Bioware flat out said PvP servers have population imbalances.

Just think with the new lagacy system I can have a smuggler with limited BH skills.

My First toon to 50 was a zabrek trooper 2nd was human Sage
I also have a 43 human Smuggy and a zabrek BH.
So its even concievable that my BH has some trooper ability.

Its all depends on what toon BW makes me put as Parent Character.

I would be kewl to start playing my sentinal with BH AND Trooper skills. Hes still LVL 1 awaiting the legacy system.

Mix and matching PVE skillsets cross faction is what i am looking to see....

Perhaps my last spot will be an Imperial agent with Jedi Traits. Maybe some Double agent story arcs later on in the year.

I very well remember this same discussion/complaints about server imbalence in both WoW and Warhamerr over the years. The ironic thing is which side has the imbalence has often changed. I have noticed as time goes on people get tired of playing a side or want to be the underdog and switch sides, i can see this being especially true when imperial players decide they wish to experience some Repubic story lines. It would not suprise me in six months people are complaining that the Republic outnumbers the Empire, things have a tendency to work themselves out.

A subtle effect of the population imbalance is that the majority (not even a huge one, but still a majority) players who play to win play Imperial -- a disproportionate number of Republic players are not in it to win, but for gits and shiggles.

A side effect of the overall popularity of the Imperial side is that it's tough to play through the Republic's group content -- some worlds, even on mid- to high-population servers have too few people to reasonably play through Heroic content.

What BioWare needs is a system that dynamically boosts / decreases rewards for each side based on population.

.....

This has to be your first MMO if you are surprised the "Evil/Edgey" faction has more players on a PvP server....

Deleted. No point. Everyone is TLDR these days. +See Sig.

I don't think anyone is .surprised. about it, but that doesn't mean that it's a bit... well.. let's just say it's not much fun, on either side.

I don't even feel like doing anything pvp-related on my imp chars because a) the player base of the zerg has the typical zerg-mentality and b) huttball all the time

the bad thing? well, they will change all warzones to 'same faction games possible' which means the former-imp players I met who switched sides... yeah.. that will no longer happen. every single player I met who 'switched sides' did so because they didn't want to play huttball all day long.

what does bioware do? basically they said 'well, the reps are the carebears, and carebears don't like pvp' (d'oh)

it's bad enough the player base apparently thinks like that, but didn't bioware create this game? shouldn't they KNOW it's really.. uh.. not that easy?

.....

So please tell me what exactly bioware can do to fix faction imbalances? Should they delete a number of lvl 50 empire toons and tell people they have to roll republic? Should the stop all new toons being created as empire and force all new toons to be republic? Should they faction change without your permission and move people from empire to republic? Maybe they should move people around the servers to spread the population 50:50 without the permission of the players? Maybe ya know drag a few people over from pve servers to level out the faction imbalances?

Its outside of bioware's control. They could possibly add incentives to play republic ie make republic players slightly more powerful I am sure that wouldnt have every pvp empire player whining OMG OP republic, QQ QQ QQ some more.

As a non PVPer I know myself and others like me get sick of constant PVP whining and ************. No matter what happens someone is "OP NERF NAO!" etc. Maybe if instead of this you instead come up with a sensible thread with some SUGGESTIONS as to what bioware can do to incentivize people to roll republic it could be something simple like more valor or slightly higher drops when lootable player corpses come on the side with the lower population. Or maybe consider how you could approach this as a community.

Finally there is a perfectly good PVP forum why fill up general with yet more pvp whines ?

Players put companies in a very bad position on PvP servers. No company likes promising things it can't deliver, but many players demand these PvP servers and won't buy a game without them, yet PvP servers never work. All PvP servers do is split the community by drawing the players dedicated to PvP away from PvE servers. But dedicated PvPers like playing with each other, not against each other, so they all pick the same faction.

I suppose players unhappy with this could protest it by refusing to play the unpopular faction on PvP servers, and then maybe players and companies alike would give up on faction-based PvP, and move to forms of realm-vs-realm combat where population balance has a chance of happening. Or something. But as long as people ask for and expect faction-balanced PvP servers, they're setting themselves up for disappointment.