(and I swear that I’m done for today)

I save here a discussion before it’s lost. The topic is the factional balance in a PvP game but from the perspective of “why one side is more appealing than the other”.

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Oh, I wrote too much about it on this thread.

My idea is that the players choose deliberately specific archetypes:

I’m saying that the race is not relevant. What is relevant is the alignment.

The alignment is a constant throughout all the different mmorpgs. Here’s a “rule”. A pattern repeating in different contexts at a glance.

If you allow each race in WoW to chose if to be alliance or to be horde you’ll have, at the end, that the alliance outnumbers again the horde. This is the point.

An orc and a troll aren’t choosed not because they are ugly, but because they do not incarnate a ‘good’ alignment. Not a case that the most choosed class (and by far) is the paladin.

And I want to add:
The only way to “fix” this at the origin, as you say, is to build in the game factions that cannot be linked easily to archetypes. And, believe me, you don’t want to go this way.

Archetype means that a “figure” acquired with the time a cultural meaning. This meaning becomes an archetype that goes beyond the boundaries of a single game, it becomes a concept by itself.

So these games are unbalanced because they work on consolidated archetypes. When a player chooses one it doesn’t choose just an image at the log in screen. The choice is about a cultural, shared background.

In general players want to be heros:

The other reason is that human, elves, dwarfs and even gnomes are standard fantasy setting. While undeads and taurens aren’t. Plus the trolls don’t look like trolls and are (arguably) the ugliest race.

In WoW this unbalance is just about the perception and the ‘good’ faction will always be more popular than the ‘bad’ faction.

Calistas then wrote better my concept:

No need to be metaphysical, they are just ‘bad’.
Show pictures of the races/cities to anyone and ask them to pick the baddies and the goodies and is, largely, obvious.

People aren’t going to ponder which one to chose. Many will just chose the goodies out of habit.

ALL this genre has value JUST because it’s archetypical. That’s the only reason why this stuff is “popular”.

This is also why I strongly criticize Raph when he thinks to these games just as formal systems. It’s the culture to permeate and give a meaning to the formal system. The formal system is nothing without the other part.