Faction imbalance, it's not the players job to fix it

Yep, they’d have to introduce racials so broken that they’d force people to pay 25 dollars to faction swap.
But how many would quit in response to such a gross move?

In general the players on horde are just better. Alliance tends to attract more kids than horde does.

Alliance already have the best pve racials in mechagnomes

Alliance are equal for pvp racials with human racials.

As someone who plays alliance I would much rather play horde but I have more friends on alliance.

You’re right. If it was cross-faction, they would make me do something like go into literal Hell to rescue the leaders of the other faction right after a war and then constantly work alongside them for an entire expansion. Can you imagine? We can’t have that!

Can you imagine?

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Just make transfers from horde to alliance free for a period of time after instituting the changes.

That’s not what you pay them for

And it was dumb. No question.

The game needs LESS of that, not more.

Think back to Wrath. Did Alliance players get off the boat in Howling Fjord and report to Sylvanas? No. That would have been ridiculous.

Did Horde players go through the Dark Portal in Burning Crusade and report to Danath? Again, no. Equally ridiculous.

Blizzard is being cheap by making a “one size fits all” story.

They should have had a Horde experience and an Alliance experience in the Maw. The basic story can be the same, but the characters should have been different.

Just like Halls of Reflection in Wrath. Same dungeon, but it had Jaina or Sylvanas depending on which faction you were.

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Surprised I haven’t seen this tidbit of (classic) news talked about here:

(edit: better link)

Basically a lot of what has been said already, this game’s population isn’t what it once was and dividing the players further doesn’t help at all. Just allow cross faction grouping for PvE and be done with it. Cities can still remain faction specific.

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I don’t disagree
That being said this imbalance has multiple factors which have led to the imbalance that presently exists.

A multi part problem, requires a multi part fix.

Fix the racials, figure out a way to bring back the alliance numbers.

Or just unite the factions and let everyone play togeather but I’m not sure how it would play out in reality.

Yup, unless they want Blizz forcing them to a faction and server.

Which people are going to hate more than unbalanced factions and servers.

Honestly I’m in the “let players group, guild, and play with each other cross-faction” camp. It’s time.

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There were windows of time where blizzard could have done something but now it’s too late.

Horde is at critical mass. We have all the groups for all the content.

Just let people group cross faction. It’s over.

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Once upon a time, there were mechanical advantages to being Horde. Which prompted people to go there. The balance wasn’t thrown too far out of whack though. At a certain point, they demolished that mechanical advantage, and actually gave it to Alliance. And people swapped over.

They scrapped that, and the people who bounced over just for that reason, went back to Horde. Horde has the number advantages at this point. Now it’s not too large around then. It’s an advantage, but not too much.

But there are still more opportunities over there, more raiders, more pvp’ers. As time goes on Alliance people move there to group up with these people. Every person who does, increases the divide. Making the other side that much more attractive.

You let this situation sit for years and it gets worse and worse at an accelerating pace.

Now? Even if you made Alliance OP mechanically(…arguably some racials are) but it’s not enough to draw people back. Because the grouping opportunities flat out outweighs that advantage. You’d have to make Alliance so OP you’d break the game almost to convince people to jump. Which isn’t a viable scenario.

This is why you address issues before they turn into problems. And before those problems approach becoming disasters. We’re well on our way to disaster territory at this point and they’re still sitting there ignoring it.

The faction divide is dumb and needs to end. You can keep factions, but stop leaving them divisive. Move them to be more like covenants, where they have stories, they have their areas, and you can be in one. And best of all you can have more than 2. More opportunities for story, more opportunities for growth, more opportunities for players to find people to play with.

Just move pvp in the world to be either FFA or keep it based on those factions and just make everyone in your party/raid “green” to you.

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It’s too late to fix it. All they can do is make content cross-faction.

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Obviously “merc mode” would be a bad name for something that has nothing to do with military mercenaries. But what you are describing is simply the present situation, any of which can be changed to make some form or forms of cross-faction PvE possible.

I’m not defending Blizz but they kinda tried in BfA, with overwhelming quests and mechagnome racial ability.
Exactly don’t know why they nerfed both of them, but I guess there must be a lot of complains from Horde side. (didn’t linger around here back then.)
It’s not weird thing, just maybe Blizz can’t withstand such enormous complains. And I think actually they wasn’t willing to do so.
Now Alliance is more… how can I put this, casual place. lol
I have no problem with it, but now I don’t know how Blizz can fix this.

The issue that happened in WoD happened in BCC. FOTM folks and incentivizing them in a 2 faction game does more harm than good. Blizzard showed once again that their ‘pillar’ is worthless.

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I agree there I’m just pointing out how they refuse to fix it for alliance retail

  1. as if WoW’s lore is anything to take seriously anyways…
  2. Don’t worry about the “RPG element”, since current WoW has only a shadow of the RPG elements of older expacs.

That’s really all they would have to do. We’re usually uniting to kill the big bad anyway so it makes sense even from a lore perspective

But I would never support eliminating the factions themselves.