And that was the start of Blizzard’s problem with faction imbalance. They had a chance to address the actual problem of faction imbalance, which is the cause of those increasing queue times, but instead, they gave the horde ANOTHER benefit (I have never been able to use merc mode as Alliance, not ONCE) but that only made the problem worse.
@thantasia idk how to quote with the new Mobile forums.
Anyway, Merc mode, was made for allies. They did fix the faction Imbalance at least the root issue which brought about Merc Mode, EMFH was rightfully nerfed.
What racial are we saying is broken now? I know I know, people say “Horde Racials OP” except, Sims are not showing that by any large margin.
Troll has best racial EVER! Yet they are not highly played? You guys are just reaching with this garbage.
Also don’t know how you can use Merc as allies, it was made for allies who had long Qs not that Horde has Long Qs, allies can still use it for double honor.
Double Honor > Slightly shorter Q times. JS.
Then we look at population.
6.5% play troll. Hmm, guess that racial is not as god like as made out to be. EMFH had what human at 50% playerbase? Lol.
Edit: apparently links are no longer allowed, hit World of Wargraphs for some reality checks.
BElf is the highest, not because of broken racial, but because it’s always been a pretty race, the popular on the horde side. The new racial IMO is worse than the old one, didn’t stop people staying BElf.
What else we got? A stun break? Oh no allies have that. We get a fear break, because every class has fear, oh wait that’s stun. Warriors have fear immunity that isn’t broken? But WoTF is? Lol.
It’s not about racials NOW (though Ion said that he was still going to nerf two horde racials; arcane torrent and berserking), it’s about past racials that caused (along with the creation of Belves) a migration of Alliance talent to the horde.
And merc mode was made for the horde. Since the migration, horde queue times skyrocketed, so merc mode allowed horde to go to Allilance side in BGs so they wouldn’t have to wait.
I know HOW to merc mode and who to go to, I’m saying that I have never been able to merc mode because the only faction with huge queue times is horde, hence it being yet another benefit for the horde.
You want to check links, check pretty much any PvP ranking and you’ll see that horde own PvP. And in a game that is designed to pit one faction against the other (PvP), that causes real in-game problems.
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No…
What we had before mercing was just even longer queue times. Also, plenty of people just quit the game because of how absurd the queue times were. It’s ridiculous that you have to travel to a hidden NPC to use merc mode. Queue times would be even lower if it was built into the UI.
Expecting people to pay money per character when some of us have literally a dozen high level characters to balance populations is absurd at best. Especially when they may not want to play faction X all of the time but are willing to fill space on the other team for PvP.
Mercing is the best solution to population balance in PvP. In WPvP it might be more complicated without more changes to War Mode. Assuming they don’t change War Mode to be all about PvP as I suggested in my thread, they’d then have to instead decide how to deal with PvE when you’re in merc mode. IE: do you want people to be able to do the other factions faction-specific PvE content?
I think it’d be great to even allow people to group up with members of the opposite faction in merc mode so you could be in more organized groups for WPvP or even rated/casual queues. Then you’d be able to play with friends of the opposite faction without maintaining alts of both factions. This would also mean being able to go merc as either faction at any time rather than just the overpopulated faction.
Opening up and expanding on merc mode would increase participation in PvP overall.
No, merc mode is a bandaid designed to help only one faction: the horde. It doesn’t FIX the problem of long queues, which is caused by the number of horde who want to PvP vs. the number of Alliance who want to PvP .
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No, it was originally designed to lower the queue time of WHATEVER faction is overpopulated at any given time. It was never Horde specific. You have a very bizarre perspective/bias about faction issues which comes through in all of your posts. Blizzard can’t help you feel like less of a victim if you have a victim mentality.
The rest of your statement is just completely absurd. Of course it helps the issue of long queue times. You’re removing players from queuing on the side with too many and adding them to the side with too few. That’s like, exactly how you solve a queue time disparity in a game with multiple factions.
It’s ridiculous to think or believe they could ever do something to get exactly 50% of the population to play each faction and even more ridiculous to think you’d get an even active number of PvP participants at any given time. Even in a more ideal split of population, you might drift from one side to the other in who had more people queuing at any one time and a merc mode would still be nice to have in those situations.
People may not want to play faction X all of the time for PvE/story reasons or because they have more friends on a specific faction, but many people are perfectly willing to play on whatever side has the fastest queue for PvP. I used merc mode all the time for a faster queue. I don’t care which side of the BG I spawn on. I wish there was just a tick box in the UI that said prefer faster queue and put me on whatever team would get me the fastest queue at that time. For some people PvP is about PvP and faster queues are a priority over faction identity.
Also, as I mentioned, an expanded merc mode could also be about letting people play with friends of the opposite faction, even when queue times weren’t their main reason for wanting to play with the other faction.
Since you don’t know me, making any kind of psychological assumption is ridiculous and only has the equivalent effect of name calling.
Sure, merc mode was designed for “whatever” faction had a larger queue but we know who that is, just as we know that Ion’s 30% buff is designed for “whatever” faction is underrepresented in Warmode.
In fact, I have never met an Alliance character who has used merc mode because horde queue times are always far longer. When you queue’d merc mode, I’m assuming it was as horde, right?
I was basing it on the numerous posts I’ve read of yours on the same topic in which you seem to have a distorted view of imagined horde favoritism.
Yes, I’m not sure what your point is as I’ve never really argued against giving a faction a stronger incentive to turn War Mode on based on population balance.
Their approach I don’t think will be enough to balance all the shards though. If we think of War Mode shards as the same as a BG instance but just with no transparency, you have some number of balanced shards and then an overflow where there aren’t enough players of one faction to match up against the remaining members of the other.
Giving an incentive to the lacking side to get more of them to turn it on might help some, but merc mode would be a better option in my opinion since you’re getting people who want to PvP onto both sides instead of luring people in with a PvE bonus and hoping they’ll do some PvP when they get there.
Also, if people only turned it on for the PvE incentive and that incentive vanishes or is reduced eventually if you ever actually achieved parity, then are they going to stay or just turn it off because you stopped giving them an extra incentive once there were equal numbers? Shouldn’t you want to balance both sides with people who are actually there to PvP if you’re balancing them for the sake of PvP? That’s a huge part of why I’ve suggested making War Mode more exclusively about PvP. If people’s main reason to go there is a PvE bonus, you’re not attracting people into a PvP mode to PvP. All incentives in War Mode should be PvP based and population balance can be achieved with merc mode.
Yes, but I wasn’t going to re-roll Alliance if I didn’t have merc mode. I’ve played Alliance alts in the past but I’ve been Horde 90% of the time I’ve played since open beta of Vanilla. I’ve had friends who quit over queue times (whether it was PvP or server login queue times on our high pop server). People just don’t want to pay even more money to balance queue times in a B2P game with a sub. It’s not our job to pay for equal queue times, it’s Blizzard’s job to provide a decent experience that we’re already paying for. If they don’t, people leave.
Which is why most of the Alliance’s talent rerolled to horde or left.
I agree that faction transfers are excessively expensive for the players who have large stables of characters, which inhibits faction transfers for queue time. The solution to this is to provide a more reasonable alternative for such players. For example, instead of charging hundreds of dollars to transfer a dozen characters, players could be permitted to transfer an unlimited number of characters at one time for, say, the cost of transferring two characters.
Expanding merc mode might increase Horde participation in PVP, but as the queue times demonstrate, Horde participation is already too high. It would most certainly decrease Alliance participation in PVP - and drive unsubscriptions on Alliance side.
Horde are already pretty happy with the game - after all, they got more powerful racials in battlegrounds, first access to high level warfront weapons, and a war mode bonus that is essentially free of risk - many Alliance are pretty dissatisfied, and some have already quit because of it. Expanding merc mode would just accelerate unsubscriptions from Alliance players, which is the worst possible thing for the game at the moment.
Getting rid of merc mode, in contrast, would help stem the tide of Alliance unsubscriptions, and with mass faction transfers would permit any Horde players who actually care about queue times a simple solution for getting short queue times.
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Merc mode is disabled for the faction with the shorter queue times. Otherwise I would have used it to spy on Horde strategies, just like Horde mercs get information on Alliance strategies. But your basic point is correct.
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Out of curiosity has any Alliance member here used merc mode?
They were doing both. Unfortunately, Blizzard gave in to the whiners.
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All AOE racials that are acceptable for arenas are overpowered in battlegrounds, especially epic battlegrounds, because they can catch many times more people.
Merc mode was added in 6.2 for the Alliance.
Take off that tin foil hate.
but this is easy, the racial change of the alliance by the horde and vice versa, and we see how all this imbalance is fixed because the players will always choose to play the best option, which was really what caused the current. Faction imbalance, only they do not want to accept it and if they know how to remedy it, they just do not do anything.
I don’t understand the logic behind this point. Why would expanding merc mode make alliance quit? It wouldn’t harm you in anyway, there’d just be more people participating on your side of PvP.
From their perspective, they would have more players to PvP with. According to the blue post in this thread, they changed War Mode already so that you’re either in a fairly balanced shard already population wise, or a completely one-sided shard (essentially an overflow shard). If we had merc mode in War Mode, there’d be a larger number of balanced shards, but the people already in shards with both factions wouldn’t even notice much of a difference because… you’re already in shards with equal numbers of both factions supposedly.
Horde would notice the biggest difference because there’d be fewer overpopulated horde overflow shards. The horde that are all alone in shards with no alliance would now be in shards with both factions.
If you believe Horde have an advantage gear wise which likely isn’t the case anymore if it ever was, some of those people would now be on your team, helping you.
If you believe Horde racials are better, why would they be turning merc mode on if they cared about racials that much? When you use merc mode, it transforms your racials into the race you become, so you’d have Alliance racials as a Horde in merc mode. I actually wish it let you choose your alter ego’s race instead of doing it automatically so you could pick which one you wanted.
If they went so far as to expand it the way I suggested so anyone could use merc mode at any time to play with friends, Alliance could actually use merc mode to experience the supposed greener grass of being Horde in PvP at no cost if they wanted to.
I don’t think people are that happy with BfA in general. Most of my friends hardly log in anymore. I haven’t really played in months and we’re mostly Horde. One of my friends I still see logging in actually made an Alliance alt to PvP with friends on another server. Though, the reason most of us aren’t playing a lot right now isn’t a PvP specific problem, it’s just overall disappointment with the expansion.
We need tenacity not rewards or more % of anything. I do wpvp not for rewards i do it because i like to kill Horde players, but if they are the majority it doesn’t have sense make pvp. More risk for more reward? come on! We need pvp no pve in pvp.
First, let’s start with the fact that there was a massive shift of PVP players from Alliance to Horde before the Legion expansion. Why did these players shift? I think most people recognize that it was related to the EMFH nerf. As a result, Alliance racials got worse relative to Horde, and the players who were willing to play either faction shifted to Horde - the players with the best ratings for the racials, and the wannabes following them.
So who is left on Alliance? Obviously, the players who care about which faction they play on - who are, in some sense, loyal to the Alliance. And those players don’t want to be fighting alongside mercenaries, who are by definition not loyal to the Alliance, even if they aren’t that loyal to the Horde either.
There are practical reasons, too. For example, if I were grouped with a merc, would he hesitate before helping to kill a rare animal that his Horde side hunter buddy had been looking for for months and was trying to tame? My bet is yes, because otherwise he’d face a lot of flak back on Horde side hunter friend. From my perspective as Alliance, though, his hesitation makes him untrustworthy - I can’t trust him to help the group if things get tough. And if party chat turned to how stupid Horde were, he’d probably defend them rather than participate, undermining party unity.
It’s bad enough having expansions where the faction leaders are working with each other instead of against each other. Actually having to work alongside mercs would be too much. It’s already making battlegrounds much less enjoyable.
You just explained why having “more players to PVP with” isn’t worth anything to us - at best we “wouldn’t even notice much of a difference”. But since we couldn’t actually build relationships with mercs that would extend further into the community - being able to trade with them, invite them to character level communities, invite them to our guilds if we liked them - what we’d actually see is that fewer of the players we PVP with are people who can actually be our friends. That’s a big hit in terms of what makes PVP enjoyable.
That’s part of the problem too. What you’re basically saying is that it would be forcing the Alliance to improve the game for Horde. That’s a big part of why many Alliance are unhappy with the game. We’re not just part of the game to be manipulated to make the Horde happy; the game should make the Alliance happy too, and merc mode detracts from that goal.
No, they’d still be on team Horde, because that’s where they’re guilded and where their friends are. Are they going to camp flight points with us to keep their Horde side friends from finishing emissary quests until they expire instead? I don’t think too many Horde mercs will be helping out with that kind of PVP, which happens all the time.
That’s exactly the problem. They’d stay Horde side for the stuff they actually cared about, and would only merc for the stuff they didn’t care about. Leave us alone, and let us stick with people who actually stay with Alliance all the time.
That would make the current imbalance problems even worse. People willing to merc would go Horde side to do their dailies, and Alliance side only to do Call to Arms. For an immersive faction war experience, what we need is for the factions to be more segregated, not less.
Sure, there’s the normal dropoff in interest in PVE after most of the expansion content is completed, which happened pretty quick with this expansion. Mercing isn’t going to help with PVE deficiencies, though.
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