My Raid Team Died on the Altar of Faction Identity

Community General Discussion
41

it is. no argument there

have you recruited for a mid-level mythic raid alliance side? I have, for over a decade. It is night and day doing it hordeside now.

you’re not wrong in a lot of what you say in these threads - blizzard has gone out of their way to tear down and devalue guilds. They’ve thrown up a lot of barriers to us in trying to find players. But it absolutely is a different experience for one faction vs the other.

or maybe it’s just a different/better experience for my guild, specifically. but I don’t really believe that.

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42

Is fun how blizzard fracture their playerbase just to have a for the horde moment at Blizzcon (and they really could do crossfaction raiding without ending the factions)

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43

I had to do a ton of expansion-long recruitment in BfA and close to half the people I would look at or talk to were “Alliance only”. It was pretty miserable.

A good chunk of that is that we’re west coast and Alliance seems to be much more populous on this side of the country. (I don’t even consider people looking to raid at what for us is mid-afternoon, which is the bulk of the playerbase.)

BfA in general was a dark time for us, people were quitting the game left and right and it was constantly recruiting for 2 years just to keep us afloat.

Recruitment has been closed for us in Shadowlands pretty much since the start, we’ve had no attrition except for workshift changes. I know General Discussion likes to bag on Shadowlands but it’s so much better than BfA.

Legion was daily chores, but was fun.
BfA was daily chores, but NOT fun.
Shadowlands doesn’t have daily chores.

It’s made my life a lot easier, that’s for sure, since it’s not making tons of people quit.

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44

I’ve most definitely enjoyed Nathria more than the BfA raids. There are things I didn’t like, but overall I think it was a great raid.

I think that there’s a disconnect in where a tier sits on the fun-meter between people who don’t raid, or people who raid easier modes that make them “done” quicker, vs people who progress through the raid for much of the tier.

We’ve had a pretty stable roster. not as stable as our Dazar’alor roster, but stable enough that we haven’t had to push super hard to recruit, and we even managed to bring Donny down without having to bring new people in mid-progression.

but… yea. idk. there’s a lot I don’t like about SL, but I don’t think it’s as awful as the forums would have people believe.

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45

they tried with WoD by nerfing LFR heavily. It failed.

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46

Mythic raiding should be easier than it is by a significant enough margin that more people want to do it. It doesn’t have to be a cakewalk, but they need to get the participation numbers up.

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Any third party site ever aggregated data to track, on each faction, how many mythic guilds are active and how many mythic guilds clear the tier each patch going back a few expansions?

Would be really interesting to see.

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Raider: Talks about raiding.

General Discussion Non-raider: “How can I make this about ME?”

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49

look at my achievement dates for raiding… until this xpac i was a raider.

Now do you want to have a discussion or pointlessly keep up that?

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50

This is 100% on Blizzard and the people follow the best (as in top guilds/pvpers etc on what side they go to). It is still funny how delusional people are when they say “racials don’t play any part in it” when in fact, that is one of the main reasons why more and more started going to the horde because the best (raiders and pvpers) were switching over and even Method has said racials is why they went Horde and still are today.

Then, Blizzard really started with the Horde favortism making it extremely obvious. So yeah, people want to get the best stuff and have the better story etc. and started switching as well. I am still waiting for 1 raid based on the Alliance and/or the Alliance story where the Horde are just throw-ins like the Alliance have been in 2 Horde story raids. SoO and Uldir.

SoO is self explanatory and Uldir was based on the whole Horde leveling story. If an Alliance player didn’t have a Horde alt they all asked “wth is the story about Uldir”? Because Alliance wasn’t involved at all in that. Why not make a Waycrest Manor raid?

So yes. To fix this Blizzard needs to stop with the better racials for 1 side. If they have to make both sides have the same racials so be it. It is a good start and maybe some of the tops will start moving back and some will follow as well. The other fix is stop with the blatant favortism.

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51

Sure, you can grab that from wowprogress when the raids are current. You can also do it afterwards although it’s a little more involved since you have to manually cut off counting after the CE date has passed.

If my memory is correct, there were somewhere around 1100 CE Ghuun guilds, about 1600 Dazaralor CE guilds, and only around 800-900 Eternal Palace CE guilds. I don’t remember the Nzoth numbers but they were higher as they usually are in the last patch.

I don’t think wowprogress includes China, though.

52

Sure, we can have a discussion.

What the hell does LFR have to do with raiding?

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as i pointed out… it was nerfed to get people raiding… you know like i typed in the original… along with a low bar to enter…

You cant force people to do something they dont want to do.

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54

That’s actually a bunch of garbage. Horde raiders have increasingly outnumbered Alliance since Burning Crusade, when Horde racials were garbage. (Back when Blood Elves had to Mana Tap 3 times before Torrenting, and Troll Berserking’s bonus was based on how close to death you were.)

Besides, Method switched right before MoP, and the best racial in MoP was the Pandaren one that was available to both sides. They even mention that in their statement they made at the time about why they flipped factions.

The “it’s all because of racials!” thing is a clutch that people who don’t raid latch on to. But it just a lot of hot air.

The reason there are more Horde raiders is because the Alliance playerbase has a heavy streak of not wanting to raid. Or even outright hostility to raiders.

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  1. Where was it said that changes to LFR were done to get people into raiding?
  2. What idiot would think that changes to LFR would get more people to raid Mythic? (Makes question #1 even more important.)
56

Tauren and Dwarf only guild…make it happen Blizz…make it happen…

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57

They don’t. And even what @Brewa posted is putting it too nicely.

According to ION (this is from his panel at Blizzconline)… you know, the guy in charge of such a decision, Racials were a part for TOP END Raiders.

Now: #1-- you’re not a TOP END Raider, so it doesn’t apply to you. But ok… I’ll humor you for the general argument. Let’s proceed…

Racials WERE a factor for the top M Raiders. HOWEVER-- according to ION, the “Racial pendulum” was on the Alliance side in BfA … except no one transferred. All the great M Raiders stayed Horde.

So Ion kept that “Racial pendulum” where it was AGAIN for SL. And AGAIN … no one switched.

So according to the GUY IN CHARGE-- you’re wrong. Alliance ALREADY HAS the strongest Racials in the game atm … and it doesn’t matter. Alliance doesn’t attract/ doesn’t already have the pool of M Raiders. End of story. You CURRENTLY HAVE the best Racials. You just don’t have any good players.

You want to blame the game, but the fault is the Alliance playerbase. At least according to the guy in charge. I’ll take his word for it.

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58

took some digging. The removal of tier sets and nerfing of gear was to get people to step up to normal +

`https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-01-lfr-warlords-of-draenor-and-you.html

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59

As I said several times before, Factions need to be merged.

Horde and Alliance need to join together. It makes no sense that one has not absorbed, conquered or destroyed the other by this point in the story.

Merge the Factions, then create two more minor factions that are PvP-centric containing the hot-heads from the previous un-merged Factions and give them quests and stories and continuing Battlegrounds.

Pledging allegiance to a minor faction doesn’t take you out of the main faction, just flips on War-Mode.

Faction population balance problem solved.

The story can progress without the constant repeated trope of Horde/Alliance fight. Big bad shows up, they unite, say all is happy. Kill the BBEG, and go right back to fighting like nothing had ever happened.

Now you can have proxy wars, and intrigue, and politics, and all the juicy little sub-plots that your Writers can go ham with without breaking the lore, or faction motivations, or entire zones and histories.

Now nobody cares what racials are, because they don’t impact faction, raid, or PvP balance since you can stack OP racial #4 however much you want and the other side can do it too until it is balanced.

Or better yet, get rid of racial abilities as tied to race all together, and instead give us training focuses that we choose in their place. As a human why am I gregarious and out-spoken as my racial? Why can’t I be a gruff mean 'ole …person of indeterminate parentage… that nobody likes but can fly into a berserk rage at the drop of a hat?

Why does the Orc who watched Thrall on parade through the newly crafted streets of Orgrimmar after the battle of Mt. Hyjal and witnessed the generosity of Lady Jaina Proudmoore as she tried to build peace between Orc and Human as a child unable to focus his life on the ideals of these two persons forced to only care about wielding an axe instead of learning languages and becoming a respected diplomat between the various city-states. Becoming well-spoken and more likable than others.

Merge the factions, turn racials into something that can be chosen (at a cost, but NOT time-gated), and permanently fix these issues.

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60

I hear you. I watched a stream last night of the first guild that I did mythic Sire with as a temporary cross realm guest about six weeks ago. I was told I would only be subbing for their main roster members that were gone for a week. I thought they would have had at least 200 pulls by now as a whole but it caught me by surprise to see other guild tags in their raid and hearing that these people have had only 40 pulls.

It was a lot of studying too on my part when I eventually did progression with my guild. The spreadsheets were different so it took me a while to get used my assignments and responsibilities such as 3 or 0 stacks for soaking, which mini boss to combust, etc. However one of those players from the outside we brought in I am guessing had no attempts prior and he was able to get the kill with us on his second week of mythic Sire progression so he was able to pick it up the fight quick.

There may be a discord already for this but I propose a temporary solution towards the end of a tier is to have a pool of Alliance players who have had the experience that are willing to pitch in and help with guilds that have roster issues. I already so this for free with pug communites. It’s like paying it back for some players who came in on their own time and my raid didn’t have a full group.

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