population %

[Asherdoom]

orders envoirment is toxic and unfriendly, players are like either elitists or complete newb, everytime i log order asked something in/ad all i got are trolls and whines.... very discouraging.

then is not something related to class design but to order brains.

You'd be bitter too if you were outnumbered all the time and finding half your friends replaced every 3 months by newbies who still think they can win.

which leads to question: what are guilds in game for then?

[Gurismar]

which leads to question: what are guilds in game for then?
[/quote]

He is saying that he does have a guild, but the guild bleeds members because of how awful the population balance is on beating down players. It is happening to every guild I know on Order. Players just don't want to bother playing anymore due to prolonged overpopulation on Destro. It makes suggestions like yours to group up and/or play certain classes useless. Small player pool to pick from = less good players, less teachers to make good players from bad ones, less classes to fill out wbs with in meta way, etc etc etc. This snowballs into Order not wanting to take it in the face in the field because why feed the zerg and reward the behavior? They don't care if it's boring for you to level up keeps. They are just trying to squeeze some relevance from their play time.

Also to address Sofong's point, Order has some genuine and great people on it...but stress and losing friends impact people. It's in a bad way with POE and other games releasing new content to try and get people to login to actually play. I imagine it will be this way until some Destro quit from it being too boring and then the cycle continues.

[M0rw47h]

Being on underpopulated realm is nice, being on overpopulated realm is kinda meh. It's mainly because it's easy to find opponents as underpopulated, which you don't have to "share" with others, get spot in fort with no effort, or even soloQ join city by queing last moment, on top of that fast pop for SCs, or even ability to play premade on voice coms in "solo" ranked.

[Drednes]

i wouldnt say destro classes are strictly stronger than orders
but i hate how much more fun they are compared order
-BO more fun than SM
-Chosen more dps=more fun than knight (strictly fun no end game pvp comparison)
-IB and BG well both are good fun tho i think BG does more damage
-shaman and AM...no comparison
-Zealot and RP are equal id say (maybe)
-WP and...DoK (**** DoK) are...well fkn mutants of a class
-SW and Squig...fk em both
-choppa...just feels slightly more fun than slayer idk man
-mara and WL are to each there own
but idk man they just feel more chill and fun to play you just run in and smash and have a killin good time

[MrBenis]

pop imbalance kills games like this, iirc the original game went quite draconian and restricted you from even logging in if the enemy faction didn't have enough people

didn't solve the problem, considering 1500 level 40s is more valuable than an even spread of lower levels and 800 level 40s defending altdorf. iirc it only took like 4 month for the desto to just cycle-sack altdorf and the game lost like 90% of its players in 1 year.

[Flet]

pop imbalance kills games like this, iirc the original game went quite draconian and restricted you from even logging in if the enemy faction didn't have enough people

didn't solve the problem, considering 1500 level 40s is more valuable than an even spread of lower levels and 800 level 40s defending altdorf. iirc it only took like 4 month for the desto to just cycle-sack altdorf and the game lost like 90% of its players in 1 year.

The identical thing happens again on a totally different server a decade later with lots of fresh people who never even played live and some people still argue its a player issue and not a game issue.

The experience of existing within the game has to feel fun and enjoyable equally, else you will get a population imbalance. This means each side needs to feel as good to play, and mechanisms need to be in place that do not allow minor imbalances to snowball. This is a complicated issue because different players play for different reasons. Different players will prefer different sides initially for one reason or another. The first job then, is to insure developers understand the general kinds of categories of player desire and distribute them in a balanced way to lure initial player distribution. As people constantly point out the dwarf niche is problematic. Some people love dwarves, other people would never consider playing a dwarf. Greenskin however, is less specific here. Plenty of people would not want to play one and plenty of people would love them, but the less concerned player who has no strong feelings one way or another will tend to accept playing a greenskin more readily than a dwarf, because the dwarf is a short guy and the greenskin is just a generic monster race whos orcs are just monster-people and a lot of players of just a general aggressive mentality can get into the fantasy of being one, and whos goblins are, unlike the short dwarf, meant to be sneaky little comic relief things that annoy everybody (which is why i dont particularly mind how absolutely infuriating shaman can be, its cute because they are goblins and its offset by how satisfying it is to catch one unaware and see them run around in panic like a bug with those little legs. Likewise melee SH are annoying because they are no longer small and run away if you chase them, its not actually a mechanical balance issue. There may be some, but its not the mechanics that get people all annoyed, its the experience). Order has empire going for it. High elves are universally considered more lame than dark elves across fantasy. Chaos is kind of trashy looking but solid due to meme potentials of warhammer chaos gods and also chaos in general.
Order has one high appeal race, one low appeal race, and one mid appeal race. Destro has one high appeal race, and two mid appeal races. The fundamental problem is basically displayed right here and further analysis is not required.

The people claiming none of this matters are just xrealming metagamers who do not understand normal player psychology and the idea of character identity. To them they are themselves and the characters are simply equipment they bring out while chatting in their discord server to have a little fun with their other clique buddies. To the standard player of an mmo, the character is an expression of their being and picking a race/class/appearance is more involved that 'what set of mechanics do i want to play?'

tl:dr people argue strict mechanical balance all day with out considering how the experience of playing the game feels and how that affects player perception and motivation. Changing somethings appearance can easily have more impact than changing its skill variables.

[fabrizio3k]

pop imbalance kills games like this, iirc the original game went quite draconian and restricted you from even logging in if the enemy faction didn't have enough people
...

Absolutely agree. The fact there are way more BOs then SMs is just because one is less appealing than the other to the average joe. Mechanical reasons are secondary and only known by the minority. Everyone is talking about balancing classes but unbalance should be created in order for all the classes to have the same amount of screenplay., thus to balance the rvr as a whole. My two cents

[Flet]

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Really you cant compensate for it with mechanical imbalances, as thats attempting to simply outweigh players innate sense of whats cool with promises of being overpowered. It works on the short term - people will have fun being overpowered for a while but then desire to return to what their real passion is. They will either quit if they cant do that satisfactorily or put up with the constant disadvantages out of love of the class, but they wont forsake the things that catch their eye. Why escape into another world when you have to endure day in and out of drudgery there doing something you dont want to? You can do that with out a game at all.

There are ways to fix it but it would require redesigns of everything along a scale you would need the actual studio and not an emulation team to do; Either reworking all the classes so mechanical capabilities are mirrored along class popularity rates, reworking the rvr and scenario objectives for each side so the naturally forming compositions of either side are suited for those goals, or reworking the terrain so that the naturally resulting playstyles of each sides compositions have opportunities to be advantaged.

Different naturally forming class compositions along classes which lay on different rankings of aesthetics between the sides lead to each side developing their own derived 'style' of combat. Since the two sides, despite the attempt to have mirrored classes, do not have mirrored populations of those mirrors, they will never be balanced. This is not unique to this game, it is a premise that can be applied to any factional game.