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Blizzard Looking at Server Balance in WoW Classic Ahead of Cataclysm Release

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Blizzard Looking at Server Balance in WoW Classic Ahead of Cataclysm Release

Blizzard are forcing players to PvP in a controversial move that will divide the community on server balance issues.

Sorry, Tom, we just had to do that part. But on a serious note, Blizzard is looking at what to do with PvP server balance and server population on two of the largest, and most unbalanced, PvP servers.

The State of Server Balance

Classic Cata is heading for a PvP balance issue, and Blizzard needs the community to help them out. So, what’s the issue here:

“Alright, so we’ve been looking at getting Wrath Classic realms condensed down ahead of Cataclysm launch, SoD style mega realms. But, while doing that we realized we have an opportunity that we’re honestly too afraid to take. Thoughts? Faerlina-US and Benediction-US are fake PvP realms, they’re 99% one faction each. One Horde, one Alliance, and almost equal in player size. Aggrend (Senior Producer on Classic) and I kind of desperately want to clash the two realms together and turn on faction balancing.”

Seems obvious, right? A bunch of folks on PvP servers who, are not playing on a PvP realm put together to actually PvP. But, Tom points out a major potential problem.

The Problem

Tom continued:

“The problem is, a very real number of people established on those realms never really wanted to deal with the reality of balanced PvP and messing with that could cause many of them to leave. Do you play on those realms? What do you think? This would be the spiciest Cata PvP realm to have ever existed.”

This sounds like a good idea, but as Tom pointed out “It’s a bizarre amount of work that causes a ton of fallout for years to come for customer service. Realms have millions of characters on, if 1/100000 has some special problem that occurred in its life it blocks the process and had to be individually dig into”

So, that’s not the fix… so what is?

The Solution

If you choose to play on a PvP realm, you do so knowing what it entails. If you decided to join a PvP realm, purely because it was 99% your faction… then that’s probably on you.

If you did it without knowing, then, you’ve unknowingly given yourself a bad experience. If you do it on purpose, then you’ve done it purely to be a “bully”. We get that this is a game, but, no one wants to be ganked, and it’s more likely folks on the 1% joined the server without the knowledge they’d be on the 1% side.

Obviously, some folks joined to play with friends, knowing it was unbalanced, but doing so knowing that would make them “safe”.

For us, the solution, regardless of how hard it might be is this:

  1. Clash the realms together
  2. Enable faction balance for new players
  3. Give players a period of time to leave the server to go to PvE/RP realms (no moving to another PvP realm)

That’s it, server problems are fixed, and everyone is happy, you can send our bill in the post.

David Hollingsworth
David has written for games media outlets for the last ten years. With his first major esports role being with Esports News UK covering mostly UK League of Legends. David is also a member of the British Esports Association and is an advisor to them on World of Warcraft Esports. More recently David has worked for Esports Insider and Red Bull as an esports journalist. David later became Editor at ESTNN and now leads the current team.