malorn wrote: Thu May 07, 2020 8:22 pm
I've been watching this thread, it's been insightful. I wanted to offer some perspective from someone who recently started playing RoR but did play WAR at release launch back in 2008.
In 2008, Order was significantly under-pop compared to Destruction. On some servers it was really bad, like 2:1 or worse. If you were lucky you were in a situation sort of like RoR is today. That pop difference had absolutely nothing to do with balance or end-game warband viability or anything of the sort - none of that was known at the time. People just naturally wanted to play Destruction more. There may be many reasons for that, but it doesn't much matter, its just a fact of the game. I think that's an important data point that's still relevant to today, and it still holds today as well. In 2008, the only known differences to the general population excited about the game was the aesthetics of the factions. We didn't have any end-game knowledge of what things would be like. We just know what looked cool and what we thought would be fun to play (and some got to experience it in beta for a short time), and that was overwhelmingly in Destruction's favor. Organization or WB effectiveness or any other such meta explanation does not fit this data point at all. And I think it's important to consider that in the context of what follows. Also any new players joining this game are effectively in the same situation - they don't know the meta. They don't know what is or is not effective end-game because very few will have invested enough time in the game to know it. They are generally in the same state as anyone else who was playing the game for the first time and drawn to a particular faction.
Now today we also have a population difference, and as I write this the side bar for T2+ says 54% Destruction, 46% Order, with a total of 1572 players. That's fairly typical. I often see it at 53-47 most of the time, just from anecdotally spot-checking it periodically to see which character I want to play that day. Sometimes late night at low pops it creeps up to 51-49 and I have rarely seen order leading with 51-49. Some of you might be thinking its not that big of a deal, and at first glance it doesn't seem too bad - 4% is pretty close, it's not
that far off, right? Lets look closer. It means Destruction has 17% more players than Order. In actual numerical terms, with 1572 players, it really means Destruction has about
125 more people than Order.
That's 5 warbands worth of people difference. Not so small a difference afterall. And it has some significant consequences.
When you have that big of a population difference, it means a lot. It means comparatively speaking Destruction has the luxury of being picky. They have a surplus of labor - more players than they need for their warbands, which means it's a buyer's market for them (buyer in this context is warband formation). Order does not have this luxury. They need bodies, and to compete they
MUST be more efficient than Destruction - they have to make their manpower count to compensate for the numerical disadvantage. However, because they lack that manpower, they have no means by which to enforce that efficiency. Destruction can establish a culture of "if you don't fit what we want, you won't be invited to groups". Order can do what destruction does, but on a smaller scale, leading to fewer overall effective groups, which translates to more order groups being mismatched against Destruction. Order instead must generally take what is given, or settle for a smaller number of optimized groups and a much larger number of garbage groups. This seems to explain a lot of what I see commented here, where Order has the potential to do well, and has examples of groups doing well, but on the whole, they do not do as well. Its simply the longer-term effects of population disadvantage and how people have dealt with it.
There are other cascading effects too. If you aren't getting the highest rewards as often, you will start to see a gear difference develop that may be noticeable, which will exacerbate the problem. Since Destruction can be picky and enforce composition, there's motivation for people on that faction to reroll and be the classes people want for warbands. That will improve the overall composition of Destruction compared to Order. If the culture of the disadvantaged faction is toxic and starts blaming their situation on other faction members' choices, then that leads to more infighting and turning people away, who may go to Destruction to avoid the drama or simply stop playing. Defeatism can also set in, where some players on the Order faction start accepting the situation as unchangeable and so they lose motivation to try to improve it and just do whatever they want. Population disadvantage has far reaching consequences that explain essentially everything I've seen described in this thread.
So to summarize, I'd say that given my past experiences with this game, the "problem" with Order stems from aesthetics and general faction attractiveness, which leads to population difference, which leads to less than optimal groups, which can lead to gear disparity (when you don't get as many rewards), which all fuels animosity out of a necessity to be efficient. That leads to a more toxic faction culture and frequent blaming of each other with less motivation to actually face the problems and address them.
