| I did a massive post about this discussing WAR pre-release somewhere, it's far too late to try and dig it up off WHA though, so just roughly:
1) The obvious is to offer faster progression on underpopulated factions. Provide incentive for people to play there, and make it so they can become competative faster.
2) Seperate queue's for each faction. WAR did this and it works well on high pop servers.
3) Faction specific transfers. Allow players from faction A on servers with faction A overpopulated to transfer to servers where faction A is underpopulated.
I had a handful of other idea's, but I can't remember them. Regardless, with these three monitored closely and applied appropriately I imagine you could keep the population on any MMO fairly balanced. The trick is to make it obvious which benefits are available and where, and have it implements from the word go. Mythic have done relatively well here, but they could have been a lot more on the ball and prevented the whole destruction overpopulation thing. The key is making sure people factor these things into their choices when they first start playing the game and are rolling their first few characters a week or two in.
Ideally, have some sort of system which would keep tabs on the games population and update these kinds of bonuses automatically. I can't imagine it'd be amazingly complex. | 