Oh people would definitely complain, but people have complained about every change to the game since Vanilla. A good example is how many people went in and did the Mage Tower, which was difficult content, just to unlock those cool weapons. Cosmetics are a very good motivator for the playerbase.
Are they? (Not being sarcastic; itâs a genuine question.)
They are a motivator for some players, but are they for players in general? I mog, but donât do any content to unlock cosmetics, including covenants. (And most of my mogging across my characters is to get rid of stuffâI donât like capes and almost always make them invisible.)
I would argue they are for a large portion of the playerbase, but obviously not all. There is always going to be a âcasualâ playerbase which is not going to to do high end content regardless of what they are offered. This is fine, and honestly good for an MMO.
The issue is, we donât need all or even a majority of players doing high end content. We just need more. When they are 6 groups for +14 dungeons and above at 11 PM on a Saturday night on Alliance side, that is a glaring issue that needs literally anything to help solve it.
This likely isnât the best solution, but it is a start. Iâm no game dev, but I know a lot of players play purely for cosmetics.
I donât know any. Hence my question.
From a sociological perspective, Iâm curious what the demographic breakdown is. Is there a correlation between age and costmetics and/or mogging? Is there a correlation between races chosen and cosmetics? And so on.
This is very interesting (Iâm a psychology major in my 3rd year of uni). I honestly donât know the answer and weâd probably need a huge lump of statistics from Blizzard to even be able to answer this.
Some of the players I know in my guild that focus on the cosmetic side are just some older people that collect things in-game for something to do. Most of the younger people I know are all pretty competitive. This is all anecdotal though.
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raid wise , horde dominate.
Arena wise, alliance dominate.
Semi-related. Until a few weeks ago, my server would become a ghost town at 10pm Pacific Time. This last week, especially, itâs been busier late at night. Has me slightly puzzled.
(Way back in 2005-2008 or so, the server I was on tended to be people over 25, many with kids. But, there were a bunch of Australian teens who would log on when school got out over there. You could almost set your clock by it. No complaints! It was great server until it split due to population.)
This might just be a result of the weather we have been having all over the country. Lots of snow in the center of the country that is not usually suited for snow means a lot more people inside instead of outside.
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All that means is less people on alliance queue for BGs is all. That doesnât mean there are less alliance in total.
You think someone would do that? Just lie?
Since he didnât give any numbers âmostly equalâ can really just mean whatever he wants, it could be 60/40, 50/50 or 45/55, we have no gauge for what he is defining it as. What we do know is most of the end game content is horde, the BG queues are also heavily horde, horde also outnumber the alliance in warmode. Pretty much every area of the game the horde have a much larger population.
Him saying the horde outnumber the alliance by a lot could make the population imbalance even worse, so he would want to try to downplay it while being non specific, he wouldnât technically be lying since he is depending on how you define âalmost equalâ but heâs not giving us the full picture.
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I expect the truth. If the statistics are as they say then why is the API private when it was public for over a decade?
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I am sure they are just looking at numbers by what people have made so yeah I wouldnât doubt if they are close in numbers in that sense but I am willing to bet people who play on their mains and alts the horde heavily outnumber the Alliance. It is funny how they say that yet then talk about how the horde dominates the raid scene, m+ and pvp. So yes, the Horde definitely have superior numbers to the Alliance.
It isnât a social thing either like they try and proclaim and Alliance didnât have any advantage in Castle or else these world first guilds would have switch to Alliance since they live for the world first race and will take any advantage they can and since the Horde have better racials that is why they are horde.
Not only that, people keep switching because they are tired of how the Alliance are treated. Even the top people in WoW at the last Blizzcon took jabs at the Alliance and the Alliance player base. Not only that, the Horde has so much more story and even have had 2 raids based off their own story. Uldir which if you are an Alliance main and never made a horde alt you had no idea what the story of Uldir was and why we are even there. Then they had SoO where the Alliance were just throw ins since they canât exclude us from a raid.
People keep saying this, but that implies that those with the data donât manipulate the data to tell their version of the story. Having data doesnât stop people from bending the truth. Where I work, this happens way too often to not make certain people in the company look bad. And itâs scummy.
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I would say across all realms, it is probably a lot closer than what players
think it is.
Cant really go by queues for anything simply because not everyone
does the same content.
I didnât ask if you cared.
I admit I do not have a character on Stormrage, but I regularly get queues of several thousands people to log into my RP realms, and no queue at all on my other realms
I think the ratio is still in the 53:47 range it was before realm pop died.
The âproblemâ isnât in over all pop which is actually pretty balanced, it is the population for endgame content which I think is closer to the 60:40 range or worse.
I agree with blizzard on this point though: it is a community created problem at this point.
Racials are more balanced than ever before, at this point people are defaulting to horde because everyone claims itâs better.
A community problem is very hard to fix because it isnât as simple as nerf x racial or even providing free faction changes. They need to change the general communities idea that the horde is better than the alliance. Thatâs a tough thing to do, they even gave the alliance the win on almost every bfa warfront and people still think the horde is better and diminish the massive accomplishment the alliance got.
If we really want to fix the population problem I think 2 things need to happen:
1.) One or more of the major world first groups and pvp teams need to go alliance (and I mean highly encouraged to swap, I will never support forcing a faction swap on anyone)
2.) The community as a whole needs to stop diminishing the wins the alliance get. Even alliance fanboys will diminish their own factions accomplishments when people bring them up.
I think between those two things the general populace will see that the alliance isnât the âbad factionâ and start swapping over. But thatâs gunna be a hard pill to get people to swallow.
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I wonder if it has to do with the cloud architecture and phasing. AFAIK, there are three realms in my cluster, but I see players from more. Iâm not saying it couldnât be done, but suspect the old API would return incorrect information.
You asked General Discussion if that statement was true in the title.