Next expansion we design all 5-man content to have enough space for 10-man iterations. These “micro-raids” are new end-game at the level of flex-raiding, but are as accessible as M+ dungeons with similar mechanics.
They are the easiest, most consistent way to gear up your character. Not LRF levels of easy, especially when you talk about higher level keys, but also not 5-man M+ levels of tightly-tuned erring on the side of easy.
…this is completely on purpose.
That’s because the gimmick of the expansion is for each 10-man raid to consist of one full 5-man group from the alliance, and one full 5-man group from the horde. Groups are assembled independently, and then you queue to find a match. Additionally, this expansion introduces WoW’s answer to raiderIO and similar sites where we track performance based on role in a manner similar to the matchmaker they have in overwatch (we’ll borrow their matchmaker team to implement it in WoW).
This way the auto-matchmaker will match groups with roughly the same skill compositions together.
So how will this help balance? Well, the entire PvE population will be content gated by the smaller of the two populations. There will be no merc mode. And if you whine on the forums about the wait to get matched with an alliance group (or a horde group if you’re Australian) the canned response from the CMs, GMs, and developers will always be the same: “The other faction has shorter queues, and they’re waiting for you.”
We will simply turn concentrating the population into a huge disadvantage to counter the recruitment advantage. And, since it will give the faction with the smaller population a HUGE gearing advantage, it will make tracking the leaderboards quite interesting until things even out…
1.) Disable racials in mythic raids and rated PvP
2.) Allow some free transfers from Horde->Alliance, for both players and guilds
3.) Introduce High Elves as an Alliance allied race (add Ogres for Horde)
4.) Tell the devs to stop making jokes about the Alliance in public
TBH I think you’d see a huge change with just those 4 options
The problem with these discussions is GD can’t figure out what they’re discussing.
Is it instanced pvp?
is it mythic raiding?
is it heroic raiding?
is it world pvp?
I can say that through my experience, there absolutely is an imbalance at the mythic raid level. Trying to maintain and recruit an alliance side mythic raid is extremely difficult…to the point that my group went horde for 8.3, and it’s a completely different story now.
I cannot speak to pvp, heroic raiding or world pvp.
But people junk up these discussion with ridiculous comments like “there are a ton of alliance in world PVP there is no imbalance”
They are correct, if you are looking at just raw numbers, the populations aren’t that out of line with each other.
But the number of non-raiders is completely irrelevant to the topic, when what most are referring to (I think, and I recognize this could be my own bias leaking in) is the imbalance at the mythic raiding level, and to a lesser extent heroic raiding.
There? there absolutely is an imbalance. One that has grown over time as the raiding (and overall) playerbase shrinks and conosolidates to the horde.
And no matter how much people might want it to be so, that void of mythic raiders isn’t going to be filled from the pet battle/worldquest/lfr population.
The biggest things blizzard could do to alleviate the problem are:
connect more realms. We don’t need more than a few at this point.
open xrealm mythic raiding earlier.
and/or
allow cross faction communities and instanced play.
As someone that doesn’t raid, or do M+, I feel that i’m part of the problem in a way. Thing is, i don’t have time to raid, a raid can take many hours, and i rarely have that time in one go, i mostly can play half an hour here and there.
But farming mogs, old stuff, that is easy, is fast.
I want to do raids, mythic, PVP, and what not, but it seems specially difficult to do those things without finding a group that matches the time you have available.
The mythic raiding groups in the alliance should work towards making the alliance stronger, is the only “solution”, and the alliance players that haven’t found a group and are thinking on changing to horde should stick to the alliance, I don’t see Blizzard fixing this, but maybe with a lot of effort, players could.
Then it can operate similar to the “at war” function previously. As in we see each other as neutral, but if you start attacking faction NPC’s then you go hostile. They could even code it so that becoming hostile instantly kicks you from the party. I’m sure we can figure out work arounds.
Or it could just consider your entire party as “at war” so even if you’re a dwarf in IF, if you’re grouping with people killing your guards… Boom, you get flipped to hostile as well.
Heck there’s even precedent. I can right now walk into boralus, use my Servant of N’zoth toy, and start killing alliance players.
I don’t really care about the imbalance. I don’t care how many people want to play as elves and how many people want to play as cows. I just care about the gameplay experience. And right now, it’s considerably better for one side when compared to the other at a specific level of play. It happened in WoD with PvP, it’s happening now (and has been gradually progressing for awhile) in PvE.
And this isn’t a horde or alliance thing. The exact same thing is playing out in reverse on oceanic servers.
if you want to raid mythic, just go horde. I was making myself sick with stress in trying to keep the raid together alliance side. hours and hours every week recruiting, only to be told time and time again “sorry, not considering alliance”. “sorry, I’m going horde”. etc. It’s been a problem for a long time, getting worse every tier.
You are correct that it is 100% a player made problem. But no single player is going to affect change. All you’ll do is wear yourself down trying to keep a group together, or if you’re not a group lead, find yourself with more limited options on groups to join.
We aren’t game designers or a social engineers, though, so maybe blizz can come up with some solution we haven’t thought of.