I don’t disagree with most of what you say, I am arguing that the timeline and the compounding effect over the years of better racials and better content (cata) just made things worse and worse.
By the time BFA arrived it didn’t matter what how over powered they made the Alliance racials. Because by that point what you describe here has already happened:
At this point any benefit the racials would give is meaningless compared to the thriving community.
If Racials were going to fix this it should have been done in Cata where the downturn began or MoP.
But Blizzard did the opposite and now this game is essentially a one faction game.
Made a lot of gold too off of WSB and others. I think I still have folders of screenshots, videos, and other shenanigans saved from my 12 years of being there. Insane to think about.
Not to mention just the memories of being ganked by Predatoria or Return, 2v10ing folks with Ankor or UndeadFred as double Destro locks, needing to god damn find Burenor, Hinik, or Scruffy among mounds of characters to get down to throw it all into disarray.
I just don’t think the race mechanics played an appreciable role in the population swings at any point on a scale worth noticing. I think a deep dive on this would shake out along the lines of faction identity/persona and how that maps onto an increasing segment of gamers falling into the edgelord-troll domain. Alliance can’t scratch that itch with generic fantasy race doormats.
Otherwise, I think we mostly agree. Alliance has been neglected on the mass appeal front and that doesn’t seem likely to change (unless my conspiracy theory about deliberately trashing Horde identity is true haha).
The only solution is to merge the factions and make pvping something you opt in to on a pvp faction basis.
Like Warsong Gultch you have to choose which side you want to fight for and each side give you rewards for honor kills or reputation.
Honestly it would be cool to add NPCs from the pvp faction fighting while the pvp battle is going on but these NPCs can’t be targeted so they’re there add more ambience.
I had a youtube full of videos of my embarrassing folks, but i deleted it over the “what is kid content” spiel youtube threw where they said if videos weren’t properly marked, you could be sued. i had a ton of videos, and i figured it was safer to delete them all.
A month later someone called youtube on their shenanigans and youtube dropped that position, but i can’t get my videos back.
I had videos of pets I’d lost on my youtube channel.
New World did that kinda, and it was still wildly unbalanced. People will just congregate on the winningest or more popular side.
I’m probably in the less popular school of thought here, but I would really lean into incentives. Losing the faction rivalry is cutting out a cornerstone of the game imo, so I think preserving it is important. I think if you saw Alliance getting more loot per boss, more currencies, more honor, more reputation until a minimum threshold is met—and don’t tie it to Warmode—you would see an equalizing trend.
There needs to be a reckoning with the narrative team as well, but I’ll not rehash that for the thousandth time.
Classic transfers were dealing with server population issues, not swapping factions. But no, they didn’t work, because dead servers make it impossible to field raids.
Yeah, Phase 1 was alright. People don’t approach the game the same way anymore, though. Just want to outnumber and grief people until they quit and then whine about having no one to kill. Which is how you end up with PvP servers that are no different than PvE servers.
And everything in Shadowlands that spat on us even harder, but wasn’t a main focus storyline is likely Danuser’s fault. Afterall with how much he hated Sylvannas, Afrasiabi woulda had her die in Ardenweald and get rezzed by a Val’kyr most likely lol.
