WAR factions balanced, says Mythic

Mythic has posted some data on the balance of player populations between the Order and Destruction factions in its MMO Warhammer Online. The stats suggests that it's as close to 50/50 as makes no difference.

In the game's early days the evil Destruction races were noticeably more popular, which led to some problems in terms of server and battleground queues, and balance in the game's realm-versus-realm warfare.

Mythic predicted this would balance out, and it seems it was right. Across all North American servers, player accounts are only 51 per cent in favour of Destruction, while experience and renown gains are equal across both factions. The biggest recorded difference is 44 per cent Order versus 56 per cent Destruction on the Monolith server, but even in this case the Order players are putting enough extra effort in to balance out the experience and renown tallies.

Developer Jess Folsom stressed that these figures are based on currently active players only, implying that many of the Destruction fans were fly-by-nights who weren't committed to the game long-term.

"We have seen some shifting with free server transfers that has, in truth, improved the Faction population differences," said Folsom. "On average, the Faction population difference on each server is negligible; and surprisingly, it is not always the same Faction that has the higher populace."