Looks like fun, no?

Ever been to a party with a conspicuously high proportion of male attendants?  Chances are if you have been to college, (or if you play video games, follow the careers of Starfleet officers, or speak Elvish) the answer is yes.  The “sausage party” (if you don’t know the terminology you can urban dictionary it) or males-only club is dreaded by most party throwers (and goers).  I can tell you (from experience, really) the flip side (I won’t use any funny slang here) is almost as bad.  It’s a little uncomfortable when one of your female friends points out a conspicuously high number (19:2) of our female counterparts to us.  Whenever a balance gets shifted too far one way or the other things seem a little out of whack – the same holds true for WoW.

They exist - but also aren't the topic of this rant.

I am actually not talking about the number of men and women that play WoW.  I don’t think anyone outside of Blizzard’s account staff really know those numbers.  (Although, I bet there are more women than the general public would guess, but a lot less than the gender ratios in the game dictate)  Nope, what I am actually talking about is the divide, not between the sexes, but between the Horde and the Alliance on each server.  I’ll admit I never really noticed a problem until I transferred to Horde side Mal’Ganis – and didn’t see an Alliance character for the first week.  Mal’Ganis turns out to be one of the most unbalanced servers by faction in the game – roughly 96% of the characters are Horde – and there are about 32,000 characters on the server.  That is a lot of Horde (28,000ish thousand for those mathologists in the audience).  That makes Mal’Ganis a pretty strange experience.  Although it’s touted as a PvP server – that really is in BG’s and arenas only.  World PvP really doesn’t happen, and if it does it’s generally the variety of a poor hapless Alliance character getting rolled by a whole Horde guild.  Wintergrasp is strange too, a handful of Alliance raid bosses running around against average Horde players (100K HP is common for Alliance there).

Things tend to be more fun when they are balanced.

But there are a lot of subtle, non raid boss size effects of the extreme server imbalance.  Questing is different – you never have to look over your shoulder for Alliance characters.  You can literally stand outside of Stormwind or Ironforge and make obscene gestures at factions leaders with little fear of retaliation.  Those seasonal quests were you have to hug, find, throttle, or sprinkle all the races and classes can become about as challenging as some heroic achievements.  Overall the server adapts a very PvE feel to it.  Of course I have completely ignored what the Alliance must feel like, those poor tortured souls; they must feel like they are living in one of those zombie apocalypse movies where literally like 99% of the population is out to eat their brains.  And unfortunately while Mal’Ganis is an extreme case, there are many unbalanced servers.  Let me throw out some samples:  Skullcrusher – 1 Alliance player to 2.9 Horde, Balnazzar 1.8 Alliance to 3 Horde, and Stormreaver 4.6 Alliance to 1 Horde.  Although the overall numbers of Horde and Alliance players are roughly even many individual realms have these conspicuously large gaps.

Everyone likes an even fight.

So is it bad?  I think so.  I know that cross realm battlegrounds and dungeon groups (and perhaps later even raiding) does a little to smooth out these incongruencies, but lump a few lopsided servers together in the wrong way and you have a very lopsided battlegroup.  Blizzard has stated that they want to bring back the conflict between the two factions in the next expansion.  They certainly have made the right lore overtures to reignite the conflict (Wrynn pretty much hates the Horde and Garrosh doesn’t seem to be the pacifist that Thrall has been).  But no matter how hard you try there won’t be any real meaningful conflict between Horde and Alliance if there aren’t both on the same server.  It’s hard to hate on an empty room.  But can anything be done about it?  Blizzard used to limit the number of characters on certain realms, sort of.  It at least seemed a little tougher to create new characters on full realms, but that restriction was lifted (presumably when the server capacity got a little better).  A return to this sort of mentality might be in order.  I am not in favor of telling players that they can’t create a specific faction character on a server just because it’s already heavily favored but maybe a more moderate approach could be used.  If server A has become a sausage fest of Horde, only allow a limited number of new accounts to register Horde characters on that server daily.  After some time the balance (hopefully) will return to a more normal level.  With a little monitoring (which could probably be automated) Blizzard could turn their sausage laden servers back into thriving faction parties.