Just because WoW touts the faction divide as a feature it has over FFXIV doesn’t mean it’s a good feature. That was my entire point
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It’s the foundational basis for the Warcraft IP and always has been - so yes, it’s a feature FF doesn’t have.
Wasn’t Ion’s statement about faction balance in relation to Wardmode? And then made moot by the number of Alliance who turned WM on for welfare gear? And then turned if OFF when the gear handouts stopped?
But sure: faction imbalance. We’ll go with that.
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One thing to note about that number.
That number is the aggregated character totals, not players.
Look at the pictures in the OP, they show players not characters.
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So? Players themselves can be both, I know I have both Horde and Alliance characters at 120. Having cross faction grouping would solve so many problems. I’d love to raid on my Alliance characters, but right now I’m going to get farther raiding on Horde. It sucks and I feel for die-hard Alliance mains.
…we just disagree.
Good luck on your post OP.
May it bring you… “happiness”.
The Fundemental Basis of the Warcraft IP, is usually traced back to Warcraft 3, not Warcraft 1.
Back in Warcraft 1, this game was still supposed to be in the Warhammer Universe.
In Warcraft 3, the races of Azeroth had to stand together in order to defeat the oncoming burning legion. The central plot of Warcraft has been about Working together for much longer than it’s been about fighting eachother.
Also, The imbalance in the raider population is too big to ignore. Remember the Hall of Fame for Eternal palace? When the first 100 guilds cleared the Eternal Palace on Mythic, the horde outnumbered the Alliance. 97 to 3.
Blizzard either needs to remove the factions entirely, or put labels on them in the character creation screen. Mark the Alliance as (Casual content) and mark the horde as (Endgame Content)
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Their is no need to remove factions they just need to fix the alliance
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Yeah. This is where Ion lets his massive horde-fanboi-ism and bias show. His response to the participation problem caused by a mass population migration of content participants from one faction to the other is, “we’re not looking to encourage mass amounts of faction migration [back]”.
His response is why I don’t have much faith in him as game director where the factions are concerned. As game director where raids and dungeon content is concerned? Sure. He’s probably one of the best men for the job possible. But his head is completely in the clouds if he thinks the solution to a mass migration of raiders from alliance to horde is to turn alliance casuals into raiders.
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That’s not really constructive and only your opinion.
We’re all entitled to our opinions, but I don’t think that a 180 degree spin in the other direction is going to solve anything at this point. Cross faction (in my opinion) is the best way to help solve the problem. That way people can play whatever race they want instead of being constrained to half of them because of faction divides.
Plus larger recruitment pools.
It’s not the best way. Not even close.
It simply might be the only way at this point because the devs have messed up so hard for so long (and as a “merc mode”. actual cross faction raiding can take a long walk off a short pier).
And it’s absolutely constructive because it points to an in-grained bias in a dev who proudly admits to not only playing a single character his entire time playing WoW, but only ever playing Horde. Ion wares his bias on his sleeve.
The time to fix faction balance was MoP, but they allowed massive faction advantage a place in the game as recently as uldir with the overwhelming advantage blood elves bought the horde on Zul.
Seriously, just compare beating zul with only a single priest and no shamans or blood elves, to doing it with half your raid capable of mass dispelling the fear adds with a racial ability. For horde, he was easy because you didn’t have to deal with an entire mechanic.
For alliance who lacked the comp, he was significantly more difficult.
Alliance have never had a boss that was that much easier for us because of a racial ability. Not once. Not ever.
And before you go saying I’m just whining about a single non-blocking fight, it’s not the difficulty that’s the actual problem. We killed Zul.
The problem is the lack of dev attention to the issue at hand. The problem is the devs sitting on their thumbs while a discrepancy like that existed in the first place.
If they were really interested in preserving alliance anything in the face of mass migrations over to the Horde, they would have fixed Zul just to show us that they were aware of the problem while he was current. They could have flagged the adds so that arcane torrent specifically didn’t work to handle them and you had to use mass dispel or purge. And barring that, they could have enabled some alliance racial abilities on a different non-gear check boss to give a similar advantage. At least then we could have had some real arguments over which faction had it worse in the raid instead of the constant, “horde has an unfair advantage!” vs “your just bad! it’s not that big an advantage!” that we got for an entire tier.
I expect that merc mode is the only fix that will work because I don’t trust the dev team to care enough to make anything else work.
…and I hate it.
I’d rather watch my faction whither and die, and take the rest of WoW with it than put up with a dev team that doesn’t care.
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I thought that was implied, but you’re correct. It’s too late really to do much else.
Who cares what the game director plays? I play both Horde and Alliance and this whole Horde bias stuff is really getting old. Was Ion in charge when the factions started going haywire? I actually don’t know, but unless he was 100% in charge and making 100% of all decisions, it’s not just him and what he chooses to play on his own time is his choice. Somehow I don’t think he’s sitting in his office rubbing his hands together like a third rate villain stroking his pointy mustache and cackling evilly about his next plot to foil those darn Alliance players.
His “bias” is whatever makes him and the company the most money. Just like pretty much every other executive out there.
Dwarves were OP in Throne of Thunder when Blizzard went bleed-happy. Also 10-man Horridon, when the variety of negative effects was a huge problem (and went against their all-negative-effects-should-be-magic-because-magic-is-the-only-thing-we-made-it-all-healers-can-remove design philosophy, which they had just adopted but then forgot about).
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Considering he directs the overall development of the entire game?
Everyone who plays alliance should.
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What they could do, is just start including racials in the balance updates and ask the simmers to keep both damage numbers relatively similiar or give niches instead.
Say if each racial is intended for flavor and balance, then buff the 1% racials to 3-4% to keep up with bloodlusts and the zandalari, maybe have perks etc to keep the numbers balanced.
Have someone run sims on racial dps/utility and find ways to keep the fine tuned numbers in. In a game where a 15% gear difference seperates Mythic and Heroic while content is much drastically exponetially harder, how stupid would it be not to expect munchkinners to pick the best % racials lol if it let them play or do 20% more damage if they had to wear a pink tutu and a dress? Of course people will do what the game encourages. But considering that Arcane torrent, while strong actually was in a buffed state from 2-3m down to 1.5m and gave resources while others don’t, it might be fair to remove the resources or balance withthe same, or turn back cd racials to a once per 3-5 minute thing as a semi occasional flavor thing. While also, allowing for characters, once at max level, to be able to configure their racial abilities for balance purposes at say the stormwind xp enableer/disabler guy, etc, or in the warmode talents. Say, you unlock your class’s racial at the start, but say you could select your racials in a very warmode talentesque ability way. Say choose one active ability (2 sec aoe silence/ability purge: Arcane torrent(Horde) / Gnomish Mana Vortex(ally), Shadowmeld(Ally), Deathcloak (Forsaken, horde, etc), )
Light of the Naruu could also be covered to compete with the 100% over 6 secs heal to go from 20% -> 50% hp over 6 seconds, with a minimum of 25% hp healed, with a additional hot canceled by any form of combat to heal +25% over time interupted or dispelled by combat/dots to help them tank better.
Worgen could get say, running wild as a instant cast to help their mobility in ground content, with a less derpy animation, And maybe a racial that gives them a blood frenzy that debuffs any targets they inflict with say [Ripped wounds] suffering +2% of all damage taken as additional bleeding/blood damage for flavor. Another popular idea is for darkflight, to also block all movement reducing abilities or prevent speed reduction below 100% for it’s duration.
Void Elves could have the 1% more magic damage racial replaced with a “A additional 1% of all magic done is done as Arcane damage” with the same flavor, or 3% leech, etc.
Then you could choose alongside say a passive racial or miniture bloodlust, say 1% crit or 1% versatility, etc, or the Orc 15% for the second row.
For the third, for flavor purposes you could have each class’s flavor racials stay to themselves, or disable Active racials in M+ and Mythic raiding content for balance purposes. Unlocking other racials could be tied to rep for instance with each ally rep such as say, Honored First talent, Revered S
Merc mode? For PvE? It won’t work. It can’t work. None of you have actually thought this through.
Let’s start with Mythic, since that’s what people freak out over and is really the only part of the game where there’s a tilt toward one faction (overall population is pretty even).
How, exactly, do people think “merc mode” for Mythic raiding will work?
It doesn’t use an automated queue like BG’s, you understand? You’re gonna allow people to join guilds cross-faction? Or not guilds, just zone in together? They need to be in the same raid, so you’re allowing cross-faction grouping?
This notion that you can have a “merc mode” for Mythic raiding, but still have the faction divide, is silly. It can’t be done.
That doesn’t prove any bias, and it is largely irrelevant. Ion is there to make himself and the company money. He’s not going to jeopardize that or his job over screwing over half the player base. But you are entitled to your opinion, so keep on believing whatever you want, I certainly am not changing your mind.
Oh, and not everyone only plays one faction.
Alliance racials are currently superior to Horde racials.
They already made Alliance racials better.
It isn’t about racials. It’s about people not wanting to play with Alliance players. And until the Alliance playerbase faces that, nothing will improve.
I really do not think that this is the case. There are plenty of a**holes on both sides of the faction divide. I believe the reason why so many people are going Horde from Alliance these days is because the semi-hardcore and hardcore playerbases are already larger on horde side than alliance side, due to the horde races having better racials in expansions prior to their recent rebalancing
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Completely wrong. Has nothing to do with it.
The reason people play or move to horde is simple. The opportunities to play are high.
Want a more robust Mythic + community? go horde.
Want a more robust Raiding community? go horde.
That’s it.
All this talk of well let’s get alliance players to play more. First off, no one has a clue how to do that. No one knows if the majority of alliance players even want that. Even if they did, it requires a heck of a lot more effort then just switching to horde.
This is an access to community problem, pure and simple.
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