Alliance or horde. 2 hour queues are not good. I’m alliance retail and km fine with merc mode. The only negative is alliance queues won’t be instant. If anything still 2 to 3 mins. Which is still fine.
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What a bad fix. This will literally help to chip away at alliance populations more. If they actually wanted to address the PvP que times with cross ques like this they should have done actual cross faction ques.
Let horde and alliance play together. This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a bit.
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That wouldn’t fix anything. At all. The people that transfer prpb would end up quitting eventually anyway. And it would be a temp fix. Idc about favoritism but 2 hour queues isn’t healthy while other faction is insta. Alliance can stand to have 2 min queues etc. And yea if anything add cross faction bgs arenas already…
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This should be implemented in retail, especially for lower brackets where you can’t use merc mode.
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No one cares.
The whole faction v faction thing was killed by Blizzard after having the narrative hammer home cooperation a thousand times. It’s done. Embrace Zug Zug.
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That’s what I’m saying. This is a half arsed fix. If they’re truly giving up on it they should have just let alliance players to que with horde ones.
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It’s amusing how the blue post tries to stay “neutral” with snippets like
Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that the high queue times are a Horde-specific problem. I’ve never seen an Alliance poster complaining about long queue times.
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They had no choice …TBC BG’s were about to die for Horde . It was either merc mode or same faction BG’s.
The wait times are almost 1 hour to get into a BG in TBC. Not sustainable
They’re testing it this weekend. On the 6th, it goes back to the standard matching system. AV isn’t included, because AV wasn’t joined to the War Games system (which is what they’re using as the ‘engine’ of the testing).
It’s a horrible idea and I hope it crashes and burns.
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Or they will implement merc mode … current situation with horde wait times in TBC (and just 4 weeks in ) was not sustainable .
His behind.
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It was a player-made problem, and Blizzard knew – just like everyone who paid attention knew – it was coming.
They could have cut off the cheerleading for rolling Horde with more pointed reminders that queue times WOULD go up and they wouldn’t be intervening, just as they hadn’t in the past.
They could have limited the number of Horde who would queue for BGs. Limited the number of Horde characters that could be made.
Instead, they threw up their hands and pretended they couldn’t think of anything else.
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Well, Blizzard’s stance in retail is it would not be too lore shattering for Horde to help Alliance take over and hold the highlands around Lordaeron, if it means the player base is not slightly inconvenienced by having a 15 minute longer queue.
However, on the same note, it would be way too bonkers, lore wise, for Horde and Alliance to team up with each other to try and thwart some all powerful existence ending entity even if it meant that a good chunk of their playerbase would not have been forced to quit or try other games because their guild fell apart and they weren’t willing to spend $40+ per character to change faction and servers to play the game they already pay a subscription for.
So ya it is perfectly consistent with Blizzard logic.
This should be done in retail as well, imo.
Story aside. You want people to play the game and do what they enjoy? Then you throw out the “sides” and throw every one together so there are games going all the time and no queue issues for either side of the coin.
Basically PvP is it’s own game without a story line. I’m just there to try and win regardless of who is actually on my team if it’s Alliance or Horde.
You want story then you do PvE and that’s that.
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But they have and did in WoD with merc mode when the queue times for alliance reached the current TBCC Horde levels
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And that was a mistake. It’s still a mistake.
If they’re going to do away with factions, just do it – none of this dribs and drabs nonsense.
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Merc mode certainly hasn’t helped faction imbalance. It was another case of Blizzard slapping a band-aid on an oozing wound.
There are other alternatives to the problem that don’t ignore faction imbalance. Horde to alliance faction transfers at a free or reduced rate, increased xp gains for alliance. Blizzard chose to prioritize horde queues over faction balance and that’s unfortunate.
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That might be more problematic in Classic because all of your toons need to be on the same faction on PvP realms.
So, if you faction transfer one, you have to faction transfer all of them.
I guess they could change that rule too, but I don’t know how the Classic playerbase would react.
Transfers should be on targeted realms, the ones with higher horde populations, which would also work toward balancing them.
If they can completely ignore the faction conflict in this game, despite the classic players disliking it, I’d think they could forgive a rule that eventually gets removed anyway.
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Why should there be any reason to choose a faction beyond personal preference?
As someone who did double agent KSM in BFA, and attempted to do an Alliance RBG toon in season 1–no thanks on the faction mixing.
I just merc queued some games tonight and had the Priest on my team LoF me away from my own tank twice. I’d catch brain cancer if I had to deal with that all the time.
Actually, they should just remove LoF from the game, or make Priest players take an IQ test to unlock it.
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