BioWare: Here is what caused the faction imabalance and here is how you fix it.

[Uzial]

While lore and marketing are all a part of it most people wanted to go sith because of the story line, and the fact that as an a imperial player you look about ten times cooler then the republic ones do in their middle ages, non tech hippie, monk outfits. Plus you shoot lighting and we throw dirt clods. Its like a cave man verses an M1 tank when it comes to animation and excitment.

 

The Jedi animations and gear are dull and boring compared to the Sith. No one ( with exceptions im sure ) wants to spend their time in a fantasy universe being dull and boring.

 

Flying in the Air shooting flame throwers and tracer missles verses my Champion cotton boots that dont even cover my feet, come on Bio-Ware. Stabbing people with vibro blades verses using a model 12 shotgun, hmmmmm. The sound of the snick as the blade goes in and seeing it stuck in your opponent is much more satisfying then a shotgun blast.

 

Its all been said before, it can be changed, and it is a vitrual world, its up to Bioware to make the republic more attractive. Imbalancing play with battleground buffs is not the way to do it. Making the republic more attactive to play with the right races, armors and animations is.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Uzial

[xXwitchXx]

@ teh OP

 

If you can get EA/Bio to make my operative or scoundrel 50% stronger, I'll send you 20 credits straight up!

 

P.S. Stop running headlong into the zerg

[Red_Cruiser]

Evil that isn't overwhelmingly powerful is going to end up feeling really lame. And apparently good guys need to feel like their backs are up against the wall to feel heroic. Or so it seems with the innovators at BioWare.

 

The problem with this game is that it is set in the Old Republic, but the factions are pure Galactic Civil War. Everything feels very anachronistic.

[Keapoe]

Hello BioWare.

 

You, by now, know exactly who I am and have for some time. During the build up to launch I warned you, time and time again, about the faction imbalance. I was told, by the devs no less, that there absolutely no chance of a gross faction imbalance.

 

I was correct, the devs were wrong.

 

An I told you so attitude is going to get you ignored. Just say what you have to say.. it makes you look like an ***

 

-----

 

With that out of the way I still want to help.

 

So I am going to explain exactly what caused this imbalance and exactly how to fix it.

 

Are you a game designer who currently works on game balance for a Triple A game? If your not, why not?

-----

 

I give this information freely with only the hopes that it fixes this game before it does reach a catastrophic point of no return.

 

-----

 

 

The Cause:

 

The cause of the faction imbalance was the pre-game hype. The Sith had a poster boy who was powerful, nearly unstoppable, and seemingly unassailable. The Sith were touted as unbeatable, unstoppable, and victorious conquerors. The Sith were never decried or vilified in any way for their actions during the course of the pre-game hype and in fact were treated like paragons.

 

One of the largest contributors to the faction imbalance was the character by the name of Darth Malgus. He was, at first, a nameless Sith that players could project their own self onto. Many players psychologically considered "themselves" this character when they were visualizing the Old Republic. This set down preconceptions which BioWare only inadvertently continued to fuel.

 

Players identified with individual characters in the trailers. Fans of the Sith identified themselves as Malgus, fans of the Jedi identified themselves as Satele, and fans of the Trooper identified themselves as the Trooper from Hope for example. It was because of this that Hope was the leading cause of the faction imbalance that came from the three cinematic trailers.

 

In "Hope" the message to the players inadvertently was as follows: "The Sith are awesome, and in a one on one fight will beat any Trooper and any Jedi. Two on one they can (barely) defeat a Sith."

 

This was actually fueled by Gnost Dural's timeline histories where he stated (regarding the events of the GHW) that the only way a Sith ever lost was when another Sith turned on them.

 

BioWare went out of their way to list off every important Sith they could, but all Republic heroes were either dead (Master Ven or Master Allusus) which sent a psychological message out: "If you want to be a hero to the Republic, you are going to die."

 

The Sith were never soundly defeated. The few times they were "defeated" it was either because of overwhelming firepower or because of extreme sacrifices. The Republic on the other hand was soundly defeated, time and again, in the pre-game hype without any similar sacrifices on the part of the Sith Empire. In fact it looked easy.

 

This sent another psychological message to the player base that was in some ways nearly subliminal.

 

The Sith were also highly defended by the devs in the pre-game build up. They were touted as "not being evil" and even Gnost Dural never used strong negative language when speaking about them. There were no real downsides to the Empire ever shown, while the flaws of the Republic were often pointed out by BioWare devs.

 

The flaws of the Republic included such things as "Poor leadership" (the senate) and "Massive dissension" within the faction at its core. The Jedi being painted as being disliked by their own faction only added to this dissension and caused many people to rally against the Jedi classes in their own faction while no such phenomena was occurring on the Sith side.

 

This was readily apparent by the massive rivalry and "sniping" going on between the Trooper forums and the Jedi Knight forums.

 

There was time to fix this with counter-hype pre-game, but BioWare chose not to, and thus we have now a massive faction imbalance.

 

This is a very bold statement. So your basing the reason of a population imbalance is based off of the fact of subliminal messaging. How did you come up with these facts? Was there a study given? Are you a game designer with a psychology degree also? Or are you blindly assuming this with no real evidence, just based on your perception?

 

-----

 

How to fix it:

 

At one time counter-hype was a viable answer to the issues. That, unfortunately, won't work now. There is only one way to fix the issue now and normalize population numbers and it, unfortunately, is now a gameplay issue.

 

The gameplay issue, however, only rears its head in one situation: "Open World PVP" and thus efforts should be concentrated there.

 

The population imbalance does impact PVE but to a far lesser extent and in Warzones, aside from gear issues caused by the recent exploits, the impact is non-existent.

 

If the Republic (or the Sith) are outnumbered by 100% or more in server population, or at least population on that world, they need to receive a buff that lets them compete. If there are 90 people on Ilum and 60 of them are Sith then the Republic classes need to be able to handle themselves literally in 2:1 encounters.

 

So, how will this work on a PVP server where almost every plant is a open pvp zone? You still have to factor in the fact that there is pvp in other places then Illum. So you want to make them receive a buff that increases their ability by 2 fold? What effects does this have on a PVE encounter? So you want them to code a entire new system and then rebalance it around pvp and pve? Because if I become 2 x stronger, that means I kill everything in PVE 2 times faster and so on. It doesn't look like you took into every aspect of the game like a Designer should.

 

This can be done with a buff that is adjusted based on population numbers for that planet (and instance of that planet):

 

The majority of players won't pay attention to the mechanics of such a buff and if the population gets out of hand, as it has on many servers, where the Republic is outnumbered 5:1 or more and Imperial players start seeing Republic players who are jumped 3:1 and then see the Republic player win they will re-evaluate their faction choice.

 

This could cause an auto-correcting population shift.

All the previous talk for a system that could? That's a lot of development hours for a brand new system to be added, for a maybe. It did not have great results for DAoC either.

 

This has to be a buff that adjusts itself constantly based on population though. If it is not then it would cause a catastrophic swing as we saw in Warhammer.

 

My suggestion would be a buff that increases damage and damage mitigation as well as grants a limited resistance to CC based on the population numbers.

 

Something like (the following is an example only):

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 50% (IE 50 Sith and 75 Reps) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 20% while also giving a 20% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 100% (IE 100 Reps and 150 Sith) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 40% while also giving a 40% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

And so on, and so forth.

 

This has to become a priority and implemented within 45 days if the game is to have a chance at stabilizing.

 

If you don't do this BioWare, then do something else, but whatever you do the clock is ticking. You have probably less than two months before this becomes a catastrophic issue.

 

 

The short is. I dont think you know what your talking about. If you were someone who any type of creditable resources or any knowledge of how a game project works you would understand that the odds of this happening are about as much as SWG reopening.

 

Your suggestion would eat up way to much development resources for something that isn't a definitive fix. Your blind speculation at the beginning leads me to believe you have just enough knowledge about Psychology to hurt yourself.

 

I do applaud your efforts though for trying to come up with a fix for the imbalance issues, but don't be so arrogant next time. So the part you said how you would fix this exactly was incorrect.

 

Cheers!

[Xzenorath]

Isn't there republic dominated servers? There has to be... I can't imagine EVERY single server is dominated by Empire... why don't they merge rep dominated servers with emp dominated servers?

 

GG problem solved, at least for a couple servers...

 

Tarro Blood seems to be somewhat balanced... I don't know if there's any place to look up the real numbers but Illum is actually pretty empty... yesterday we had some pretty sweet TM/SS like fights where we had about 10vs14 or something, it wasn't imbalanced to where we couldn't win, hell our 3 healers gave us a big advantage and we won most melees.

 

I do have to say though... there's a LOT more decked out battlemaster empires on my server than I've seen republics... I think I could count on one hand the amount of decked out reps. Hell, I could give you their names there's so few of them LOL

[Vlacke]

Isn't there republic dominated servers? There has to be... I can't imagine EVERY single server is dominated by Empire... why don't they merge rep dominated servers with emp dominated servers?

 

GG problem solved, at least for a couple servers...

 

Tarro Blood seems to be somewhat balanced... I don't know if there's any place to look up the real numbers but Illum is actually pretty empty... yesterday we had some pretty sweet TM/SS like fights where we had about 10vs14 or something, it wasn't imbalanced to where we couldn't win, hell our 3 healers gave us a big advantage and we won most melees.

 

I do have to say though... there's a LOT more decked out battlemaster empires on my server than I've seen republics... I think I could count on one hand the amount of decked out reps. Hell, I could give you their names there's so few of them LOL

 

I think that MOST EU PvP servers have vastly superior Empire numbers.

 

There are much more US servers with better balance than over here.

[Bulde]

I am all for helping create factional balances and concur with the idea. The only issue I foresee is that not everyone will always be grouped in open world pvp. So for example, if I am empire and am running around solo, and run across a rep who is also solo, I don't stand a chance against him due to the fact that somewhere else on the planet there are a bunch of empire guys running around, thereby buffing the reps. Oh well I guess...

[RyanJIee]

to the people saying that a buff is not the answer, i'm guessing you are an imp and dont have to worry about trying to win a 4vs1. something needs to be done, i cant stand starting to fight someone and 1/2 into the fight 3-4 more imps show up and save the guy i have below 1/4.

[unicornfive]

Hello BioWare.

 

You, by now, know exactly who I am and have for some time. During the build up to launch I warned you, time and time again, about the faction imbalance. I was told, by the devs no less, that there absolutely no chance of a gross faction imbalance.

 

I was correct, the devs were wrong.

 

-----

 

With that out of the way I still want to help.

 

So I am going to explain exactly what caused this imbalance and exactly how to fix it.

 

-----

 

I give this information freely with only the hopes that it fixes this game before it does reach a catastrophic point of no return.

 

-----

 

 

The Cause:

 

The cause of the faction imbalance was the pre-game hype. The Sith had a poster boy who was powerful, nearly unstoppable, and seemingly unassailable. The Sith were touted as unbeatable, unstoppable, and victorious conquerors. The Sith were never decried or vilified in any way for their actions during the course of the pre-game hype and in fact were treated like paragons.

 

One of the largest contributors to the faction imbalance was the character by the name of Darth Malgus. He was, at first, a nameless Sith that players could project their own self onto. Many players psychologically considered "themselves" this character when they were visualizing the Old Republic. This set down preconceptions which BioWare only inadvertently continued to fuel.

 

Players identified with individual characters in the trailers. Fans of the Sith identified themselves as Malgus, fans of the Jedi identified themselves as Satele, and fans of the Trooper identified themselves as the Trooper from Hope for example. It was because of this that Hope was the leading cause of the faction imbalance that came from the three cinematic trailers.

 

In "Hope" the message to the players inadvertently was as follows: "The Sith are awesome, and in a one on one fight will beat any Trooper and any Jedi. Two on one they can (barely) defeat a Sith."

 

This was actually fueled by Gnost Dural's timeline histories where he stated (regarding the events of the GHW) that the only way a Sith ever lost was when another Sith turned on them.

 

BioWare went out of their way to list off every important Sith they could, but all Republic heroes were either dead (Master Ven or Master Allusus) which sent a psychological message out: "If you want to be a hero to the Republic, you are going to die."

 

The Sith were never soundly defeated. The few times they were "defeated" it was either because of overwhelming firepower or because of extreme sacrifices. The Republic on the other hand was soundly defeated, time and again, in the pre-game hype without any similar sacrifices on the part of the Sith Empire. In fact it looked easy.

 

This sent another psychological message to the player base that was in some ways nearly subliminal.

 

The Sith were also highly defended by the devs in the pre-game build up. They were touted as "not being evil" and even Gnost Dural never used strong negative language when speaking about them. There were no real downsides to the Empire ever shown, while the flaws of the Republic were often pointed out by BioWare devs.

 

The flaws of the Republic included such things as "Poor leadership" (the senate) and "Massive dissension" within the faction at its core. The Jedi being painted as being disliked by their own faction only added to this dissension and caused many people to rally against the Jedi classes in their own faction while no such phenomena was occurring on the Sith side.

 

This was readily apparent by the massive rivalry and "sniping" going on between the Trooper forums and the Jedi Knight forums.

 

There was time to fix this with counter-hype pre-game, but BioWare chose not to, and thus we have now a massive faction imbalance.

 

-----

 

How to fix it:

 

At one time counter-hype was a viable answer to the issues. That, unfortunately, won't work now. There is only one way to fix the issue now and normalize population numbers and it, unfortunately, is now a gameplay issue.

 

The gameplay issue, however, only rears its head in one situation: "Open World PVP" and thus efforts should be concentrated there.

 

The population imbalance does impact PVE but to a far lesser extent and in Warzones, aside from gear issues caused by the recent exploits, the impact is non-existent.

 

If the Republic (or the Sith) are outnumbered by 100% or more in server population, or at least population on that world, they need to receive a buff that lets them compete. If there are 90 people on Ilum and 60 of them are Sith then the Republic classes need to be able to handle themselves literally in 2:1 encounters.

 

This can be done with a buff that is adjusted based on population numbers for that planet (and instance of that planet):

 

The majority of players won't pay attention to the mechanics of such a buff and if the population gets out of hand, as it has on many servers, where the Republic is outnumbered 5:1 or more and Imperial players start seeing Republic players who are jumped 3:1 and then see the Republic player win they will re-evaluate their faction choice.

 

This could cause an auto-correcting population shift.

 

This has to be a buff that adjusts itself constantly based on population though. If it is not then it would cause a catastrophic swing as we saw in Warhammer.

 

My suggestion would be a buff that increases damage and damage mitigation as well as grants a limited resistance to CC based on the population numbers.

 

Something like (the following is an example only):

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 50% (IE 50 Sith and 75 Reps) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 20% while also giving a 20% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 100% (IE 100 Reps and 150 Sith) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 40% while also giving a 40% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

And so on, and so forth.

 

This has to become a priority and implemented within 45 days if the game is to have a chance at stabilizing.

 

If you don't do this BioWare, then do something else, but whatever you do the clock is ticking. You have probably less than two months before this becomes a catastrophic issue.

 

I chose Sith on every star wars game i played, i chose sith here, and i ll keep choosing sith over jedi in every future star wars game.

Even if they buff republic with a +10% dmg buff, i ll still stay sith.

And most of my friends did the same...they only chose sith on earlier games...

I dont know what you talking about bioware favored sith over jedi...

Tbh i prefer the guardian animations i saw than the lazy sledgehammer swings that juggernaut has and i allready made a lot whine posts about this.

[dadamowsky]

(...)

My suggestion would be a buff that increases damage and damage mitigation as well as grants a limited resistance to CC based on the population numbers.

(...)

 

About the reasons - well I must agree with it. This was very good, very pleasing and very emotional ad campaign, that favored one side. Marketing staff made a great job, but without coordination between marketing and gameplay top-bras we get what we have.

 

 

What options do we have? Nothing safe and free from risk. Sorry BW, you're going to make the decisions that will (that must since it's already to late to do it painlessly!) hurt in the very countable measures ($ub$ that is) right after implementation, but might (however, only might) also save the game in the long run. Doing nothing will most likely limit game's attraction.

1. Sharding planet to smaller instances, but not taking whole population of players avalaible. And - most important - forcing both sides to be as even in numbers as possible by letting in only certain amount of players. Yup, most populated faction would have initially problem with entering battlezones at all. Some would unsub, some would reroll, some would abandon planet PvP and stay only on WZs.

2. OPs buff. But seeing one faction beeing favorised because the other one is stronger in nubmers can invoke massive rage and misunderstanding - eventually players unsubs. If 1 Rep can easily handle 2 Imps, while he shouldn't, it is not going to help neither the PvP, neither the game itself.

3. Drop the Ilum (and the concept of planetary battlezones) as top PvP place, and focus on the objective based WZs development and implementing arena for normal fraging. Fill Ilum (later, much much later, after the WZs and arena improvements were introduced) with standard PvE content to save it from waste... at least partialy. Idea of planetary BZs might come back when player base would stabilize. No BZs would of course mean missing one feature - which is not really encouraging for players and their cash.

 

And one idea that would probably need a lot of work, funds and time to develop, but cannot backfire. Ok, it can but only in terms of time that gamers would have to wait for it.

4. Create Ilum a cross server instance, autobalancing in numbers, joined via PvP queing system. That would give both - people to make it massPvP and balance of both sides. And constant flow of players making ques reasonable in time. Limit might be flexible, letting more or less player in, regarding on demand and qued players. Yet I'm not even sure if it is possible from the dev side, and I'm afraid to guess how long would it take to make it, then test it, and introduce it.

Edited January 19, 2012 by dadamowsky

[Jaegon]

Why not just put a population cap on the empire side based on number of republic players in the Ilum zone, and a queue for people that want to get in to the zone, not only will it fix the Ilum issue, but it will give sith an incentive to fix the ridiculous 4 : 1 population ratio on almost every server.

[Xzenorath]

I think that MOST EU PvP servers have vastly superior Empire numbers.

 

There are much more US servers with better balance than over here.

 

Oh, right I didn't consider EU, makes sense, with the posh accents and all.

[Gragus]

Majority of the people playing Empire is due to the main fact that Republic classes/races are incredibly dull and boring in comparison.

 

I agree that this is true, which is why I find playing my empire toons vastly more enjoyable than playing republic (Alas, my son LOVES his trooper. Thank you clone wars! lol). IMO, the empire's storyline/environment is simply better and more varied, classes are more unique and interesting, and combat animations are smoother. It seems to me that just about everything republic side was rushed.

 

However, there *are* PVP imbalances, too - real or mostly perceived, it does not matter. We know this is true on the simple observation that PVE server populations are more balanced than PVP servers'.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Gragus

[Masanis]

WRONG. In WoW vanilla, Horde was so underpopulated it wasnt even funny. Get your facts straight.

 

People started flocking to the Horde quite later on. The beginning of the change happened when people realized that Will of the Forsaken was by far the most imba racial around.

 

Your post is mostly correct. Will of the Forsaken followed by the Blood Elf racial in the Burning Legion helped start the shift towards the Horde.

 

I remember the 1.5 hour Warsong Gulch queues when that BG first came out (and I also remember very rarely playing Alterac Valley due to the imbalance.)

 

I had already planned on rolling Republic, but when I heard that there was going to be a massive faction imbalance I had to go with the underrepresented side. It just forces you to play smarter and get better in the long run.

[Nulli]

Couple of solutions eomployed in other games:

 

1) diminishing returns.

 

PvP rewards diminish based on valor rank of victor/vanquished.

PvP rewards diminish based on server population balance

 

2) improving returns

 

Gear prices (commendation vendor) reduced based on population balance

NPC defenders get increasingly stronger based on population imbalance

Flashpoints get increasingly easier based on population imbalance

 

I like my comment enough to start it its own thread.

[Surfiehbk]

The Devs knew that there would be a faction imbalance. In fact they even facilitated the imbalance. There are a lot of reasons for why this imbalance exists, but the most important is the coolness factor. The Sith look cooler than the Republic. Jedi Knights are the backbone of the Stars Wars universe, and they should look cool. But Bioware went and gave them the ugliest armor (Battlemaster) ever created while giving the Sith Warriors awesome looking armor.

 

Bioware claimed that the Jedi Knight armor looking bad was subjective, but that’s completely false since 99% of the players thought the Jedi Knight armor looked horrible. That turns something that is subjective into something that is objective.

 

The Sith also have cooler abilities. Not only do their abilities look better, they are actually better than the Republic counterparts. Why would you roll a Jedi Consular to throw rocks at someone when you could roll a Sith Inquistor and shoot lightning while having an advantage since the lightning version is instant cast?

Edited January 19, 2012 by Surfiehbk

[iceperson]

lol the OP thinks he's special

[Nikushim]

I've played alot on Rep. side, have three chars at lvl 30 (i like the diversity so i play different classes ) and made about three days ago a Sith Sorc as they kept handing me my *** in PvP (know your enemy you know) and to be honest, im having more fun on the Sith Sorc than i had on ANY of my Rep. Characters! The quests are more immersive and actually have a goal compared to the Jedi's who is more like running around, helping him, saving them, find this and finding this...

 

The class quests for the Jadi Shadow is depressing up to 30. All you do is like look for the the antidote and the evil 'presence' making jedi go nuts. Trooper is alright, but downright boring - why would you go around space with an elite unit hunting down deserter... only to convert them back to light side and life time in prison :/

 

I dont have a fix, none of us really have! But i would begin by saying that if the Rep. side was not so downright boring! Both in the way they are all talking, but the apperance as well! I know that me and most of my friends would continue on our Reps instead of the Imps! (we are 11 people, so thats 11 people in Shadow Runner that have changed sides because Imps are geniunly more fun to play!)

[Batslav]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/394417_10150500938104807_11455644806_8871673_324213102_n.jpg

[Masanis]

Id be happy if those sith lightning bolts didnt bypass my armor and shields to start. that may have something to do with the imbalance. As a trooper im shocked(pun intended) that apparently in the star wars universe trooper armor doesnt even have the same flame retardant properties a modern day race car driver has... I mean one would think with the non metalic armor and insulating properties of the gear troopers would be a bit more rsistant to the lightning and flame abilities we see in game...

 

Why are you shocked? Stormtrooper armor didn't do a darn thing against rocks and rope flung by little, furry bears in ROTJ. You should be happy that it stops anything at all.

[mgbaron]

You can write all the walls of text you want. The reason Empire outnumber Jedi is because they can shoot lightning or they have a Boba Fettish.

 

period.

 

I think that the OP raises some interesting points about the games marketing but the truth is that most gamers didn't pay that close attention. I actually think this comment is much closer to the truth. The imperial classes are just cooler (now empirically proven).

[Benbjammin]

You're a genius bro. Every person in here wants to think their class is better than other classes in some way. One way to do that is to give the underdog the advantage in a 1 on 1 fight. Emps will switch over because they will want to go around and faceroll people jsut like they do now with sheer numbers. Hell, I wanna faceroll people in a 1 on 1 fight too! If that happens it would bring Ilum into a game of strategy, 2 sides of equal power fighting for bases. Instead of 1 side owning all bases and the other side luring that side into the turrets in their base.

 

GG

[SWImara]

Its an issue of player preference pure and simple. "Bad side" is always more popular in MMOs, particularly an MMO with any sort of focus on PvP. The only time this faction imbalance should be any sort of issue is in world PvP where a few precautions (like turrets one shotting people near rez areas) will resolve them. If people want fair and even fights, thats what warzones are for. If you're getting stomped in warzones, I'm not sure what to tell ya.

[Cryonax]

Hello BioWare.

 

You, by now, know exactly who I am and have for some time. During the build up to launch I warned you, time and time again, about the faction imbalance. I was told, by the devs no less, that there absolutely no chance of a gross faction imbalance.

 

I was correct, the devs were wrong.

 

-----

 

With that out of the way I still want to help.

 

So I am going to explain exactly what caused this imbalance and exactly how to fix it.

 

-----

 

I give this information freely with only the hopes that it fixes this game before it does reach a catastrophic point of no return.

 

-----

 

 

The Cause:

 

The cause of the faction imbalance was the pre-game hype. The Sith had a poster boy who was powerful, nearly unstoppable, and seemingly unassailable. The Sith were touted as unbeatable, unstoppable, and victorious conquerors. The Sith were never decried or vilified in any way for their actions during the course of the pre-game hype and in fact were treated like paragons.

 

One of the largest contributors to the faction imbalance was the character by the name of Darth Malgus. He was, at first, a nameless Sith that players could project their own self onto. Many players psychologically considered "themselves" this character when they were visualizing the Old Republic. This set down preconceptions which BioWare only inadvertently continued to fuel.

 

Players identified with individual characters in the trailers. Fans of the Sith identified themselves as Malgus, fans of the Jedi identified themselves as Satele, and fans of the Trooper identified themselves as the Trooper from Hope for example. It was because of this that Hope was the leading cause of the faction imbalance that came from the three cinematic trailers.

 

In "Hope" the message to the players inadvertently was as follows: "The Sith are awesome, and in a one on one fight will beat any Trooper and any Jedi. Two on one they can (barely) defeat a Sith."

 

This was actually fueled by Gnost Dural's timeline histories where he stated (regarding the events of the GHW) that the only way a Sith ever lost was when another Sith turned on them.

 

BioWare went out of their way to list off every important Sith they could, but all Republic heroes were either dead (Master Ven or Master Allusus) which sent a psychological message out: "If you want to be a hero to the Republic, you are going to die."

 

The Sith were never soundly defeated. The few times they were "defeated" it was either because of overwhelming firepower or because of extreme sacrifices. The Republic on the other hand was soundly defeated, time and again, in the pre-game hype without any similar sacrifices on the part of the Sith Empire. In fact it looked easy.

 

This sent another psychological message to the player base that was in some ways nearly subliminal.

 

The Sith were also highly defended by the devs in the pre-game build up. They were touted as "not being evil" and even Gnost Dural never used strong negative language when speaking about them. There were no real downsides to the Empire ever shown, while the flaws of the Republic were often pointed out by BioWare devs.

 

The flaws of the Republic included such things as "Poor leadership" (the senate) and "Massive dissension" within the faction at its core. The Jedi being painted as being disliked by their own faction only added to this dissension and caused many people to rally against the Jedi classes in their own faction while no such phenomena was occurring on the Sith side.

 

This was readily apparent by the massive rivalry and "sniping" going on between the Trooper forums and the Jedi Knight forums.

 

There was time to fix this with counter-hype pre-game, but BioWare chose not to, and thus we have now a massive faction imbalance.

 

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How to fix it:

 

At one time counter-hype was a viable answer to the issues. That, unfortunately, won't work now. There is only one way to fix the issue now and normalize population numbers and it, unfortunately, is now a gameplay issue.

 

The gameplay issue, however, only rears its head in one situation: "Open World PVP" and thus efforts should be concentrated there.

 

The population imbalance does impact PVE but to a far lesser extent and in Warzones, aside from gear issues caused by the recent exploits, the impact is non-existent.

 

If the Republic (or the Sith) are outnumbered by 100% or more in server population, or at least population on that world, they need to receive a buff that lets them compete. If there are 90 people on Ilum and 60 of them are Sith then the Republic classes need to be able to handle themselves literally in 2:1 encounters.

 

This can be done with a buff that is adjusted based on population numbers for that planet (and instance of that planet):

 

The majority of players won't pay attention to the mechanics of such a buff and if the population gets out of hand, as it has on many servers, where the Republic is outnumbered 5:1 or more and Imperial players start seeing Republic players who are jumped 3:1 and then see the Republic player win they will re-evaluate their faction choice.

 

This could cause an auto-correcting population shift.

 

This has to be a buff that adjusts itself constantly based on population though. If it is not then it would cause a catastrophic swing as we saw in Warhammer.

 

My suggestion would be a buff that increases damage and damage mitigation as well as grants a limited resistance to CC based on the population numbers.

 

Something like (the following is an example only):

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 50% (IE 50 Sith and 75 Reps) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 20% while also giving a 20% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 100% (IE 100 Reps and 150 Sith) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 40% while also giving a 40% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

And so on, and so forth.

 

This has to become a priority and implemented within 45 days if the game is to have a chance at stabilizing.

 

If you don't do this BioWare, then do something else, but whatever you do the clock is ticking. You have probably less than two months before this becomes a catastrophic issue.

 

 

 

While I agree that this could help, i think that it could also be a cause for abuse, I know that, having several accounts, I might be incllned to fly some lowbie alts over there and just /dance. You know, just to skew the numbers in our favor, or at least less in theirs.

[Halvos]

My suggestion would be a buff that increases damage and damage mitigation as well as grants a limited resistance to CC based on the population numbers.

 

Something like (the following is an example only):

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 50% (IE 50 Sith and 75 Reps) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 20% while also giving a 20% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

If one side outnumbers the other side by 100% (IE 100 Reps and 150 Sith) then the lower population side gets a buff that increases their HP and Damage by 40% while also giving a 40% chance to ignore/break a CC.

 

And so on, and so forth.

 

This has to become a priority and implemented within 45 days if the game is to have a chance at stabilizing.

 

If you don't do this BioWare, then do something else, but whatever you do the clock is ticking. You have probably less than two months before this becomes a catastrophic issue.

 

Hate to break it to you. But WoW tried this with Wintergrasp and it failed horribly. Fact is, either the buff the lower pop faction receives isn't strong enough and they still die outnumbered or it's too strong and they completely steamroll the other side. Wintergrasp became such a joke, that you had a handful of people who were essentially mini-bosses. While fun briefly, it changed nothing.

 

The only real way to fix a faction imbalance after release is to open up free transfers and really just hope for the best. They could also lock any new characters being created on the Empire side on the servers where the difference is extreme.

 

Truthfully, this is why three factions would have been a much better choice for this game. When one faction outnumbers the other two, the other two team up and suddenly it's even again.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Halvos