How One Of Classic WoW's LAST Balanced Servers Fell

faction balance has always been an ethereal and difficult to achieve goal within world of warcraft and for nearly two decades it's been a core part of the game's fantasy horde versus alliance two factions two sides and a never-ending series of back and forth conflicts over the years though more often than not players have found themselves witnessing their faction leaders working together and story-wise both sides putting differences aside to address a greater evil the lich king himself during his named expansion deathwing the destroyer in cataclysm garrosh hellscream's true horde during mr pandaria and so many more during battle for azeroth blizzard reimagined servers from either pve or pvp to instead just normal or rp a new pvp mode known as war mode was introduced this could be toggled on or off at your faction capital and whilst you had it on in the open world it was like playing on old pvp servers however with additional pvp specific talents activated as well as boost to experience and reputation it was all about adding some risk and reward and in the final major content patch of the shadowlands 9.25 differences have finally been cast aside permanently as blizzard implement cross-faction play for certain areas of the game changing the direction of the two factions forever before we go on though i want to talk about food buffs no not in game i'm talking about getting well fed in real life hello fresh is america's number one meal prep kit no more meal planning grocery trips and worrying about an empty cupboard hellofresh delivers everything you need to prepare wholesome delicious meals right to your door get straight down to what you need to be doing by making cooking a fun and engaging experience hellofresh cuts down on time in the kitchen with meals ready in around 30 minutes or in some cases less with a wide range of recipes hellofresh can help you with your health goals without sacrificing on flavour which in my experience certainly matters on the longer term 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thank you to hellofresh for the sponsor let's talk wow back over in classic well we are certainly a few years off of that happening in fact in many ways we are seeing similar trends repeat themselves however it's an even faster pace than they did in retail players are a lot more savvy nowadays to important factors that make a server work or fail the faction representation the total population and of course server type we still do have the old school pvp servers well i call them pvp servers but as we will see that's not really why people are choosing to play there now i have to add here for the information we'll look at we don't have the full picture as to the population and a really accurate faction representation across servers and we never will because blizzard holds that information what we do have though is fairly good ways of predicting how things look one of these tools is a site called ironforge.pro it tracks the number of players participating in arena each week as well as the number of characters who have appeared on warcraft logs a site that tracks raid performance this means the data is representative of the end game player base much more so than the levellers gatherers or just well more casual players who don't do group content outside of dungeons really all the same i think it's been a valuable tool to assist players and making decisions on where to play as well as tracking how things are looking overall because that overall number the one at the top has never been too bad as of today there's a few percent more horde than alliance and it's always been within that small margin overall in classic there was a higher proportion of alliance players and now that's taken a shift to hoard in tbc and racials and everything else aside i'm convinced blood elves and paladins are the single largest contributed to this by a huge margin yet the more we peel back their layers and begin to look at more relevant numbers as to how things are well it just looks worse and worse if we look at tony pbe servers some 65 of the player base is alliance that's not such a small margin after all but hey that's pve it doesn't matter as much right well sure so let's look at pvp then and ah not so good either overall about 60 horde 40 alliance well that would mean in the open world for every two alliance players you would encounter you should expect there to be three hoard on average but no in reality it's worse than this because on an individual basis for each server which is what really matters when we're breaking down these numbers from the data we can see the vast majority of pvp servers fall outside of the 60 40 margin in fact most of the large servers in the world only have one relevant faction on them players have sorted themselves into environments where they will not experience any semblance of faction balance at all and for raph the lich king you should very much expect this trend to continue because when the scales begin to tip when a faction gains that noticeable foothold and advantage over the other one it's only a matter of time before the other half leaves for good over time blizzard has tried to incentivize players to move to servers that would balance things out more through three character migrations but it's never really worked out after all who would choose to move to a server that could also just die off in a few months time blizzard would have to quite literally force move players to make any difference and with wrath of the lich king they will be doing that it was announced a short while ago blizzard will be closing off loads of the very low population classic realms and moving the leftover players to more active servers instead they have never done this in the history of world of warcraft existing it's a drastic step to address players feelings though they have to be on a large server drastic as it is however it's not really affecting that many people overall but speaking of large servers we have what is the real subject for today's video fire more fire more the server that is it's been through one hell of a journey at the start of the burning crusade it had a decent population pretty close to 50 50 with more horde overall and a rating cap of around 10 000 players in january of 2022 the server saw a huge volume of transfers on both sides of the horde and the alliance guilds tend to organize mass server swaps on a certain date from their current server where they feel things are going poorly to a much larger one and with the popularity of discord and guildmasters generally talking to each other about things like this it doesn't take many people to convince potentially hundreds that they're being swept up and off to another server if they wish to remain with the guild and mostly these transfers aren't just on a whim either you scroll down ironforge dot pro and there is an absolute graveyard of service that are due to be closed soon remember on classic there's no sharding no cross faction no cross server tech your server is all you have in order to find other players to play with and as per available data fire more's rating and pvp population ballooned from some 22 000 at the end of december 2021 to an insane 35 000 by the end of january 2022 it had taken the server from huge to the largest server in the world within the space of one month though interestingly at this point in time the server was still gaining players on both the horde and alliance usually it's one way or the other and firemore continued to grow as tbc progressed seemingly infinitely even to the point of seeing dreaded queues make a reappearance during summer yes for firemore they didn't have to wait until raf content is out before they got queues again the server just got way too full on the 23rd of may blizzard finally took action at some point they had to do something and this was it firemore was locked this means that transfers were closed and unless you already had a character on the server you were unable to make a new one the results of this were pretty instantaneous week on weeks several thousand less players were being actively tracked on dot pro from the date of the server lock to six weeks later some 11 000 less players were found as actively logging in and playing while the locker had certainly had the intended result the server wasn't growing anymore in fact the opposite was happening the population was now dropping at an alarming rate though it wasn't just through the lack of new players people were finally leaving fire more this is what blizzard had been trying to get people to do forever with their actions in regards to servers success then um not quite see despite firemore being huge and relatively well balanced for its size alliance had had the numbers advantage for some time and this server lock had been an unintended catalyst for a side effect the faction minority exodus ford began to finally take advantage of the three character migrations away from this mega server to a smaller server perhaps a place where the horde needed a few more players to really push a 50 50 balance no of course not don't be silly the majority of them went straight to gohanis the largest by far poor dominated server in europe which as of a recent reset had about 20 000 hall players logged and some 69 alliance einforge.pro shows the full extent of how many players left during a one week period and even i'm surprised to this it feels like the people left on fire more didn't get the memo this is an alliance server now between the 6th and the 13th of july firemore lost about 8 000 active raiding characters that's like saying 320 25 man raiding groups have left the server and the majority have gone straight to a server where there's only horde players during the same time frame which was only a week mind you johannes gained 6 000 new active raiders in fact so many players have moved from fire more to gohennis that blizzard had to close three character transfers to stop the never ending tide of new people who were finally escaping their locked server as of july 19th blizzard have finally announced that fireball will be reopened for transfers and new characters the aftermath of the server lock has lost fire more about half of its concurrent player base and completely removed the one faction from the server i mean take a look at the bulletin board add-on for horde here this add-on combines messages from all chat channels and aims to help players find groups and services this is not what a healthy server looks like on this add-on here's fire more alliance just for comparison by the way so the server locket kind of worked in that it reduced the number of people playing on fire more but it kind of didn't because it encouraged the horde to transfer to another mega server back in january of 2022 the classic community council made a forum post about faction bounce in classic world of warcraft which game producer agreement replied on all fronts in detail as two thoughts from blizzard's point of view saying things such as free character migrations have been attempted on many counts as relief valves but often players didn't want to go to the locations offered with justifiable concerns they would just have the same experience as their current server merging for blizzard didn't make sense in fact it's never been done for any version of world of warcraft they assume if servers are the way they are and that's an environment that's been built by players why would you force them to change it would they consider incentivizing people playing on low population servers if so how would they consider capping factions perhaps well they said it will limit player choice way too much given how we know servers tend to end up how about free transfers but for one specific faction which is becoming problematic but this regard he says it's fairly conclusive that players do not take advantage of free character migrations or paid transfers to move to the underdog faction it's just not something that happens to a degree to move the needle in a positive direction and offering that move as the only option that players have for free transfers is likely not going to be positively received by players who are unhappy with their current realm what about cross realm play then is this just the end game for world of warcraft servers that they see says what if it was restricted to only people on your friends list or in the same community as you what if this only worked in instance content these are a few things that might be cool to explore it's definitely worth talking about more but this is something we'd really have to think long and hard about perhaps most interestingly he says overall the data we have suggests that players don't seem to want an even playing field and or they care more about having their faction be heavily populated and lively than they care about their realm being balanced it really is quite a complicated system take fire more for instance blizzard does nothing the population over triples from the start of tbc they take action and nearly half of the player base goes and one faction entirely leaves in many ways this kind of feels like the retail faction balance conversation all over again by the way despite having crossover play for years retail realms are by no means balanced either certain content can only be done by players from the same server and the auction house is still a thing too nevertheless balance was an active talking point for years and years with blizzard saying we're talking about it we're aware we're thinking about it we're considering our options and all that time the solution loomed the drastic step that everybody knew would really solve things but it felt as though it couldn't be justified until it was and that was cross-faction play in classic it's similarly been a day one talking point blizzard are trying to fix things they're aware of the problem but what's our obvious solution that we all know would fix things purely not sharding in cross-server play we have seen first hand with retail it doesn't work out long term still those seem to just want big servers with one faction on them should there only be a handful of mega servers per region with a huge amount of layering what about the war mode model instead of pvp and pve servers is that what classic is missing but the ball is in blizzard's court to make a decision if anything will truly change because player trends won't and blizzard can make the difference fire more has shown that even the largest server in the world isn't immune to drastic change when blizzard takes action as of today despite overall faction balance standing within a few percent of each other across all tracked servers only five of those servers are within a five percent faction bounce average between the horde and the alliance but hey there's the raf classic fresh servers surely things will be different this time i mean blizzard hopes so there totally won't be one horde server and one alliance server surely it won't happen again one of the big reasons a lot of people came back to world of warcraft and rolled a pvp server back at the start of classic was for the open world for their conflicts and for pvp experiences that you could no longer find in retail and we didn't even have to wait for flying for that illusion to be shattered in reality things have followed the same path as retail but at an even faster rate if you're new or returning for wrath of the lich king this is kind of how things are now i would use the site ironforge.pro to get a good impression of where people are playing it will also let you know whether your server is dead without you having to pay to log in and find out yourself overall when it comes to any semblance of faction balance it feels like all the solutions aren't working maybe there just isn't one maybe having static servers with two factions just doesn't work as a good long-term format for an mmo rpg but if classic is to be different from retail it has to do things differently from retail all while sticking to those design pillars that they went over not too long ago and honestly i've no idea what they could realistically do and i'd usually try and propose my own ideas here but i've really nothing that either hasn't already been suggested a million times over or completely breaks the whole nurture and protects social experiences aspect of the game so i guess let me know below if you've been affected by any server problems felt the need to transfer also if you have any idea of what could be done to improve things in the game drop that down below as well that's about everything from me today though as always thank you all so much for watching and listening and i shall see you on the next one very soon [Music] you

Channel: WillE

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Id: pQMqfKTXSxA

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022