I just faction changed to Horde recently due to the gameplay habits of Alliance players. They largely seem content playing unrated BGs, warfronts, and mythic+ dungeons. 4 months into this expansion, several guilds I joined hadn’t even attempted Uldir Normal despite regularly forming WPVP groups to raid Orgrimmar or camp BFA spawn points. Additionally, I turned off Warmode twice to play with an Alliance friend and was greeted by 3x the amount of players in Boralus each time, to my chagrin.
After switching to Horde, leveling up a DK and a DH showed me even more bad Alliance habits. Groups of 5 -12 max lvl Alliance players regularly raided Horde strongholds in Hellfire Peninsula, and max level Alliance rogues and teams of two regularly swept down on me in Legion zones for no-skill kills.
Alliance players don’t seem to be astoundingly less numerous, they just play the game less competitively and care-free, avoiding difficulties of the game. That being said, it’s great to be back in the horde.
This is “characters active at a high level” which is how the trend of population begins to roll to horde’s favor.
There could be an equal distribution of players across all realms for each faction, but there’s a lot lower activity for content. This leads to players changing factions and/or going inactive on their alliance toons.
What I think is more realistic is that alliance have a higher “alt per account” than horde so each alliance account has higher numbers of alliance characters while a horde main may even have alliance alts but their main is active horde-side in a way that the alliance main isn’t.
There’s a lot of RP community that favors alliance, a lot of “collector” type players on alliance for the “pretty” aspect, and even more that we’ve seen entire guilds change to horde due to the inactive progression scene.
How do blizzard combat this inactivity? I think they’ll eventually resort to a “war mode” bandaid give a flat bonus to rewards, which would likely incentivize higher alliance participation but would ultimately piss a LOT of people off. In reality, many progression guilds have already offered to switch back to alliance if Blizzard were to comp their faction transfers for all of their alts (in the hundreds of $ range) which Blizzard is likely hesitant to lose that profit (which they’re not getting anyhow cuz no one is transferring)… so here we are in a stalemate where the alliance progression scene is dying and players are going with it. The faction population won’t completely die off, but the raiding and m+ scene will grow desolate and further incentivize horde participation.
I don’t dispute that those statistics are a reasonable indicator of a serious problem. I think that they should have a mythic+ component as well. However, I suspect that the mythic+ component would skew the same way at around the 30% to 70%.
At this point, Alliance guilds with progression have moved servers (probably several times, condensing the population on the Alliance side to a fraction of the servers). I don’t raid with my guild’s mythic team any longer due to schedule changes in real life but play some and contribute to guild. The mythic team is 6/8. The guild moved from Lightninghoof to Korgath (at the start of the Throne of Thunder Tier in MoP) and from Korgath to Sargeas (last expansion).
At this point, reversing the skew of the population is going to take a concession on Blizzard’s part: either wildly buffing Alliance racials or giving free transfers to several high end formerly Alliance guilds (with some sort of “and no backsies” clause). Maybe both.
Also, the various developers need to put a tiny amount of time into thinking “wait did our changes in two different areas interact and make a serious horde advantage?” Changing Arcane Torrent to be an aoe offensive dispel and then making a dungeon and a raid mechanic that require an aoe offensive dispel at the same time looks seriously like favoritism. Yes, priests can (and are forced to) mass dispel it on Alliance side, but mass dispel has a huge mana cost on it. Huge. Horde rotations their 20% of the raid blood elves through it (they lose some time to movement and gain some resources - if not a wash, it sure beats being the priest that has to mass dispel that crap).
Appearances matter. A bit less publicity for “rah, rah, go horde”. (Or a lot). Being seen to care about both sides instead of “oh no, the horde queues are too long for bgs… let’s make bots for them to play against”.
I think this is true of both factions. I play on Stormrage Alliance which is high-pop and lots going on. My guilds are active. I am on Horde Argent Dawn which is dead. Every active guild I have been in has swapped servers at some point.
Can you blame us for playing horde. It’s a cool fantasy faction full of monsters, the alliance is your basic Starbucks faction. Very plain and boring and you can play things like the alliance in many other games.
For those who dont understand: the point OP is trying to make is that if you are looking to progress in PvP or PvE the numbers from this website say that if you are 6/8+ or 1800+ their is a 70% chance you are playing horde.
For my opinion: It sucks. Ive played alliance gor every xpac except one (because I wanted to progress through RBGs). I AM an alliance player and it sucks that it seems to have drifted this way. And not that I dont like the horde (which I don’t) but that it isn’t even for everyone. But what can be done? Blizzard cant force people to faction change all they can really do is offer the war mode bonus for those who are at a disadvantage, in hopes people will re roll or faction change.
It really is unavoidable though. If a majority of people are playing horde, its only natural that others will drift that. Whether they be a new player that is following friends or they see that more progression is being done on horde so they faction change.
I would like to try to progress through RBGs again but to do that on alliance would be tough. Regardless: For The Alliance!
So someone could be playing hours a day and unless they are 1800+ or 6/8 mythic (ridiculous cheery picking metric) they are inactive to you? Have you ever wondered why nobody takes Alliance crying seriously?
Yes. Because they don’t do any meaningful content. Play the game all like you want, but the other side also have people doing the exact same thing, plus people doing rated content.
Says the Blood Elf, lol. In all seriousness it wasn’t this bad before. Blizzard just went out of their way to make the Alliance a lot less cooler (especially Night Elves).
This is definately how it feels. Also the reason why increased rewards in war mode will never work. Nothing is going to make getting corpse camped in your quest hub worth it
Incorrect. There are more Horde characters AT 120.
That means there are more active Horde players. If the Alliance reached 120 then quit, there would be just as many Alliance characters at 120.
There aren’t.
The Alliance aren’t making it all the way. They’re either giving up and quitting, or they’re just alts who were never going to be fully leveled anyway.
With the pitiful amount of effort required to hit max, a character who is not 120 is probably just not active.
Problem with using Realm Pop.
I have 12+ Characters All Alliance
3 of them are for role playing… That I forgot to delete… I was bored (Don’t judge me)
All of them are alliance
2 of them are 120 But only one is my main and one is a toon I just got to 120 because being a mage waiting for dungeon ques really sucks.
So, when you look at the total of realm pop for alliance you’ll see that my 12+ characters are calculated in the total of alliance characters.
Even I hate to admit it but I have played Alliance for about 14yrs but recently I have been shifting toward the Horde more and more. The story is better, the Allied races are better, and even more recent I have found quite a lot of nice people to play with.
Since I touched on the Allied races I will go one step further and say that in every way Zandalari destroy Kul’Tiran. That fact alone is going to only add to the imbalance issue. Then if the next set is Vulpera for the Horde. The Alliance will almost not exist. I firmly believe the only reason they have not announced them is because there is nothing in the pipeline for the Alliance that is as interesting to play.
I could go on and on. The Alliance is in a bad spot. Really needs some love and I do hope they got something more in store for the Kul’tiran then what we have seen to perhaps foster more player interest. Right now it is just big humans that can be classes humans could not be before. Not a big deal really.
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")