The funny thing was, for a long time, from Vanilla to TBC to WoD, the Horde were the underdog race, EMFH, pre honor talents was one of the most powerful arena talents in the game and most of the quote ‘attractive races’. People naturally love seeing ‘brute’ races fight and brawl, but for your player character people naturally tend to play the ones they find nicest/coolest to look at.
From Undead Dks, nelves, female draenei, female pandaren, etc. Humans in pvp were always very powerful with a proper pilot behind them. They used to have a free pvp trinket on a 2 min cd for all content back before talents which meant a second trinket slot, opening up 3-20% more burst dps could be used on your “KILL” phase to completely burn down people. All the leading pvp teams were humans despite blizz even putting triple the pvp stats on trinkets. +900 agility, + 1400 versatility/resilence, etc. Humans however used another trinket slot and pwned.
But it was fair that for a mass bgs, Alli attracted more casual players, Horde more pvp oriented/competitive players as a player who played 6-13 toons on both in WoD. (I got RaFed onto horde, and liked Frostfire ridge’s story, but the community on Ally Moonguard just has no horde equivalent that exists lol and gnomish druid cannibalism fests vs Orc tribes mud hut rp or random cat clans vs Dragon clans shennaigans ensuing.
I think the main problem is, although technically for Myhic invitationals, ally with the power of coordination and mics can take advantage of racials like meld, they’re still extremely situational unless the whole group has them and aren’t very useful in a random chaotic pug box.
Raidwise however, horde gets more concentrated bursts (Orc mini bloodlusts), that gave them 3 week leads on rank 1 ally guilds, while others that transfered (explicity for racials, even with existing players) all agreed that goblin rockets and orc lusts let them burn things down, and Belfs old racial silence being op for mythics while Ally’s useful racials.
(EMFH, Stoneskin), were in WoD left untouched with blizz nerfing them from 45% horde 55% ally for “class balance”, and wo and behold, the 10% of racial chasers went to 55% horde, 45% ally.
A simple, but balanced option would be to say do a customizable talent system where you could earn equivilents of the other racials’s perks through pvping / pveing or rep grinding. Say, grinding honored on Gnomeregan/Goblins could give you a mirrored rocket jump and escape artist and vice aversa, and various racials could be tweaked lightly or additional more useful ones added. (Etc: Bloodgore: Worgen: For the next 30 seconds, you have 15% more haste/crit etc. )
OFC, that assumes the current faction imbalance is unintentional. Guessing by Ion on High elves not caring to player feedback or hype by saying “If you want to play a blue eyed elf, just play horde, i’m not bothering with ally.” He’s a one trick Orc shaman of a guild called literally “Elitist jerks”, Which does do mythic raids and very little else. It’s not unknown for him to go into a raid and wipe 3 times before nerfing it to hell for his group to pass it lol.
That’s the way of a game dev, if the content is too hard to do, except through severe game breaking/ creative use of mechanics, make it impossible for all the other players and nerf it for yourself when you get there lol. I’m not saying i wouldn’t do the same, or my 10 year old younger cousin on a tabletop, but im not the game dev of a multi billion falling once king mmorpg now am i?