WAR factions balanced, says Mythic

By Oli Welsh Published 21 January, 2009

We're not all bad guys any more.

Mythic has posted some data on the balance of player populations between the Order and Destruction factions in its MMO Warhammer Online. The stats suggests that it's as close to 50/50 as makes no difference.

In the game's early days the evil Destruction races were noticeably more popular, which led to some problems in terms of server and battleground queues, and balance in the game's realm-versus-realm warfare.

Mythic predicted this would balance out, and it seems it was right. Across all North American servers, player accounts are only 51 per cent in favour of Destruction, while experience and renown gains are equal across both factions. The biggest recorded difference is 44 per cent Order versus 56 per cent Destruction on the Monolith server, but even in this case the Order players are putting enough extra effort in to balance out the experience and renown tallies.

Developer Jess Folsom stressed that these figures are based on currently active players only, implying that many of the Destruction fans were fly-by-nights who weren't committed to the game long-term.

"We have seen some shifting with free server transfers that has, in truth, improved the Faction population differences," said Folsom. "On average, the Faction population difference on each server is negligible; and surprisingly, it is not always the same Faction that has the higher populace."

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (7) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Gurgeh #1 3 years ago

    "Developer Jess Folsom stressed that these figures are based on currently active players only, implying that many of the Destruction fans were fly-by-nights who weren't committed to the game long-term. "

    Or they stopped playing because the faction numbers were so imbalanced at the start. I guess losing a chunk of subscribers is one way to fix a balance issue.

  • Hypercube #2 3 years ago

    @Gurgeh: Not necessarily, in the early levels faction imbalance isn't really as important, since you're only really doing scenarios and capturing battle objectives in the tier 1 RvR area.

    Even in later areas, I think faction imbalance is less of a factor than actual server population - the server I started on became pretty empty, but now I've transferred it's pretty busy all the time.

    Of course, this is all from my subjective viewpoint ;)

  • Slabbathepave #3 3 years ago

    I stopped playing WAR because nobody else did. The only PvP i got was through scenarios and i had nobody to group with at all....outside of scenarios the game was a barren wasteland with boring spammable moves. Admittedly the PvP (when i actually got some) was excellent and by far and away the best yet.

    Swings and roundabouts.......innit.

  • Fleisch #4 3 years ago

    I know its a PVP focused game but they should try and enhance the PVE a little, leveling was boring as the areas were all just dead as a dodo.

  • JediMasterMalik #5 3 years ago

    Their server caps were too low, not allowing enough people on a single server means no one is in the same area at the same time, which is particularly true for low level areas.

  • Orange #6 3 years ago

    Far too many servers on release as well.

  • biscuittooth #7 3 years ago

    @ Fleisch:

    The PVE is great. The game launched with 15 instances several of them located in the capitals, and the public quests get more and more interesting as you progress. The main issue is server population, as stated. However, this is easily addressed by rolling on, or transferring to, a server with a high population.