The faction imbalance is going to strangle this game

Community General Discussion
866

https://realmpop.com/us.html is a completely flawed site. It won’t tell you faction imbalance. All it will tell you how many characters there are. It won’t tell you if that character is someones 50th alt and they main a horde character, for example. So overall a bad way to measure actual population. But it is unfortunately the best metric, barring release of details from blizz.

But a 53/47 split which is often quoted could very well be a major variance if we consider who makes up those populations.

Lets assume ideal 50/50 split and each side has 100 players. Using prices law, which states that the square root of any population will produce 50% of the production, we will assume 10% are hordecore.
Horde have 45 casual players, and 5 hardcore.
Alliance have 45 casual players and 5 hardcore.
Now lets assume that for whatever reason, 3 of the hardcore players from the Alliance go horde.
Horde now have 45 casual players, and 8 hardcore.
Alliance now have 45 casual players and 2 hardcore.
Only 6 players difference, yet there is a huge discrepancy when it comes to hardcore faction balance.
And that is assuming 53/47 is the numbers we are actually dealing with.

Saying “the factions are almost even” shows a clear misunderstanding of whats going on here and just makes you seem simple.

Saying “Alliance just need to participate more” is just silly. What you essentially are suggesting is 2 hardcore Alliance players from the above example convert 6 of the casual players to hardcore. That is just not happening.

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867

If you look at it the first week of an expansion, that’s a good indicator of faction pop, since very very VERY few people level a 2nd toon to max the first week of an expansion. The ratios were the same the first week of the expansion. And the second. And the third. And so on.

Realmpop’s numbers are pretty steady.

868

IMO One solution would be if Blizzard made it so guilds could exist cross server. With LFG and world phasing that’s how everything else exist now. Just make guilds that way as well.

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869

So you can be in a guild with somebody, but you can’t group up and use the group finder tool.

Unless you also allow people to use the group finder tool cross-faction. So now Alliance & Horde players are grouping together to do faction assaults… how does that work, exactly?

Cross-faction won’t work.

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870

I was a big believer in this camp at first, but I don’t think this strategy will work anymore.

Mirroring racials / Removing racials would make them balanced yes, but it wouldn’t balance the raiding community. The Raiding community as an entire collective will do its best to stay on one faction.

Yes, the top 1% of players care about the slight edge that racials can give them, but what matters a lot more than a 1% bonus is the imbalance of established raiding guilds on the horde.

Upwards of 80% of the Heroic and higher raiding community is on the horde. There are more Alliance guilds transferring every single day. The Horde already has an established and bustling raiding community. Therefore, any guild that wants to focus on Heroic and higher raiding is HEAVILY influenced to join the Horde, that way they can share from the same recruitment pool as everyone else in the raiding community and have room for upwards growth and expansion.

If you were to snap your fingers, and remove all the racials from the game, the Horde would still be the faction with all the Raiding guilds. No one would want to reroll Alliance just to no longer have a large recruitment pool and no access to the rest of the raiding community.

The Video, posted by OP does a wonderful job of explaining this.

The problem isn’t part of the faction divide, the problem IS the faction divide.
Splitting up your players in a primarily cooperative game is a terrible game plan.

This comment is brutish. But it does help further my point.

The factions aren’t split because of fantasy anymore. They are split because of gameplay.
Most Alliance players that get aspirations of Higher end content realize that the Horde has a bigger, more established community for such things. Sooner or later these people will either quit, or transfer.

This is the root of the problem. Removing the faction divide would effect things very little. Casual Players could continue to do things casually, Hardcore players could continue to guild up and focus on the Endgame, but Everyone would be able to do content together as whatever race they want. The ideal situation for a Cooperative game.

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871

Honestly this game in general is just dieing atm. I qued a bg on my alliance alt this week and I got 7 of the same 9 people after having to wait for 6m.

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872

Its time blizzard allows cooperative cross server guilds for pve.

There is no reason not to do this.

Simply provide the option for RP guild, faction guild or global guild.

Allow global guilds 5k members.

Allow player to join a global guild and a faction guild.

There an option for all.

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873

well, horde has taurens, otherwise i would be alliance

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874

Youre a blood elf named sylvanas you cant judge people on a lack of imagination lol

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875

what is that again? A human playing a human?

If I flip one of the letters in your name 45 degrees, you’d become Anduin.

in all seriousness though, had the name since 2003. And been a fan of her savagery since then.

876

Why do people post such ridiculously long posts? Faction imbalance means absolutely nothing in the era of warmode and the abolition of PVP servers. And even if it did matter, there is nothing Blizzard can do about it.

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877

I’m sure someone else posted this in the pages of posts I don’t have time to read, but a lot of it comes down to the writing. The writing for the Alliance side is atrocious. Nothing interesting/exciting has happened in the Alliance story line since maybe the death of Varian in the opening to Legion? And even that wasn’t that interesting. The Horde have had such turmoil throughout the game’s history, and that is interesting. Christie Golden writes the Alliance as if it’s some romance novel. It’s awful. Many players aren’t attracted to that, and so Horde it is. shrug

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878

Your horde is showing. If you’re going to blindly try to protect your faction advantage, at least have the decency to post on your main.

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879

My suggestion is not for having cross faction grouping. My suggestion was for creating cross server guilds within just each faction.

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880

This would help out a lot.

…especially if they were to enable X-server guilds for alliance and not for the horde. Might help the alliance be more competitive with fewer people by lowering the bar to entry a bit. Meanwhile, you keep it higher for the Horde and maybe you can get some people to jump ship for the advantage.

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881

For old content yes, for new content no.

Not sure why everyone thinks cross faction means re-coding the entire game.

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882

you mean like the communities tool that blizz added in bfa?

883

If Mythic had options for 10 man it probably would do a lot of good for 2-5-10 since heroic guilds could then progress into mythic nautrally without being deathhauled off with decline in bfa raiding interest.

It makes no sense for content made around the top 1% of the 10% also require those 0.1% to find 25 other people in the 0.1%, without any job or schedule commitment, to commit to hours long or days long boss progressions wiping over and over with no gold except from the occasional BoE from mythic (And God forbid if your gl has a ‘all BoEs go to guild bank for repairs’ option if you’re lucky, or straight up starts a guild war over a 170k mythic boe the tank rolled on but the GM’s undergeared discord e-girlfriend wants before they eventually vendor the 170k boe for literal ocd reasons since it didn’t match their set, yeah…)

I admit i dipped my toes with it back in WoD when Mythic was first introduced with a Tich Horde guild that we did like 4 of the first bosses and then Mythic Sorcethar at the time of 1 year drought. But the gm guy would legit watch or demote people for taking unassigned bathroom breaks ready checks since once one guy would go afk, 2-4 more would. He also got pissy at everyone for mistakes that if you say geared up feral, for pvp on a pvp server he flat out would reject players for not rerolling boomy even if you sunk all your time into the legendary ring for one and me for ‘missing’ raid days he didn’t even take half the people on for test days. You’d sit there for like 3-5 hours, told not to do anything since you were on call and only grabbed if someone dropped. And even heroic gear was already enough to do all the content and pvp was ilvl cappped at say 700(PVE gear) 730(PVP) even if you had like 745 Mythic gear.

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884

Pretty much

“Merc mode” is being used as a referential example. In reality, what were talking about is allowing PvE content to be cross faction. Grouping, dungeons, raids, guilds, trade, all cross faction.

Correct

Moronic.

It has nothing to do with that whatsoever. The issue is not people not wanting to play with Alliance players, but people wanting to play with Horde players because the community is much larger and stronger.

Completely inaccurate.

Realmpop is a garbage source that counts characters not players.

Wowprogress tracks players, not characters, and has shown a significant imbalance for years.

This is it.

It’s been about 7-8 years.

What drivel.

Who describes groups of people as a single monolith like this? I can’t imagine what kind of racial sentiments you harbor if you believe you can categorize and describe swaths of people in this way.

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885

This whole thing reads like some pompous two-year-old saying I’m better because I play this when in fact you’re just lucky to be playing on the side where there’s more people to play with

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