the reason the queues are so long for horde is because of the massive faction imbalance. Horde have the best racials so more people play them. Maybe work on your faction imbalances before you just cater more to the horde and truly kill off the rest of the alliance
The gravity thread is based on the sole assumption that horde v horde in the exact same state as tested will be the only step taken to resolve the greater issue. It also operates under the assumption that not having wildly disproportionate queue times is the only solution to a problem that exists regardless of the bg queue time.
“pvp is figuratively impossible if you play horde” shouldn’t be the driving factor for players to roll alliance. Obviously these things don’t exist in a vacuum and influence one another but maintaining the current status quo is not an acceptable solution, it’s simply pushing the issue onto casual horde players instead of casual alliance players.
One group of players feeling alienated over the other sounds like “good enough” and “good enough” generally isn’t good enough.
I’ve seen a lot of constructive suggestions to help alleviate
The test went great, but now i’m back to half hour or more queue times.
While I agree that you shouldn’t be subjected to very long queue times, you have to understand that the more intelligent Alliance players see a system like this as the effective end of the growth of the faction. The addition of the boost caused the amount of players on Horde to grow by roughly 50% since before the prepatch, whereas Alliance has grown by <10%. Something like this serves to slow the amount of new Alliance characters entering the game to a halt, over the entire course of TBC. Alliance won’t disappear entirely, but Horde will only grow larger and larger as time goes on, not unlike what’s happened in Retail now for years.
The numbers of the players on Horde and Alliance must be brought closer together to achieve this, and accomplishing such a feat is going to require something along the lines of:
- Re-balancing the racials, which will upset Horde players (mostly Undead players)
- Offering something to Alliance players that Horde don’t have/can’t get, such as Dual Spec or Every Man for Himself, which will upset Horde players
- Offering something to Alliance players that Horde players CAN get, but make it far easier for Alliance, such as epic flyer or boost to honor/rep gain rate, which will also upset Horde
Horde are going to be upset with all of the options, unless faction queues are also implemented permanently alongside one of these listed suggestions. I truly believe that an equilibrium can be reached, but it’s on Blizzard if they’d be willing to just endure the potential Horde heat they’d get by offering their minority faction something to make playing alongside them more appealing.
Not the person you asked, but at least for me:
- No, why would they? How does this directly negatively affect them? Even if it makes horde more appealing in some way, it’s a lot of work to reroll to 70 and start over – only the sweatiest will do it (I know, am sweaty.)
- Honestly I think given the scale of the issue, this is the only solution, though of course opening up H → A transfers may (just may, I honestly believe this is very unlikely) have a few hop over and help any dwindling numbers the Alliance may be facing, but wouldn’t count on it.
Re. 2 – The only realistic alternative solution I believe would be mercenary mode and I think it’s worth considering. Others, such as honor boosts or even time-in-queue-based honor boosts sound ridiculous.
Posting my comment from a similar thread: Let’s fix queue times and faction balance without turning the classic world into a speedily gratifying lobby game like everything else out there. There is a reason that retail feels less and less like an mmo RPG.
I’m gonna go around preaching my proposed solution until I see a better one. This is obviously an ambitious solution whereas the strengths of horde v horde are how robust and obviously simple to implement it is, so I’m open to new ideas and suggestions. Anyways I’ll quote my proposed solution below:
I also think it would be cool because it would draw world pvp to the old world and the neutral cities where mercs would queue, would have exciting fights between traitors, horde, alliance, and goblin bruisers, and would have that classic feel since there would be world pvp without flying mounts.
Most importantly, this would maintain the tegrity and immersion of the world; without players getting honor for fighting their own faction or wearing silly masks.
how the hell do y’all keep thinking this pvp fix will somehow worsen the faction balance? is there some massive influx of new players holding out from joining the game that no one else knows about?? retail didn’t die out. alliance is still there and doing just fine; retail isn’t a horde only game. the sky never fell.
1 Like
the imbalance is SO massive! it’s only a 10% difference. the actual fact is most alliance don’t want to pvp to begin with, and the ones that do have already completed the main grind and have the honor gear so they’re not queuing as much… but yeah, keep pushing that narrative of population imbalance until people think it’s truth. you alliance remind me of these idiots we have in office now.
3 Likes
Its not that I’m going to reroll Horde, it’s just that I’m not going to bother with PVP at all because it’s so bad Alliance side (because the pool of competent and driven players is higher Horde side).
I PVP’d in Classic and it was pretty miserable outside a premade most of the time…so I’m honestly not going to bother in TBC.
The issue isn’t ‘Oh no…maybe all the invested Alliance will reroll’ it’s… ‘Even more players are going to dip out of the PVP system because it’s trash’.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a BG system that aggregated All horde and alliance players and just mixed the teams so they were more balanced.
I know at least 10 friends off the top of my head who have vowed to quit and return to private servers if they dont bring back the PvP same faction Battleground fixes.
This has been the single best change in all of Classic/TBC. My friends and I can FINALLY play PVP when we want. It was absolute heaven this past weekend being able to play with my friends.
I dont understand why ANY SINGLE PERSON would have ANY argument to not have this feature. You have an ENTIRE FACTION of people who literally cannot do PvP. Then you get a huge gap in gearing between Horde/Ally for arena so this problem just gets even worse.
If you do not bring back the PvP balance, and not allow over half the pop. to play PvP, people will LEAVE to private servers in massive numbers.
3 Likes
And if they do bring it back, people will LEAVE as well. They kinda painted themselves into a corner with a radical “test”. It was pre-emptive and simply set the stage for these types of threats.
Man, screw your same faction BG’s. Make it HvH only, or an opt out.
I find the idea of AvA as a solution to a Horde queue problem one of the stupidest things anyone’s ever trotted out.
There really should be no same faction battle grounds, that only compounds a broken system where one faction can have significant advantages over another and which is leading to huge server imbalances. Please leave the quick fixes like this in retail, and solve the real problem which are the creating the actual realm imbalances.
4 Likes
I agree that realm imbalance is the root issue, but how can it be fixed at this point? We are almost 2 years into Classic.
Free faction transfers for H to A may bring some people to switch, but I think many are pretty solidified with guilds and friend groups.
Paid transfers would definitely not work - maybe if it was account wide, but no way I would pay to transfer 8-10 characters (plus another 5 on a 2nd account).
The only way that HvH would make the imbalance worse is if they allow faction transfers for A to H. People are not ditching 2 years worth of characters and gearing for a slight advantage with racials.
3 Likes
Does anyone know if they haven’t given a position yet?
Loved it, played battlegrounds all weekend and had a blast. Fixing the queues has got to be your top priority. Was about to un-sub before this test weekend.
Hope it stays 
2 Likes
Loved playing battlegrounds and being able to group with friends. I really hope this becomes a permanent change. Lets turn it back on already !!
2 Likes
I don’t think they’ll go same faction bg’s. They would’ve answered everyone by now. I think they’re gonna leave it for now sorry too say but it’ll be awhile till they do anything most likely. I just don’t get it they nerfed honor by ten times on top of this issue going on.
1 Like
A little feedback from Blizz would be great. Some indication on where things are going would keep me from checking this post twice a day (edit: because I’ve got so much free time waiting in queues).
4 Likes
No thanks, don’t enable this permanently.
1 Like