We don’t even know that much. It could be an accurate representation of the population we just don’t have any way to confirm, but it’s really our only source of data so I don’t know what you expect us players to do about it when trying to talk about population issues. The only bit of info that supports that Horde massively outpopulates the Alliance is that BG queue times are insane for us, but given we know the Alliance overwhelm PvE servers that can be argued to just simply be in their nature to not queue as frequently and those that are invested in PvP premade which leaves casual Alliance out in the cold as well (and further kill their incentive to PvP).
We also know over in Retail that Horde v Alliance population is actually pretty even, but that all the talent has gone to Horde over the years. This makes me feel good about assuming the ironforge numbers are a decent representation of the population breakdown even if we know it’s not the actual numbers.
All in all I feel good about assuming the populations are relatively balanced as one could hope for with the assumption that the factions are doing different things. Could be proven wrong if Blizzard ever gives us the data, but it’s all we can do until then.
Right, anyone who exclusively PvPs and has no interest in raiding and never does won’t be recorded ever. I feel like those players are going to be rare, but they definitely do exist. Classic WoW content really does encourage people to do a lot of content simply because of gear rewards. Lots of PvPers bought raid runs to try to get a piece of gear that was BiS for PvP so I think those people will still be picked up somehow (eventually). And if you have two 70s and raid on both of them you get picked up twice.
Since the Alliance don’t seem to be PvPing as much and are largely seen as the PvE faction it’s fair to assume their number is more solid than the Horde’s because of that. I’d also argue that given how bad BG queues are for Horde right now a lot of them are not focusing on PvP specifically (at least until this weekend). The skew is probably harder than what ironforge gives us, but it’s hard to say if the skew is 54-46, 60-40, 58-42, or super bad like 70-30.
Personally I think if Blizzard was actually concerned with the faction balance they would attempt coordinate faction transfers from Horde to Alliance, specifically on fairly balanced PvP servers where Alliance suffer. They could also throw in a free server transfer if they offer it to any server that is so lopsidedly Horde that no one would take it. A lot of the PvP focused crowd would likely jump at that, and you’d probably bring in some casual PvPers who just want better queue times when they do decide to do some BGs.
But they won’t likely do that. At best they’ll offer paid faction change sooner or something
now let’s apply that same logic in a different way
We know that horde are the pvp faction and pvp more, and alliance are the pve faction and pve more. So there’s almost certainly a lot more horde who don’t post logs than there are alliance who don’t post logs. That would mean the disparity in faction players is in fact higher then warcraftlogs would indicate.
Personally i think the split is probably closer to 35-40% alliance to 60-65% horde. This alone doesn’t explain the long que’s, i’ll agree to that. FREE faction transfers would have helped balance out both the overall faction disparity as well as the PVP one. This change just destroys it even further.
Like you said
Everyone who want’s to be competitive at either PvP or PvE is now going to want to be horde. Anyone who even thinks that they want to be competitive will want to be horde.
If blizzard is just going to throw in the towel and allow HvH bg’s, the last perk alliance had, they should have just straight up got rid of factions altogether. They’ve effectively removed faction balance concern for the horde, but left the concerns of imbalanced faction’s for the alliance.
Hate to break it to you but PvP servers aren’t the only ones with battleground queues. The majority of pvp focused players play on PvE realms because all of the meaningful pvp content is instanced.
There is no pvp rating in wpvp. HWL and GM are just titles given to people who grinded the most and have nothing to do with skill. Nobody reaches gladiator by camping the towers in HFP.
Nobody cares about wpvp. So please lose your entitlement.
The only people rolling pvp servers are gankers who are obsessed with camping people in the world. All of the meaningful pvp in the game is instanced now. You don’t hit Gladiator in STV or Nagrand.
Because the alliance is the boring faction. Alliance could have op racials and theyd still have less players - which they did have better racials in multiple expansions and nothing changed.
That’s how all politics work, even video game ones. It’s like when they tally gun deaths, crime or housing markets. Anything that can be used as a strawman to inflate a position in an argument can and must be marched out.
Anyone with a basic grasp of those sites know they only measure end game PVE raiding of players who are lvl 70. They don’t measure all populations on servers or sub 70 characters at all (nor pvp only players).
Its def. worse than what Ironforge.pro shows. They only take data from the ppl that raid. I can promise you a big chunk of pvpers never steps a foot into any of these raids.
Also there were some recent free character transfers I believe around the time TBC or so hit.
On IF. Pro said server looked balanced but the free character transfer from blizzard only allowed horde players to leave.
IF Pro is def. not accurate when it comes to pvp numbers
here:
They allowed free character transfers from faerlina on both sides, but horde only from whitemane to another server.
Ironforge pro lists faerlina and Whitemane as equally balanced.
True, because there’s no point, unless you premade. The recent “fix” does nothing to address the fact that queueing up is a waste of time for alliance players.
And on pvp realms it’s actually 60/40 horde. 17 of the 24 US pvp servers are worse than 60/40 horde, and only 6 are within 60/40 either way including both rp-pvp servers.