Two points here:
1) I was playing PS back around Q4 2003/Q1 2004, at that time you could NOT have characters of more then one faction on the same server to discourage switching to the winning team. Some people just moved to their characters on other servers hoping to find it a little more slanted in thier favour.

2) You can't have toons in both factions on PvP servers, but you can on PvE servers.

This could have merit if you balanced the pro's and con's more. ie 5% buff to damage to enemy PC's for all 4 towers.

Here is where it breaks down though. Blizzard applies the same rules and mechanics to PvE and PvP servers. So on a PvE server you would want all 4 towers, but on a PvP server you could intentionally not cap them to keep your player killing buff.

I can't see Blizzard being able to hang on to the hardcore PvPers. The company likes to entwine PvP and PvE too much for that crowd and spends a lot of development resources on content that a hardcore PvPer has no interest in. Blizzard would have to fundamently change how they handle the different rules for PvE and PvP servers.

It needs to be asymmetric; a 5% damage buff vs. PCs isn't enough to tip the balance back, but a 40% buff to PvE damage is way too much as a reward.

As to intentionally not capping - this isn't a purely PvP game we play, even on PvP servers. If the reward is inadequate to convince people to take it, then it's inadequate to promote PvP in the first place, isn't it?

It's called an analogy. Let me begin with it again, "Just because there are 20 levels of character advancement in GW does not mean it's actual character advancement in the game design paradigm because those levels are, essentially, a tutorial, so all players are the same powerlevel as other players. You can swap spell loadouts/"classes" at the drop of a hat, essentially, so it is, essentially, Planetside without the time / achievement requirement for swapping loadouts / "unlocking" loadouts. No loadout is, strictly speaking, more powerful than any other loadout."

Is that clear?

Details are important. Character advancement in WoW from 1 to 60, while not the grind/differential that it is in EQ, is fairly significant. Increased gearlevels can correlate to increase character levels. My AQ40 geared rogue does, in fact, hit harder than most people's rogues. THAT is character advancement. While I may be a terrible rogue, player skill aside (I hear I'm a terrible rogue), my rogue will win the vast majority of my rogue versus $someguy's rogue matchups. Specficially because I hit harder, take less damage, take it less often, and that's due entirely to the mechanics of my character advancement, not my personal playing.

THAT is the definition of character advancement. You've been arguing all this time over something for which you've had no cogent working definition?

Yes, in the sense of "Having any character advancement", Planetside has none. OK, so now we're agreed.

Really? Because we've covered like 5 major MMO games who had $$bank$$ behind them who failed to achieve it, and you're not forthcoming in a valid counterexample.

The more in aggregate is at stake, sure. But the more personally at stake? No way. "It's not my fault, why didn't the healers keep me alive? IT's not our, healers, fault, why didn't you duck out? IT's not anyone's fault because the tanks didn't do their job!" It's a 40 person game large of point the finger.

Conversely, when you are the only person on your team, you can either take the blame, or accuse the other dude of hax. Pretty large personal responsibility.

Which is my point, yes, thank you.

So now you have a gun of +1 to headshots because you control Zeta 3 and Zeta 5, which means that you're going to be +1 better at keeping Zeta 3 and 5 (which, presumably, you'll want for the gun of +2 to headshots). The rich will get richer...

So why wouldn't we just hold 5 relics? Is there bonus DKP for the victory condition? What's to stop me from going on a rampage now with my +10 to headshots?

Oh, sweet. If I'm getting beat, I only have to wait a year before the game becomes fun. You didn't contradict the rich-get-richer, you said it happens until the rich retire. Woooooo great.

My friend informs me that currently, there's a 6 hour cooldown from switching to your character on any faction, which I sortof tried to imply earlier, or thought I did.

As for the disproportionate buff:

A) On most servers where Alliance outnumber Horde 4:1, how asymmetric does that buff have to be to be useful, and is that reasonable? Boomheadshots, people, boomheadshots.

B) It seems to me to be exactly the sort of thing that'll become a case of my bike comes in second, but I think EPL being re-designed this late in the game is a primary problem.

could you force population balance somehow? I had a few ideas.

1) character creation: require that alliance and horde have an equal number of players (maybe allow a difference os 3-5% or something)
-- the problem is that is 90 people sign up for alliance and then quit, the population doesnt have away to balance this. Same if everyone that plays horde is 14 and plays when they get home from school till 10. and alliance are are working age and log on around 5 and play till 1 or 2... or whatever.

2) Queues, only allow equalish number of max level characters to be involved in pvp at a time
--this doesnt work if both sides dont have permaqueus, so they are never uneven.. also queues are gay(gay in the interwub vernacular naturally)

3) Instance'd pvp, like battlegrounds in wow, but less buggy in the join features(I havent seen an even match in AB in months) as well as having the result provide some sort of buff, or benefit for the winning side.


thats all i got, other ideas?

When fighting population or skill imbalances, it's better to nudge your playerbase rather than rule with militaristic standards. Players should not rely on the game, nor should they be given the illusion of choice.

It tends to fail (see Planetside, Shattered Galaxy both changing rulesets to allow players to flip faction). I do like how SG "nudged" players towards the underpopulated side - sort of like the Recommended Servers now in WoW, although with a factional bias as well. "We recommend the Horde side for you!" [Back] taking you to a faction select screen sort of deal.

Level 60 when you're wandering around EPL is probably not ever going to make a convincing reroll argument for your average player, let alone us types.

Give the "ugly" side a "pretty" race ?

>_>

I think factions are, ultimately, a mistake. An attractive mistake, to be sure. But when it comes time to actually play - wouldn't everything be better achieved through a "global" factional system? Alliance or Horde, we can go to Orgrimmar and Naxxramas, but if we step into zones specifically set aside for aggression (STV comes to mind) where whichever side of the fence we fall on flags us hostile for each other? - Keeping in mind it makes a bit more sense designed from scratch (that is, ZG is problematic - perhaps arena-in-reverse style anti-PVP staging areas) then retrofitted. And if things are unfair, people who enjoy challenges can change sides (ever hear of something like that in EVE?) without forgoing existing character progression - they just flip reputations.

So we can have our world PVP in world PVP zones, and who cares that everyone rolled the pretty races.

Edit:

And just to elaborate, I was thinking about this because I have made some casual and some hardcore friends who are on both sides of the factional fence, on various servers. I accept the limitation of servers, it's a technical limit, but we couldn't even all transfer to the same server and play together if we wanted to because we're both Horde and Alliance. I know, we could all reroll, but that's not as easy a choice as throwing $25 at the problem - I know, tBC provides a wonderful opportunity to start over, eccet, but that's really not addressing the issue: WoW is not designed for you to play with your friends.

Erm, I disagree.

WoW is not designed to let you play with ALL of your friends, nor designed for you to fill out a group (raid or not) with nothing but real life friends. I play with friends quite often, however, it is ridiculous for me to fill out a raid with people that are friends, or even friends friends, and unless I work at Microsoft, I also do not expect co-workers to fill out my raid. To say it's not designed to play with your friends is merely anecdotal. Most of my friends play on a grand total of 3 servers, and it's actually my fault I do not play where the majority of my friends do (in fact, I used to play with nothing but friends).

If you generally cared about playing with your friends, you would be, my general consensus is you would simply prefer not to than going through leveling another character is all.

It was intended for you to play with friends if you wanted to, so I guess I'm actually not disagreeing with your point.

A good motivator for people to balance population would be increased reputation gain and also increased honor. It would not have to be great even something like close to 10% like Humans have on rep would be a nice motivator. Honor bonuses would work alot better now since you wont be competing against your own side, but will use it to buy things. This will tidy up the gear imbalance. The only thing worse than population imbalance is when gear imbalance follows because, for instance, everybody begins to think its easier to PVE progress on Alliance and rolls or switches over there.

Because generally, the only thing that is going to trump people wanting to join the side already winning is personal greed. If they are rolling up a new character and thinking about how to get Uber the fastest such a bonus might cause them to roll horde. I.e. They think, "I can get that HWL Sword, Exalted mount reward, whatever, two weeks faster If I roll Horde." They will care less that they are joining a side that loses most of the outside PVP scenarios, as long as indivdually, their character has a chance to own his opponents on 1v1 matchups. Get enough people thinking this way and the tide will slowly balance. Then you drop the bonuses.

I dont think NPC's are ever the answer in a game where you want dynamic world PVP. You want corrective measures that encourage players to fix the imbalance not AI. Because as the end of the day, its simply not as fun to fight bots. Nor to have them as teammates. Certainly not when your looking for PVP, its kinda hard when the 'player' part is missing. Not only that but it continues to discourage new players from rolling that side. Not because they lose all the time (the NPC's help with that) but because there are not as many real live players on that side to interact with. That makes finding Guilds, either for PVE or PVP harder. The community is just worse on the low population side. Worse economy, harder to find small balanced groups for instances, etc. Then in a game like WoW you have places where the NPC's dont go that would never fix the imbalance. Random outside world battles, general chance to be ganked by unfair numbers, or straight wrecking the BG balance and creating hugely long Quere's because one side has a line of 5000 people for AV and the other side has 1000.

I think the closest WoW came to using NPC's for balance was in Tauren Mill/Southshore where attacking civilians would spawn 30 guards or something ridiculous. I dont think nobody really liked it and it only served to further kill PVP in the area. Then in Alterac Valley the NPC's were far too easily manipulated back when they were powerful. They either waffle stomped you when you chased the opponent into them, or they were easily bugged out for example the summoned bosses and the Lieutenants.

This is true it would be hard to rely on new players alone. But remember many players have left Horde and may still have characters there, in fact quite high level good geared ones. And the bonuses to rep and honor would not affect just level 1 characters, but every single person currently in the PVP system, going forward into BC. And the reputation gains would affect every single player in the PVE side of the game because for the fact that almost every new large 40 man (soon to be 25) has some type of rep faction usually associated with it, that is tied to admittance, quests, or rewards. I think its a fair bonus to give them since the lower population side has far less players to recruit from, and often smaller sized guilds that cannot min/max as much on class combinations for raiding.

There might be other types of incentives that could be granted other than the ones I mentioned, but I do think imbalance has to be handled with incentives of some type. Merely, guiding a player to the Horde start screen, for instance, isnt enough and doesnt work. I also mentioned in the earlier post how there are many problems with NPC solutions and that obviously does not affect the PVE side of the game.

On the contrary, I now have 60's on other servers. But that's exactly where my observation is coming from: That's an insane time sink just to play with some friends. I know it's not tough @#$@ to anyone here, but I'd like to bring my AQ40 epics from one group of friends to another. I don't want to do the WSG/AB grind times number of friend groups. And those friends cannot play with other friends of mine, who don't have the time to level up characters on each other server, on both factions (and then there's trying to play with my cousin, who got an account swap from Horde/Alliance on a PVP server, wasting all my time/effort there...)

But they're already established, level 60, and leveling a new character and tooling around isn't very exciting. Us running Strath together would be cool, them powering me through Wailing Caverns is not.

Now, from the start of things, sure, me and all my pals can agree to [re]start on the same server/faction. That's actually how I chose a starting server - a friend of a friend was playing on the server, so we all went to join him.

The problem was, then, A ) it turns out other people also have friends of friends, and B ) I made friends over the last two years.

And you didn't really redress my issue that WoW isn't designed to be about playing with friends. You just stated with some luck, and some planning (and not mentioning the idea of making new friends along the way who may already be established in WoW / sacrificing the idea of character advancement which is sort of the main draw of WoW) that it isn't a problem.

Again, not the world's largest issue if we could just throw $25 at the problem for transfering to an agreed to server, but we're not even all Horde or all Alliance, so...

I definatly have 10 or so level 20's all made to play with friends. When it gets down to it though I dont want to reroll. I have a perfectly good level 60 druid in top notch gear sitting in Ironforge ready to kill any boss in the game. I want to play that one. I -dont- want to run mauradon for the 1000th time. I have seen that, it was fun, but I have done it enough.

Even further, say I finally get my hunter to 60, I sure as hell dont want to run MC again. And even if I did, I can't be running MC on my hunter in a friends guild on a different server, and Naxx wuth my guild. I simply dont have the time or energy to keep to characters in raiding shape.

back to faction imbalance though: I like factions, I like how it (kinda) fits with lore. I'm not a huge fan of how I cant talk to horde (when in WC1-3 did you see any race not able to talk to any other race?) But still, I like how they have their city and I have mine.

What I don't like is waiting 45 minutes for an AB to queue. I don't like never seeing horde when I'm running to an instance. I dont like being able to kill a faction leader and no one but some level 40's fighting back. I know this isnt the case on all servers, but it definatly is on mine.

I could transfere to another server with better balance, but that would A) cost 25 dollars (i'm a hella poor college student) and B) leave my guild behind. both of which suck too much for me to seriously consider

To touch on the issue of wow being a non-friends game I agree to a certain extent for reasons not even discussed. This game is so central on pve raiding and the people within your guild its hard even to play with people outside your guild or to have a reason to on your server let alone opposite faction or different server without tons of time to spare. I remember when I joined my first raiding guild to do mc everyone I had leveled up with almost became non existent unless they were in that guild just because when I was online to play I had no time for them because of guild commitments. For a game that is an "mmo" I really only interact with 50-55 people the active players in my guild. This is actually probably less people then when I played a fps actively where you would know the 15 people in your clan and countless people from the other 20 clans you would regularly compete with.

This will exist as soon as the next patch goes live.



Fewer plays on your faction ---> Faster queues ---> more games in the same amount of time ---> more honor in the same amount of time ---> faster access to PvP gear

WoW is indeed a sometihing of an autistic game in this regard. You exist in your guild microcosm, playing with your guildies, chatting with your guildes, hanging out with them in vent or TS. Everyone else is almost nonexistant in the game: occasionally you notice somone from your friendslist logging on and off (though I rarely chat them up tbh) and you might enjoy the trade channel banter in town, but that's basically it. That's probably why I'm such an forum addict in WoW. The social component that goes beyond intra guild relations comes mosty from forums and anot from ingame interaction.

I would blame the limited social ingamee environment on instancing and the faction barrier. Instancing enforces the bubble effect on your guild, as you don't run into situations where you have to compete for camps, and as the faction barrier makes ingame communication with you opponent impossible, PvP encounter become just another mob fight.

This exemplifies the extreme "guided experience" model, on which WoW is designed. It's all about your and perhaps your guilds progression as predefined by the game designers. Instancing definitaly helps this, but I'm not so sure about the faction barrier.