I don't quite agree with that one. I think most people in WoW just picked the side they preferred which resulted in far too many people playing Alliance, same thing sort of happened in WAR but then it was Destruction.
I don't think (most) people generally thought "Ow here there are more people, this is the side I'm chosing". Not during release time anyway.
The reality of it is though, it was bound to happen, and foolish of Mythic to expect itself to all magically balance out, which, in retrospect, they apparently were hoping for.
In WoW, yes sides are unbalanced as well, but they have the benefit (and downside when you consider further open FvF development) that their game doesn't suffer as much from it as WAR does. Mythic created a game that relies on good populations and also equal populations on so many levels, it just boggles my mind they let the populations run wild as they did without *any* form of control. And it's not like they didn't know. I and many others asked questions about balance often enough but always they either just ignored it or talked about some mythical balance system that would "help" the losing side keep up.
I guess maybe they put too much fate in their Dogs of War system but it seems they weren't able to get that off the ground.
You can also argue that, in reality, their *original* design, the one where the game was without keeps and relatively low on Open PvP and mostly focused on scenario's, was simply much more suited and resilient to population balances. In essence, it's the fact that they changed to more Open RvR at one point during beta (or rather were forced to since the beta people considered what was there so much lacking ORvR was simply needed) that probably caused this flaw to grow to the proportions they are now.
Comments
I don't quite agree with that one. I think most people in WoW just picked the side they preferred which resulted in far too many people playing Alliance, same thing sort of happened in WAR but then it was Destruction.
I don't think (most) people generally thought "Ow here there are more people, this is the side I'm chosing". Not during release time anyway.
The reality of it is though, it was bound to happen, and foolish of Mythic to expect itself to all magically balance out, which, in retrospect, they apparently were hoping for.
In WoW, yes sides are unbalanced as well, but they have the benefit (and downside when you consider further open FvF development) that their game doesn't suffer as much from it as WAR does. Mythic created a game that relies on good populations and also equal populations on so many levels, it just boggles my mind they let the populations run wild as they did without *any* form of control. And it's not like they didn't know. I and many others asked questions about balance often enough but always they either just ignored it or talked about some mythical balance system that would "help" the losing side keep up.
I guess maybe they put too much fate in their Dogs of War system but it seems they weren't able to get that off the ground.
You can also argue that, in reality, their *original* design, the one where the game was without keeps and relatively low on Open PvP and mostly focused on scenario's, was simply much more suited and resilient to population balances. In essence, it's the fact that they changed to more Open RvR at one point during beta (or rather were forced to since the beta people considered what was there so much lacking ORvR was simply needed) that probably caused this flaw to grow to the proportions they are now.