While I understand your point, this is extremely disingenuous. I get that you might not, but from the people I have seen there is a clear level of disdain for the Horde to a degree that goes far beyond simple faction balance issues.
Faction balance is important, but some of the following things I have seen to justify the “queue times” situation without actually talking in depth about the problem lead me to believe that a fair amount of Alliance players on the forums just want to vent and yell at Horde:
“You caused this, so you should suffer the consequences” (Ignoring that the vast majority of Horde already existed before TBC, many from the start of Classic)
“Horde just camp summoning stones all the time!” (Which is a function of PVP servers, regardless of faction imbalance)
“Horde are all just Undead fotm rerollers for racials and they suck” (Ignoring that players pick factions and races for a variety of reasons.
Yes faction imbalance on PVP servers can be a problem. Even if the entire population was even, servers could still be WILDLY imbalanced. There’s a lot more moving parts to this situation, and for 15 years Blizzard tried and failed to maintain balance.
TBC Classic is not going to have the major influx of players over the life of the game that original TBC did. We’re basically at what we can expect to reasonably be peak, and it only ebbs and flows from here.
There’s far too much involved in trying to massage not only total faction numbers across all servers, but individual server faction numbers to be of significant value to addressing the issue.
We have TWO problems then, not one, since one issue cannot be solved simply without either changing the fundamental core balance of the game or trying to slowly and deliberately affect change on individual players through incentives. The latter process takes A LARGE function of time, and trying to use the queue times to force that change is more than likely going to lead to player losses rather than player rerolls, even if we added free faction changes on targeted servers.
It’s not like they can’t do BOTH solutions. Because they can. But the Alliance players want to use the negative Horde queue times to force players to take faction changes or leave the game. Which is a terrible solution.
I mean we’ve seen this line of thinking in action during Classic. Overpopulated mega servers were unbearable to play on. They offered free server transfers for affected realms. It worked at first, because it was before most people had any character investment or social interaction with their servers. But now we’re two years in for most players, having put in Classic and now moved to TBC. The same solution, targeted server transfers was opened up. And the movement was minimal at best. Most servers did not significantly have affected change from the free transfers.
In fact, my realm Anathema, saw more PAID transfers off realm than free transfers on realm. It was much easier for affected players to abandon our realm, due to not having their investment anymore, than for players on existing servers to come supplement ours and leave their location behind. The free realm transfer didn’t work, and it’s unlikely the faction changes would have either.
Alliance would have praised the change, Horde would have hated it, a handful of people would take it, queue times would stay high or even get longer potentially, and a month later we would see people dropping like flies.