Kretias, This is why you are on the council and I am not.
I’m impressed with your capability to keep calm.
I don’t have that power.
I’ve thought the Factions were poor design back When I started playing in Cataclysm, and I Think the factions are bad design now.
If you have a split playerbase, you invite imbalance. You invite the oppurtunity to have players, like you. That lose the faction they care about and lose any incentive to play the game.
Factions should have been Quests and Flavor from the start. Saying that you can’t play with the other faction is bad game design, and it was 17 years ago.
Alliance is not dead, there are plenty of Alliance CE raiding guilds. Are there more Horde guilds? Certainly. But that’s been the case since TBC.
There are lots of things that can be done to fix this:
Aggressive server merges to get the Alliance players where they can play together. And they need to be LIKE-FACTION mergers, not this ridiculous “we’ll merge an alliance and horde server together to make a balanced server THAT BENEFITS NOBODY” garbage.
Make end-game activities rewarding again and less of a pain in the butt. More people doing end-game = more Alliance doing end-game. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Get rid of the damn hall of fame. It’s what sparked all this hand-wringing in the first place.
We’re way passed factions splitting the player base.
Warmode and “Peacemode” divides the players.
Classic and Retail divides the players.
Classic vs. Burning Crusade Classic divides the players.
Cross-Realm Zones divides the players (and even parties most of the time).
Server location divides the players.
Those are just the technical server based divisions.
Mythic+ and Raiding divides the players.
Casual vs. Hardcore divides the players.
Political chat in trade, general, and any other chat channel divides the players.
There are a lot more divisions. At least Horde vs. Alliance actually has a gameplay basis.
Yes sure there are guilds. CE Guilds. However in comparison to Horde is absolutely laughable. Faction population swapped constantly over the years yeah sure but never has it been as bad as it currently is.
Yes thats one solution that might work.
Thats not going to work. Alliance people want to do end game. Those Alliance have swapped and are swapping over to horde over the last years, resulting in the current population problem that we have.
Hall of Fame is just one of many issues. And yes i agree it should be removed. I have already stated that im not a fan of the hall of fame and i have been in the alliance halls twice.
I can do that as well.
In fact i have already stated that i do think this to be the case. I am utmost skeptical of the program. They are free to prove me wrong but i have stopped giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt.
And in before someone asks “why did you apply then?”. It beats sitting idly and doing absolutely nothing rather than using the tools available to you.
I agree… And true mergers not these realm connection things. All Blizzard has to do is add last names to characters to handle mergers. Default the last name to the old server name and allow users to change them.
If they want to be nice, they can give us the option to turn last name display on or off.
I want to touch again on the server merger thing, just because Blizzard’s server merges are sometimes borderline insane.
In the last round of mergers, one of the announced merges was a merge of Hyjal (which is High Pop) with Proudmoore (which is one of the highest-pop servers in North America).
And there was a huge outpouring of “WTF?!? NO!!!” from players on BOTH servers.
Proudmoore is overwhemlingly Alliance and Hyjal is overwhelmingly Horde. BOTH high-pop servers (Proudmoore excessively so).
Who would have benefited from this? Nobody! You make a laggy mega-server with login queues for no purpose whatsoever.
Fortunately, they called it off after the outcries. But seriously… what were they thinking?
That they could save a few bucks a month in datacenter fees. All the mergers have been made with the idea of saving money. They were not done to benefit the players.
I was on Thorium Brotherhood before it was connected to other realms. It is more dead today than it was before the connection.
It’s not about lack of incentives, it’s literally a snowball effect that started going hard since legion because of belfs. There would need to be something REALLY big for people to swap back at this point.
Aggressive server merges would probably just be a temporary bandaid for people who aren’t willing to server transfer but for the rest of the difficulties outside of mythic it’s already crossrealm and it’s still bad so people just swap.
That would be pretty nice, or at the very least make it global rather than per faction.
There’s this crazy notion in the community that most former Alliance raiders have switched to playing Horde. This is not true. Most former Alliance raiders don’t raid anymore, having either quit the game or quit raiding.
Go back 5, or 7, or 10, or 12 years. Look at the top, say, 500 Alliance raiding guilds. Where are they now? Are they Horde? No. They don’t exist.
People need to get over this notion that there’s been some massive exodus from Alliance to Horde. There hasn’t. There’s been a great die-off, which is not only a much bigger problem, but has to be approached with totally different solutions.
Having Horde vs Alliance in every aspect is such a unique identity to the game. It would really suck to see it stripped away.
Unfortunately, that’s the route we’re moving. It’s almost like the next expansion (Or a future one) needs to silence the conflict between our factions completely. It’s a ton of work but that’s just how the player base is moving.
Except in recent years people have been actually switching a lot more or quitting, it’s not a thing from 10 years ago even if horde already outnumbered.
Ok, you can say the same thing about a lot of horde players.
Nobody has ever been able to show me ANY data of a mass Exodus. The factions were pretty even before Legion, Blizzard says the factions are pretty even now (in terms of overall playerbase). If a mass exodus had occured, that would no longer be the case, because raiders are (contrary to what some believe), a very large portion of WoW’s playerbase, and if there was an exodus on that scale it would have titled the overall player numbers, which hasn’t happened.
If somebody can show me evidence of a mass exodus, I’d love to see it. (And no, “there are more Horde guilds” is not proof of an exodus, it’s been true to some extent since TBC and data shows it’s because of a larger die-off Alliance side, not because of an exodus.)
Exactly, overall playerbase. A lot of people don’t raid or do m+ and you can just go ingame and check how many pugs there are on both lists. Because the difference is night and day and that was not the case in early legion as someone who played and pugged on both.
How is it that hall of fame is filled significantly faster on horde side compared to Alliance? Because most of the top players play horde so what happens when guilds die off due to lack of players and they have little to no choice on Alliance? They quit or go horde. The longer it goes on for the more it snowballs.
Go ahead and compare top 1k whats the ratio of Horde vs Alliance guilds.
I want cross faction so I can play Dranaei and Worgen. Love them both, especially Worgen
But I don’t want to just up and leave the Horde and all my resources just to play one. I don’t think the Alliance population will die more so it will just be muddied, which IMO is fine.
I don’t know if this already exists but with AH already shared I’d love to see cross faction account mail. Would really incentivize me to make characters if I could send gold cross faction.
