One PvE Mega Server Per Region - MoP Classic
A similar process occurred on Season of Discovery realms, and the current Anniversary Servers also have only one server type (PvE or PvP) per Region. Would this realm consolidation plan also work in Mists of Pandaria Classic? World of Warcraft Senior Game Producer, Tom Ellis, explained his reasoning behind this plan, as well as why all PvP servers appear destined to become lopsided.
Tom Ellis
So being sassy aside, thought I'd fill in the blanks on why PvP realms in WoW always without fail slowly drift into mono-faction psudo-PvE realms and why Warmode ultimately happened instead.
The tongue in cheek joke is that players don't really want PvP, but like to be on a PvP realm for that old school prestige, hrm, maybe for some but for most no, they just wanted to play with enough people of their faction to do the content they wanted.
The slide towards mono-faction starts right at the birth of a realm, when we re-launched Classic most of the PvP realms landed somewhere around a 45-55 split, some realms pro-Horde, some pro-Alliance, that's decently balanced at a glance, but its also the seeds of their eventual destruction.
Generally, no one wants to be the underdog, and even with a 45-55 split, that's a few extra guilds that the opposing side will always be able to field, every world PvP engagement is generally just ever so slightly lop-sided against you if you're on the 45% side. What we saw is that on these servers there were usually cornerstone guilds that held up their sides "PvP army", you know that one guild that was able to break through and actually let your faction raid Molten Core that night.
Eventually, these guilds would get tired of the slog, and it only takes one of them to decide to move to a realm where their faction isn't the underdog and there would be a big swing in the balance of power around the PvP hot spots. That would trigger a much quicker exodus of the remaining serious raiding guilds who didn't want every raid night to get blocked by the opposing faction.
When picking a new home, you don't pick yet another realm where you're slightly outnumber, you pick one where you slightly outnumber, you've had enough of that crap. This pushes the destination realm more out of balance, and the smaller faction there goes through the same process.
As we watched Classic go through Vanilla, TBC this process accelerated because well, doing Sunwell dailies on a contested server where you aren't the big dog... sucked. By the end of TBC almost all the PvP realms were mono-faction, not because people didn't want to PvP but they didn't want to be on the more often than not losing side, there were no "balanced" realms to go to so mono-faction PvP it is. There was also the old realm caps, we've massively increased realms ability to accept players so this one isn't relevant now, but if you had an older Classic style realm that was balanced and queued, vs a mono-faction realm queued, well there was twice as many of your faction to group with on the mono-faction realm.
This process is exactly what happened to Mainline WoW and why PvP realms ultimately were removed and Warmode created.
Fun fact, Warmode, we totally made the same mistake too. At launch, we knew that overall Horde players generally participate in PvP more than Alliance so we knew that it was likely more Horde and Alliance would opt into Warmode. They wanted to make sure that each Warmode shard had some Alliance players so it spread out all the Alliance players between all the Warmode shards we needed based on player numbers. Uh-oh, er, there's like 40 Allies in the zone and 200 Horde. It was a blood bath, so Alliance stopped using Warmode. They then changed it to a max allowed delta, I think the split was 40-60 and then all remaining Horde would go into excess shards that were just all Horde and no Alliance.
But... that's still you're always outnumbered if you're Alliance, participation from the Alliance continued to drop making things worse. Finally, it was settled to balance Warmode shards at 50/50 and all spillover goes onto single-faction Warmode shards which is where we remain today, if you're on a Warmode shard and you see the other faction, you should have an equal amount of back-up as they do.
All this PvP mono-faction realm stuff is why for Season of Discovery we took our first stab at forced faction balance, it worked out stupidly well for how basic the system was at its heart, so we did it again for Anniversary and it'll likely be the norm for all Classic flavour PvP realms going forward. By preventing one faction from becoming notably the underdog it stops the slow drain and then route as one faction starts getting bodied constantly. Its not perfect, but it's had great results.
Why didn't we turn this on in Classic Cata at the time? Since we're only gating initial character creation, it has no effect on already heavily unbalanced realms, that horse had already left the stables.
Anyway, thanks for following along this random trip down memory lane.
What do you think of the reasoning behind the realm consolidation plan for Mists of Pandaria Classic? Should Blizzard continue to force faction balance on PvP servers? Or would you like to see Warmode added with the next version of Classic? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
