Right, people act like the current-day alliance players self-selected this problem by deciding mutually to roll Alliance so they could avoid competition.
This is ultimately a Blizzard-created issue as much as it is a social issue. Balance issues and adjustments over the years have led us here. It’s not a problem that some players don’t prefer competitive play, it’s a problem that it took so long to create a balanced environment it could thrive on both factions. That’s not on us.
It 100% is a self-fullfilled prophecy.
It’s just not, man. It just isn’t. You’re just wrong here. The only way that’s true is if you just decide to ignore like 10 years of history because it’s not convenient for your point.
What does “Almost equal” mean?
The factions are pretty closed to Balanced. The discrepancy is when you get to talking about high end content. There are less Heroic raiding guilds on the Alliance and a LOT less Mythic raiding guilds on the Alliance.
Similarly, if you are looking to run lower keys on Alliance, you will be fun, but even by the time you hit +14s you are looking at a dramatic difference between Horde and Alliance numbers. It’s at the point where if I go looking for a +14 group after reporting all the adds, it takes one scroll from top to bottom of the list in LFG. This is RIGHT NOW midday on a Sunday.
The overall playerbase is equal, but the hardcore playerbase is not even close.
Lots of people join alliance to be casual and farm transmogs and roleplay. I mean, how do you make them stop doing that?
You know it’s convenient for Ion if we believe that factions are balanced? As in biased.
I don’t even think it’s relevant. Population matters a lot more for endgame than it does for casual play/questing/just generally soaking up the ambiance. If the endgame populations were balanced but there was a huge casual population on one side or the other, it might speak to something lacking in the game but it wouldn’t really harm the players too much. At endgame, if there are far fewer groups forming on your faction, you’re having a far worse experience. That’s something that needs fixing no matter how many people there are on your faction who aren’t interested in the content you’re trying to find people to play with you.
What do you expect him to do? Should they force people to complete mythic raids in alliance in order to roll new Horde toons?
This is a great question. The larger the numbers, the more percentages start to lie. 51/49% seems really close, but if there are 5 million players that’s still a difference of around 100,000 people. So I’m curious to know what “close” means to Blizzard.
Well, you don’t have to make them stop doing that. I do that, but I also like to push high-end content. Offer better cosmetic rewards for doing higher end content.
Also, making people stop doing content is not the answer. They either need to find a way for Horde to start going Alliance at the High end without making Alliance way more powerful OR allow the factions to play together. That is something I was very very against for a while, but I feel like we are out of options at this point. If we could play together, the problem would dissolve pretty much instantly.
I don’t know but it’s not really on us at this point.
Blizzard wanted to create a dual-faction game and they’ve done that, but they took a very long time to create an environment where the potential for success felt roughly even, at least in a mechanical sense. In a way, they’ve already failed. What they do now to fix it would have to be a pretty large undertaking or change.
Like, at the end of FF6, you defeat Kefka. But he’s already destroyed the world so really, he already won.
I’m kind of waiting for WoW2 at this point, or the outright removal of most faction restrictions because I don’t know if anything aside from intentionally imbalancing faction racials for an expansion cycle could really do anything.
Out of all the characters created, it’s probably balanced. Out of people who participate in group content, it’s very likely Horde-heavy.
That assumes that the people who do high-end content care about cosmetic rewards enough to do it in both factions. Maybe just give alliance a gold bonus in mythic content. That might do it.
No, that assumes that collectors care enough about cosmetic rewards to be involved in high end content. This is already proven based on how many people PvP to 1800 rating at the beginning of the new patches just for the new transmog set and the vicious mounts.
All I know is that wherever I go, there are more orange names than blue. I have zero issues with jumping into an Alliance heavy “raid” killing some named boss.
My queues are average length for dps, either Horde or Alliance for dungeons or BGs. I think Blizz is doing fine with whatever they’re doing to make this happen. I remember vanilla/TBC Alliance crying cuz 1 hour BG queues. Now that’s gone.
Don’t really care about the overall population balance across the game - I only see whoever’s on my screen. Seems to be pretty even steven in my eyes.
I strongly suspect that if they locked amazing cosmetic rewards behind high level content, people would just complain that they can’t get the rewards, rather than start to do the high level content.
Anything starting with “Ion claims” or “Ion said” makes me cringe on sight.
that statement is 100% BS
because the usual answers are “make cross-realm pve” to “server faction lockdowns” are not only unoriginal but would kill the game