Horde has the better playerbase

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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The more experienced you are in the game the more the game “forces” you to switch to the horde if you want mythic raiding progress or even just overall better pvp experiences. The alliance keeps getting worse and worse because of this over the years. ( the better you get at the game its gets way harder to find players to do high end activities to do with and everyone just ends up switching faction towards the horde to find said players).

I know this issue has been brought up before but blizzard just keeps blindly looking at their metrics instead of trying to comprehend the player experience.

Is there anyone on blizzard willing to give a response to this, is this even something you will consider fixing ?

(its not that hard to balance racials and allow cross faction raiding already)

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Alliance have the better racials. They have had the better racials for years. This is not the problem and isn’t relevant to any fix. The alliance playerbase is more casual in almost every region. It was always going to be true that the higher end would congregate somewhere as the skill req went up and the acceptable player pool decreased (talking about players who can realistically clear raid on the first week, like 50 people, maybe).

Numerically, the factions aren’t that unbalanced. 10 pts isn’t a big gap. But alliance players don’t have a large faction of competitive players (sargeras and oce excluded).

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I’ve had no problems mythic raiding with a guild or finding a mythic raid community run for my alt. However outside of that its night and day pugging heroic SoD or m+ past 15s

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Horde has just as many good and bad players as Alliance. They just have a massively larger population. What that means is that the % of good players to bad players are the same. Just different number of people.

A lot of people back in the day rolled Horde when they had the far superior racial abilities. When they tried to swing the balance back, no one gave a crap about it anymore. Those that re-rolled Horde, did not want to pay for a swap or start all over again. The population balance was already screwed, so now it’s just a slow and constant trickle as time goes on. At this point, the only way to right the tipping ship is to remove it all together.

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you know what horde doesn’t have though? functional layout cities.

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I give you that one loool

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But we already have better racials at least for dungeons. That’s why as soon as everyone gets on the tournament realm they make dwarfs and night elves.
Goblin jump and bezerking are probably slightly better for raid but for keys it’s not even close. Alliance wins by miles.

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I already explained why balancing racial abilities will do nothing at this point.

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To be fair, they’re talking about balancing racial abilities AND allowing cross faction raiding. It wasn’t an either-or proposition that was presuming everyone will reroll Alliance if they buff some racials.

Populations are the sort of thing where critical mass comes in. If you have a side considered “better”, people will naturally gravitate towards it and keep skewing the balance. The same phenomenon happens in any open-world faction control game; everyone just wants to go play on the dominant faction, which makes it more dominant, which … Many good Alliance guilds did reroll Horde purely because it was getting harder/unmanageable to recruit quality players and stuff like that. It’s not that the Alliance player base is somehow “more casual”, it’s that there is an actual impetus to switch from the Alliance as you get “more hardcode”.

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As the wealthy leave an area, that area becomes more poor. Same goes when all the semi-hardcore and hardcore players leave, the faction becomes more casual. This has been a slow bleed for years and it’s totally fair to say that currently, the people left on alliance are more casual on average.

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It depends; there’s a lot of assuming in that analogy.
If the wealthy were contributing to the area/community, their loss would be felt to that area. If the wealthy were just THERE, and then went off to go live on the moon, the area/community hasn’t really changed, and calling them poorer is just a way to belittle them. If the wealthy were specifically exploiting the community in that area and making it worse, and then left, the area hasn’t gotten poorer, and may just improve economically/whatever now that the thing keeping them down is removed (unless too much damage is done).

The people left on the Alliance are probably no more casual on average than the average Horde player. It’s just an effect on a fraction of the playerbase (e.g. if the “hardcore” is just 3% of the overall playerbase) that might even vary by activity. Like, idk if it is now, but it used to be a thing where Alliance would be auto-win on certain BGs and Horde would be auto-win on certain other BGs, not because of map imbalance or anything like that, but just who in each faction wanted to queue into a place where they would be guaranteed wins.

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No it doesn’t. If the communities average wealth is $100,000 with a mix between $100 and $10,000,000 every time a top end person moves away, the average will be reduced. I’m not making a political statement. There’s historical precedence for this, but again, not trying to make a political statement.

The average of a set of data is changed when some of that data is removed from the sample. There’s no assumption there. If I remove the top 20% of a sample, without also taking out the bottom 20% the average WILL drop.

I feel like this is simple enough, but let me provide a sample:

Consider the data set of 1, 7, 3, 4, 10, 10, 4, 8, 6, 9
average is 6.2

Remove the highest number: 1, 7, 3, 4, 10, 4, 8, 6, 9
average is now 5.7

Remove the highest number again: 1, 7, 3, 4, 4, 8, 6, 9
Average is now 5.25.

As top end players have left the alliance over years, the average player on the alliance is lower.

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This is predicated on first assuming that the Average wealth is what means something on whether an area/community is richer or poorer, as opposed to other statistical figures like the Median wealth, or number of people under the Poverty Threshold, etc., let alone actual population metrics like the quality of infrastructure, schooling, price of services, etc.

As top end players have left the alliance over years, the average player on the alliance is lower.

This is why I brought up that it also depends on what fraction of the playerbase is the top end.

If you’re dealing in subsets of 10, you can swing differences wildly. In a different hypothetical example, if you have Fifty Thousand 5’s, Ten Thousand 7’s in the Alliance and Twenty 10’s versus Fifty Five Thousand 5’s, Twelve Thousand 7’s in the Horde and Two Hundred 10’s, your average for the alliance is 5.335 versus the average for the horde of 5.372.
The “hardcore” fraction in that Horde is orders of magnitude greater than its Alliance counterpart, but the differences in averages is almost meaningless. Play around with increased numbers of 5’s or 7’s to both sides, a not-as-large difference in the hardcode population, etc., and you could just as easily end up with a smaller average for the Horde even if the hardcore subset is significantly bigger for it than the Alliance.

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100 Alliance: 95% of Alliance are trash, 5% Hardcore. 5 Alliance are doing high end keys etc.
1000 Horde: 95% of Horde are trash, 5% Hardcore. 50 Horde are doing high end keys etc.
Yes those are fake numbers, I just used them to make the point. Saying one side is better then the other is not relevant. As others have pointed out (yourself included), the damn has had a crack for a long time. At this point, the reason people are swapping over faster is simply because it’s easier to find people to group with because of the higher population. You’re still gonna run into the same stupidity on both sides as far as quality players.
I have an Alliance and Horde warrior, I’ve seen the good and bad of both.

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I’m not talking about raw numbers though. Neither of us have those. If you could prove that 5% of the alliance are hardcore (or even semi-hardcore) I’d be absolutely shocked. Who cares what the raw numerical values are for that.

Besides, the numbers wouldn’t be 10:1, they’re 1:3 based on numbers I’ve seen recently (which is admittedly flawed because alts are counted) the numbers are 36:63, but the number of high end players may actually be 10:1. The alliance is still pretty heavily populated, but with people who don’t do group content. That’s why I consider the faction more casual. The percentage of the faction who participates at end game is lower.

If we’re strictly to consider the HoF, 306 horde guilds had CE before the 100th alliance guild got it. At Alliance 200 CE, there were 747 horde guilds with CE. Just based of this, the horde high end player base is roughly 3x the size of the alliance so the alliance is comparatively more casual. (Everyone who has CE is admittedly better than I am, I’m talking about figures, not personal vendettas)

This has nothing to do with my point at all. Of course there are idiots everywhere, it’s the internet. My point is the above expressed that if you compare the number of high end players, there are considerably more on horde and the actual number of alliance isn’t some crazy 10:1.

edited to fix numbers

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Even if less than 5% of the Alliance are “hardcore”, it would only matter if you could also prove that at least X% of the Horde is also “hardcore”.

In both of the hypothetical examples you were replied to with, the number of “hardcore” players given to the Horde was 10x that of the Alliance. In my one, the total Horde population was only 11.9% more than its counterpart imaginary Alliance, and the whole thing could still come out more or less even.

Which is sort of the problem - you’re just throwing a conclusion out there and trying to come up with ways to justify it after-the-fact.

EWww, no, this is a TERRIBLE basis for guessing anything. Guilds getting “CE” doesn’t represent the proportion of the hardcore playerbase, especially so when you end up accounting for the fact that several of those guilds get to be propped up through sponsorships, fans helping them out with alt runs, funnelling loot, etc., that let them survive things guilds just behind them would not.

On top of that, by the very nature of the beast, the guilds that are one boss down, or working on Cutting edge, or in the middle of the progression, are the ones bearing the brunt of the faction-related problems, and the proportion of guilds in that space is as relevant. Are there more Alliance guilds who struggled or broke on Painsmith? working on Sylvanas? KT? Fatescribe? They’re not less hardcode as players just because they’re working with more issues than the people above them had.

Never mind of course, the logical inconsistency of results-based analysis when applied to a subjective “value”.