hey arli good to hear from you
what makes u think destruction will outnumber order by that much?
i know they have been big in beta, i have been in the eu beta from first invites where sent out
and generally there they have 40-50% more than order
i do however firmly believe that the people u see in beta= signed up years ago etc, are very different from the people that buy the game off the shelf
so i expect it to be close to even, and if it hadnt been for all the people claiming othervise, i would likely still believe order would outnumber destruction, atleast after hedstart
ahh anyway we will see i guess:)
lvling up aint that hard so could always do a sideswap if its totally fubar
Hey Shaftoe! Well I'm glad that my time playing lotro had a good outcome in introducing a great player to a great guild! Glad to see you stuck around bud!
Don, I am making that assumption based on two things really, so my argument is not terribly strong, but it may be compelling at least. First, before they took out the population counts on the US servers that you could see when you first logged in, I only counted one instance in prime-time play where a server had more order than destruction. I started running the tests nightly at 8 pm cst and initially only had Warpstone and Tyrion to survey, but that increased of course recently when they added the three additional servers. I simply logged in and took note of the population count listed.
The following was pretty much what I was seeing consistently (pulled from a thread over on NFs forums):
Tyrion Total: 1351 Order: 523 (39%) Destruction: 828 (61%) Favored: Destruction +22%
Abhorash Total: 1690 Order: 581 (34%) Destruction: 1109 (66%) Favored: Destruction +32%
Barak Varr Total: 2312 Order: 1034 (45%) Destruction: 1278 (55%) Favored: Destruction +10%
Mad Dog Pass* Total: 629 Order: 216 (34%) Destruction: 413 (66%) Favored: Destruction +32%
That's not exactly 2:1, but it is significant if it holds true on launch. Note that once the CE Beta started, those folks could not access Warpstone, so its population nose-dived, but remained one that favored Destruction.
My second basis for this assumption is even shakier, as it relies on the belief that players from other games (particularly WoW) who give WAR a shot are going to be immediately drawn to the feel of the Destruction zones, particularly if they played Horde in WoW. Add to this what I believe is a natural tendency for the 16-21 demographic to play a realm that is oriented towards the same themes as we find in Destruction/Horde/Generally-Bad-Guy realms. The hunch is that you will see a reverse of what happened when WoW launched, when the kidz flocked to Alliance and more seasoned guilds went Horde (which kinda disproves my previous point, but like I said, it's a shakier assessment).
All that being said, I would give the population edge clearly to Destruction on launch. Which, in an RvR game, gives them the edge across the board and makes Order's job that much more difficult. I envision a repeat of the portal keep camping in emain, but on a larger scale (now I'm not sure why we want to roll Order, come to think of it...)
Anyway, I could be way off on this and you could be totally correct that you cannot generalize from beta pop counts to launch pop counts, but it was really all I had to go with when I began to wonder about it.