Gonna need a source on that one
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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 .
lmao the two posters above me disputing this100% truth are posting on blood elves.
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I remember hating blood elves. Another reason BC sucked.
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Hey man, I changed my UD warrior to Goblin then BE in Cata. Don’t hate.
76.6k Alliance
57.2k Horde
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.
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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.
Well, you forgot about Esfand and some others who play alliance.
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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.
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Swifty, Staysafe, Esfand, and a couple others are all going Alliance.
And if you’re letting streamers dictate how much fun you’re having then you are the one ruining your Classic experience, not them.
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I’m going with what I have at hand and experience. You are welcome to prove the opposite that the Horde was somehow just as popular in Vanilla WoW as it is now, since it certainly never felt that way.
Sure there are some streamers who play Alliance but come back to me when Classic releases and analyze the data on the Twitch page of Classic WoW and count the amount of Horde streamers to Alliance streamers. It was mostly all Horde during the beta phase.
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Esfand, Monkeynews, McConnell, Swifty, Quinn, Madseason, Staysafe, Perplexity…
Just to uh… name a few with some decent followings you might have missed here.
If you’re talking streamers with MASSIVE cult followings and viewers in the tens of thousands, only two streamers for WoW really have that kind of crowd: Asmon and Sodapoppin, who play Alliance and Horde respectively…
Are you REALLY sure they’re all going horde?
Firmly in the meh category for me. Horde dominated (many) pvp servers, my guild was alliance on a pve that was 3 or 4 to 1.
Rolling horde on pvp just means the leveling experience will be similar to a pve server. At least we get cross realm battlegrounds.
I’m 100% positive that most streamers will be Horde. Like I said come back to this thread when Classic WoW releases and analyze the data on the Twitch page for Classic WoW. Count the amount of Horde streamers to Alliance ones.
So wait, your entire complaint is based around speculation around the data of population distribution that we dont even have yet?
What an engaging argument.
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This stuff can fairly easily be looked up - Illidan, for example, was almost at a 3:1 ratio for Horde.
PvP servers were largely slanted in the Horde’s favor for population, PvE servers for Alliance. This is not surprising when you look at racials in classic.
I was on a number of different PvP servers and the queue times for Horde were always worse because of the over-saturation. It’s why the GM grind was easier on Alliance, because the queue times were near instant.