These are the comments about the problems of factional balance in an open PvP environment. Old problem for someone who plays DAoC from a long while.

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Mark Asher:
One of the nice things about the WoW battlegrounds is that they sides are even. Out in the game world the sides are not even. This was sometimes a problem in frontier fighting in DAoC.

Also, controlling hot spots is a lot like controlling keeps in DAoC, and one of the problems in that game was people just organizing at weird hours to retake a keep.

PvP is fun when the sides are even. When one side is outnumbered, it’s not a lot of fun for that side and it tends to drive players away because they give up. How will you keep the fights even?

Oh, it’s simple.

Each zone will have a special recruiter that will count dynamically the horde/alliance ratio in that zone and, if the conditions are met, will allow a player to “betray” its faction and fight for the other. In this case the recruiter will cast a “spell” on the player, turning his name green toward the other faction and letting him communicate and fight for it. This status is reset when the faction balance in the zone changes or when the players leaves the zone.

Well, this was just a joke.

The point is that what you say is not even correct. Blizzard didn’t solve at all the faction unbalance. You still have it in the form of long queues.

So it’s not Blizzard’s idea solving this problem against HRose’s idea creating this problem. It’s just a choice between having to sit in a queue for 20+ minutes between each BG session or erase this waiting time but suffer for a situation where fighting is harder since you are easily outnumbered.

BOTH of these suck, I’m really not sure that Blizzard’s solution is that much better.

The point is that my idea INHERITS this problems, it doesn’t create it. The faction balance was a design issue to solve the minute after Blizzard decided that the game was going to have two rival factions. What I mean is that this problem doesn’t belong on the level discussed here. It must be solved somewhere else.

That said. There are ways to mitigate the impact of that problem. Solving it is impossible. Even if you are the best design ever. But some sort of mitigation is always posible and some ideas can be developed in that direction.

DAoC also uses some of these ideas that never really convinced me. For example, we could give the outnumbered faction a bonus multiplier on the PvP points they gain, so that, even if they are outnumbered and more frequently killed, the reward system still “compensates” this greater effort.

This would work on the systemic level and keep things even, but it wouldn’t work on the “fun” level, I believe.

Other mechanics could be about adding some quest patterns. For example: the alliance outnumbers the Horde by a fair margin and is holding an hotspot from three days. Every attempt to attack it failed miserably. We could add some PvP quests, similar to Alterac Valley, where the horde players could roam around the zone to accomplish some goals and “summon” an hero or a NPC army that could assist them in the assault. This could help to obtain an alternation on who is holding a spot.

It could work because the faction holding an hotspot is required to camp it and remain at a radius, or the hotspot resets by itself. So the horde is more free to roam around the zone, sneakingly working on their next assault with the added tools.

This solution would be way more development-intensive, so I’m not so convinced by it. But it’s another example to mitigate again the unbalance.

A third solution could be about letting the Horde (outnumbered) assault the Alliance on multiple points/hotspots. Lowering for them by a fair margin the requirements to “cap” one. It’s a more tactical strategy that would allow the Horde to launch some “stealth” attacks instead of trying to charge the Alliance all at once.

This third solution could even work similarly to DAoC, where an hotspot is also upgraded and defended by NPCs. So that the Horde would be able to push all its resources in one to make it inexpugnable even when defended by a few players. While the dominating Alliance would try to maintain many more hotspots, hence spreading the resources and showing many more weak points that could be targeted by the Horde as tactical, quick incursions.

The design strategy I follow *is not* about solving the unbalance, here. But about opening gameplay patterns so that the game remains fun even when you play in a outnumbered faction.

Again, solving completely this problem is not possible because it belongs to another level of the design. But it’s possible to mitigate it in a number of ways and I don’t think the situation with the queues is much better even compared to a scenario where my system would be plugged without any of those “safenets” I explained.

Here I wrote down in five minutes some ideas to address this problem that I believe could be valid. While Blizzard is still doing jack shit after more than a year the game was released and after five years of development.

Excuse me.