Astrenar wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2022 2:27 pm
I'm definitely what people here would consider a casual player. I've played RoR on and off for years now (mostly off) and in that time I've played a bit of both factions but mostly destro. I want to provide my insight into this as someone who isn't too heavily entrenched into the history and meta of the game.
When people bring up something like class distribution within a faction especially when it comes to order having lots of range and destro having lots of melee, it seems like they're not sure why it is the way it is. As someone who plays more casually and doesn't have *a lot* of knowledge of lore or anything like that, most class decision made at the character creation screen comes simply from cool factor. If you've picked order, your ranged options are things like fire mage, elf archer, and engineer, all serving well established and loved class archetypes. Similarly, healers have archmage and war priest which serve the elven mage and priest/paladin respectively. Melee options for order a bit less straightforward, swordmaster and white lion wear kilts(?) which aren't associated with melee classes in other media and WL doesn't even show the pet in character creation so people might miss the hunter angle of it. Witch hunter seems to be the most popular melee class on order because it's the most iconic, slayer close behind because of it's berserker style but I think most people don't pick this as their first and choose it later because they hear it's powerful. knight of the blazing sun also serves the paladin angle, but I think people make this then drop it for something else often because it doesn't play into that immediately. Ironbreaker and runepriest seem to mostly be played by people who are either very familiar with the game or just like dwarves in general.
TL;DR, Order ranged has strong class archetype recognition while melee doesn't as much, and their ranged classes tend to have better "cool factor" throughout first impression and play.
For destro, it's inverted. Witch elf is IMMEDIATELY recognizable as a rogue, chosen and marauder both look like death knights, choppa gives barbarian vibes and black orc is like a walking tank, when I saw disciple of khaine the first time I thought "oh, it's like a vampire class! awesome!", even the least popular blackguard on character screen looks like some kind of dragon knight (even if it isn't this at all). Meanwhile for ranged I'd say sorcerer/ess is most popular but it also serves the mage archetype, but also I think the female armor for them draws a lot of people, as most of them choose a female character. As for the rest of your ranged you have magus which even if he's also clearly a mage he rides around on a disc which while I think is cool I think it puts off a lot of people and those that do try it aren't expecting their pets to function like turrets. I've never even seen anyone play zealot as a dps, and I think people see it thinking "oh I can play as a cultist!" and then "oh, but it's a healer..." Then goblins are already a "you love them or hate them" type of race, and the armor shown for them while cool and thematic isn't as visually impressive or distinctive as other classes making them less popular.
TL;DR, Destro melee has the most "whoa, look at THAT" of the faction, while their ranged options can be misleading or don't grab a lot of people's attention immediately.
I think the... how do you describe it... "general style" has started to shift toward "edgy" being in again so that might be contributing to rising destro popularity. Also, I'm sure everyone has heard of WoW and its sharp decline in playerbase. The vast, VAST majority of WoW players play horde, and destro is what these players will equate to the horde side.
This kind of stuff explains why people might initially pick a faction, but why do people stay on one? I think people staying or not comes down to two major factors which are their ability to actually play on that side and their available time investment. Time investment is obvious, if someone doesn't have a lot of time they'll stick to just one character mostly and maybe a few alts, on the other end you have xrealmers who have loads of time and want to acquire loot for multiple characters. Ability to play is more about how easy it is to jump on and get started. In my *personal* experience, in the past order has more insular guilds who rarely recruit or will only accept specific classes and barely anyone who will open and actually lead a pug wb. While on destro I typically have a decent chance of getting into a public wb lead by someone who is willing to at least give basic commands like "group up at x" or "head to y" and "next go to z". Also there's typically at least one guild recruiting anyone of any level.
"Yeah that's interesting but what can we do about it?" Honestly, not much. Sure devs could implement anti-zerg debuff but this could easily backfire and punish people who only play on one faction and only are able to play during prime time for their faction, it could even make xrealming more volatile and unpredictable as they would constantly be switching because of the debuff if they're trying to avoid it. If you could get enough people on board, you could form a group of xrealmers who specifically play for the losing side at any given time but good luck getting people to agree to that.
I think the best community solution might be to organize cross realm between guilds to try to fight at certain times, leading to something like an even baseline to start from. A dev solution is trickier, and I'm not sure it's possible within the game's infrastructure, but I think instead of discouraging zerging it would be more effective to incentivize character loyalty. Allow people to select a "main" character that can be changed maybe once a month. This character would receive increased renown gain and either a bonus to their loot bag roll, an extra, smaller bag for every bag they gain, or just increased rewards from bags. A bonus that is good enough to make you want to focus on one character but not so good that other characters feel like you're wasting your time. Another potential solution would be to add a server wide renown bonus (like an extra 50% to 100%) to both factions whenever the faction populations are evenly balanced, which would encourage people to xrealm for the sake of balancing the population instead of joining the bigger side.
