They aren’t pretty but there are actually a few solutions. These aren’t even the most extreme solutions I can think of, so bear that in mind. I can list those too if you want.
Flat 30% buff to alliance stats while in war mode. Similar to the determination buff in LFR, give 30% more health, healing, and damage to Alliance in the world with war mode on. Even with this, you are still going to lose in those all too common 10+ v1 situations we run into. The 30% doesn’t have to be the magic number, but something in that ball park can be determined.
Complete revamp of Alliance racials. Nuff said.
30% buff to reputations with war mode on. Though this ship has mostly sailed already with more and more people getting their flying already, if the current war mode buff included reputation, I think you would be hard pressed to find Alliance with it off.
Give Alliance an extra PvP talent.
Lootable Horde corpses with a chance to drop a pet, mount, or even just benthic level gear.
Again, I can give some of the more extreme examples if you want, but extreme problems often require extreme solutions. Currently war mode is a complete failure, either by the perception or the reality that Alliance players have of the hopelessness of turning on war mode. After the patch I was pretty sure WoW was dead. Hardly saw anyone in Nazjatar. Turned off war mode. Oh, there everyone is.
This is gonna go places; But I’d actually consider pvping if they didn’t gate all of the cosmetic rewards behind such steeps curves of like 60/80+ honor level
They should just buff Alliance racials for PvP for a year or so, which would make hardcore PvP players switch back to Alliance. Then when the PvP participation is about equal for both sides, nerf the racials again and disable racial abilities for PvP.
I support this but this isn’t much of a carrot for the Alliance to change their current behavior. This is gonna have to be one giant carrot. I’m pretty sure Blizz knows it too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see war mode it it’s current iteration completely overhauled or even scrapped for 9.0
They should also remove the monetary barriers to evening the factions. Make faction changes free in every case that there is a large faction imbalance for the opposite faction.
They should also remove the penalty for rolling the opposite faction by allowing you to send materials and gold to your alts on opposite factions.
A lot of Alliance players just don’t like PVP, I don’t know why people find that so hard to understand. Trying to get them to turn on Warmode is the wrong approach. You do no want people who basically don’t like PVP to turn on Warmode briefly for a reward. That is not good PVP.
You have to look at the population of PVP players. For whatever reason, most PVP players have chosen to go Horde. That’s where the problem is, and that is where it will have to be solved. Getting Horde PVP players to switch to Alliance is probably impossible at this point because the devs have made the Alliance so unattractive to them.
The thing I can come up with is require people to queue for Warmode, and create perfectly balanced shards. Many of the Horde PVP players will have to wait in queue, but that is what PVP players get for all going to the same faction.
The core problem with war mode is that a player’s ability to manipulate the shard that they’re on (via grouping) to put themselves in a favorable situation completely throws out the background matchmaking that’s meant to keep them in check. I suspect that they can’t really fix this without being willing to make ungrouped players bounce between shards far more frequently than they’d be willing to.
There’s no easy solution for this. Doing no sharding at all seems unlikely, as would any restriction of cross realm play. What war mode has really done here is expose a bunch of latent problems by giving players more granular control on whether they have opted in to PvP at any given moment, so I honestly can’t see this getting any better unless they make some kind of fundamental change to how often or how easily war mode itself can be toggled.
One option that would help in some scenarios would be to stop raids from bringing everyone to one shard when war mode is on, limiting the largest possible “block” of players that can guarantee that they’re on the same shard to 5. Quite counterintuitive for stuff like world bosses on war mode shards, yes, but tremendously helpful for some nonsense like what happens with the Battle for Nazjatar.
There was, but it was anything but balanced. It very rarely evened the playing field. Instead, it’d just swing things very far in favour of the person getting the buff.
That’s not to say that tuning it wouldn’t help, but I don’t think a %HP/damage buff would ever be a clean way of balancing uneven teams. It’s just too janky.
Warmode shouldn’t have been implemented with a bonus for either side.
It should just award a special currency for killing the opposing faction that can be used for time limited stat and xp buff pots. If there’s no one to kill or you don’t kill you can’t buy the pots.
It’s not just PvP though. Something is wrong at the heart of the Alliance. It seems to have become the faction of children and soccer parents. Alliance is lightyears behind not just in PvP but in raiding, and mythic+. But, most third party sites seem to indicate the Alliance actually has more players. What do we Alliance do all day, just level alts and LFR?
The only way to have a prayer of keeping warmode balanced is to keep servers balanced. Join some that are heavy one faction over the other to balance it out. Then when the population shifts in favor of one over the other past a certain percentage you can’t make any more of that faction on that server until it evens out a bit more to get below the threshold.
They can’t balance warmode when most people have no interest in it, they have people uninterested in pvp turning it on just for these boosted rewards, end up getting owned and having a bad time.
There aren’t any good options to fix it, sharding seems impossible to manage without a queue system into warmode to keep numbers even.
The reward system should just be scrapped, the benefit of warmode should be the pvp, pvp related achievements and the activation of pvp talents, nothing more.
Pretty much. Horde players are using Warmode as a “safe” source of extra resources right now and casually deleting any Alliance they see in a 4/5-v-1 gank. Most don’t want to PvP and will run away if they ever get hit head on by themselves.
The only Alliance players who have Warmode on at this point are the ones who really want to PvP. It should be the same for the Horde side.
O.o If you don’t consider those “solutions” extreme, then I’d be morbidly interested to see what you do consider extreme.
No buff for turning on warmode. They either need to do something so it’s cross-faction (i.e. making Grand Companies that you can join that fight other Grand Companies regardless of faction) or just do the Timeless Isle thing and let everyone beat on everyone else.
Warmode shouldn’t award anything other than the fun that you have beating the crap out of other players. If you don’t have fun in world PvP (even when you’re losing, because, let’s be honest here, there is ALWAYS going to be a loser) then you have no business turning it on in the first place.