Sunday, May 11, 2008

Will Order or Chaos prevail in WAR?

I'm reading about Warhammer Online, and stumbled upon one interesting fact: even when doing PvE quests, you contribute to the points for the RvR conflict. Which means that even players who don't want to participate in PvP have an influence on the outcome. That made me think of World of Warcraft, where Alliance outnumbers Horde on most servers by 3:2 or even 2:1. Even if the more numerous faction has lots of casual players who chose their side just because the characters were prettier, in a system like WAR these players would still add a lot of RvR points to their side. So the less numerous side had it even harder to overcome the numerical disadvantage.

Of course this will all depend on how casual player friendly WAR will be. The hardcore players will probably distribute pretty evenly over the 6 races and 2 factions of WAR. But the "I want to play a pretty elf" type of players are probably going to play Order more often than Chaos. And up to now the guys from EA Mythic are mumbling in their beards about being aware of the possible problem, but haven't come up with a good solution yet. Combat boni for the less numerous side? Seperate login waiting queues and population caps? All these have both advantages and disadvantages. Players neither want to be forced to play one side, nor do they want their side to constantly lose because of being outnumbered.

So what do you think? Will Order dominate WAR in a similar numerical imbalance as Alliance outnumbers Horde? Or will the forces of Chaos prevail, or at least draw even, in Warhammer Online?

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