We’ll see if that incentive will actually help now that most people are established. It will probably help more in the long term than the short term. Hopefully Thorgrim is one of the servers that gives a bonus to Order.

I’m not sure if it’s the solution I would have tried first. I’d probably give more renown, more coin, and more frequent loot drops before I gave additional XP; Order players already gain levels faster due to scenario frequency, and now they’ll just outlevel the tiers quicker.

Another change I’m happy to see and would have made myself:

“While in scenarios, players will no longer be able to select “Need” in their loot windows unless their career or race can use the item being offered. Please note: players of a lower level than required by the item are still able to roll.”

No more of those incredibly annoying people selecting Need every time. Man those people piss me off.

It would definitely help out the very low population servers, but would not come close to completely solving the problem.

If you have 1500 Destruction players and 1000 Order players queued for T3 scenarios, that means 83 can be going on at once. 504 (33.6%) Destruction players can’t play at that time. Then, 15 minutes later (if all the scenarios went to max time), those 504 Destruction players who didn’t get to play in the first batch will get a spot in the second batch (as long as 504 [50.4%] Order players requeue).

If you have 150 Destruction players and 100 Order players queued for T3 scenarios, that means 8 scenarios can be going on at once. 54 (36%) Destruction players can’t play at that time. Then, 15 minutes later (if all the scenarios went to max time),those 54 Destruction players who didn’t get to play in the first batch will get a spot in the second batch (as long as 60 Order players [60%] and 6 Destruction players requeue).

As you can see from those sample numbers, the bigger the pool gets, the more likely players are to get into a scenario quickly, and the less dependent Destruction players become on a large percentage of Order players requeueing. It’s not super significant, but I think it’s still a non-trivial difference.

On lower pop servers, players can easily get left in the dark for 30 minutes or more if not enough Order requeues. I’d like to see Mythic’s numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to 2 to 1 in favor of Destruction queueing for scenarios (I believe Destruction players queue more often than Order players due to their inclination to PvP AND because it takes so long to get into a scenario) if there are 1.5x as many Destruction players on servers in general.

1. Queues are short on cap population servers because the population online at any given time is guaranteed to be equal. On Skull Throne, queues are short at primetime because the server queue makes the population of order and destruction equal. At off hours, it can take an hour to get through a single queue, though that’s an extreme situation – the same as any other imbalanced server.

2. There is a(t least one) very specific reason WoW battlegroups mix PvE and PvP servers – their demographics have alliance up by about 1.5 to 1 for population on PvE servers, horde by 1.5 to 1 on PvP servers. Match the two together and you get a situation where the populations match up fairly well.

3. The players will adjust eventually, but it will be painful until then and it *will* cost them customers – with some segment of the population “adjusting” by playing something else. They need action that will actually work. Battlegroups would work if their problem is a specific one: if they’ve got so few Order players in some places that Destruction players end up stuck in queues for long periods of time simply because there aren’t enough players on the other side queuing to start a game. In that situation, you have players locked out of Scenarios for time disproportional to the population imbalance. Battlegroup up and you’ll make the wait time proportional to population imbalance instead.

In the end I don’t have access to their internal data, but I suspect battlegrouping up a few lower pop servers here and there would help things a lot. In the meantime, unless they can come up with a painless way of pushing Destruction players to Order (and I suspect no such method will be found) they and their players are just going to have to ride out the population issues until it is naturally resolved.

I’m very happy to see mythic add the ability to queue all 3 scenarios at your tier. That was a plus and I’m sure their thinking of ways to continually help the population issues. I would not mind battle groups or server merges or something to help with this. I am so glad I’m not the only trumpeting for cross server queues either

On Throgrim, let’s say we have 2800 Destruction and 2000 order. It’s a factor of 1.4 to 1 in favor of the Destruction side in numbers. That means that through rotation in the scenario cues, The Order players will get into about 50% more scenarios, since they will immediately get a spot in the scenario following the one they are doing, while Destruction has to wait for that one to end to get another (it’s just an example, not 100% accurate.)

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there are 100 servers, and they all have similar proportions to the one mentioned above. Math tells us that if we take a cycle, and change it by a factor of 100, it doesn’t change how long that cycle takes to complete, only how many get through the cycle. Since this is happening concurrently on all of the individual servers anyway, putting the servers together really only serves to keep the server community from developing interesting rivalries (I’ll get you one day, Grumpi!) and making things muddier and more difficult to quantify on a server by server basis (like the Renown Rank factor.)

It’s admirable to want to make a change that improves the quality of the game for everyone, but this smacks of action for action’s sake. When the difference is painful enough, then enough people will move to the other side to compensate. That is the only real solution until we all reach max RR.

[...] problems that have cropped up in its first weeks of life. Chief among its growing pains is the problem of scenario queuing issues, both on barren servers and the ones that are practically choking on players. Snafzg over at The [...]