How One Of Classic WoW's LAST Balanced Servers Fell 

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I don’t think the server consolidation is a drastic move really. The ones they are consolidating are *literally* dead. I logged into my old vanilla toon on Rattlegore to see what the status was before taking the free transfer, and I was (not joking) the ONLY horde player online. It will have little to no impact on the player base, it’s more just consolidating wasted server resources.

It’s honestly kind of mind blowing the Grob Gang has maintained 50/50 despite every other server being completely dominated by one faction.

You forgot to mention that Firemaw Horde abused a loophole where you didn't incur a transfer cooldown when using a free character transfer, so they hopped over to Razorgore, and then again to Gehennas, all for free.

We holding it out on Grobbulus!

Just by looking at the thumbnail, I already do not agree. I’ve been on Grobbulus, the only true 50-50, since day 1 and I PREFER AND LOVE it like this.

I wish Grobbulus would be locked. We have so many toxic people flooding in and it killed the RP scene... I want it to come back, but that's not going to happen if the server stays open to transfers and character creation

I wonder if this "faction minority exodus" will happen to Grobbulus? It's a PvP RP realm US West with 51.5% horde, best balanced I've seen. I feel lucky to play there

There should be separate "forced balance" servers, where balance would be maintained through longer queues for major faction

Create official "Balanced Faction" servers and you must agree to the terms that Blizzard has control to lock and reopen character creations and transfers at will to keep it balanced. Folks that want a balanced server to play on should have no qualms with agreeing to that if it keeps their server factions within 5% of each other.

Videos like this just make me realize how much of a miracle that Grobbulus is. I think it should have deserved a mention at least

u forgot to mention that it was a mistake/loophole made by blizzard that allowed players to transfer from firemaw to razorgore to gehennas for free.. People really went out of their way to join the horde mega server

KEEP GROBBULUS EVEN!

You missed an important point about the Horde migration from Firemaw to Gehennas. There was no direct free migration to Gehennas from Firemaw, but there was a loophole that some found out. You could migrate all you characters for free to Razogore and from then you could again migrate all you characters for free to Gehennas. The loophole was the thing that made most of horde go from Firemaw to Gehennas. The fact that is was free but only open until blizz found out made EVERYEONE wanted to use it before it was too late. And that was the reason most of the horde migrated in only 24 hours.

Options: 1. offer people 2 months game time for switching to lesser populated faction 2. offer one way faction swaps 3. offer a free pet or a free title, unique only to switchers 4. offer some sort of cool cosmetic for switchers 5. lock new characters getting made past a 60/40 split on any server theres loads of things they could do if they had any will at all.

I hope grobbulus stays as it is It feels like the last balanced server left

The Firemaw Exodus was a real wake-up call concerning the player community. So many people just blindly following the GDKP Mafia Guilds and Botters, destroying the last balanced server and moving to a mono-faction realm. Shows that the vast majority of „pvp players“ don’t really care about the game itself (or the fun in it for that matter). They have optimized the game and care more about being able to join a gdkp run at 10am for any raid rather than having a good community or immersive world. Very sad testament... pathetic sheep ofc, but still sad

The faction balance problem is actually pretty easy to fix, and I'm surprised Blizzard has never thought of it. Perhaps they have and can't code it. The solution? Dynamic matching. 1. Make all servers single faction. This happens over time dynamically by player migration but just make it official. Name severs by faction, ex. Thrall would be horde only. 2. Each week match the alliance and horde servers by size. Biggest alliance and biggest horde server are linked, next biggest together, etc. The next week this is updated if populations vary changing a servers rank. 3. Do the same for layers. If people of one faction flee a layer to avoid the other faction the layer will dynamically re associate it such that faction representation in a given layer is as balanced as possible. There should be a delay but not too long on layers being reassociated. The one problem this can't fix is if people flee a faction completely. Horde is already 60% of the PVP population and as retail showed, people don't want balanced PVP and over time I could see alliance PVP completely dying.

This is the first RU-vid video that I've ever seen where the sponsor's message got interrupted by a RU-vid commercial. "We interrupt this commercial with another commercial."

One thing that would help a little bit is to connect all the 3 AH (Horde, Alliance and goblin), at least if you are on the smaller faction you can still gets the mats you need.

I'm convinced that the issue is that people are intrigued by the idea of world PvP, but they don't actually want to engage with the content.

You sort of need to salute Grobbulus players for maintaining the almost only real PvP server in Classic WoW, certainly the most balanced one.

They always should've had a maximum ratio difference of 45:55 with new servers, each account representing one individual in the population regardless of how many toons on the server (all have to be same faction). This ratio can be extended to at most 40:60 but your account needs an invite from a player on the server. Each player gets one account invite, but will not work past 60%.

I recently transferred to grobbulous, it’s 50 50 and I love it, I haven’t had this much fun since classic release

One of the big things that also killed big open world pvp was that once you got 2 raids against each, the lag just became unbearable where you would have 2-3+ seconds of delay and just couldn't play properly whatsoever. I _believe_ they still have this same problem on retail as well. On private servers you could have hundreds of players in an area fighting, aoeing, etc and there was no noticeable lag, but the official Blizzard large company servers lag out to all hell with just a fraction of that.

Grobb has nearly 20k players and it's almost exactly 50/50 Horde Ally ratio. Blizz doesn't have to do anything. If you want world pvp on a large realm, play on Grobb, if you dont, play on Benny or Faerlina. There's something for both types of players. It's not an issue. I'm on Grobb and it's amazing. The world is so alive and most zones, both Outlands and Azeroth alike, are a warzone. If I didnt care about that, I'd be on Benny or Faerlina.

The solution was so easy, so self-evident, laying before their eyes for years all along. People were calling for this in/after the disastrous start of classic p2. After the server locks when there were hour-long qeues already. After the balance started to tip over. After the AQ War Effort was over. After removing layers, which, while problematic on their own, at least provided members of the weaker faction a chance to escape their gankers. After server communities (which did exist, on some servers more, on some less) started to disperse: Locking servers for ONE faction. And preferably before queues kicked in. An easy, absolutely no-brainer solution. All their "issues" they've raised before (keeping your name, technology, server identity, etc. etc.) would've been cowered by this. Instead, in their sheer hubris, allowed for the loophole which sealed the fate of Firemaw. How the hell could they allow free transfer to a dead server for free - from which you could transfer to ANY server for free. But if you thought that's all - well, it's happening AGAIN. Couple that with player behaviour - and at this point, unless you play on classic era or one of the private servers, faction balance is dead for good.

Myself, my husband, his sister, plus my brother and sister were all playing together on a pve server. We however decided to move to a new server due to balance concerns it was about 40% horde and 60% alliance. The first day the server was available we switched over, fingers crossed after joining the discord for the server, we thought that it would at least be balanced but that it looked like it would be a horde dominant server. The first few days the server grew with horde players and some alliance, but slowly it began to scew to alliance again. After about 3 weeks it was predominantly alliance and even worse than before, the server never grew beyond maybe 2 or 3k and it was at least 80% alliance. We went from bad to worse and we couldnt move our toons back. We would have had to reroll at hte time. They ended up all quitting and never came back. I myself rerolled and played a bit alone but ended up quitting too (during classic vanilla)

There's a critical piece of information you missed. On July 10th players of Firemaw discovered a glitch. They managed to transfer their characters to Razorgore, and then receive an additional free transfer to Gehennas. Horde players took the opportunity. Within one week they sent the 63-37% balance server to 93-7%. Rougly 8k horde players dropped within 2 days, as seen on ironforge pro. All thanks to an exploit, and a major f.up on Blizzard's end.

I was on bigglesworth as it slowly died. Most of us were going to transfer to whitemane, but then free transfers opened, and one option was grobbulus. Honestly we never would have considered it but a bunch of horde and alliance guild leaders from grob were working together and reaching out to get people not just to xfer to grob, but to keep the server balanced. I dont know how all of this was organized but i bet it would make for a great video. “How grob stays balanced”. Im proud to be a part of this server. Maybe one day i’ll even see barnybee on his bug mount somewhere 😂

Please just don’t ruin Grobb man. Idk why so many players don’t care about faction balance but leave that ideology on other servers

Grobb mob checking in

No speak of Grobb Mobb ? come on now , RPPVP is still a pvp server.

I'm really glad I played on Zandalar Tribe. Even though it died in TBC, in Classic it often felt like the only balanced EU pvp server, and while everyone was complaning in phase two, we were having ton of fun fighting over who gets to control which zone.

Simple solution: Faction pairing. Take a faction minority and crossrealm it with a server where that faction is the majority. Example: Atiesh alliance (81.9%) gets pooled with Golemagg alliance (8%). The Atiesh peeps get Horde to contend with, and the Golemagg peeps aren't so lonely anymore. No need for transfers, no need for radical fire-in-all-directions crossrealming.

Faction population caps per server are the only solution.

We have no one to blame but ourselves for the downfall of warcraft

I always thought it would be worth trying Alliance-only and Horde-only servers, with Blizzard pairing them up on their end. Basically, the highest pop horde server would be paired/merged with the highest pop alliance server, second highest with second highest, etc. This way, they could reevaluate every month or couple of weeks and if there are massive population changes, just rearrange and re-pair servers. This way they could move large populations around without having to do server transfers and keep individual servers basically intact.

On Whitemane NA, we were balanced for a long time, but then eventually went 99% horde. The dormant alliance population is maybe coming back now, for the wotlk balance that favors humans. Since the bonus XP started, there's a noticeable amount of alliance. Especially geared 60s leveling 60-70.

Blizzard should have done their jobs and kept realm balance under control at the start of the game. Too late now and they don't care lol.

What i just thought of: Sharding, crossrealm activities and signup systems proved to work very well in the past. What if we combine this? Give players the option to join ‘the pvp realm’, which is a crossrealm layer instance of the outside world, accessible by players on any server. This will finally achieve the BALANCED open world pvp that players desire. Now ‘the pvp’ layer doesn’t have that ring to it, so we’ll call it ‘The Brave World’ for now. All players of all realms can join The Brave World (pvp layer) by turning their ‘brave adventurer’ option on. The brave world is a pvp crossrealm layer that you can only access by zoning in to it, like a battleground. Though it will feel more like joining ‘the pvp layer’ because you keep your current spot and it will feel like transitioning into another layer on the same realm, which we already experienced before. Just like a battleground fills its ‘instances’ evenly, this brave world (pvp layer) will be filled by an evenly distribution of horde and alliance players by a sign-up system. Think about alliance from firemaw and horde from gehennas, and many players from all realms signing up for this. With too much of your faction on it compared to the other one, you would be placed in a queue. For example it could be a margin of 50-100 player difference by faction. This pvp realm would still be able to fill up to thousands (say 5k) of players on each side, as long as the two factions equally fill it up. If one pvp layer really becomes overpopulated, then we make 2 pvp layers. ‘Why join a crossrealm pvp layer instead of safely exploring the world on the layers of my alliance- or horde only realm?’ You might ask. Well, why did we create characters on pvp realms in the first place? You were willing to face some foes while you were walking outside. How will this pvp layer be playable and not filled up with ganking rogues only? How will i still be able to quest on it? Will this bring big open world pvp fights back? - Players could be given a buff as a small incentive to join the brave world. It rewards their bravery and motivates them to treat it both as a real leveling and exploration world but also an opportunity to form big faction fights. An example of this buff would be ‘Brave adventurer: + 20% reputation and xp gained and +20% honor gained while in a raid group’. (The auctionhouse and mailbox would still be linked towards your own realm. You will not be able to trade items with players from other realms And you would zone out of this crossrealm layer and into a layer of your own realm if you toggle of ‘brave adventurer’.)

i feel like the people that want a balanced server is a loud minority and/or sweaty rogues. World pvp sucks and always has sucked. Getting ganked while questing is nothing but an annoyance. It's for people that can't arena and want to feel good at the game by either ganking lowbies or only picking fights if they have an extreme advantage. If balanced servers were as popular as some people think then there would be more. But the majority has shown that they dont want balanced servers by choosing to swap to a favorable server for their faction.

Players: "When are you going to make servers balanced?" Blizzard: "You don't want that. You say you do, but you don't."

i just don't understand why they didn't just make it so it's not possible to go over a 40/60 balance. If there's 60% alliance then no more alliance characters can be created or transfered until the balance is closer to 50/50. Sorted.... -.-

This whole classic WoW thing has been very sad. I was so ready for a nostalgic experience, but instead, we saw both Blizzard, and ourselves as mass groups of people, botch one thing after another. The snowballing of small advantages for one faction on almost every server was so sad to see, and I'm just glad I stopped playing it before it got too insane.

Horde left firemaw because it was free to transfer from firemaw to a dead server, and then free to transfer off the dead server to gehennas. blizzard screwed up

I joined Gehennas-EU Alliance side when I got back in WoW and couldn't find a balanced server, and tbh, I like the vibe of the community. Sure it could be less dead, but we get to know the people who hang around, especially with a nice guild.

I was a horde at firemaw, just started up two weeks ago. Didn't know that horde had left the server. Got chased out by continuously getting ganked, so now I am at Gehennas where I belong apperntly.

honestly i wish blizz would just lock character creation on servers when needed more often

Honestly a handful of massive servers would probably be the best solution. Things that might "help" is faction specific queues on servers. This kinda worked in private servers, but only kinda.

The problem is giving people access to transfers at all, as soon as they feel their side is lacking just a little bit they take the easy way out and make the problem even worse. Just get rid of transfers and the 40/60 ratio will be preserved, the lacking side wont quit so easily when all their character progress is on the line.

Interesting stuff. Thanks for the vids!

The more important question: Does faction balance actually matter? It seems to most players, the answer is no. The bigger server problem is the mass migration away from small servers onto mega servers leaving people forced to transfer or take MM out of there ORPG.

Gotta admit, I'm laughing my ass off at all the arrogant douchebag wanting to be on PvP servers, and then watch them flee with their tails behind the hindlegs to PvE/Horde dominated servers.

I don't understand the point of War mode when we were already able to toggle pvp mode on regular non pvp servers.

grobbulus best server, even balance, pvp and high pop

There a way to make single faction servers. then do like seasons (2-3 months or something) where your faction server is paired with a similar sized server group from the other faction. set it up so it attempts to keep server groups paired until the discrepancy becomes to large.

"Players seem to just want big servers with one faction" This is wrong and Firemaw has proven it. The server stood balanced and growing until the lock. The only reason it died is because bots could no longer supply mat demand because they couldn't create new characters. Players don't want one faction, they want cheap prices on items, which blizzard is not able to supply because they limit the amount of players till the lower populated faction leaves.

I give zero fucks about PvP. I just wanna play Horde, I wanna do dungeons and raids, and I want a lot of people on the server. Simple as.

I don't understand why Blizzard wouldn't just force balance servers... Take guilds that are massive but active and move them and balance everything. Like four interns could do it over the course of three months...

Cross faction is the best thing they've implemented in a long time, preventing gameplay improvements to protect lore elements that not even the writers of the story care to protect is just silly, if there was any form of consistency in the history of wow that justified maintaining this class-faction lock I would understand, but so far alliance and horde have teamed up more times than they have fought, the next step is to simply have a quest chain that allows one to fully change factions and enable faction choice for any race upon character creation.

Grob rise up

I came back specifically for the animosity. If we don’t have that, I’m gone.

What's sad is what happened to Grob after everyone left, 1 weird guild remained gatekeeping the entire server and they're yeah as bad as they sound.

I just don't understand this at all. Everything about Classic WoW is based on the community. That thing that was destroyed by Blizzard with LFG/LFR/ and mega servers. This same community that wanted to play a version of WoW without all of those things, seem to be hell bent on turning Classic in to Retail. They bitched about not having LFG in Wrath and got Blizzard to cave on it in under a week. They are doing everything that they can do to get on some mega server. They have done everything in their power to buy the leveling experience through boosting to the point that Blizzard finally had to kill boosting. If you don't like Classic WoW the way it is, why play it? Why are people who (allegedly) don't like retail, trying so hard to turn Classic WoW into retail? That whole "You think you do, but you don't." quote that J Allen got flamed to death for.....all the guys who are involved in these activities....you're proving him right.

Grobbulus is a 50/50 pvp server bro... It's maintained it since classic's launch. RPPVP is the trick. All these RU-vidrs discount data staring them in the face. Emerald Dream on retail is the same way. It doesn't fit their narrative so it gets ignored.

The Bald One sent me

I’m one of the few horde left on firemaw, we will prevail

I am routinely reminded that i am one of the few people that loved the open world pvp mess that was in phase 2 onwards and even in phase 1 of classic vanilla wow. I loved the hostility of it all, it made stepping outside a city or town truly dangerous. I know you would die a lot but the few times you were able to evade and escape your doom made up for every single failure.

its not hard to achieve. They literally just have to stop letting people make characters on a side that is unbalanced.

Love the new cooking skills in your general chat! Congrats. Keep up the good work. I keep watching even though I quit in TBC :D

I just don't understand why anyone wants to pick a PvP server, but then only play on a 99% one sided server..at that point you're on a pve server where you can occasionally steamroll a random stubborn player. I know its complex, it just kinda bugs me that alot of people don't want to play on a balanced server for long.

some random ideas...1) release the actual server population/faction % numbers. then let the players decide themselves where to roll on. 2) also maybe allow an FREE to anywhere/faction transfer 1 time per toon. or 3) make everyone factionless by default, then you can choose which faction to join. can reset every X months.

In my opinion, what really killed classic servers and SoM was the fact that there was a 5000 server capacity + up to 10 layers. It should be 7-10k population capacity and 0 layers. That is one of the main reasons why private servers was so successfull.

There's an issue in the video, transfers to Firemaw have still not been opened. Only character creation has been enabled.

As someone who has spend my entire wow classic career on windseeker, I am happy to see it with a good balance and a small but healthy population :)

Having a handful of megaservers available with an optional cross-server war mode is the end game.

grobbulus is the last good classic server, but it can't stand forever, rip

I know many people have pointed out that the free transfer exploit via Razorgore was a huge reason why the mass exodus was able to happen, however I've not seen anyone mention another key part of the exodus - Real Money Trading. Although there is the obvious "we don't want to be a minority faction" drive to the exodus, the actual trigger is a slight bit more complicated. After Blizzard had stopped character creation and server transfers to Firemaw, queues that up to that point had been 13k+ at peak disappeared VERY quickly, but ironforge pro was reporting the same number of players. What ironforge does not report is bots, and Firemaw was absolutely filled with them. With the closing of the server, banned accounts could no longer create new account to make more bots and more importantly they couldn't take advantage of the free transfer from dead servers where they would farm materials unchallenged and then move them to Firemaw. This is why Firemaw saw huge inflation with Haste Potions go from 7g a pop to a whopping 25g at it's height. This combined with the announcement of wrath and summer dried up big GDKP spenders, there are a huge amount of guilds and organisations that ran GDKPs on Firemaw and suddenly saw a drought of income as well as a huge inflation. This was by no means a horde only problem, but when these GDKP communities decided to root up and all move to Gehennas a domino effect occurred where no one wanted to be left as a minority faction. So in the end, all though Blizzard's "decision" did cause the issue, their reluctance to fight RMT also had an important role to play in the events that occurred.

Gehennas player here. I migrated from recently dead Mograine and all I can say it's pure PvE without a drop of PvP (which is not surprising), but it does not feel like Classic. Not without world pvp and ocassional encounters. Even though server is live basically 24h a day, it just does not feel right. Firemaw horde migrated due to Razorgore loophole, but something needs to be done with mega servers, for real. Maybe merge them together and make a giga server xD who knows what might be a solution now, if there is any at all

I was leveling up a paladin on Faerlina when phase 2 dropped and literally overnight the game became unplayable to me. 30-45min corpse runs to get to BRD was killing any drive I had to play that character. It was honestly a really painful experience that made me transfer to PvE server and I never looked back. I blame toxic player behavior on why faction balance can't be achieved.

Classic needs a flat damage% boost to the underpopulated faction on all servers in all outdoor content

Video starts at 6:43

What I appreciate the most is that you used actual footage of Firemaw Orgrimar as I recognized some of the players there. Actually bis wow classic content creator

I think the best solution is for blizzard to connect horde heavy servers with alliance heavy server. Maybe they can have alliance and horde players on differnt servers. And they can connect them together depending on the balance on those servers. Clearly we cant relly on players to keep faction balance, it must be done actively by blizzard, kinda like a dungeon master.

Grobbulus is basically even in a pvp setting no hype for my server being even for so long

The factions have had no reason to fight for years. The population should be locked at 50/50 and fuck anyone else they can find another server.

Grom: Fortunately they only hurt my pride Thrall: Great because we get out, we left the human lands forever *Goes to genhennas*

I know nothing of the logistics behind implementing this idea here, but what about creating connections between 3 servers? With the example of War Mode, the idea is that you have a non-PVP server dominated by each faction and a PVP server that tries to self-balance players coming from and going to those servers.

Benediction was so awesome throughout classic. 50/50 population throughout all phases. Now it’s so overpopulated that you can’t even read the chat. It’s just endless GDKP and boost spamming.

I wonder if WoW should consider an Eve Online approach? Where all players on each faction can interact peacefully until they sign up for faction warfare, where they are unable to enter the opposing faction's cities without being attacked. On top of that, if they join up in faction warfare, they need to rebuild their relations with the opposing faction if they ever want to reenter those cities after they retire from faction warfare. Maybe employ guild vs. guild just like in Eve Online? That'd be interesting.

Faction-based login queue. Only characters/accounts are able to log in fro mthe character selection screen, when the balance etween factions is within the 10% (45 : 55) difference. And when 1 faction gets overpop, a queue pops up untill some people fro mthe other faction logs in. This will ensure people will want to find a balanced realm or they cannot play.

Here from Grobbulus NA and I hope our server stays balanced. The last one now

I played on Whitemane since the beginning of classic where it had always maintained comfortable faction balance. Perhaps 5 points advantage horde 10 at worst. This changed with TBC, however. When all the smaller servers began to be abandoned, all the horde players chose Whitemane as their destination. That 50/50 balance quickly became 60/40 and then 70/30 and by the time our guild decided to bail to Benediction, it was 80/20. Getting into SSC was a nightmare and would take most classes 3-4 death runs. We knew Caverns of Times would be a nightmare and Sunwell even worse.

Grobb Gang! Only balanced server with a healthy population!

Video idea: What daily quests should I focus to unlock for best raw gold + mats that drops on the way. 2. daily quest route for all 25quest that are worth to do

Blizzard just doesn't WANT to fix it. #1) They want more paid transfers. #2) Fixing it will definitely make some players mad at them, and will require effort on their part. Here's how you fix it. #1) Merge low pop servers to balance out. Maybe even allow a server to vote on where they're going, and if there's no majority, give them the option of other servers, but no options where it would be more than 55/45 for their faction. #2) faction-queues. On balance servers, enforce logged-char faction balance via queues. Force a faction to queue when they have +10% advantage. #3) On unbalanced servers(greater than 60% of one faction, reserve 5% of server character-capacity for the unbalanced side. The low-pop faction NEVER has queues, the dominating side likely gets them more during peak. If the server is low population, no one will be effected, oh well. On a high pop server, it will encourage people to xfer off, and incentives the smaller-faction to stay. #4) On very unbalanced servers, give +2% exp (small faction only) for each percenter of faction imbalance over 60/40. Similarly reduce the penalties for spirit healers. If faction balance reaches 75/25, the smaller faction now gets free repairs from their faction vendors, and vendors buy items for 50% more. Bonuses are given when you log in, and last a full month, so you get to enjoy them even if the server balances out during the month you xfer there.

This is where a lesson from Dark Age of Camelot would help. Single faction PvE areas. For PvP you would have battlegrounds and also a large scale open PvP area. I'd suggest an Alliance only server and a Horde only server. pair servers up and link BG's. Have a new linked zone that you can jump into (Winter's Grasp or AV for example except larger) that had PvP objectives and let people go at it. Win win for everyone.

There is no good solution for the server imbalance, but what could decrease the problem is this : When a server got 10%+ of a side (Alliance or Horde), than the players on the weaker side should get a small experience & factions gain and damage buff (similar to the old Onixia Buff of Stormwind, but weaker). By greater population differences, this buff should get even stronger, until a maximum of 50% Exp Bonus and 50% Damage Bonus when a side is below 10% of the whole server population.

Mobile games let you transfer with a regularly obtainable item but more of them are required as you gain server standing