Disagree with ‘fixing’ faction imbalance, it should be embraced, people should be encouraged to once again be either Horde or Alliance, let the bloodbaths and the war continue. Should be forced to be just single faction on a server (or server cluster) and not be able to make the other faction.
Factions need to mean something again.
It’ll help treat the symptoms by making it easier to group, and I really believe that there’s a large number of people playing Horde purely for the population that would switch back to Alliance races if they weren’t forced to be Horde to progress.
Ironic from the faction that can make blood elves.
I for one would xfer my horde toons to alliance if there were no faction barrier.
At $25 a character it is expensive to keep flipping. Even during the sales, it is expensive.
And also, I’d play Horde a lot more if there were free trade. Most of what I do in game involves crafting and moneymaking, and my Horde characters mostly sit unused because it just doesn’t feel worth it to do anything on them when profits and inventory are locked in the other faction.
People will re-roll new characters like it’s going out of style, and you can buy a race change with gold too. I don’t think it’s as much a barrier as you say. I’d probably swap a couple of my main characters over to Horde races immediately.
They don’t even mean something in the current lore. Between Thrall and Jaina’s “What’s different?/We are” cinematic and the fact the Horde is helping Tyrande for the second time (if they went Night Fae, and I think even in 9.1 everyone is) shows the factions don’t matter. We’re helping the faction leaders but it’s too lore breaking if I decide to help a Night Elf struggling with a mob? Or want to take my Worgen friends through a dungeon?
The factions haven’t made sense for nearly a decade now, essentially since MoP was the last time the war was even good and not forced for some arbitrary story reasons. They’re an archaic function that need to die.
agree, that needs to change, the factions need to mean something again.
They should just open up cross-faction guilds. The lolstory can survive by allowing you to opt into that. Little pockets of inter-faction fighting can still happen in the open world. BG’s would be fine.
Do you want BFA again?
Do you love to see your favourite heroes destroyed because of fanfiction?
Because let me tell you, that’s exactly what you’re going to get
Even Cata/MoP’s faction war felt pretty forced to me. The story basically made Garrosh fail upwards into the warchief position and the premise of the war was “twilight cultists gank a bunch of druids and did it so well that both factions think the horde did it but it doesn’t matter because Garrosh wanted to go to war anyway and we need Thrall out of the warchief spot in order to facilitate that.”
It was really dumb.
I would say do the same thing that caused the imbalance…
Buff Alliance racials so it entices high end players here, wannabes will follow, and then eventually…nerf the racials.
Fixing the imbalance is easy but delicate; you have to give people an incentive to switch, then at the right time equalize it. How that’s done is up for debate. Also have to accurately gauge what rate of transfer on how enticing it is to swap.
No, it’s time to nuke factions from orbit and make the story good again.
Well yeah, honestly faction’s have never made sense in WoW to me. They even had an early alpha build where there was no divide, which would continue the spirit of Warcraft III. But from day one they felt either inconsequential or unimportant. PvP, sure, you fight the other faction. Unless you’re in arenas where you can fight the same faction and often do. World PvP was hugely popular, and I respect that. But you can still have that by having “War Mode” be “Faction Mode” and letting those who want to move away from the pointless faction divide have the option to, especially since the story supports it more than continuing the stupid conflict.
You mean blood elf boring?
The way you fix it is by removing it. If you attempt to “balance it” you end up nerfing one enough to the point you force players to change thus creating the same thing you attempted to fix.
As someone who only started playing with the release of SL I feel there is no need for “factions”. At no point when playing and leveling (1-120) did I ever feel a loyalty to any faction. In fact it felt as if I was just in my own band helping groups of other factions to come together and defeat the main villain of whatever xpac I was on.
edit- fixed my horrible typos
As opposed to the Horde players that only play one boring race?
Horde players love to push this fantasy of “We love to play races which look like they climbed out of the local landfill we promise we hate pretty things”.
“See I’m unique lol have fun playing your generic human noob.”
When in reality, the Horde actually got people interested in it after Blood Elves were added. The Horde were in the minority before that.
Leave the two factions, but add a third neutral faction that anyone can join. In war mode, you can target both other groups. That way a party of 5 could go out and warmode PvP against other two and actually find more targets.
If you go neutral, you need to join a neutral guild. Language would be learned by neutral, so that one advantage would let you talk to all. If you go to Radom BG, you could potentially join up with any other type of group.
My irl friend stopped playing since it became a real chore trying to find groups on his alliance server. He might swap to horde but only after seeing how 9.1 turns out.