Earlier this month, I stumbled into a dev blog from the World War 2 Online devs – yes, WW2O is still alive and cooking. What caught my attention is the detail with which the devs at Cornered Rat are addressing the faction imbalance in the PvP MMORPG.

“For way too long, one side was rolling the other one mercilessly during campaign offensives, which was often exciting for the people with the momentum and completely crushing for the other side on the receiving end,” the devs explain. Apparently, they’re using a feature called “side lock” to basically minimize dogpiling from F2P fans (paid players can always pick their preferred side), reducing imbalance incidence by around 23% and imbalance difference by about 37%. Not too shabby, and that’s just one tactic they’re deploying.

Mostly, I was just excited to see an MMORPG dev dealing with this problem and explaining it out in the open! Too often studios will just handwave the problem or pretend it doesn’t exist. So for this week’s Massively Overthinking, I’m asking our writers and readers about faction imbalances in MMORPGs, particularly of the PvP sort. What’s the best way to deal with them? Which MMOs are succeeding – and which are failing the test?

Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): Man, I spent so, so many years on World of Warcraft PvP servers where Alliance was vastly outnumbered. It gets old in a hurry.

The problem is always sorting out exactly how much open-world freedom a studio is willing to sacrifice on the altar of faction balance. Some sandbox gamers would argue even having factions is a compromise too far; they definitely don’t think devs should be meddling in capping how many people you can bring to your war. Others just give up and box everything up into battlegrounds.

Personally, I am a fan of dynamic systems; I prefer those to hard caps. I would rather see dynamic nerfs/buffs or NPC assistance applied to the sides to try to keep them in balance. Much more difficult, yes, but it also stops the dogpile that drives people to quit MMORPGs.

Carlo Lacsina (@UltraMudkipEX, YouTube, Twitch): I remember Guild Wars 1 has this issue now that the game is in its quiet years. Getting a game of Fort Aspenwood can be tough without organizing it with the other players. The way ANet solved it was to just allow folks to sign up for any of of them using their PvP characters… that was a smart move since getting to FA was time-consuming!

Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): Admittedly I’m looking at this kind of stuff from the outside in since I’m not a PvPer. That said, I’m not sure there’s an elegant solution or silver bullet for this problem, so I suppose that incentivizing balance – or outright forcing it if players do what players do – is probably the best way to go about it.

Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): The thing about faction imbalances is that they run into a fundamental issue with factions in any particular game: They’re simultaneously a roleplaying choice and a mechanical choice. This ties into an article I wrote about how roleplaying is way more common than you think – you may not think of yourself as a roleplayer, but odds are you do think about what faction represents your character and which one you vibe with. And that causes problems when you need the same number of people in two or three or fifteen or eight hundred factions for a fair fight because odds are good that some of those factions appeal to more people than others if there’s any real identity to them.

Final Fantasy XIV has had this problem since the beginning with its Frontline PvP modes. The three factions players choose between – the Maelstrom, the Flames, or the Adders – all have their own lore, city of allegiance, and broad story identity. The trouble is that none of this really ties into PvP, and while it made sense to make the three-way maps tie into that allegiance, it could easily lead to one faction having a lengthy queue time while another gets more or less instant access.

The solution has been to make sure that everyone queues in as a mercenary, representing a random faction, but it also means that any sort of factional identity is completely washed away in PvP, since there’s no real way to control which group you’re fighting for, and making the whole thing seem arbitrary. It’s not a huge issue simply because FFXIV isn’t really focused on PvP, but it also means that the Grand Company system feels like a vestige of a game design that no longer has much relevance if any to the game people are playing.

Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): I’ve seen developers do a couple things to put their fingers on the scale. One of them is to provide irresistible incentives to roll on underpopulated factions, kind of like a “signing bonus” for those who take the plunge with the hope of staying there for a while. Another is to artificially buff the underpopulated faction so that the power levels between the factions more or less balance out. Both of these approaches aren’t ideal, but they are a flexible solution.

Sam Kash (@[email protected]): This one takes me back to a whole slew of faction PvP games. It’s obviously not a problem that’s easy to solve, or even one that seems to be solvable at all, at least if history in MMOs means anything at all. In Warhammer Online it was just annoying. The Order faction was just about always the losers, at least on my server.

Players in MMOs follow the same laws of physics as just about everything else; whether we’re talking about gas, water, or MMOs, players we find the easiest way to go for the most loot. We flow towards the path of least resistance. So devs are going to have to work against physics to prevent players from taking advantage of the system. The suggestion above is a good start. Another might be to reduce the rewards for the side that has the overwhelming majority. Of course, then you’ll get guilds that game the rewards by finding ways to lose just enough to max those rewards.

When GW2 released there was a server reward that provided greater mining and harvesting pulls for the server who was winning the WvW rounds. I liked the idea of that, PvE rewards for PvP effort. But that just caused players to not even bother competing if their server couldn’t win the round.

So who’s doing it right? I don’t know. But there’s countless MMOs that do it wrong.

Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!