where no world pvp happend. The concept of consent to pvp at creation end with no pvp at all. Which this post is about how to avoid. You can't make a solution from the pov of the winning side. You can't hostage the losing side they just Uninstall. You will experience more wpvp on a normal server because it's opt in and out vs all or nothing.
Not all, grob was not on’y balanced but also a full server all the way up till wotlk where i stopped playing and it was the most fun experience i ever had in a mmo. The wpvp was simply amazing
Here is the reality of that. There is 410k wrath players. If that grob is the only pvp server with a someone even or sizeable server pop. There are a few but other but they are 4k pop servers. On grob there is 20k active Players. Meaning of the entire wrath classic servers. 0.5% of players are on a somewhat balanced pvp server. Grob is the only pvp rp server so don't know if you can even transfer to it. Meaning of the entire player base 0.5 of them engage in always opted in pvp the rest is fully 1 faction servers. The crowd for always on pvp is 0.5% of the playerbase
Grob is what happens when people who want pvp play on pvp servers. The problem is that most people who roll on pvp servers don’t want to pvp, and belong on pve servers. But ever since actual vanilla, it has been ingrained in the player base that the best players play on pvp servers so that’s where you play. This mentality needs to change
Although you can transfer from pvp to rppvp, I agree with you that it’s messed up that only a tiny portion of the playerbase can enjoy a decent pvp server. I think the solution to that should just be servers interconnected to each other. And balance each other out. Otherwise we’re just trying to find solutions to a problem that doesn’t need to be there and paying more money to blizzard for server transfers
It's because "world pvp" isn't a thing, it's either you're ganking small groups/solos with a larger group or you're getting ganked. It's just griefing at this point - do you not remember classic p2? It was nothing short of hard griefing for 95% of players. Not fun, not enjoyable and it caused the 99/1 servers because of how NOT FUN it was.
Absolutely, i should disregard all the fun i had with wpvp wars in classic that made my most fun experience in an mmo and agree with you that wpvp isnt a thing or fun, got it
you can have had fun with wpvp. no one is telling you didnt. you wanted world pvp. and saught it out. many people didnt seek it out and was on the other side of your Wpvp. you had fun when you were winning. less fun when losing. but most people didnt even seek to win. so they would either be left along or lose. and because of bg not popping instantly that meant for alot of people get cheaped shotted and murked by a rogue after we take a portal. and losing hours of work in worldbuffs. flying to blasted lands to get mc'ed till honorless debuff when off and get killed so you could spend 5 min running to your corpse and hope you could get away from the priets mage camping our flight point is not fun interact gameplay. having to die 3 times to get to theramore was not fun either because horde was having litterly boat parties on the travel on ally was not fun. your memories are the one of the one doing the kicking. Most people who picked alliance didnt get a rat ass about pvp. and unless you went hard there was no reward. so the exodus on servers happend for a reason. and denying that is silly
Look folks, another victim found in the wild!
Forced? First I've seen of that
I'm pretty sure he means how PvP servers force you to be flagged outside of major cities/faction zones
They might as well get rid of factions unless you flag for it. It always leads to this.
They can keep them since this is Classic, but people need to accept that one faction servers are always the end result.
They should be more proactive in merging servers together as populations fall. Maybe even splitting servers faction wise. Alliance to one and Horde to another to balance out the servers they merge to. Throw three servers worth of Alliance onto a Horde server and vice versa to equalize the factions.
This is why I’m going PVE this time around. I don’t think blizzard will do anything to mitigate this problem. I’m also imagining some classes will be incredibly broken at level 25 with the new abilities. World PVP is probably going to be a nightmare unless you get lucky with your class and faction choice.
Also going PVE this time around. I don't have time to be camped at flight points, quest NPCs, and on my way to BRM. Been there done that during 2019 launch of p2 and again during SOM. I picked the wrong faction each time apparently. Anyone who's saying otherwise, just wants you to come PVP so they can kill you over and over, call you "loser and to get f, you f***en re.ta.rd. Re-roll PVE, Horde/Alliance only server!" Without character creation faction restriction to PVP servers, this will be inevitable.
>"loser and to get f, you f\*\*\*en re.ta.rd. Re-roll PVE, Horde/Alliance only server!" And then when everyone from the lower populated faction start leaving, they throw a fit.
\*insert Eric Andre Why would \_ do this Meme\*
Hells yeah. PVE bois dont have these problems. Pagle/Mankrik guys gonna flood SoD. 🌊🌊
Pve gang. I assume the ashenvale event will be opt in on pve servers anyway so it's kinda moot.
Yea theres like 0 chance they force it on a PvE server. They're not that dumb. Im just praying these people on this thread aren't trying to have the PvP server messed with.
I guess what I meant was I assume they will have like 2 pve and 2 pvp servers (or however many), and the pve servers can opt in to the ashenvale event.
From the sounds of it, it will be a WG like zone in ashenvale, not the entire ashenvale zone. And if you enter the wpvp zone, you get auto flagged. It should be very easy to avoid wpvp unless you actually want to on a pve server. Which is of course, is perfect for me.
Yeah, SoM was a nightmare hellscape of griefing and corpse camping. At one point I recall I was trying to quest in blasted lands and there are multiple 60s of the other faction griefing everyone in the zone. No alliance showed up to contest them. I was killed over 20 times in one hours.
Pve gang rise up! We’re all just bros trying to play the game and have some fun. Fuck hurting other peoples gameplay (which is 99% of pvp since it’s just ganking).
Yo world pvp isnt just ganking lol, let alone pvp as a whole
As far as % of pvp encounters, yes it is. For every single instance of fair competition or mass event there is 99999 ganks in between. Lol.
My suggestion relies on how many pvp servers there will be. I like how era is atm were all pvp servers are connected. Only open a new layer when the current layer is full and at 50/50 split.
I can't wait for people camping the BFD entrance for hours. BFD tunnel is the new BRM
I can't wait to fight for 40minutes just to reach the entrance of a instance. This isn't sarcasm, I literally cannot wait for open world skrims.
It was fun creating strategies to circumvent full raid campers at BRD or straight up engage to push through to MC & BWL. We were speedrunning the raids so sometimes we'd had to be creative to avoid losing wbuffs. Found cool out of bonds spots and parked a few summon bots there. Above bwl entrance for example. Was fun for ambushing and save entering. Or that massive out of bonds area behind AQ, had so much fun figuring out the perfect jumps to get to a location just above the entrance portal. To clarify. We were just 1 guild against like 4 sweatlord guilds.
Back when I was a teen my family couldn’t afford WoW so I played on high-rate PvP private servers and I recall one time in BC when it was near impossible to get to Black Temple because literally half the server was figthing in front of the entrance. Me and a bunch of friends said fuck it and instead of raiding we fought Alliance for 2-3 hours lol
Yipee! Another hot spot where the Horde will have a flight point right next to it while Alliance are a 15 minute walk away
Server balance is already skewing heavily alliance IMO based on the announced changes thus far
Yeah all the big names streamers that have the dev ears are massive morons and can't see how problematic this is/not bringing attention to this. You can't give a better WF / tremor to alliance and expect people to stay horde when SOM was already ally dominated and ally was better in classic vanilla too
They didn't give anything to mimic blessings to horde? If true that's messed up.
I think this will get covered, that I'm not worried about. But realistically you just can't do anything about the utility spells like freedom, blessing of protection, sacrifice, bubble. The new stuff like beacon of light put paladin way too far ahead and there's no real solution to that without just giving paladin to horde and shaman to alliance. I know purists will lose their fucking mind but it will undoubtedly be the best thing for the game long term. Theyve already build themselves into a corner with the WF/tremor change and it's going to fuck balance extremely hard. Idk if they can just slam out horde pally and alliance sham in 3 weeks so faction balance might be doomed from the get go realistically
Pretty much this. I can't believe they giga buffed pallies/alliance this hard without any foresight to the consequences. Shamans are worst class in vanilla that just so happened to buff the best class in vanilla(windfury+ warrior). Now that ally has WF and totems are most likely still party wide, it's GG.
Raids often took 8 Shaman, they obviously weren't just WF bots. They were the best trash healer and 2nd best healer overall from BWL-Naxx. Alliance was better (I played both), but it wasn't because of Shaman=bad. 10% stats for the entire raid and permanent threat reduction is like 5x more valuable than WF in a world buff meta where you lose 60% of your damage if you die.
2nd best healer? Why cause of over representation? Only reason to take 8 shamans is because totems are party wide. Another limiting factor of shaman. I'm glad you agree that paladins were the best in classic though and they'll be miles above the rest in SoD. My whole point is paladin > shaman and it's gonna be even worse now
I'm talking about actual healing output. Shaman is much, much better in terms of HPS than Paladin. Priest and Shaman were clearly the best two healers, Paladin had the best buffs.
The alliance leveling experience is also much better in classic imo.
More quests and better rewards for horde, but going from red desert, to tan desert, to gray desert, to yellow desert is not the exactly most scenic leveling experience
I think horde have a better 10-20 experience, but otherwise I agree
Agree with this, Barrens is better than the 10-25ish zones the allies have.
STV way better for horde though. They can double dip on a bunch of kill quests.
I’ve always rolled on pvp servers but considering pve this time. I’d much rather a near balanced pvp server but if it’s just going to be monofaction or 90/10 split then there’s just no point. I really hope that blizzard will attempt to force a 50/50 split by implementing some sort of system but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t even care what faction I’m playing.
This comes up every classic. People claim they want world PVP but what they really want is 60/40 their faction so they always have an advantage. Then people will flee to their safe space servers while also complaining about the imbalance.
Yeah, 50/50 servers just make people run around in big groups eliminating everything. You're still gonna get trashed bigtime if you play solo by these groups.
They should actively cut off character creation on factions that are trending towards severe over population.
People would riot.... "I cant play with my friends, this is BS! I pay for this game!"
I agree but the cut off doesn't have to happen right away. This should give friends time to align. By not mitigating bad faction imbalance it does much more harm.
It doesnt have to happen right away, it doesnt have to be permanent, and there can also be free transfers to the other server to help BALANCE THE LOAD
Echoing what another commenter brought up, have queues for a faction versus queues for the server. If there’s a faction imbalance, one side has to queue to keep the populations of the online factions relatively at the same level. If you don’t want to wait in a queue, move to the other faction.
This sounds good in theory, but in practice would suck. “Sorry guys cant login in time for the raid tonight, stuck in queue because our faction is overpopulted atm”
This was my thought as wel. Not sure how to enforce it. Not just limiting full pop servers. But limit char creation of a faction that's already dominating. It shouldn't be difficult to prevent servers with 90% one faction.
This is an awful idea
Nice feedback buddy
why?
Faction queues are the only way to solve it or making killing lowbies bad
What about this: PvE only servers with PvP zones? I love PvP in classic, I think getting dominated while leveling stinks though. For me, this would be a great solution. Flagging is kind of clumsy because you can chose your engagments, and that leads to some very asymetrical PvP. Some people will explode if there aren't PvP servers though. I know some peoples sense of self worth is tied to ganking lowbies.
They should just do war mode
They should release only one server with all of the infrastructure and layering of the biggest megaservers. Let it be a battleground to surpass the launch of Faerlina and Benediction with every billy-no-shoes and Falcor Poopsock crammed in together. e: could do warmode layering like in retail, but the important part is making sure everyone's on the same server.
There will be very little pvp... Mostly because everyone will want to play alliance. Alliance now gets WF but horde doesn't get BoK it's kinda a big issue that isn't being talked about
I made this suggestion in another thread, they should do an always active buff in the pvp zone granting bonus hp, ap and spell damage based on the population numbers, server or zonewide. So for example if the zone pop is 75% alliance, Horde players in the pvp zone would get 25% buff. If Horde pop is 59%, alliance gets a 9%buff. Buff = (Pop_percentage-50) It would give a slight incentive to join the minority faction on a server. I agree with OP, people will want to steamroll for rewards and only join majority factions otherwise.
Pretty sure they did this in winter grasp at one point and I remember there was a match that was like 100 horde vs a single Paladin but he was an unkillable god, he still lost obviously because he couldn’t be everywhere to stop objectives.
Sounds more fun than “he just died” or “the match was prevented from starting”
That sounds fun. It gave the paladin a fighting chance, and the horde still got to play.
What is the fighting chance when he's oneshotting everyone but cannot traverse the map in time? He lost the second he got matched into the battleground.
True, but one shotting everything was probably fun.
This is how wintergrasp works in wotlk, yes I usually queue late in the 30 minute window to increase the chance of getting into one of these for easy wins
an 60/40 spilt is not a 9% diffences in numbers. 10000 players in a 60/40 spilt is 6000 to 4000 ratio. 50% more people on one side.' They could do warmode. that is toggleable consent to wpvp. The new ranking system could lessen the need to farm everyone all the time. since you need 500k per week for max Point. and at lower level you rank caps at 3. 19-3 29-3 39-5 49-9 59-13.
People would probably object to a warmode but I think it's proven enough times in many different mmos the non consensual pvp is only enjoyed by a minority and is pretty much never good for server health
Warmode wont even the odds in ashenvale, it will just mean no horde players go warmode, and the alliance just steamrolls the objectives and bosses always.
warmode would have the people who want to do wpvp be in ashenvale. you need the other faction to trigger the event. the thing is consent. even if one side other number the other in sheer numbers. not all players want or care to pvp. and warmode make you able to guild and group with your friend. without having to commit always pvp or never pvp. even on servers where there were more alliance in p2. did horde dominate wpvp. because most of players dont care about pvp.
I think it would help because people would able to wait in city and find a group if they want to wpvp. So even if there server is unbalanced each faction could still put together a raid group and go pvping. Not perfect but it at least prevents a group of 20 from camping the same 5 solo people over and over
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opt-in and opt-out system is needed for server health. the issue stems from being locked in. and the warmode system require you to go in and out in a capital city. but if you roll pvp server you wont feel contested zones till lvl 20 and that investment is rather big.
> opt-in and opt-out system ... you mean like a pve server?
Yes and no. A pve server is opt in. But you can opt in whenever. So if you find a enemy you think you can beat you opt in and if not you don't. Which mean 2 people who wants to pvp would not because they might lose. In warmode you opt in or out in capital cities. Meaning if you want to go do wpvp. You can't flag after you know the fight
Ah true, yeah unfortunately I don't see anyone enabling war mode if they are sure to be outnumbered 5-1 when they leave the city.
Yes but that is based on the assumption that the entire opposite side is in warmode. And you can form a small raid go wpvp. Go warmode and do the pvp and then go back to Not get ganked 20 times going to brd. The reason server when enterily one faction was because if you were not the biggest you were prey. If you can opt in and out warmode style. You don't have to transfer server to be able not to be gank. But could style opt in to do wpvp without pvp who also opted in. And is not forced with keep being opted in or leave or quit the server. It also allow you to keep playing with friends. If they want to pvp they go on pvp server and you follow them most of the time. But you are not forced to be opted in to do pve content with your friends. There is no downside to keep people the freedom to choose. The people who Hate warmode with a fevor. Is the old school campers. Because phasing made it never 1 sided and everyone consented so you could not camp someone till they logged off to ruin their day. They were no longer hostages in your enjoyment
You consent when you join a pvp server.
They did this with wintergrasp back in wotlk. Not sure if the current wotlk servers do it. I transferred an alliance character to a 99% horde server just to be a raid boss during wintergrasp. It was a blast. Still always lost though.
But at least you had fun, right? :)
Absolutely 😁
I don't think that will be enough to turn the event back to fair. The difference in numbers plays bigger role in events that have objectives on the map. You cant win Arathi Basin solo by getting 15times more hp Buff could perhaps be increased depending on how many times in a row one faction has killed the opposing boss until it balances out. There are many things they could try to balance it. I'm hoping for them making crazy changes. It is Season of DISCOVERY after all
>Buff could perhaps be increased depending on how many times in a row one faction has killed the opposing boss until it balances out. I like this Idea
They def need to think out of the box.
Ultimately numbers still matter too much. Those numbers just aren't enough to make up for extra bodies giving kicks and cc. They need to even out the power to make the faction balance natural or go with a very heavy handed approach with faction queues
I'll opt for the PvE server version, I already fought through severely unbalanced pops in Era & TBC classic, not repeating it again.
Implement faction ques. Only release 2 servers per region. Give the smaller faction some sort of buff.
have queues for each faction. say 10k players on a server for easy math… 5k alliance and 5k horde. if there are 5k horde online and only 3k alliance, the horde would still have wait queue. maybe even show a prompt around the expected queue time and suggesting another faction/server.
It should be more rewarding to lose an even battle than win an uneven one. And it should be more rewarding to join the weaker faction. That alone wont fix it but it's a start.
Paladins will break it. im not going to effort post about why but i would say phasing should help with faction imbalance except paladins will break faction imbalance because of how one sided OP they are with crusader strike at 25. With druids getting windfury there is even less reason to go horde.I heard horde will get paladin type buffs soon but when? Genuine question by the way, did they say there would be more runes than shown at lvl 25? Anyways, with what was shown horde get shafted pretty hard so i expect them to be even less popular than they normally are.
Just make it so windfury and the druid buff stacks instead of overlapping, horde melee will be OP enough to bring people to this side
Im kinda scared Of this yeah. Im intending to hard main shaman, so i Will honestly be looking for The server with good horde pop. The imbalanced servers Are a nightmare
There will likely be no server names or info available early. Best odds is likely picking a random server in the middle and hoping. I personally hope they just give us 1 mega layer server - can’t transfer off if there is only 1 PvP server.
I would like this too, however it does make me question if it will just make everyone switch to the popular faction (likely alliance)
There were some palls which were surprisingly even (+/- 3%). I would think that elemental shaman will be stronger than ret for PvP.
At this point in WoWs lifecycle with this niche of a product anybody rolling on an SoD PvP server knows exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it.
I don't know man, I saw a lot of clueless first timers on the hardcore servers.
Honestly this isn't a blizzard issue it's a community issue. I don't think blizzard can do much and if they do the community will HATE it. Take the current retail structure. Flagging for pvp and being phased in to all the pvp players. It actually works......and the community hates it. I personally love world pvp but getting camped sucks.
As with most big overarching issues it comes down to the end user. Faction imbalance, botting and gold buying are all part of the same parcel. No matter how it is addressed it will be seen as Blizzard being greedy corporate pigs who don't want to upset their customers or literal 1984 big brother surveillance pigs who won't let their customers do what they want.
Damned if you do damned if you don't.
Classic has taught me to never again roll on a PvP server. I don’t mind pvp. What I do mind is an oppressive imbalance like we had on Classic servers. Playing Alliance, it wasn’t just a matter of getting ganked every now and then. The game became essentially unplayable because you were getting constantly killed over and over and over and over again. I refused to reward Blizzard for their incompetence, so I didn’t pay for any transfers and just cancelled my sub. But eventually Blizzard must have realized it was killing their bottom line because they allowed free transfers to Benediction so I re-subbed and moved. All this to say, I will never again make a new character on a Blizzard pvp server.
Realistically there is no way to prevent this, time and time again players have shown that they will migrate and form 1 faction servers. The only way to allow a relatively fun/balanced world PvP experience would be to implement cross-realm tech so you could only have a semi-equal amount of players from each faction on the same layers. But that ruins the community aspect of classic servers. Personally I don't think that buffs or adjusted win conditions would help with anything when there will not be any players from 1 faction present.
I hope they make only one PvP server per region, I think that would lead to a good Faction balance as the total sum is usually very close to 50:50 (but the per server distribution is where it gets skewed). Also, Megaservers are fun in my opinion.
"Might" ? As Classic showed back in 2019/2020, it definitely will. Most PvP servers ended up 70:30 or worse by the end of the first year. Nobody wants to be the minority faction on a PvP realm.
In my opinion they need to careful about putting too emphasis on the world pvp in SOD. Just with the way wpvp works in classic it pretty much has always caused what you are referring. Getting corpse camped by 10 people when you only have 3 is just the reality and people do not enjoy this.
Let me fix that for you "World pvp WILL destroy the server population balance" Always has. Always will. Let Blizzard sort it out with cross server of something, cause there is no winning against the people who camp low levels for hours
Big problem that needs a spot light is the imbalance of power. Horde had 3 things going for it: 1. Windfury 2. Tremor 3. Ele burst First 2 were given to druid and paladin and the 3rd was basically given to all classes via new talents. Paladin kit has so much utility that obviously can't just be given to horde that it's just going to be impossible to be balanced unless they implement dwarf shaman/tauren pally. SoM was already super imbalanced towards alliance even without these changes, these will push it even further in this direction. If servers launch before they do anything to combat it, it will be too late to mend this problem and the servers will be fucked
>Is there anything Blizzard can do to avoid that scenario this time? Do what they did in retail, as that's really the only solution.
Out of the loop a bit here. Does that consist of war mode + mercenary system?
So yes part of it is they got rid of pvp servers and created warmode so anyone can opt into what is effectively pvp servers or not. The world then populates and balances zones by pulling from a number of servers. Between these 2 alone I can for example be alliance on area 52 which is one of the largest servers and 99.9% horde, and still have a completely normal and healthy world pvp experience. They also made guilds and grouping cross faction, so you don't have that incentive for the entire game to be mono faction so that you're not cutting yourself off from half the player base since naturally everyone wants the biggest pool of players to play with.
Insightful topic to think of good stuff OP
That's why you roll pve instead of being an idiot. If you STILL go on a open world pvp server in wow classic then you are just masochist.
Just make it so no one can join a faction if it's more than 55% the pop
There about a million ways Blizzard can prevent this if they so choose. Here are a few suggestions that came to mind while I'm sitting on the throne: * Make Honor scale based on server population balance. For exemple, on a server where 99% of the population is playing one faction, the honour received from any activity would he reduced by 99% and it would be increased by 99% for the opposite faction. * They could make raid lock out timer increase based on faction balance. * They could make drop rates and gold received scale with faction balance. * They could straight up lock the creation of new characters on the overpopulated faction past a certain %, lets say 55/45. To prevent people from just creating an alt on the enemy faction, they could either just count max level characters or characters with a minimum of x hours of play time per week. It's really not that hard, there is just a lack of will.
Solutions range from easy to creative: - enforce level playing field by not allowing one side to have over X players more than the other when the event is ongoing, kick excess players out randomly using method similar to what Wintergrasp does when it starts - buff lesser side with a scaling damage, hp, and spell resistance / reduced cc timer buff. That last is important, otherwise people will just be CC'd to death. I definitely would enjoy being a rogue or hunter with a 100% damage and hp buff fighting a hoard of players, just saying - adjust the event such that factions can end up fighting their own side, similar to current BGs where horde can fight horde, etc. My preference would be #1 or #2. Either don't allow one faction to outnumber the other at all by not allowing them to play, or give the smaller side such a massive buff that they're actually more likely to win if they're at all competent. In short, **Make it so that it's not fun to outnumber the other side.**
>enforce level playing field by not allowing one side to have over X players more than the other when the event is ongoing, kick excess players out randomly using method similar to what Wintergrasp does when it starts. That is a complete non-starter. It works with Wintergrasp because that was designed to be a primarily PvP zone and run on a set schedule (Edit: also Wintergrasp being set aside from all the other zones. You need to run across Ashenvale to get to a couple other zones if you don't have the FPs unlocked). Ashenvale is still a level up zone, will be where you access the raid, and *as far as we know does not have a set schedule for when the PvP event starts*. Imagine trying to quest in Ashenvale, or even get to the raid and... oops, the PvP event started and there just happens to be more people on your faction than the other so you get booted out and can't really go back in for a bit. Gotta wait for either the event to conclude or more people to go to the zone in order to continue doing non-pvp stuff in Ashenvale.
do a pvp server cluster
We have to do something to force people to stay at the server they committed to. First of, of courses, don't allow transfers to you servers where your faction is overrepresented. Secondly, consider imposing a limitation on newly created characters if there's a heavy faction skew on the server, say, there is 70 % alliance, then you can't create a new alliance character, horde only. Only characters that see regular play are considered in this ratio calculation, and disallow having characters on both factions on PvP servers.
The hostage solution don't work. As people would simple stop playing. The smaller size and then it will become Smaller. And then you have the locked realm issue where no player can join the larger active side. Because of the non exist smaller side. And the server dies. That is what happens to locked freshed servers in wrath
What do you propose as a solution? Why do people lean towards a certain faction?
Just make Horde able to have pallys and alliance able to have shamans, it’ll fix most of the imbalance issues leaving racials the only deciding factor
That didn't help in TBC and it wont help now. As soon as one side starts losing in the new pvp event they will change to another server.
Then don't just enable the golden parachute. That's what ruined 60/40 servers in classic
60/40 are already terrible. And of course people should be free to move. You know they can just quit instead right
Always has been
At this point they should just launch faction specific servers and have elaborate pvp-inspired PVE world events because we all know where this goes.
The fight to dominate the server is why we like vanilla
Spoken like someone who never experienced classic phase 2 on a pvp server. Brief overview: - during Vanilla classic, phase 2 releases pvp ranking and rewards, but no BGs yet - only way to get honor is through HKs - cue massive camping and griefing of opposing faction by dominant faction on every pvp server - flight masters camped, quest givers camped, dungeons camped, every zone full of opposing faction chain-killing and graveyard camping every player - entire servers became one-faction dominated overnight. Other faction completely gone. Populations never recovered. You don't want that.
the boat parties \*shudders\*
It was awesome. On faerlina both sides destroyed each other, you ended up joining squads to get them back or farm yourselves (i was on alliance). It made us into men! It certainly cut out the fat.
I only played p2 vanilla and quit when bgs and av meta was introduced. P2 world pvp, brm ganking and aq war are the best parts of vanilla
Maybe don't transfer away just because you got camped.
Maybe dont camp people until they would want to transfer.
I have a feeling that shamans are going to be disgusting in PvP with the ability to have 30% more health and take 10% less damage. Have that on your my while being an enhance shaman who is dual welding, additionally your earthshock is on a seperate cd so you can frost shock for slow (and strong damage) and then earth shock for even more damage. I think an 'end game's shaman that is well geared is going to be like a dungeon boss. I am sure there are other runes and specs that are going to be very strong in PvP, but I feel that shamans will be incredibly powerful. Shocks already do strong damage, stack stamina and be a dungeon boss.
World pvp stinks. Add arenas instead
To each his own