Population Management Is Challenging

I've given Blizzard a lot of crap for Classic's terrible population management, but I'll fully admit that it's not an easy task. This has been very apparent in era's recent growth.

When there was almost nobody playing era, it made sense for people to band together in any way they could, just to be able to play the game. As it happens, this led to the main PvP clusters in both Europe and the US to have almost perfect faction balance. The PvE clusters were more Alliance-heavy in both regions, which seems to be a general trend as I remember Pyrewood Village starting with a similar faction balance back in 2019 - but with no mandatory world PvP, this sort of imbalance isn't an issue on a PvE server as long as there are still enough people on each faction to do the content.

Accordingly, the natural advice whenever newcomers came and asked where they could find others to play with was to tell them to simply pick either the main PvP or PvE cluster according to their preference. However, with the recent increase in interest in era came a new kind of player - one who didn't simply ask where to play, but wanted to know which server had the most Alliance or Horde. Often they'd add that they didn't care about PvP or PvE; they just wanted to be where "everyone else" is. The "play what you like" answer was increasingly rejected as unhelpful, or replaced by enthusiastic recruiters simply wanting to make people come to their server, where their faction is huuuge, honest!

It's not hard to see how this can cause problems. Especially on the PvP servers it currently feels like there's a bit of a battle for the cluster's soul going on, with people being fearful of their faction becoming the minority and being declared dead. I don't play there but it still pains me to see faithful old-timers that have made their home there despair at new players being warned away from their faction just because its population may be marginally smaller than somewhere else.

For me personally it's been bittersweet because while I'm happy to see era thrive on any level, the new line of "which faction is bigger" questions means that Horde on the PvE cluster in both regions is left in the dust, because it's always been the minority and nobody wants to be that now.

I've got to admit I've been feeling extremely jealous watching basically all other faction-server combos post numbers to prove their massive growth on the era Discord pretty much daily. A thousand players online concurrently! Ten thousand auctions on the auction house! Meanwhile, there's been an increase in activity on Horde side on the EU-PvE cluster as well, and again, I'm thankful for that, but it's hard to feel pride in the auction house going from 300-500 auctions a day to 700-900 when others are bragging about how they have 10-12k auctions going on at the same time.

When I started playing on era I kind of assumed that its lack of mainstream appeal would make it a relatively safe haven from the kinds of shenanigans that ruined TBC/Wrath Classic for me, but I have to admit that the recent developments do have me at least a little concerned.