In Vanilla WoW most people played the Alliance because the Horde didn’t have Blood Elves yet which were merely added to attract former Alliance onto the Horde to boost the population of Horde. But in Classic WoW more people will play Horde because all the streamers play Horde and all the Blood Elves will create Undead. This is 100% truth and I am not wrong.
Classic WoW will not feel like the true Horde experience we had in Vanilla WoW being the underdogs. It will be a revisionist experience where Horde is the faction the masses play reflecting retail WoW.
The course of retail WoW and every Blizzcon since the release of BC has been to mass market the Horde and make it the popular faction and it will be reflected in Classic WoW despite Horde being the outnumbered faction in actual Vanilla WoW.
Blizzard was upset that the WC3 story didn’t make Horde popular in WoW when it released. They’ve made a concerted effort to make Horde the faction of mass appeal ever since.
This is so far from the truth that I actually love it. Pre Alpha/Friends Family testing, World of Warcraft was designed to be Alliance only. Horde wasn’t the popular choice at release because rumors got out the leveling experience would be more difficult due to many areas of the Horde zones having a bad railroad of quests to follow. Once the honor system came out, more horde began to surface. This is why horde got RFC and WC so early compared to Alliance Deadmines .
Anyone who played Vanilla knows Alliance was more popular back then. It wasn’t till BC that Horde became more popular with the addition of Blood Elves since Blood Elves are just an Alliance looking race added to the Horde.
Pretty sure the server stats on Arthas in Classic were very close. There were loads of Alliance sure, but there were also tons of popular Pre-WoW MMO guilds that came to the server and filled in Horde.
Sure you could find individual servers with a more even population but overall it is no secret that the Alliance was more populated back during Vanilla. Classic WoW is just going to reflect the population imbalances of retail WoW ever since Horde became the faction of mass appeal.
Oh, I do agree with you on the current state of the game having an effect for sure. The Horde simply has cooler appeal. Though I still do think some of the largest servers were very even. I think I recall a stat that there indeed were more Alliance “Only” servers during Vanilla. Like we’re talking 80/20 ratio, I think they were probably PvE servers though.
You’re going by thread clicks. Not very statistically relevant.
Either way, according to your method of calculation, the entire pop discrepancy is on PvE realms only. PvP is dead even. RP and RP-PvP are also pretty much even.
Most people agree that racials played a huge role in race selection, Horde racials were generally considered better in PvP and Alliance racials for PvE. Obviously there are outliers, I’m speaking generally. So you would expect higher populations of Alliance on PvE realms and higher Horde pops on PvP realms.
If they have a cooler appeal then how come they weren’t the popular faction during Vanilla WoW? It really has nothing to do with being cool or not. It’s the fact they added Blood Elves to the Horde that boosted the amount of people on the Horde because Blood Elves are one race on the Horde that looks the most like an Alliance race. And that’s what most people want to play as, are races suited with that high fantasy Alliance aesthetic.
All it took was giving Horde an Alliance looking Elf race and then marketing them as the “cool” faction Blizzard wants you to play at every Blizzcon and promotion since.
I believe if you look at the history of WoW development, the devs have mentioned that many of the Horde zones were afterthoughts. They were some of the last zones added into the game and filled with NPCs and quests, that is why starting areas for Alliance are so flushed out and pretty while the Barrens is…barren.