Warhammer Online: Population Imbalance Issues

From mmorpg.com

After a smooth launch and a lot of buzz, we're starting to see dents in Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online world.

As it's not my intent to go on and list them, I wanted to narrow it down on one specific problem that might cause a series of problems that might very well drop the entire game a notch - Population imbalance between the different factions.

First, let's take a look at what this imbalance means and how it affects the world:

Most (if not all) servers seem to have a population of around 60% Destruction oriented characters and only 40% Order. While those numbers may change slightly, the majority remains on the destruction side.

This is a double edged sword of a problem. First, Order players end up with not enough participants to cover all the Public Quests. Since most of those quests require at least 4-5 players to complete in their last stage, the Order players are missing out on a lot of the less popular PQs. In addition, and maybe more importantly in the bigger picture, the only time when Order can gain the upper hand in RvR is either in a "guerrilla" raid of Destruction taken RvR control points (Night-time raids, small strike groups taking isolated locations, etc.) or when a large group of Order is assembled.

While the latter option seems very valid, we all know that it's also impractical to ask Order to organize an allied raid once a day at least.

Destruction's side isn't full of honey either - While there is enough population to run almost all of the PQs, I believe that the Destruction players are missing out the fun of just clicking on the WAR icon and getting instantly invited to join a scenario as their Order players can do. I can attest from my experience that queuing to an RvR scenario with my girlfriend while playing our Destruction characters would usually end up waiting for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, while I was entering and leaving scenarios non-stop when playing our Order characters.