faction-population
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Breakfast Topic: How realms evolve (or don't)
While writing a recent news post on Blizzard's decision to open free transfers to Drak'thul, I nosed around the server's forums to see what the inhabitants thought of the coming flood. As a server that was converted from a PvP to PvE realm, opened to transfers, and listed as a Recommend realm to boot, Drak'thul's undergone a fairly drastic set of changes, and all within a short period of time. As you'd expect, player feelings on the subject were mixed, but there was one former Drak'thul player who really got my attention. Drak'thul, he/she claimed, had been home to some of "the most mean-spirited PvP (he'd) ever experienced on ANY realm." It sounded like a tall claim, but there are a lot of other threads on the forum with oblique confirmations; players recall Alliance towns and quest NPCs "being camped 24/7," and holiday events and Alliance leveling zones being swarmed by opportunistic Horde players. Drak'thul became a low-pop server with a murderous faction imbalance -- Warcraft Realms listed the server's active population as 94% Horde before transfers were opened -- and I wonder how much of that be traced to the relentless ganking and camping campaigns three years ago. I look at realms like Cho'gall with equally crushing faction imbalances, some of which started out with fairly balanced faction ratios, and wonder -- how the hell does this happen? What spurs the departure of so many players from a specific faction? Is it really that simple as a relatively small number of players exercising such an impact on what happens to everyone on the server?
The disappearance (maybe) of faction pride
Kinka of Spinebreaker posts a question that I haven't seen anyone ask for a while; does the Horde really have more faction pride? Various reasons are this feeling are offered, from the lack of a strong Alliance-side leader (with Varian Wrynn feeling like a shoehorned, and controversial claimant to that position), to the less unified Alliance leveling experience, to more philosophical assertions from Filara of Terenas concerning early Horde differences continuing to exercise an influence to this day. In classic WoW, Filara observes, the Horde population on each server was typically small and outgunned. People knew each other, could network easily, banded together againt superior Alliance numbers in world PvP, and -- when battlegrounds became available -- could typically get games significantly faster than their Alliance counterparts. Add the numbers up and it's easy to see how faction difference became part of WoW's conventional wisdom.What interests me more is how rarely we see this question come up nowadays. During and shortly after classic WoW, comparison of the two factions was both inevitable and the source of major fights on the forums. Despite being outnumbered on the vast majority of servers, Horde routinely encountered more battleground success -- or so went the popular theory. As BC went on and the Alliance slowly lost a bit (though by no means all) of its population advantage thanks (let's be perfectly honest here) to the influx of Blood Elves to the Horde, it's possible that some of both factions' finer "cultural" distinctions have been somewhat eroded, if they ever existed at all.
Faction populations largely balanced in Warhammer Online
When Warhammer Online launched, one of the pressing concerns players had was population imbalance between Order and Destruction. Some of the measures Mythic Entertainment has taken to remedy this -- like free server transfers -- seem to have worked, according to Mythic's Jess Folsom.A recent dev blog by Folsom at the Warhammer Herald addresses the concerns WAR players continue to have about faction imbalances, and paints a decidedly bright picture of the current state of play.Percentages shown for the average of all North American servers shows a near equal balance in active accounts per faction (49% Order vs. 51% Destruction), and an even 50/50 split between factions in terms of average experience and renown point gains.
