New Servers/Character transfers are only pieces of the puzzle, please think about the other moving parts

[zooloo]

To the devs - surely by now you’ve realized that throwing more servers at the problem is only a temporary/not ideal solution. Upping world capacity is also only a small bandaid that brings issues - overcrowding already overcrowded quest spots, resource spots, performance issues in main towns, etc. The offer of free character transfers is a solid idea, but it creates a problem of its own - allowing players to transfer characters they made on other low pop servers, to the high pop server they were trying to play on originally, doesn’t accomplish anything. Point being that this trajectory is going to end in a whole lot of people getting frustrated and stop playing your game. I’d personally like to avoid that, as I enjoy the game.

One of the biggest issues is obviously the balance of factions on a new server. A lot of these servers were basically pre-crafted via coordination by the community to ensure a decent balance of power and thus (hopefully) longevity of the server. The (reasonable) fear for people moving to a random new server is that X faction is going to snowball and stomp everyone else- effectively killing the server at some point in the future. With these hasty (by necessity) server additions, the kind of coordination and vetting that was done pre-release just isn’t feasible by the community.

I’d propose that you implement a system where players can somewhat quickly coordinate these things. I don’t know how feasible it is but ideally players could register, and whole companies could be registered, in order to be matched up with a server that would have a balanced faction population. So the head of a company can input that they have 50, 100, 200, etc, players on X faction, looking for X language, yadda yadda. If you were to give large blocks of players the ability to get a similar server experience, just with a different name, I’d imagine that would placate a lot of people. I know you obviously want this game to be a success, as do the players that already love the game, so please try to take everything into account when you’re addressing these problems.

[Meireles]

While such a system/solution would be certainly complex to implement, it could indeed help bring balance to the servers in a smart way.

Faction balance is a problem and we need all the suggestions and solutions we can come up with to help solve or at least mitigate it.

I believe the giving of bonuses to minorities can be a way to achieve better balance without forcing or restricting player choices.

I also believe server capacity should be evenly divided between the three factions. If a server’s capacity is, say, 1000, there should be an allowance of, say, 320 for each faction’s exiting players and 40 for recently created players. That should help make it so organization and coordination decide the course of wars, not sheer numbers and queue wars.