I’m pretty sure none of these things are a major influence on the faction imbalance. In Classic, for example, PvE servers are overwhelmingly Alliance dominated, and PvP servers are overwhelmingly Horde dominated. The overwhelming majority of people who play Horde do so because they want to be the ‘bad boys’, and the overwhelming majority of people who play Alliance do so because they want to be the ‘good guys’.
Furthermore, I don’t concede that Alliance players have it particularly bad. In BfA, for example, Boralus is a much better designed city than Dazar’Alor, and Drustvar is usually considered to be the most interesting of the starting zones. And whilst I haven’t been a particular fan of the overall plot in BfA, particularly as it related to Sylvanas and the Horde, I did rather enjoy Jaina’s more personal story on my Alliance character(s).
Even as a new character, I think Alliance have better choices. I think Dun Morogh is the best Level 1 starting zone in the game. And whilst the human zones are less visually interesting, I still think Elwynn ==> Westfall ==> Redridge ==> Duskwood is the smoothest and easiest early-game levelling path.
You want to fix it you need to do it within the player base.
For instance Alliance needs people to step up to the plate to better their faction community/mythic/raiding forces, jumping ship to the Horde won’t help it will only worsen things.
Realize the grass is not always better on the other side, Server low ally Pop transfer to a bigger Ally Pop server might help.
Server Mergers would also help across the board.
Broken Racial’s will not fix faction imbalance if anything it will just cause more friction especially amidst the pvp community.
I don’t disagree honestly with any one point you mentioned there…but I find that there is quite a bit about a current situation that is a result of bad or misinterpreted intentions from the development side of the game completely out of the players control. I do very much want players to have a pure choice is what they want to do and which faction they play. The problems I’m mostly speaking about, and probably didn’t word it correctly, is that a creeping effect of those said actions has made it harder to find guilds in some aspects, harder to self improve, or even have enough to spend the time to train newer players when people are struggling to fill a basic raid group at times.
I would love if endgame had no effect on the non endgame aspects but they do, everything from economy to just general recruiting. It makes me feel like the choice that should be out of pure enjoyment for warcraft as a whole or a certain faction is being forced one way or another, and that becomes a illusion of choice.
There was initially a small imbalance across all servers.
However, there were a very small number of PvP servers with VERY high pops, and these were more skewed towards Horde generally.
Around Wrath, I think, players started transferring to (or re-rolling on) these high pop PvP servers. Not because they liked PvP. And not because they had a preference for the Horde. But because they perceived there to be a benefit to being on a high pop server.
At first it wasn’t so bad. But then people started following their IRL and in-game friends to these servers. And soon it became a mass migration of players onto these PvP servers, most of which were Horde dominated.
And, being PvP servers, people soon realised it wasn’t much fun playing Alliance on Horde dominated servers. So they switched characters.
And maybe they continued to toy with playing Alliance on other servers for a little while, but it didn’t last. Because what they really wanted was to be able to find a decent casual raid guild. And it’s easier to find such a guild, and cement a raid spot in that guild, on high pop servers.
And that’s where we find ourselves today. Most of the players huddling together on a small number of high pop servers. And the reason they don’t faction change isn’t because of racials or whatever, it’s because of the faction imbalance.
In other words, the faction imbalance is the primary cause of the perpetuation of the faction imbalance.
According to the server data sites factions are population balanced across all realms.
Maybe its time to remove server restrictions on guilds, and maybe increase guild size. That way the fewer alliance pve guilds could service more people.
I know that blizz is making bank on all the alliance transferring to stormrage for that purpose but many dont, and have limited options.
Also this will allow people who didnt research server loaction and rolled an east coast server while residing on the west coast and miss all raods due to time differences ect.
Why are there different servers anyway? Its not 2006 the concept of servers in a game like this is stupid, and no, server specific communities wont die, just will grow,
I would tackle it in a different way - I wouldn’t dissolve the factions, but make it so that any character can do a quest at any time to join the other faction. It would need to be long, and difficult, and difficult to switch back, but it could be done.
Then give both factions something equally appealing and very rewarding (could be anything, really, additional “faction” type racials, ranks that include power, housing, etc).
It won’t fix the problem on its own, but it would be a good start…
Improve the impact of alliance self-dispel racials
I’m not talking about directly buffing alliance racial abilities with numbers. I’m talking about a measured impact-study performed by the dungeons & raids team specifically focusing on alliance racial abilities to make sure that in nearly every raid there are major and minor mechanics that alliance races can self-dispel for good effect.
That means nasty poisons for the dwarves, big stuns for the humans, and “kill U™” snares for the gnomes.
That means mechanics for night elves to avoid with shadowmeld.
Don’t break our racial abilities. Just put in effort to make sure that they’re occasionally useful once a tier or so. There are so many times you run into a boss mechanic where you think, “Hey, I’m an X! My racial self-dispel Y should be able to handle this! [button-press]” only to be disappointed because while it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s actually a pigeon and you’re screwed.
By all means then, why don’t you put together a forum post explaining to us just how to use our superior racial abilities to out-perform the Horde in raids?
You can just go to a math site like bloodmallet and see a comparison of the throughput racials. The advantages of other things like Shadowmeld (which is the most powerful ability in Mythic+, by far, which is why all the MDI teams are Alliance) are also detailed on sites like raider io’s weekly route guides.
When we see a mass exodus of raiding toons from the horde to the alliance because of racial abilities, bloodmallet will actually matter. Until then, it doesn’t.
Same goes for M+ dungeons. The MDI is played on a tournament realm and otherwise has zero impact on the game which means that shadowmeld actually does not have an impact on M+ dungeons since the actual leaderboards aren’t nightelf dominated.
It’s nice that you know all this theorycraft about racial abilities, but it means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
How would I fix it? Add a couple hulking ugly races to Alliance that would attract Horde type players. Take away the Alliance’s ‘safe space’ button - Warmode? Never heard of her. Back to PvP servers and add in more contested areas that exist even on PvE servers. Jerk the story back to Azeroth for some serious Horde V. Alliance shenanigans to light a fire between the playerbase, no more sorta-kinda putting differences aside to take care of a big-bad-evil-thing. Betya a dollar the issue would sort itself out in a matter of months.
They could also fix the racials thing by making them cosmetic-only fluff as this would have the effect of eliminating gameplay race advantages so every can just play whatever race they want within each faction choice.
That isn’t ‘fixing’ them, it’s breaking them and further lowering the skill floor of the game. If the desired result is more skilled players joining the alliance, you won’t achieve that by making skilled players leave the game due to homogenization and boring gameplay. You have to give the elitist jerks something they dont have right now -a reason to roll Alliance.
Side note, i would like a merc mode for pve. So you can choose to go toggle sides. Still wouldnt be cross faction, at least no more than it is currently
Also, it makes a hell of a lot more sense in pve than it does in pvp anyways.
Specifically, what is the lore reason behind the current merc mode? Why would a hordie turn traitor and start killing other hordies, oh and btw you face no repurcussions.
