could just do that under the guise of wargames or skirmishes to keep people in fighting shape.
Isn’t that just somebody’s blog?
I always shake my head when this kind of argument is presented. How did anyone at Blizzard EVER think this???
It’s like… ok, I don’t like horror movies. Just… not a fan.
I imagine myself out in front of a theater, deciding what to watch with my friends, when some Studio executive starts wondering “maybe he’ll go see it if the ticket price was lower? Or maybe if popcorn was cheaper?? Maybe if we did this, that or, the other??!”
Dude… it doesn’t matter what you do, I DON’T EFFING LIKE HORROR MOVIES. Similarly, I think most people just DON’T enjoy raiding. More specifically-- they don’t want to clear/learn a raid in LFR … DO IT AGAIN in Normal … AND THEN DO IT AGAIN at yet another difficulty. Blizz doesn’t appreciate the negative reaction a lot of people have to “I’ve already DONE THIS … why am I doing it AGAIN??”
When 9.1 releases… why not just add different boss mechanics to CN?? That’s all you want, right? Just new mechanics?
See how stupid that sounds??
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Bear in mind, you don’t have to erase factions from the game. Just the divide.
In fact, scrapping the current system opens up more opportunities to do things and every story doesn’t need to be Horde vs. Alliance. You could have three, four, or more factions and have them exist as RP vehicles/Cosmetic choices.
Just an extension of Class Halls/Covenants are. You can be in a faction, and only one. You can’t go into another’s area. You can play with anyone. Boom, divide gone and plot story opportunities abound.
Or yanno, keep strangling the game for those sweet sweet faction transfer fees. From the people who don’t just quit instead.
the tweet links were from the rewards designer himself.
Engadget is a blog style site, but not someone’s personal blog.
Oh, this is back when Flex was added, right?
Makes for better story possibilities, though, if you have the hard-liners in charge as the primary motivation.
Greymane/Tyrande refusing to join with the Horde and going out on their own while Malfurion/Tess stick with the Merged faction.
That Mag’har Orc who came over from Draenor, and Talanji refusing to join the Alliance etc. Unable to fight against the united faction, but refusing to disarm or do more than pay lip-service to that cause. You’d get skirmishes, small wars, and more as they tried to fight each-other and prove the other is a vile faction of evil-doers while trying to illicit support from those in the Main Faction.j
There’s more room for conflicts without forcing the same tired total war narrative over and over again, better room for intrigue, spying, and politics as well.
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there we go. it was after flex because that was MoP
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I remember that. When Flex was added, they actually did a dev watercooler talking about the failings of LFR, and the failings of doing the raids with random strangers every time, thereby giving no progression in terms of strategy.
Their “LFR offers none of that” watercooler. And Flex was intended to fill the void.
I think they succeeded. LFR’s numbers seem really low these days, which is why they keep bribing raiders to pitch in with things like Augment Runes. We also know from datamining sites that about 40% of the playerbase clears Heroic, every tier. (There’s no way to track Normal completion, though.)
So in terms of getting people to do Flex (which is now Normal), I think they succeeded.
In any case… what does any of this have to do with getting more people to raid Mythic, which was what I was talking about when you brought up LFR?
Well what do you expect when they constantly pit us against one another. I mean it’s not like the Alliance is going to be feeling too trusting after what the Horde did to the NEs and Teldrassil.
Your problem is Alliance players who can’t find a home in the limited number of Alliance mythic raiding guilds knew that instead of waiting for an opening, they will have a much easier time on the Horde side. You can’t expect them to just sit there and wait for a shot when they know there are opening on the other side of the road.
mythic is its own beast. Drawing the line between raid logging and “mandatory” work is the key but in itself mythic will scare some people away.
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If somehow super elite players were encouraged to play with “bads” maybe there would be more super elite players to recruit from.
Which brings up another issue.
If cross-faction play was enabled, the Alliance Mythic raiding scene would be decimated. Their players would be scooped up by the far more numerous (and successful) Horde raiding guilds.
Cross-faction play will NOT turn out the way some people think. They aren’t thinking this through to its logical conclusion…
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Warmode, sure. But there’s no reason not to have random PvP queues with a faction randomized mode.
It doesn’t really matter at that point.
I just want to play my cute elf. I could care less about which faction.
Plus, PVP queues would be improved so drastically.
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More often than not, our factions don’t even exist as far as the story goes. We’re effectively just champions fighting a cosmic evil most of the time. Even in some of the raids, NPCs from both factions are fighting with us.
It just makes no sense anymore to let one faction rot for the sake of story when horde players can choose to fight for the alliance in the one place where faction matters.
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The Horde/Alliance cooperation is, at most, once per expansion.
It’s overblown, on this forum.
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If the Alliance side becomes unplayable for mythic raiding, an honest retrospective from Blizzard wouldn’t focus on the extremely marginal impact of racial advantages (even in earlier years). They’d recognize that the situation today for the Alliance is the almost inevitable outcome of setting the raiding size for the hardest difficulty to the 20-man size.
Recruitment needs for 20-man guilds, and particularly guilds that are still growing and making the jump from heroic to mythic, are severe. It didn’t create the initial disparity between factions, but took that disparity and accelerated the effects of it, throwing a metric ton of gasoline onto what was a tiny fire.
It guaranteed a vicious cycle - people leaving Alliance to get to guilds with stronger recruitment pools to work with, leading to even less people in the Alliance recruitment pools, making even more people jump out of those pools. (A similar cycle also occurs intra-faction on the Horde, in terms of realm servers - people leaving medium pop realms for high pop realms, making the medium pop realms even harder to function on for those that stayed).
Things could have worked out the opposite, with the Alliance on top and the Horde severely on bottom. But the issue of a mass disparity just seems to me like an inevitable outcome of setting a high number threshold for playing the top mode. How could that result in anything other than a spiral where raiders flee the less raider populated side for the more raider populated side?
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There’s zero evidence of a mass exodus, though. There are some anecdotal examples, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that the overwhelming majority of former Alliance raiders aren’t raiding Horde, they just don’t raid anymore (or probably play anymore).
Attrition is the enemy, here. Not faction transfers.
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