To take your example again, in this instance what you have is twenty people who like the colour blue and hate the colour red, but ten are forced to play red in order to balance things. That’s the difference, there is an initial bias towards one side, and despite the fact that the red players may eventually come to identify with their side, it is my belief that it will take much longer for it to come into effect. In the meantime the not-so-happy red players will be fighting over limited resources against the perfectly happy blue players. Therefore, in all likelihood the blue players will win more often because they have the morale advantage. This increases their morale whilst further reducing those of the red players. Eventually the red players will either a) leave or b) switch sides when given the chance. Either way, the enforced balance is lost to the further detriment of the red side, and now there is an association with them as being “the side that ‘never’ wins”.

I’m not saying that this is a mathematical certainty, but it is my belief that it will happen. As I said at the start of the original post, I’ll be interested to see how it pans out.

Take 20 random people, assign 10 to the Blue Team and 10 in the Red Team, and then give them a limited resource to compete over. You’ll very soon see identification with the group and denigration of ‘the other’.

But yeah, the capacity for betrayal is also very much present in human nature!

@Hirvox: It certainly is a sight to behold! Alas, comparing the number of pink-pigtailed gnome Rogues to the number of undead ones is probably all the proof we need in this instance.

@painghoul: They would have had the same problem, but in a different form, the form that Aion has now. Mythic spent too much time pimping Destruction as the cool kids. Far too much time. If they’d forced people to roll Order when they wanted to play Destruction in order to maintain balance, then they would have bled those players even quicker when the lacklustre PvP end game was reached. Thus there would have been a massive imbalance anyway, only there’d be no way easy way to correct it at that point other than to force every new play to roll Order.

@Adam: On your server perhaps; I’ve experience both sides of the coin having played on several servers. Warhammer doesn’t really compare to Aion in this case because Mythic didn’t force people to choose Order, instead they opened an overly ambitious number of servers, spread people too thin and never had the issue that Aion is having now. In fact, Warhammer is one end of the scale – too many servers with no restriction on population, with incentives and coercion after the fact in an attempt to balance things – whereas Aion is at the opposite end – too few servers with a very strict server balance policy. Somewhere in the middle of those two should be a happy balance. Perhaps we should be looking to Darkfall and EVE as approaches that work.

@Chris: Try and try again. Doesn’t happen that often these days, in my experience, a large proportion of the player base will just quit for the next shiny MMO. And let’s assume that all those players do re-roll and start all over again, what happens to the server balance when they do so?

@Tesh: Indeed so.

I understand people wanting to be in “now, now, now” but if people’s impatience proves anything it’s that they don’t care about the future but only instant gratification.

It might not play out the way you think.

Order looked pretty sedate and Destruction was all heavy metal badass…

Playing as Order… we beat Destruction so badly they still cry about it.

I like killing stoners so I play Order ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Arbitrarily assigning someone to a particular group has the tendency to ensure identification with that group. I’m guessing that those that are coerced into joining the Elyos will probably end up preferring that faction.

Also, as my PvP inclined kinmate said, “Lets play the fairies so we can make spotty 14 year old boys cry”.