Aion faction balance

After shameless stealing his "Thought for the day" idea, I'm now morally obliged to make up for it by linking to Melmoth's better posts over at Killed in a Smiling Accident. ;) But seriously, his post on Aion's attempt to balance their two factions by simply forcing the players is excellent!

The fact that Aion's endgame is PvPvE, and not pure PvP, solves at least the problem for the stronger faction: They'll be able to do PvE in the endgame in absence of a real challenge from the weaker faction. The weaker faction is just plain out of luck, as they are basically permanently excluded from having any endgame at all, unless they like suicide missions.

Makes you wonder why developers still make PvP games with only two factions, when nobody has found a way yet to effectively balance them without some inconvenience to one side (not always the weaker side, in WoW the more numerous side is disadvantaged in terms of battleground queue waiting times). Games like EVE or Darkfall, where players form "factions" themselves, and these are constantly shifting, are ultimately more balanced.

But now that I said something nice about Darkfall, I have to balance that out by another quote from Killed in a Smiling Accident, this one by Zoso, who imagines how a cataclysm would look in other games:

Darkfall are also set to overhaul their starting area, finally introducing proper impact PvP. Unlike the original namby-pamby system put in to appease pathetic losers who can’t handle a real game, where death merely results in a bit of lost loot, Darkfall: Teh Ubahclysm introduces permadeath. Not some sort of rubbish pseudo-permadeath either; if you’re killed by another player then your character can’t be resurrected, your account is banned so you can’t create a new character, your credit cards are blacklisted so you can’t create a new account, and an Aventurine employee comes round your house and smashes your PC up with a baseball bat. Eurogamer’s re-review of the game awards it a score of 9/10.