Good question. I’d personally like to see it at max level with little-to-no pve content. I think switching the world quests for something like pvp quests might work.
Thinking back to legion, there was an arena you could jump into and it was free-for-all. I’m thinking around those lines but the world is included instead.
Easy. Eliminate the Alliance.
Allow cross faction grouping, communication, and guilds. Also merge more servers.
Boom, the only problem created by the imbalance is fixed.
I especially love how this entire expansion was built around working together and getting over our differences (just like MoP), and even our commanders are explicitly stating that we should work together. Hell Anduin helped carry Saurfang into Orgrimmar… Yet in game we’re as separate as ever.
Add a new scaling bonus to the game for transferring from the overpopulated faction on one server to the the underpopulated faction on the same server or any other server. The more egregious the imbalance on the server you transfer to, the bigger the bonus. If you transfer again any time within the following year, you lose the bonus and anything earned with the bonus (to prevent scummy abusive behavior).
This accommodates both players who want to stay their current faction as well as those willing to transfer, and it’s self-balancing – eventually, all servers will be relatively balanced, disabling the bonus. Players will watch for the bonus with baited breath and jump on it the moment it pops up, keeping all servers balanced and preventing lopsidedness from ever occurring again.
Further, the system would include a way to for players to invite their guild, friends, etc to transfer and receive the bonus with them, fixing the problem of people not wanting to leave their connections behind.
Uhh… Hire a better game director who can propose a good solution?
I guess I should have added “allow cross-faction guilds/raiding” as well. But I feel like a lot of people who have no real intention of ever doing high-end content are picking Horde because most of the people doing competitive high-end content are Horde, despite their faction choice not impacting their play in any way. This leads to a vocal minority of Alliance players lamenting the degradation of their community: if they want to have fun, they have to play horde. which, despite not being the sentiment of the vast majority of people, frequently sets the tone for the Alliance in pretty much every form of content. The faction imbalance at the top (which derives from a combination of beliefs about racials and, more importantly I think, the aesthetic preferences of people who do hardcore raiding, including influencers) tangentially effects every part of the Alliance experience. So I think the best solution to this, rather than making everything on the Alliance cartoonishly awesome and OP, is to make the faction system more fluid, without totally dismantling it (to preserve a pretext for wPVP/BGs). This way, the Alliance FOMO syndrome would be mitigated; people could still have their cosmetic/RP/storyline faction identity while being free to seek out competitive opportunities they felt were previously harder to access. Just the knowledge that you could possibly raid with all competitive guilds despite being a Male Human Paladin would improve Alliance morale, in my opinion.
Players have dramatized and perpetuated this issue for years. I’ve played on both factions since 2004 over multiple accounts. I’ve won many pvp games and cleared raids on both sides for over a decade. I can guarantee that both sides run into the same issues.
Maybe I’m old school at this point, but I couldn’t care less about what people around me are doing or what some simulator says is slightly more efficient in perfect world. I play what I want to play and I accomplish what I set out to. Any racial or imbalance can be played around with some effort, coordination, and skill.
The increasing imbalance seems to be a case of players taking rumors, simulations, and guides a bit too seriously. There’s not much blizzard can do to incentive people to go to a faction they believe is inefficient or a lost cause. People will play what they identify with in the end. Seems like identity is correlated more highly to efficiency over fantasy these days.
Thing is, the Horde playerbase has also degraded. The game only has a fraction of the people playing it as there were even 2 years ago.
Because normal raid gear becomes useless so fast. Emissaries scale to that ilvl, and you can get better gear from multiple, easily accessible sources. When the reward was heroic raid ilvl it was useful for a bit longer, so more people participated. AOO was supposed to be an incentive to turn warmode on. When they nerfed it they took away that incentive, and therefore the purpose of the quest in the first place, as many predicted would happen.
Yeah - tbh I really don’t think the Alliance perception of community degradation is totally rational. I think it’s a suspicion that gets validated by the top .01% of players, and that it affects the tone of the community downstream. The lack of morale is merely a good excuse to implement systems that would make the community and world feel more expansive and less restrictive.
Make blood elf racials mechanically on the same level or worse then draenei racials. God forbid that the horde actually be about orcs, tauren, and trolls.
You missed my point. The fact is, you DO have the numbers to compete, or even dominate in war mode. This fictional imbalance is because you lack the desire to participate.
For nearly a month every single FP, dungeon entrance, and WQ were farming grounds for roving Alliance kill squads.
It’s a choice, not a bias.
People were playing Blood Elves even back when they had to Mana Tap 3 times before they could Torrent.
It’s not about the racials. Never was.
This is coming from the faction with 40%+ cute elf population.
I would argue that if a lot of alliance guilds hadn’t migrated to horde we wouldn’t need incentives to participate. Because, as you said, more people would choose to participate. Unfortunately, a lot of alliance endgame population has migrated horde. The problem isn’t casual people not being interested in endgame, the problem is the people interested in endgame are leaving.
There are still massive Alliance death squads in war mode, it just depends entirely on region, time of day, and sharding.
If you play late at night on the west coast (as I do), there are massive Alliance groups in war mode all the time. Nazjatar is considered by many Horde players to be unwinnable on late night west coast, at this point.
And god forbid you end up on an Oceanic shard. You’ll never know what hit you, there are so many flagged Alliance running around.
Then, do it. If it isn’t about racials as you claim then nerfing belf racials to flavor only wont have any affect besides encouraging players to play the real horde races and not alliance red.
Why on earth would Blizzard nerf Horde racials when they’re already inferior to Alliance racials?
Free faction changes to Alliance.
All Alliance races can now be any class.
I’d roll Void Elf Paladin in a heartbeat.
Uh, huh. Yeah. Guess you are fooling someone, maybe. Or possibly everyone realizes you are just a pathetic alliance red shill. But you keep going on. Players respect you and your opinion, or not. Superstar or pathetic loser. Whatever though, just keep on going on with your propaganda.