Can you take back a server?

Gevlon's last experiment was to create a "blue" raiding guild, one that would prove that it was possible to beat difficult content while wearing inadequate gear. It would be testimony to his belief that WoW is easy and skill conquers all. And it doesn't seem like they are making much progress due to lack of interest.

Gevlon, of course, preaches winning by abandoning loyalty, morality, and fun at the expense of unrelenting efficiency. So asking his fans to do something incredibly inefficient and fun out of loyalty to "The Goblin" unsurprisingly falls flat. True Gevlonians probably calculated that the only possible reward was more self-satisfied posts from Gevlon, something they already get for free without any inefficiency, loyalty, or fun required.

His recent project is interesting too : to resurrect the Alliance faction on one of the many PvP servers where it is dead. World of Warcraft, like almost every massive game, requires a certain-sized community for play to be sustainable at the server level. When you don't have the community everything is broken. PvE, PvP, and even commerce is pretty much shot when there aren't enough players. The problem is exacerbated on PvP servers, where the faction balance turns everyday merciless ganking into a real problem.

The problem is bad game design. PvP servers are not about PvP so much as ganking and griefing, so being in the "world" while part of the severely outnumbered faction quickly becomes tiresome. Meanwhile you'll have trouble filling out raids, buying and selling on the auction house, and even finding partners for PvP.

How to fix it? PvP servers should be abolished altogether. There should be more world PvP, of course, though with more of a Wintergrasp flavor, i.e. areas designed to both host and reward PvP.

Of course I'm an engineer so I'd want to solve the problem with better design. Gevlon, whatever he fashions himself nowadays, wants to solve the problem with better people. He's forming a guild of like-minded, self-reliant players with the intent of building an economic, PvE, and PvP community that will reverse the trend of alliance flight.

This Gevlonian experiment will fail for the same reason as the prior experiment, for the same reason that the central conceit of Gevlon-Idol Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged would never work. People driven to succeed are not willing to fail to prove a point.

The problem of taking back a server remains an interesting one, though, but one that players could never accomplish on their own.

Players are products of the games they play. You can see it in the way players have changed since classic WoW. We run more 5-man instances -- because they are easier to run and reward every level of player. We run more PUG raids -- because we have four lockouts for any given raid instance so we can profitably rerun content we already know. Raiding guild leaders are less likely to be despots -- because we can run PUG raids or make our own 10-man raids. Ninjas are less prevalent -- because there is less loot to steal and so much less to be gained from loot stealing.

And so on. Players did not change the way game was played. The way the game was played changed, and that changed us. Some day Blizzard will make rebuilding a faction productive and fun, and factions will be rebuilt.