I've been looking at different forums following the game, and I understand that is just a very small fraction of potential players, but it does represent those who will probably be the most organized with guilds and pvp.

On the forums I've frequented, I'm seeing a lot of people leaning towards joining Ebonheart Pact, especially those who are pvp oriented. I'm wondering once the game launches what the devs will do or can do if one faction dominates in population- since pvp is centered around control of keeps which give guild bonuses, stores, etc, what is to stop well organized players from making a push to control the game simply through numbers. And we all know how attractive a winning side is, especially for those who don't want to work hard for a victory. Especially now that races can join any faction simply with the preorder, it makes it even easier to pick the side that people see as the most dominant.

Thoughts? Has this been brought up before as a discussion topic, and if so, what is the consensus?

The devs have stated that lower population alliances gain more points for various activities in Cyrodiil, and that's pretty much it. I also expect Ebonheart to dominate PvP, and even though I don't enjoy PvP at all, that makes Ebonheart the alliance of choice (strictly to gain the free buffs that result from the winning alliance).

Why?

Yea no matter how much bonuses the low pop one gets, 10vs1 is still 10 vs 1

But I also know there is little they can do to control population except forcing players to go to one side. But that would be bad

Or they can offer bonuses to players (like extra gold, easy) that choose the losing faction, but again, offers advantage so it's a gamble, depends on how they want to adress it.

I believe that offering incentives to make characters in the losing faction that are CHARACTER LOCKED should be the way to go.

thats the good thing about 3 way pvp, if one faction is strong, the 2 other factions will to some extent join forces

i dont think we will see 1 faction having more players than the 2 others combined, so there will always be a basis for combat

with 2 way pvp when one side gets to strong its basically over

also some of the better PVP players have a tendency to play for the underdogs, since that means more people to kill

edit: personally i will try to start in one of the smaller factions, i enjoy being the underdogs

While the human behaviour will not allow for bashing the lower guy, in 3 way pvp there is always the possibility of 2 factions just bashing 1 to the ground.

Likely? Very unlikely since there is no reward for allying with another faction, except in the case of need.

But thats another dark side of 3 way pvp, there's always that 2 front war 1 faction might permanently face.

I don't get it. There is no "world" PvP and cyrodiil had an even number from all sides

One of the really nice things about the AvA system is that the population of realms will be split between different campaigns. In addition, there is a balancing cap I believe that will even out the amount of players.

The only possible unbalancing I can see is hardcoe PvPers all joining one faction... but that wouldn't be affected by the all races all alliances change anyways, since hardcoe pvpers join the best faction regardless of race.

Not sure about the forums in question but http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1486053-what-alliance-are-you-picking-and-why/ shows a fairly balanced interest.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1486604-which-race-and-faction-will-you-be-going/ another one that didn't get far, but still.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1486419-poll-on-faction-choice-with-any-factionany-race-option/ has a collective of 123 members.

And finally there is http://tesocensus.info/.

All in all, I see them pretty even.

Even if one faction was outnumbering by a large margin, the other two factions can team up and take it down. Then fight it out among themselves.

I'm just basing it on many fan site polls showing Ebonheart with significantly larger populations than the other two alliances. There are a few polls that show the three alliances fairly even, and none of them are recent enough to take into account the recent any race/any alliance feature. I'll be watching newer polls from here until launch to get a feel for a change in the wind direction, if any.

From what I've seen, it looks like all the factions will be pretty equal.

thing is though, since chances are only x amount of people can play on one side on a campaign, all sides in campaigns(assuming they are at max/near max pop cap) will have equal numbers.