Article - Balanced Servers

When playing the game we all want to have fun. This is the ultimate goal for everyone - or for most everyone. 

Players'  Expectations

One part of having fun includes the ability to play throughout the whole season. While different players have different play styles and expectations to what they consider "fun" in the game, what is common to almost all players, is that they do not simply want to log in and do - nothing. Doing nothing is boring. Farmers want to be able to farm. Theory crafters and build testers want to craft and test builds. Fighters want to fight. Prestige farmers want to farm prestige. These may be different types of goals, but the common ground is: do something and not just sit around.

In order to be able to do something, you need to have access to the basic requirements. in all cases - whether it is farming, testing builds, PvP (fun or war) - you need access to one basic thing in the game: troops. And to have access to troops you need - resources!

Now, to accomplish the common goal, most people agree on one thing: the server should be as balanced as possible. And there we hit the problem. The question "what is a balanced server?" usually brings up huge discussions and often starts fights and the ever proclaimed "toxicity". 

Contributing Factors

There are so many different factors at play that it seems difficult to find a common ground on how to achieve a "balanced server":

- number of players
- strength of players
- experience of players
- activity of players
- server setup
- type of campaign
- (dis)advantages of factions
- availability of resources
- available commanders/troops per faction/alignment
- ... and so on.

How do you measure all these different factors? Which factors are (most) deciding? Which can be neglected? Opinions go in vastly different directions.

Excurse - Server Experiences

I started playing this game when it first got officially released after the Beta testing - on September 23, 2021. Currently I am on my 9th season with my main good side account. Besides this account I have several others, some bigger than others. Among these is one bigger evil account with also 8 seasons and another decent good side account with a total of 7 seasons under the belt. All in all I have seen about 30+ different servers across most seasons and campaigns.

With all this experience you would think there had to be a few balanced servers among the list. However, I have yet to see that one truly balanced server. There is also the reality that people perceive the same server very differently. Just as an example, there was this one server that I perceived as immensely stressful from day 4 when war started until roughly 4-5 hours before the countdown ended. At the same time another group found the server extremely boring. Given these very different perceptions about that particular server you guessed it already - the server certainly was not balanced.

Solutions?

Players tend to ask developers to do something in order to balance the game. The requests go from asking for separate servers for "whales" vs "F2P" to controlling the numbers of registrations per faction/alignment or experience of these players and whatnot.

We all can see that the developers try to tackle the problems at hand by implementing different systems and algorithms that are aimed to help the balance problem. We have seen them cut down numbers per factions, capping the registrations per alignment (good/evil), capping the amount of players per team and more recently in some registrations (campaign S4 - The War of the Ring) requiring a minimum ring level in the previous server to be eligible to register for the campaign. And last not least the newest feature that will be implemented with this week's patch: the creation of registrations for players who never won the "Ring". All this in order to try and attempt balanced servers and enhance player experience.

Most people want servers to be populated. More server population = more competition = more activity = more fun. This is the idea and in the majority of the cases this is certainly true. However, how do you get servers populated? The game team can hardly force groups into registering for a certain campaign against their will. Some groups wait for friends who are still stuck in servers and want to join them, so they wait. This makes it very difficult for the game team to really influence players' choices in a grand scheme.

So, what net? We end up on a server with differently populated factions. This is the basic reality. Within these differently populated factions we have different strengths. One faction may have higher numbers than the other, but still be weaker because of lower activity, higher percentage of F2P vs whales, etc.

We could start counting the numbers of players. Do we count all players in all listed fellowships/warbands? Or do we stop after the top 15? Top 20? Or do we count only groups with X amount of players? Do we consider how many "alts" or secondary accounts they have, which may not be played as much as their main accounts?

Utopia - The Perfect Scenario

Let's assume we have a "perfect" server with 4 factions that each have 2 full fellowships/warbands - 200 people per faction. For the sake of this example we will say the other factions are completely empty. Further, let's assume the four full factions are equally active and all have the same amount of seasons under their belts. All this should allow for a perfectly balanced server, right? Simply two factions vs two factions = perfect balance.

Hold a second! How do we factor the status of the individual players' developments? We will not have a homogenous group of people who are all on the same level of commander/gear progress. Even if all those players had spent equal amounts of money, they would not have equal amounts of luck with their chest pulls - those pulls are RNG based (as so many other factors in the game).

So, how do we measure the strength of the players?

- Do we measure it by how much they farm in the first week? We have seen great farmers who don't fight much, though.
- Or do we count how many commanders at R10 they have? Commanders have different strengths and different gear set ups etc.
- Does one "kraken" outweigh 3 (or 5 or 10) whales? How do you measure this?

We'd have this perfectly "balanced" server and again we'd struggle. Simply because of the difference in strength of players. Let's now add to this the different strength of commanders/builds/troops in the alignments good vs evil. Some builds work better against good, others work better against evil. People are set up one way or another - depending on what they played so far and even with the Elven Craftsman's Hammer we cannot dismantle whatever and whenever we want to. Those items are limited.

Conclusion

In my personal opinion and according to my experience it is impossible to achieve a balanced server. What is balanced for one (e.g. equal numbers of players) is not balanced for another because they consider something else balanced (e.g. number of factions per side). The "headache" of trying to make a server balanced is taking a lot of time from the actual fun in the game - playing it, i.e. grow your commanders, manage your resources, troops, etc. and then go fight and try to win or have another favourable outcome that you worked for.

Disclaimer:

All expressed thoughts are based on my personal experiences, views and opinions. They may not be shared by other players in this or a similar way. I do not claim to have the one right opinion or view on things, but merely share my take on things based on my own, personal experiences in the game.