hehe you do a spectacular job of encouraging us also and i doth paraphrase
sir tarrok: no you cant have that. or that. orrrrrrr that. because it might hurt the horde.
alliance player: but the alliance is dying. our raiding and pvp is scene is near gutted. we’re losing players to other games, at the character creation screen or later, to the horde. we need to, at the very least, be able to be competitive at the character creation screen for new player participation.
sir tarrok: it wont help. you’re just a bunch of bad, lazy players with a victim complex.
alliance player: if thats true, how did we manage to hang on to raiders and pvpers till legion?
sir tarrok: you suck, okay. thats why you cant have nice things.
I just don’t think cosmetic/story content is going to influence people to stop thinking the horde is the only way to go for doing high end content. Which from all we know is the place where there’s a problem. Population is close enough to equal not to be a problem but people aren’t participating in some things on the Alliance side.
I want to see that fixed, but that’s going to be a task of changing the perception of the whole playerbase. Right now as a whole the people who play think at the least that Horde has more people who do the content to choose from, at worst they are convinced that alliance characters are at a mechanical disadvantage so why bother? And people shouting that everything is tilted against you sucks the energy out of things, and drives people away from that.
I mean, look at that Ruin (I think that’s the name) group that’s organizing Alliance pvp, that kinda stuff helps. Get a positive community that wants to do things and pushes it. I mean, look at MDI, Alliance isn’t at a mechanical disadvantage, they can do awesome stuff.
About the only hyperbole I have here is when I point out that different elves, or awesome story beats or other stuff that isn’t related to the high end content in question, where I note that if the population ends up 90/10 A/H but if people still don’t want to run the content on alliance characters as much as horde, we’re at the same problem.
Story and races are their own category with their own arguments (and frankly, if story influenced people to leave a side to do raids etc on the other side, then Blizzard did everything they could in BFA to drive people out of the Horde side) They’re still important. I just don’t think they connect to the problem of participation.
player participation isnt equal because those are former alliance players and some horde players, getting alliance achieves/pets/mounts on alts, and then they go back on their horde mains for endgame. this is why it seems okay numbers wise, but isnt okay for the actual endgame.
the alliance as a faction is darn near dead and because people are stuck in tribal mode, they dont realize the issue is at crisis level. something needs to be done and one thing that can be done is to attract new players to the alliance, at the character creation screen. i’ve said this before and will say it again… the alliance is the engine that populates the game. but if our characters are not any better looking than some other old game, we lose those new players, either to other games or to the horde.
I’m just saying that models are just as likely to draw people in who just want to do achieves/pets/mounts/rp on an alt, and if you don’t get people thinking positively about doing the content on the Alliance that’s not going to change anything.
And part of that tribal mode that’s leading to this crisis is people who are stuck in this mindset that not only is there a participation gap but that it’s active malevolence on the part of the devs in screwing over the alliance in favor of the horde. With enough people shouting that it breeds a mindset in everyone that it’s not worth it to try on that side and make a horde alt to run raids or M+ on.
They are working on it, BFA and ARs have seen the alliance get some strong racials that are best for a good number of specs out there. People just have to be convinced that it’s not going to be pointless because they can’t do it just because they’re alliance. And some people on the forums, despite being all in for the alliance, are their own worst enemies in getting people to give it a shot because they’re basically screaming “WE CAN’T DO IT! JUST ROLL HORDE!”
one of the reasons the horde became so popular was the devs gave you playable high elves. the models were the first non-caricatures in the game, as all the other races were spoofs on fantasy races, and belfs were based on actual fashion models. on top of that, they gave the horde access to the paladin class and included the seal of blood for blood elf paladins only. it worked. spectacularly.
so allied races come along, they finally give the alliance high elves but you cant select them on the starting screen, in fact, they are hidden. they are easily skipped over by character boosts included in every purchase of the special edition of the game, and are the second blue race with tentacles on our faction - a very specific set of unique and not necessarily attractive features to the average elf fan.
if you want new horde players in the future, you’re gonna have to encourage the devs to give the alliance an extremely attractive and popular core race, because that has been the alliance’s role all these years - snagging fantasy rpg players at the character creation screen, introducing them to how the game works, then some go horde and some stay alliance. but if alliance is broken, expect horde to be broken next
But the Horde didn’t surpass Alliance population until 1 or 2 expansions ago. It wasn’t like BC came and it shifted from 60/40 A/H to the reverse. It brought us closer, either due to Blood Elves, or access to the Paladin class. It wasn’t until Cata that we even had as much content as the Alliance.
I think that projecting the idea that the faction is broken is doing more to break the alliance than any cosmetic or story function. I mean, if people are getting met with the attitude of “don’t bother, we’re alliance we’re not going to do it” people aren’t going to want to play with that. But when people just forget that nonsense and do the content it works fine.
And it varies by server, I’ve seen alliance people talk positively about their server community and how they actually can get groups to do stuff off group finder, and in fact that horde has the opposite experience there.
Maybe half elves (or high elves if they decide to do that) will bring people to the Alliance. But they aren’t going to stay there for the content if they’re met predominantly by negativity and aggressive pessimism that discourages even trying to do something. Assuming you’re right about the models, you would still need both for the new players it brings in. Give them the looks they want, but they also need a community that isn’t actively telling them that they’re not going to be able to do all the end game draws on that side.
Less stuff that makes ally players go: " levling my druid was really depressing when I was during the alterac valley thing, all anyone ever did was go “we’re alliance its why we always lose”
More: “Oh man Korraks revenge was amazing. If you could get enough of the Alliance to listen and you knew what you were doing you could pull off amazingly fun wins. >.< I used to play AV constantly until Pandaria. Love it when I can get folk listening”
thats because the alliance is the engine. its a fantasy rpg. they look for big ticket fantasy races like elves and dwarves and humans and gnomes, and then for more specific class stuff, like necromancers, wizards, druids, bards, mages and so on. that wow has playable orcs, goblins and minotaurs is a draw for fantasy rpg people also but they are more specialized and dont have the same level of interest as an attractive elf
i’m telling you, if they would just give us our requested traditional pretty/handsome elf, alot of these problems would go away. of course, it helps if they have really good racials too.
p.s. ogres would be good for horde too. fantasy rpg players love ogre warriors.
But what I’m saying is that that may draw people in, but right part of the participation gap is the bandwagonning behind the world first guilds rather than playing the game as they would if those guilds didn’t exist. But also the people sabotaging the Alliance from within by basically attacking the idea that the Alliance is ABLE to do the content at all. And if it’s all doom and gloom where people give up easier because things are stacked against them, people who want to do the content will probably move on to greener pastures where they can, and that leaves us at the point where we have relatively even populations, or even Alliance having more players, but they still go to a horde alt to do content because they don’t have to fight the pessimism.
missed this. i dunno how i skipped it somehow. this has been happening at least since tbc, as i played vanilla but dont think i queued for any bgs till tbc. i also ran horde and alliance chars. and without fail, if i was on horde,horde lost. if i was on alliance, alliance lost. ya start thinking you’re the problem lol
it has always been like that. always. the only difference for horde side when i was on my horde, was they wouldnt say anything at all.
on alliance, they’d start talking smack and telling the rest of the alliance on their team that they sucked. which was often the case, because, like i said, alliance reeled in new players, taught them how the basic game functions, and then they were faced with the decision of staying alliance or going horde. even back then, many made horde chars for pvp.
so alliance was continuously bad at pvp because they had a continuous flow of new players. doubt thats the problem now though. now its likely everyone truly is demoralized. people are beginning to sound desperate, even despondent. and that’s only a few steps away from, gee i wonder if this other game is better or gee i wonder if its better on the horde.
And I’m trying to point out that there are people posting on Alliance characters who seem to take glee in stoking that despondency. Making up conspiracy theories about how not only is it harder to get a group on Alliance, but that the devs have it in for that half of their own game and are actively trying to destroy it and give it sucky races that don’t measure up so that they can’t perform in high end content. And that just makes it more likely that your scenario occurs. That’s what I was commenting on that started all this (and no, it was not your comment I was commenting on)
I’m not saying it is the only problem. But it is A problem.
But look, I want the Alliance to start having fun with their game time. And if they pull in some records, great who doesn’t like an underdog story.
*Note: In the conspiracy theory statement I am not referring to the problem of getting a group as a conspiracy theory, that sounds like it’s a real problem.
wait tarrok. no, i’m sorry but i know what happened. its not a conspiracy theory. they let the guy’s video play at blizzcon, wherein he told real people who played alliance chars, to kill themselves. the devs have repeatedly demoralized their own alliance playerbase because the majority of them only play horde mains and they seem to think this will be a good image for the game.
and because we fuss about it, they get on stage and in a sort of eye-rolling way… for the alliance…heh…heh…heh. . I mean they act like they have to force themselves to tolerate half of their playerbase, for being unhappy about what is happening to their game. you’d think the devs would be equally worried about their game but they only seem to be half heartedly invested in the alliance which is part of their game. if its that bad of a faction, make a new one you like for people to be in. dont punish your customers
Wow, that’s not paraphrasing Hyper - that’s outright attributing things he hasn’t said to him. Poor form.
par·a·phrase
/ˈperəˌfrāz/
verb
express the meaning of (the writer or speaker or something written or spoken) using different words, especially to achieve greater clarity.
It does not mean:
par·a·phrase
/ˈperəˌfrāz/
verb
Distort the meaning of (the writer or speaker or something written or spoken) using different words, especially to make it seem like they said something they didn’t.
I agree, but I also, from my observation the subject of High Elves seems to bring out the worse in people. I know it has done so a few times with me. When it does I will usually mute the threads until I am able to talk without saying something nasty. Of course that doesn’t always work.
Crazy and does not make any sense! For one thing Dwarves don’t like Elves.