Connected realms for unbalanced realms

Unfortunately it's not possible to solve faction balance completely. I expect many of you have heard us say this before, but there are way more Horde overall on European PvP realms than Alliance. On EU PvE realms it's the other way around, Alliance outnumber Horde. Short of forcing people to faction change (which is not a realistic option), there will always be faction imbalance to a certain degree.

However, when choosing which realms to connect, we picked ones that improved the situation wherever possible. And in Warlords of Draenor, the PvP zone will make use of cross-realm technology to ensure there will be a good faction balance there to help with the PvP objectives.

15/11/2013 16:11Posted by Ragebar

First of all, other than paid faction changes (20 euros or so lol) there are no incentives from your side to improve the situation at all. In fact, doing nothing only generated more revenue for you guys due to paid faction changes, where the outnumbered faction simply joined the winning team.

Actually we have a great incentive to improve the situation: player happiness. If that isn't taken into account, we actually lose revenue. This is why we offer free character migrations for people on realms with queues, and if the realm is heavily imbalanced in favour of a particular faction, we tailor the FCM to ease that imbalance.

So what could be done to somewhat solve the problem or flatten such an inbalance? Well, you could offer free faction changes. Other games have done that, you could do it. You have the tech to switch races in the blink of an eye. So there's no excuse not to offer it. While of course, for some realms where you have distributions like 1 : 10 you might want to offer a bit more than just a free faction change. Because, who would want to switch to the helplessly outnumbered faction anyway? But maybe a mount, or a pet (you are good a creating that stuff and selling it for 5-20 bucks anyway) or maybe some recruit a friend benefits. There are possibilities. There are things Blizzard could do.

We've experimented with this before, and found that people are reluctant to move without their friends, guilds, etc. Plus, as it was mentioned above, no one wants to be the first one to move because they don't want to run the risk of ending up on the minority side. I personally don't think any kind of incentive like you mentioned would be enough to persuade a significant number of players to change faction, be disconnected from at least some of their network of friends, and potentially put them in a weaker position than before from a PvP standpoint.

Having said that, we developed Connected Realms technology to help with low population realms, and we'll continue to look into ways to help with faction imbalance.

We're not asking for perfect balance. All we're asking for is to make it so the game is actually playable.

The problem is not the ratio of horde/alliance. It's that one side is utterly dead and has empty cities, practically no guilds, no crafters and barely anything on the AH, all while the other faction is flourishing.

Why can't a heavily Horde server be connected to a heavily Alliance one?

When the population level allows it, that's what we're trying to do with Connected Realms. But as I said before, there are for example more Horde-heavy PvP realms than Alliance-heavy ones, so that can't be done with them all.

When reading sites like MMO-Champion, you can see, that Connected Realms are being pushed at US, is there a reason why you are just holding them back at EU?
Would like to see a reply to this issue?

We're not holding back, we started a few weeks ago and more are regularly being added http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8427764143

16/11/2013 00:15Posted by Ishayu

Have you ever considered offering free faction transfers on servers with high imbalance?

We experimented with it in the past—people are very reluctant to leave their guilds and friends to change sides. Also, there's a risk they could be one of just a few who move, then end up vastly outnumbered on the minority side. Judging by past trials, it's just not something people are willing to do. So we're looking for other ways to help.