Honorable Horde first, followed by Tauren, which is why it pains me to see the Horde always have an identity crisis over and over again. Having said that I just can’t bring myself to play the Alliance. I only played an Alliance using the 110 free level token to do the War of Thorns and Battle for Lordaeron on the experience of the Alliance side. It was admittingly the worst experience I’ve ever played. Not because of the burning of Teldrassil or anything like that, but it actually felt like I was playing a failed Horde, or Blue Horde. It felt like it was trying to unify a team that had no feeling of unification. In short, it just felt like nothing but humans, a human king leading a human nation despite different races. Now how this came about can only guess it by two things.
First off the leveling experience of both sides felt like being complete opposites. The Horde was more about survival, there’s a reason there’s the quote “I survived Barren’s Chat.” It was not just the chat that was bad, if you strayed off the road even by the tiniest bit, you’ll be dead by a pack of hyenas, centaurs, raptors, harpies, cultists, what have you, the list goes on and on. There were a lot of group quests, and quests that should have been group quests, so you had to group up, YOU HAD TO GROUP UP! Even grouping up to go to just travel to “normal” quest areas in the Barrens wasn’t rare back in my time. Like a raptor’s den that sure you could solo a raptor easily … but they were in packs of 3 or 5. So the sense of unity and comradery was always there, because if you were alone in the Barrens, you would not make it far! That and since Orcs were mostly a warrior race, Horde proably had more Warriors, and warriors can’t solo in classic. Also last but certainly not least, now I cannot exactly recall the exact level, but I remember being stuck in the Barrens for about levels 10 to 30 to 40, I think it was 35. So you were stuck in the Barrens for the long haul.
Now I’ve played on the Alliance side back in classic and I only was able to get to level 20, and be done with Westfall. The only time I felt like I needed aid big time was from the infamous Hogger, and the Deadmines, hence why he is so popular. Well that basically was what Barrens was, a Land Hogger, and the Wailing Caverns as the Deadmines but on steroids.
Second reason is both factions are built on opposite ways when it comes to faction and races. The Horde has different races built into it. Each race is completely different in terms of religion, practices, rules, etc. The Orcs were honorable to the core, even if it meant death. The Tauren are peaceful, and value life. The Trolls worshipped Voodoo and shadows. The Forsaken were the black sheep, pragmatic and believe victory at any costs. Even the Blood Elves were very different from the other Horde races both in looks and believes. We didn’t need to work on racial identities, we had to work on the opposite, to unite under one banner, the Horde banner. So screaming FOR THE HORDE! Is the representation of hard work between NPCs, and even players. Now if we can only remember that, and get this identity crisis out of the way finally!
The Alliance however are the opposite, they were already unified. However the NPCs were more okay with that, it was the players that had to bring out their own identities from their factions. The problem with the Alliance though is that most of the races worship the same things. The Humans and Dwarves worshipped the light. The Gnomes were a joke race so sadly they didn’t even matter. The Night Elves worshipped Elune, that is probably why most NE players felt alienated from the others. This leads to the problem that the Alliance are just a big blob of Lawful Good Humans, you have you normal humans, your tall and pointy ear purple humans, your short humans, your short short humans. Even the Draenei worshipped the light, making them big blue goat humans. So to me, when screaming FOR THE ALLIANCE! It feels hollow and empty because not a lot of hard work was placed upon it. A lot more hard work was placed on trying to not be a giant big blob of Lawful Good Humans. Unfortunately it feels like Blizzard forcefully made the players fail in that regard with Varian being High King, and how the commanders of the Alliance are all Humans.
That’s my guess on why both factions are different and opposites in terms of factions vs races.