If you think that being nice to people to get them into raiding it’s “working more”, then boy… that’s just sad.
And look. I’m on the side that supposedly has it easy, the one you’re trying to claim it’s “favored” and yet… I don’t raid, despite all the so-called advantages, I haven’t touched a raid out of LFR since MoP, and even abandoned LFR al together save for having to kill Jaina for the war campaign as I didn’t have a choice if I wanted to move forward with that quest.
And you know why I don’t raid?
Because of people.
Not because blizzard has done anything I don’t like, not because I perceive some bias… people are the ones giving me a reason to not do it.
If you need advantages to have the so called “pros” switch temporarily to your side and “fix” things for you (like it happened during WoD…), the problem is not something blizzard can fix.
This statement highlights the importance of the semantics here.
Because most of the people “proving” there is an imbalance in the game in this thread, are highlighting ** PvP ** issues. That’s not an accurate comparison.
Because if we have 46% Alliance, and 54% Horde (reliable stats, btw), that IS NOT imbalanced!!!
But now …
… if 90% … of the 54% of Horde players turn on WM,
but just 10% … of the 46% of Alliance players turn on WM …
… then you gotcha yurself a big ole’ imbalance. THAT part I will agree with.
But the GENERAL populations?? Sorry-- EVERY statistic proves that wrong. Because the same PvP argument works for high end raiding. There are (sic) 46% of Alliance players in the GENERAL population, but only 2% of them raid.
So AGAIN, the GENERAL populations are about as even as you’re ever going to get them. But … for whatever reason(s), Alliance: don’t like to PvP, and they don’t like to raid competitively. Why are we the players, the Horde, the Devs supposed to hold their hand???
The solution is sitting right there as the IN GAME STORY has detailed for at least the last 3 expansions (if not the last FIVE!): REMOVE THESE STUPID FACTIONS.
Horde has more competitive pvers, meaning more pve guilds, more progressing guilds and more importantly MORE pugs for raids and m+ aka more options, a bigger pool of skilled players, they also have more skilled pvpers and fair better in random casual bgs.
Did this happen magically? Did the horde became more skilled suddenly? No, people migrated from the Alliance at the end of WoD/start of Legion for the racial advantages and then stayed there(Even if they dont do mythic or serious content, they followed the streamers and big guilds cuz humans are dumb), and now since those people have moved and stayed there since even after the balance changes of racials there was no reason to move to the Alliance, now this means Horde has the bigger content community which means if you care about that you are a fool to not go to the horde because life is easier due to more options being available at all times. And this creates a snowball effect that only gets worse the more it is ignored.
In other words, Alliance is dying and it is only going to get worse because more and more people realize Horde is the superior faction, therefore I am very happy to accelerate the death of the Alliance by faction changing so the problem becomes worse so the devs are forced to fix this.
And that is what many alliance are doing, my mate is also moving to the Horde because many of his friends are also moving to the Horde, and this will continue until Alliance dies out, that is a fact because that is HOW THE SNOWBALL EFFECT WORKS.
Remove player faction boundaries in PvE. Let players join any groups they want, any guilds they want, ect.
And then for PvP, don’t have it based upon Horde or Alliance. Have a three faction, mercenary organizations, option with no unique rewards of any kind. Just three different teams with no unique rewards that either faction can join AND that have caps so that if one team pulls too far ahead in number of players then its locked and no one else can join that team until the numbers even out again.
GW2 and ESO have shown how a three faction system works well and it could work well in WoW as well.
I think from a narrative standpoint that Horde and Alliance should continue to stay in uneasy tension but players should be seen more as Neutral organizations like The Cenarion Circle in terms of mechanics when it comes to PvP and handling world threats. Besides, the actual Lore will always depict things differently, look at Chronicles and how story wise it was told who killed what raid bosses.
I think those two things would greatly improve balance.
Nothing will get better unless change happens, and there will always be those who resist change but the game NEEDS change. Spinning our wheels and going nowhere clearly isn’t working.
WoW isn’t the only game in the industry to have this problems. Simply flipping off the ability to create or transfer characters to an overpopulated faction would do it. People will eventually settle in. The sooner the better.
People are already raiding on Alliance, doing high-tier content on Alliance - it’s not as if it’s impossible, you’re right, and when there’s a will, there’s a way.
However.
When there’s a split between two factions, people are going to be biased towards one or the other, purely out of convenience. They’ll go where their friends are, where they’re told the ‘endgame’ is, perhaps even to the detriment of playing a race/faction they actually want to.
Further, if you subscribe to the theory that Alliance is for more ‘chill’ players and Horde more ‘hardcore’, you’re sort of stuck with that depending on your faction. If you’re on the Horde and want to play with the more chill Alliance players, your choice is to roll an entirely different character.
It’s simply not a problem that can be fixed - people will always choose one faction over the other, it’s just a fact, and no amount of action, even from Blizzard can change the simple fact that people want to play with each other. They’ll choose the side that makes that easier, that makes ‘winning’ easier, and while it won’t immediately lead to 90:10 level imbalances, it will gradually snowball towards them.
While I think OP’s solution is … a bit stupid, Blizzard would be foolish not to implement some sort of cross-faction PvE system sooner, rather than later, before it gets really bad.
I have an idea out of your idea.
On Warmode, we get a weekly quest to kill alliance player (which i can complete with ease each week because there is alot of alliance).
We select a dungeon within that weekly pvp quest zone and wait for the alliance to be teleported into the instance. Then, we start killing them!
We kick them out, we get 5 new alliance, we kill them, boom! Quest completed.
Or we could also wait for the alliance tank to be at 25% and just finish him off.
An mvp in here advocating for changing every dynamic of wow. Destroying any chance of an rts in the future and races as we know them.
Face it - what you’re proposing would change warcraft as we know it. The formula is working just fine and there isn’t a faction imbalance.
You still have yet to show how anything is imbalanced. Like I pointed out - nothing except word pvp is really affected and even that is server/shard based.
Player choice isn’t a problem.
Thank god it won’t be changed
Ps: blizz isn’t changing factions. It will always be horde vs alliance.
This is ironic, coming from a Night Elf. WC3 worked just fine with more than just the monolithic ‘Horde vs Alliance’ conflict the MMO has dumbed things down into, and the night elves in particular were allowed a lot more interesting expression in that game than they’ve ever had in WoW.
All the formula really does is turn the focus to Orcs vs Humans - making the story about as interesting as one from a game over two decades old. A focus on the individual races making up these massive, monolithic factions will always be more interesting than that.
That is, of course, not the reason there’s an issue … but it’s daft to act like Horde vs Alliance is all we’ve ever had.
I always enjoy how people on General Discussion point to the Cutting Edge leaderboards and say there’s a problem, and then devise “solutions” that would only apply to queued content.
The people and guilds on the Cutting Edge leaderboards aren’t queueing up to do content, guys. These “solutions” you keep coming up with from a LFG/LFR perspective won’t do anything.
M8, warcraft 4 is never happening, blizzard is too scared to innovate or touch a genre that is pretty dead.
instead of a new RTS they decided to remake wc3 when instead they could use those graphic upgrades for wc4, new systems, new units, new upgrades, but they are too scared to ever do that, too much “risk”
The difference is people blindly follow the cutting edge guys, streamers, rank 1s even though they are never going to reach that level. And that is why the faction imbalance starts from the top and affects everyone else.
I understand the warcraft 3ore enough to know it became more than just humans vs orcs. But that’s not even the point I was trying to illustrate.
It’s even worse that there are only 2 factions now - merging the two together would break the formula altogether is what I’m saying. Which it would. So good thing it’ll never happen I guess
There’re other options besides ‘keep people split’ and ‘merge the factions entirely’ - they’ve been discussed at ridiculous length on this very forum.
It’s just silly to be so reductive, to make things so black and white. People can play with each other without deleting factions entirely, even if I do think they’re utterly pointless in their current form.
Don’t twist my words, Saithis, and nothing about what I said ruins anything, if anything it separates the players further from the factions and allows more narrative freedoms WHEN it comes to the factions.
We, as players, already don’t exist in a lore narrative sense outside of quest text. The overarching story refers to us as random adventurers that Blizzard spins whatever way they want.
Sounds like you’re just tired of world of Warcraft then. Cuz there’s thousands and thousands of players that can outline why it’s unhealthy for the game too.
Just because you’re on one side of things doesn’t mean you’re in the majority and that it’s the correct way to go about it.
Plus there’s no issue at all. Things are fine with two factions. I have yet to see a realistic issue between the two except one has more players than the other. That affects gameplay how?
