The faction imbalance is going to strangle this game

So many opinions and complicated suggestions, so many people saying nothing can be done.

Join the friggen factions already!!!

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Yeah, I don’t want to see the pendulum swing in the other direction. That would just be the exact same problem with a different flavor and it would cause a lot of negative sentiment towards Blizzard (Lord knows they don’t need it right now).

There are certainly things which can be done to make it easier for Alliance to group with whoever is left but to me that’s just prolonging the inevitable. A slower decline is still a decline and we’d just end up in the same place a little further down the road. Better to swallow the bitter pill and make a hard choice now before it gets even worse, in my opinion.

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Or… they can stop being so infatuated with how THEY want the game to be, and start making a game that will be fun for people to play again. And GROW the playerbase instead of continuing to shrink it.

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Now you’re just talking fantasy! I cringe every time Ion says something like “we hear your feedback but we think X is better.”

Blizzard has a really hard time grasping that literally no one cares what they think when that thought results in something that isn’t enjoyable to play. “I’m not having fun, but Blizzard says they think this better so I guess I’m having fun now.” Said no one, ever.

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There are no in game changes you could make that will measure up against the advantage of being in the larger pool of end game players. As someone who as raided in the top 100 several times, to where I am now at 900, I can tell you this is a pervasive issues throughout the raiding community as a whole.

Even though it would be convenient for me to not have to pay to transfer my characters and spend the time leveling new characters on Horde, I don’t want them to enact changes to motivate people to transfer back to Alliance (regardless of whether it would be effective or not).

I don’t want them to fracture the massive raiding community on Horde into 2 smaller, less viable communities.

If we never get cross faction content, everyone is much better off if we all just transfer to a single faction, and have a much larger, more active community for us all to play with.

Titanforging being reworked into corruption, a more extreme version of everything everyone hated about titanforging is a great example of this.

Blizzard is very tone deaf a lot of the time and it feels like it’s gotten worse over the past few years.

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After he went to Riot, Ghostcrawler said in an interview that “At Blizzard, the developer is treated like a rock star. At Riot, the customer is treated like a rock star.”

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In my opinion.

At the start of the game, people went for Horde because “better racials” and that bias became popular among the playerbase, making even more people transfer to horde.

Maybe also because the Horde faction has a “better RPG fantasy”.

I describe that situation like this : Someone (Horde Racials at the beginning of the game) rolled down a little snowball at the start of a cliff, and the longer it rolled down, the bigger it gets (Horde population increasing).

Recently, Blizzard removed the person(Balancing Horde and Alliance racials) that started the snowball that now became a huge mega titan snowball. Soon, no amounts of solutions by Blizzard (Barrier to stop the snowball) will be solid enough to remove the problem (huge mega titan snowball still rolling).

For a solution to the problem, they could implement Cross-Faction group.

But, they won’t because “It’s war time”, sorry but, all the past expansion since Cataclysm made Both Factions always being united to defeat the common evil, we almost had 4-5 chances to being together and implement Cross Faction group but it never went on because “war time”.

Sorry, but that argument is just stupid, enough with the Alliance and Horde stupid invented fight with cool words like, Faith, Destiny, Cycle to reason the stupid invented “war”. It’s time to allow Cross Faction gameplay.

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My favorite Blizzard/customer interaction, even more than the guy dunking on them over Diablo Immortal, was when Ion did an AMA on reddit so he could tell people how right his decisions were.

Ion: “These things might not be fun right now, but trust me in the grand scheme of things it will be awesome!”

Customer: “OK, then instead of paying monthly can we pay per Grand Scheme?”

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It just doesn’t hold water. The only real remaining bastion of the faction divide is the mechanical divide itself.

The story and lore abandoned the faction divide years ago. It’s now just a knob Blizzard turns back and forth to auto generate story points, and an excuse for them to maintain a framework that is both making them money from faction transfers, and damaging the fabric of the game from the motivation of those same transfers.

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Exactly. It’s just stupid.

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I play LoL and this statement is a joke.

So you seem to be saying that you don’t really want the Alliance to have a viable pool for endgame content. That’s either cross-faction gameplay or Horde should be the only place for endgamers.

Cool, if I had to make that binary choice then HardcoreHorde it would be.

Not only that, they have to create significantly more content to support these 2 sides. It was a novel idea years ago, but that time really has passed. Just put your focus into one faction. We will get more content for it, and the playerbase will have more options/be happier.

The only upset people will be a few purists.

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One individual’s choice is spitting in the wind. This is a structural issue, not a personal dilemma. The logical choice is the one most competitive players will be making, and that is to go Horde. To go against that is to be a masochist. I’m sure you would understand this if the situation was reversed and Alliance was the faction with all the hardcore players (assuming you prefer Horde lore over Alliance lore).

In all honesty, I think the situation is unfixable. If they merge gameplay, it’ll feel crappy from a lore standpoint. If they don’t, then we will have to accept that Horde is the go to faction for group content.

It impacts more than just group content. For example, WPvP. With the advent of warmode it quickly became simply a default setting for Horde while they quested through zones devoid of more than the occasional Alliance getting rofl-stomped. When Blizzard attempted to fix it with OP rewards for Alliance there was a massive backlash from Horde.

That, to me, is a case study for what will happen if they try and balance group content by giving Alliance any sort of OP bonus instead of making the hard choice now and allowing cross faction play.

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I’m saying with the current state of the game, and with respect to all the cross server functionality that has been implemented, players enjoy a better experience playing the game when they have more players available to play with.

Now that we have been enduring this trend of players moving over to Horde, creating a super-community on Horde and a desolate player-base on Alliance. It would be ridiculous for those players who spent the money to create this super-community to then move back to be in a position somewhat as viable as Alliance was years ago instead of more players moving over to Horde, improving their situation AND increasing the viability and stability of this super-community of players.

It’s not that I’m saying Alliance should just rot and die, just that this social experiment we’ve been running all these years that has resulted in the imbalance in the first place has highlighted an issue with the faction divide itself.

Eventually, players who take part in end game content will become aware of the fact that there is a huge advantage to congregating on the same faction, and over time this behavior will trickle down to less and less serious players as they find that they no longer have any headroom to progress into because that strata of players has transferred already.

I’m not saying I don’t want Alliance players to have people to play with, just that it’s an inevitability no matter what changes they make to either faction individually that players will congregate in one place. If they don’t allow us to play cross faction and remove this pressure, it would be the lesser of 2 evils, and better for everyone if they were to just transfer Horde and at least be able to play the game properly.

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Horde main checking in to disagree with you. Factions are completely borked, Cross faction chat and communication need to be a thing, and allowing players to choose what faction they want to be on, AFTER they choose their race should also be a thing.

The faction divide is an antiquated system that needs to go! I say this as someone who 100% plays Horde and wants to play with my Alliance friends.

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Same here. I wanna play with my horde friends.

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So let me toss out some food for thought for these ‘hurr durr its a player problem’ people.

While yes, you can accuse it of being a player problem–you can’t absolve the devs from blame either.

How many players got fed up with the lack of interesting story being given to the Alliance and transferred Horde? Its not the players fault, its the devs.

How many players got drawn to the Horde over the course of time via devs fostering a “for the horde” attitude at blizzcons, twitter, responses, etc? Its not the players fault that the devs prefer one faction over the other and make it more enticing to players.

Mounts, allied races, cinematics, etc. There are a myriad of reasons to want to switch to Horde which are fostered by the devs themselves.

Most of the ballooned Horde population is alliance rerollers–so if there is a player problem, look at all the people who transferred like sheep or because the devs fostered an environment that made the Horde way more enticing.

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Or how much QQ their was from the horde over mechagnome racials before they got nerfed into a complete joke? Can’t let Alliance get anything good. On a race that is already aesthetically unappealing. It all has to be mediocre.

And they still cry about AoO despite the fact it is just 50 extra conquest and a 415 piece.

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