They have the data, and I am sure they reviewed it. But I do think that they had already made their decision about this. Otherwise, why did they even go through the trouble of developing a new queuing system ahead of time?
They knew exactly what they were going to do, weeks ago, all this “reviewing the data” was just them looking to confirm it did what they wanted.
#WorldofHordecraft. Why fight it, I already started leveling my Horde characters for when the system goes full time. I want to be ready to jump right in.
Well because the #somechanges isnt going to step into the realm of trying to balance racials.
The underlying problem is the original game itself, which I would rather they leave alone as much as possible with maybe a few QoL changes. Not balancing.
The underlying problem is close to a decade of player perceptions and lemmings playing follow the leader. They wanted a fix that could help this decade, without forcing players onto servers or factions they didn’t want to play on.
Personally would have preferred they went with changing up racials + faction changes and maybe even incentives for Alliance to queue, but I recognize all of those also would’ve still set the forums on fire and wouldn’t have led to anywhere near the amount of BG participation same faction did.
Hoping that once they do go through with this completely, there’s at least a minimum amount of time before same faction queue kicks in.
I’m also hoping they finally give us some actual numbers regarding faction/server balance, but that’s just another pipe dream.
The racials are already largely balanced in TBCC. That wouldn’t solve anything. In Wrath, EMfH becomes ridiculously strong in ICC, so we may see some very late-Wrath Classic Alliance dominance - but it won’t do much for population outside of it, if it even does at all.
I’d prefer they leave it alone too, but we have TBCC already. And this BG change is a massive one.
They said win rates between alliance and horde were 50/50 also.
Less alliance pvp than horde as always, and therefore participation is never going to be truly equal.
I think I understand what you’re getting at but that’s not the problem they’re trying to solve, it was purely just horde queue times and while the underlying problem is still there, at least most of their paying customers aren’t going to up and leave in the short term.
Do I think they could do more to entice alliance players into queuing? Sure. Most of the solutions to that on the forums are way imba alliance favored and would never happen though.
I’ve seen someone talk about giving alliance gold for queuing which seems interesting as it would help alliance save for epic flight, get more gold into alliance economies, and lower queue times for horde as more alliance queue.
All the things alliance said would be destroyed by this change. Me personally, I think horde queue times were lessened even without reimplementation of the change (from an hour or more during peak to maybe half that now) and could live with this being an intermittent thing when it gets unbearable.
I’ll agree with the lemmings comment, as that’s largely the cause of the huge population shift. But balancing the racials, or doing any number of things over a year ago would have been the best way to address it. If they weren’t going to go no changes in TBCC - and they had to have known long beforehand - they shouldn’t have tried to do the same in Classic.
Taking steps B and C when trying to fix a problem would be better than going straight to Z.
Pretty much. Testing the system is understandable, but there should be a period where they still try and match AvH. And yeah - we’ll never see the data nor numbers. They don’t announce live numbers for a reason.
If we are talking PvP it will have a large impact. Thing is most players PvE and aren’t rerolling for a PvP racial anytime soon.
If you go look at he warmane WotLK arena ladders you will see a VERY similar picture with human to what we see with undead right now.
I’m obviously going to be bias because I have been enduring BG Qs for the last month, and if I hadn’t capped honor in the prepatch (didnt catch the 1st night >.<) I would REALLY be struggling for gear right now and I can see why this is being addressed.
Percentages would work while still protecting their precious subscriber numbers. That’s all I want. Just an overall percentage, a percentage on the Server Selection screen, and some indication of percentage of Horde queueing vs Alliance queueing.
Ironforge pro being the best we have, when there were multiple census addons that Blizz just broke, is something I don’t like having to lean on. And drustvar might be even worse.
They don’t do things on a whim, everything is planned in advance. The test was more then likely to see the horde communities response as for some H v H battlegrounds are a deal killer. Since the horde community feedback was mostly positive so they are moving forward. I expect the reasoning and statistics to be works of alternative PR ‘factoids’
It would at least let us know what the actual balance is like. Especially on PvP servers. If I pick a server that has 40% [faction], but go to the factions capital/Shattrath and can barely see the ground during primetime, it’s pretty easy to tell it’s a bustling server where I’ll stand a chance against [opposite faction] out in the world.
I mean… the Horde community is relevant, but the Alliance community is there too. I wouldn’t put it past Blizzard to focus primarily on the Horde community - as that’s the community they’re specifically targeting with this change, and they can drown out any negative feedback (especially from Alliance) with the positive feedback they’re getting.
Saying, “95% of the playerbase’s feedback was positive”, for example, without actually showing any data about the real numbers.
It would have to show active players, and not individual characters.
But, yeah. I’ve already rolled a Horde character that I’ll be slowly playing if I keep playing at all - I’ve gotten back into other games, and XIV, and am having a lot more fun.
Exactly, this short term solution is exactly that - a short term solution that will keep quarterly profits (which have been lacking since before the launch of TBCC, this is part of why TBCC and its prepatch were so rushed). Not a decision for the long term well-being of the game or any of its players.
I believe they’re looking at the data to justify their decision but not to seriously analyze the situation. We also have no idea what “about 50-50” means. In any case, nobody was saying the win rate would immediately decline, they said that over time ally pvp community would wither and decline. The recent blue post did not even address the principal concern with the proposed change, that it would worsen faction balance over time.