I've been following WAR online for only a few months now, and so far I can't find anything about the game that I don't like.  But the more I read the forums and watch the podcasts the more I realize whats going to happen:

A whole lot of Destruction vs. very few Order. 

My MMO experience is limited to WoW and Vanguard and something similair happened in both cases.  Everyone wants to be the evil ugly guys.  And its going to be much worse for WAR because Desctruction is so much uglier and evil....er.

Plus the Devs themselves in the podcasts can't stop talking about how sweet the greenskins and chaos are going to be (especially the brittish guy with sunglasses) and the poll on this forum shows the top 3 race choices to be the 3 Desctruction races! (mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm) Thats about as unbalanced as you can get.

If this were any other MMO I wouldnt even bring it up, I really didnt care in WoW or VG, but this is a PvP centric game.  How much fun will it be on either side when its 3 to 1 or whatever.

I just thought I'd implore the people (especially the good players) to give Order another thought.  When the servers go live and people see that its 100000 to 10 its usually the weak who switch sides to balance it (counterstrike experience )

Edit: I forgot to mention this guy only-war.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php who praises a Descrution class as not only the best in the game but the best in any MMO hes ever played.  I probably could spend all day pointing to articles praising the Destruction classes.   I should ask the EA Mythic guys to make Order immortals or give them a higher level cap.

I think the number of people that are going to want to play Warrior Priests will balance it all out.

Ok, joking aside, it's hard to tell at this point. Non-hard corps types tend to go to the pretty races which are going to be the High Elves and the Humans.

Just my 2¢.

Yah, I totally feel you there.  When the game was first announced I swore I would roll Chaos, but now with what will most likely be an overwhelming Destruction  population and how sweet the Bright Wizards sound I may have to roll Order. 

A few more polls like that and High Elves might just hit a niche with the underdog-lovers...

And that's a good thing for an MMO race :)

Umm, in WoW Alliance outnumbers Horde. 1.3:1.

The 2 most popular classes are the Human and Night Elf both belonging to Alliance. Blood Elf is third, which has helped even out the sides a bit.

The ugliest and meanest, which I consider Orc and Troll are the two least played races. Not sure why you are thinking peolpe choose the biggest, meanest, ugliest  toons, when the evidence says otherwise.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

It was real bad before the blood elves evened things out.

I also suspect your assumptions in VG are probably just as wrong.

  something I noticed when playing DDO was there was a certain personality type - the lets say the dogged underdog lovers - that always seemed to end up playing dwarves...

   maybe that will translate in this game too.

Originally posted by brostyn

Umm, in WoW Alliance outnumbers Horde. 1.3:1.

The 2 most popular classes are the Human and Night Elf both belonging to Alliance. Blood Elf is third, which has helped even out the sides a bit.

The ugliest and meanest, which I consider Orc and Troll are the two least played races. Not sure why you are thinking peolpe choose the biggest, meanest, ugliest  toons, when the evidence says otherwise.

 

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

It was real bad before the blood elves evened things out.

 

I also suspect your assumptions in VG are probably just as wrong.

Perhaps it was just my server.  And also I played WoW for only about a year and a half after it came out, things may have changed.  But believe you me, I was human and was waaaaaaaaaay out numbered by orcs.

And what assumptions?  I was there, it sounds like you werent.  the VG world wasnt that big and i can tell when i'm out numbered.

Originally posted by apocalance

I think the number of people that are going to want to play Warrior Priests will balance it all out.

Ok, joking aside, it's hard to tell at this point. Non-hard corps types tend to go to the pretty races which are going to be the High Elves and the Humans.

Just my 2¢.

Good point. I think the thing about WAR that'll mix things up nicely though is the Dark Elves are evil AND "pretty." So I'm sure we'll see a good number of folks who tend to play only pretty races lured towards Destruction. The only realm on the Order side of things that catches my eye are dwarfs. I normally can't stomach elves but I must confess that WAR's elves look pretty appealing. I never play humans since I get to be one in real life, but if I did, the warrior priest doesn't look bad. Heh heh.

One of my first posts on these forums was to create a thread on this topic...and I was flamed mercilessly about my suggestion that the sides of Order might outnumber the forces of Destruction due to the "pretty" factor.

But either way would be a bad thing.... and in WOW generally the Alliance sides have outnumbered the Horde in almost every server.

I'd like to see a cap on the number of players on each side...i.e...... lets say that the Destruction side has 2000 people online right now...but Order is at 1500.  The servers should block any more Destruction players from entering the game until the sides more or less balance out.

Yes, I know....some folks hate the idea...but it seems to me that since this game is so realm vs realm oriented I forsee some major problems if one side is always outnumbered by the other on a regular basis. (was a real problem in DAOC as well)

Originally posted by brostyn

Umm, in WoW Alliance outnumbers Horde. 1.3:1.     What an overwhelming ratio!

The 2 most popular classes are the Human and Night Elf both belonging to Alliance. Blood Elf is third, which has helped even out the sides a bit.    Who wants to play an MMO to be human?  I can be human IRL.   And besides, human racials were crap in that game compared to others.

The ugliest and meanest, which I consider Orc and Troll are the two least played races. Not sure why you are thinking peolpe choose the biggest, meanest, ugliest  toons, when the evidence says otherwise.   Thank you for proving through your one example that the OP is wrong. 

 

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php    everone knows this page is not 100% accurate, or even close.

It was real bad before the blood elves evened things out.     

 

I also suspect your assumptions in VG are probably just as wrong.      Haven't they cancelled this game yet?

Originally posted by Proserpine

Originally posted by brostyn

Umm, in WoW Alliance outnumbers Horde. 1.3:1.

The 2 most popular classes are the Human and Night Elf both belonging to Alliance. Blood Elf is third, which has helped even out the sides a bit.

The ugliest and meanest, which I consider Orc and Troll are the two least played races. Not sure why you are thinking peolpe choose the biggest, meanest, ugliest  toons, when the evidence says otherwise.

 

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

It was real bad before the blood elves evened things out.

 

I also suspect your assumptions in VG are probably just as wrong.

Perhaps it was just my server.  And also I played WoW for only about a year after it came out, things may have changed.  But believe you me, I was human and was waaaaaaaaaay out numbered by orcs.

With the introduction of the Blood Elves, the tide has turned on the PvP servers, and the Horde actually outnumbers the Alliance by a ratio of 1.2:1. Go figure.

When factoring in the carebears (erm PvE folks) they seem drawn to the Alliance in droves (when reviewing WoW Census, the Alliance does indeed have a larger player base).  However, once you pull out the PvE servers and focus on the PvP/ RP-PvP servers it is the Horde that are the more popular race (especially now that they got the Blood Elves).   I'm not sure if PvPers are motivated by the racial abilities of the horde or prefer the cooler more sinister looking characters (probably a little of both, though I lean toward the advantages of the Horde racials).

Warhammer's destruction faction is slightly different than WoW's Horde side.  For one thing the destruction side is a real "evil" side (the Horde really aren't evil / sinister).  The second factor is that the destruction side has a human race (Chaos..they are humans) and they have dark elves..in other words they aren't as "monstrous" in appearance as WoW's Horde side was originally.  It will be interesting to see if PvPers are generally more drawn to the "dark side" (I imagine it will remain competitive between the two sides.  There are always people drawn to the underdog's (or perceived underdog's). 

Originally posted by Kyleran

One of my first posts on these forums was to create a thread on this topic...and I was flamed mercilessly about my suggestion that the sides of Order might outnumber the forces of Destruction due to the "pretty" factor.

But either way would be a bad thing.... and in WOW generally the Alliance sides have outnumbered the Horde in almost every server.

I'd like to see a cap on the number of players on each side...i.e...... lets say that the Destruction side has 2000 people online right now...but Order is at 1500.  The servers should block any more Destruction players from entering the game until the sides more or less balance out.

Yes, I know....some folks hate the idea...but it seems to me that since this game is so realm vs realm oriented I forsee some major problems if one side is always outnumbered by the other on a regular basis. (was a real problem in DAOC as well)

 

I could do with a simple indicator showing which side has the population majority so I could join the other.

Character interests and general public aside, the fact that Mythic plans to include "incentives" to play the less populated side, I *really* don't think that population imbalances will be significant at all.  Mythic is keenly aware of the impact that realm imbalances could have on the game and have plans to combat the issue.  Seriously, this is an issue not even worth worrying about.

Population imbalance only affects PVP in open world, free form PVP.

I mean, it can make queue times higher for instanced scenarios/battlegrounds, but the actual negative affects only really hurt in open world PVP.

UO had a "cap" on the number of players that could join the specific factions for their Faction PVP system. It was a great idea. Why it worked was because there were no races or classes and players were given the choice of which faction to join. You simply can't do that in a game like Warhammer because the IP forces only two factions/armies and the specific races have to be in the specific faction.

Limiting the number of players that can connect to a maximum for each faction does not work, because players will betray the race/army they actually like in order to play on the "winning" side (some will anyway.)

My idea has been and always will be to have a "underdog" bonus to the factions(s) with the fewest number of players (only in open world PVP areas.)

What this does is give the faction/army with the fewest people a slight buff to help even the odds, the more populous faction has an advantage, strength in numbers, but the under-populated faction becomes more powerful per member, to help make up the difference between population numbers in combat.

That's my idea, and it'll be in my next blog post for sure.. check it out when I write it. K cool thx.

shameless plug, sorrry.

---

Originally posted by Proserpine
I've been following WAR online for only a few months now, and so far I can't find anything about the game that I don't like. But the more I read the forums and watch the podcasts the more I realize whats going to happen:
A whole lot of Destruction vs. very few Order.
My MMO experience is limited to WoW and Vanguard and something similair happened in both cases. Everyone wants to be the evil ugly guys. And its going to be much worse for WAR because Desctruction is so much uglier and evil....er.

---

Just because places like this has more chaos folks don't mean jack. The same was said about WoW and look at that.

In my circle people are opposite of what you describe. We like "good" side and not failed genetic experiments as characters.

I'd be willing to bet a case of Guinness that Order will out number Chaos easily.

I suspect, like with DAoC, Mythic will have a way to balance that.

Originally posted by cptnj4

Yah, I totally feel you there.  When the game was first announced I swore I would roll Chaos, but now with what will most likely be an overwhelming Destruction  population and how sweet the Bright Wizards sound I may have to roll Order. 

exactly

Originally posted by muaddib101

Originally posted by Proserpine

Originally posted by brostyn

Umm, in WoW Alliance outnumbers Horde. 1.3:1.

The 2 most popular classes are the Human and Night Elf both belonging to Alliance. Blood Elf is third, which has helped even out the sides a bit.

The ugliest and meanest, which I consider Orc and Troll are the two least played races. Not sure why you are thinking peolpe choose the biggest, meanest, ugliest  toons, when the evidence says otherwise.

 

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

It was real bad before the blood elves evened things out.

 

I also suspect your assumptions in VG are probably just as wrong.

Perhaps it was just my server.  And also I played WoW for only about a year after it came out, things may have changed.  But believe you me, I was human and was waaaaaaaaaay out numbered by orcs.

With the introduction of the Blood Elves, the tide has turned on the PvP servers, and the Horde actually outnumbers the Alliance by a ratio of 1.2:1. Go figure.

IMO, that just further solidifies the theory the people want pretty, not ugly. Something that people relate to. Maybe, that's why humans are so popular. I honestly don't believe Chaos will outnumber Order.

i believe the average gamer typically likes to play as the good guys. Of course there are those that like to play the evil ones for the dark side (myself for example), but I think destruction will be slightly outnumbered. Although it could even out but we can't tell until the game comes out now can we.

I always have and probly always will go for whatever race / side that seems to not have it all.  WoW I went with Horde... cause alliance seemed to have the game catered to them (which is argueable I know), with EQ2 I went with Evil again cause good had so many people around that for the most part, no one knew how to do anything worthwhile.. it was just a big zergfest.  I know these aren't the greatest examples, but I bet alot of people are like me.. and if chaos turns out to be easy mode.. not that I'm planning to play them.. but I sure wouldn't then. Whats the point in playing if everything is easy? 

Plus someone made a great comment on another post like this that if Chaos just dominates Order all the time.. then more then likely order won't even fight it.. they'll just ignore em.. and in a pvp centric game.. and tons of people playing to kill order... it'd get really boring if they didn't even fight back.