Was this truly the best solution?

PVP War Mode and World PvP
1

I get that there was population imbalance between the Alliance and the Horde pre-8.1, but was the weekly quest to give Alliance players a 370 piece of gear and 1.5k AP upon completion truly the best solution to helping the population imbalance?

All I’ve seen from the Horde side and the Alliance side are just increases in numbers of Alliance gank squads rolling around especially at incursions. It doesn’t feel like there are more Alliance just with WM turned on for it just to be on. Though this is only the first week of the patch and the true effects of the addition of the quest remains to be seen, I feel like it’s a highly inefficient solution to the problem.

There’s nothing to stop Alliance players from just turning WM on, hopping into a massive raid group, finishing the quest, then turning WM off again. As I said before, it’s only week one of the patch and whether the quest truly worked or not remains to be seen, but i can safely say that for the quest to have succeeded in its intended purpose we will need to see an increase in the number of Alliance players who have left WM on after completion of the quest and for them not to just turn WM off at the first sign of trouble when they’re out questing. Because if the quest doesn’t solve that, Blizzard has only succeeded in making Horde players salty a few days of the week and the Alliance look pathetic that they need a tool like the quest.

Personally, I’d have just improved the sharding/phasing system blizzard currently has to make it so that each WM shard has relatively equal amounts of alliance and horde players. So maybe like a margin of error of like 5 players. And because there are more Horde players with WM on some Horde players will just get put on a shard with ZERO Alliance players. For example, if there are 500 Alliance players and 600 Horde players, most of them would be put into shards with 50 Alliance players and 50 Horde players for a total of 10 shards with 100 players each. Then have remainder shard of just 100 Horde players and no Alliance players. Then to cut off loose ends, add a mercenary mode for Horde players only for WM. That way if Horde players truly want WPvP and get stuck in a phase with no Alliance players they can swap sides. I see only one foreseeable problem with this system and that’s if players call in lots of backup from their guild. Then it might cause the sharding/phasing to mess up, which may or may not be a blessing in disguise because that’d be a good way to disperse large raid groups of players in non-guild situations.

Personally, the best part of WM i like as Horde AND Alliance is not the fighting. It’s the uncertainty and waiting to see if crap is going to go down. It’s popping up at a WQ solo and seeing “one” person of the opposite faction there too and wondering if I’m gonna have to kill this person. It’s the general tension and uneasiness that I like about WM.

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2

Wait horde don’t get the kill 25 player quest?

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3

Lol nope, and I’m glad we don’t because that’d just piss off Alliance players.

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4

So wrong of it to be on a weekly set lol.

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5

People despise the sharding and they despise the increase rewards. Whats left really Tenacity so you just happen on a raid boss player or Queueing for warmode itself? When every option is getting voted down by horde players then it doesn’t really matter what gets chosen.

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6

The quest should be for both sides!!!

It’s a decent incentive for world pvp, first day out for the invasions was massive and I had a blast.

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7

Yea… but do they hate sharding more than fighting a raid of roaming people? Personally, I wouldn’t mind solo killing raids but Blizzard would have to give me Strike of the Windlord and Serenity from Legion.

8

To be fair I’m seeing way more balanced numbers out in the world since this inniative

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9

no idea but they have been complaining about sharding so much they want servers that never shard ever because of it so its harder to advocate for just super strong sharding when people are throwing fits about it

10

These new buffs need to be equal on both sides at LEAST at some point in this expansion. Trade off ect. if they have to, I would have rather had them give both factions the quest simultaneously though :expressionless:

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11

That’s a good thing. However, it should be taken with a grain of salt because we are only in week 1 of the patch. People are out doing new things and what not and are likely doing the quest for the first time.

There is also the matter of the “balanced numbers” that needs to be looked at. Are these numbers of people you see out actively ganking for the quest or do they just have wm turned on like most horde to do just quest, get bonus, and get into the occasional duel/skirmish.

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Oooh, thanks for the pro-tip!

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If there’s a significant imbalance in Warmode participation, the outnumbered faction gets the weekly. If the sudden spam of Alliance raids farming their 370 somehow encouraged enough Horde to turn it off, they’d get it the next week.

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14

Nope.

But, asking if literally anything is “truly the best solution” is perhaps bordering hyperbolic.

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15

While this may or may not be true, it feels like the quest only solves things short term (if at all) in a poor manner.

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16

Because Blizzard refuses to do for the Alliance what it did for the horde when their faction was the underdog.

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17

The underlying issue was a significant (20%) difference in maximum level populations, leading to a massive (10x?) difference in war mode participation. This in turn led to better rated battleground and progression raiding performance by Horde, since they were getting massively more of the benefit from war mode.

Was the implemented solution the best solution? I think addressing the population imbalance directly by getting rid of mercenary mode entirely would have been a better solution. With longer battleground queues on Horde side, some players who like PVP would have switched to Alliance, and some of those would have played in war mode. Even before the patch, it had gotten to the point where PVP inclined Alliance had little problem in war mode if they were willing to group, since most war mode Horde avoided PVP. The problem was that Alliance who had bad war mode experiences early on didn’t want to try it again; an influx of PVP people escaping the Horde’s long queue times would have tried Alliance side war mode, liked it, and gotten the word out.

For the same reason, merc mode for war mode would have been exactly the wrong thing to do; it would just have made even more of the 10% bonus flow to Horde, further benefiting their already disproportionately strong mythic raiding and rated battleground scene Horde side.

Another alternative would have been to handle the imbalance entirely through adjusting the war mode bonus. Instead of leaving it capped at 30%, they could have allowed it to go as high as it needed to go to balance the total amount of bonus going to each faction. For example, if Horde were completing, say, 9x as many world quests in war mode as Alliance, they could have let the Alliance war mode bonus go up to 90%. However, I suspect this would have resulted in complaints from Horde players, and it would have put progression raiding guilds in a difficult situation, where they had to guess how long Alliance would have had a huge bonus.

What Blizzard did instead was turn to an alternative way of balancing the war mode bonus benefits between the factions. Rather than buff up the Alliance side bonus to levels that could potentially distort raid results, they chose to address extreme war mode faction imbalances by putting in an Alliance side quest to ensure that Horde didn’t get the war mode bonus without some concomitant war mode risk. I think the right way of viewing the quest is not as a way to let Alliance get war mode benefits in raid - it doesn’t really do that, since most world quests, including invasion quests, can’t be completed in raids - but rather to drive some Horde out of war mode, specifically the ones that were doing war mode purely for the 10% bonus without any desire for PVP or PVP risk.

There might be some Alliance who are getting into raids to complete the one quest and then getting out, but I doubt they’re in the majority; for most mains, even Alliance side, the 370 equipment is at best a sidegrade. For example, I’ve gotten three 370s and a 385 from easy quests and scenarios this week, and only one 370 was from Against Overwhelming Odds.

What I think is happening is that the Alliance PVP raiders, who were spending less and less time in those raids, now have a reason to do them, since they’re providing cover for other Alliance to do the invasion quests in war mode. What I’vd seen is that there are a lot more Alliance war mode questing groups available in group finder than before 8.1. Some of these are staying in war mode for other activities besides invasions; for example, there are now as many war mode groups for Arathi rare tours as war mode off groups, whereas there were usually no war mode groups before 8.1. So I think it is helping the Alliance side war mode scene overall.

Is it helping as much as a 90% buff would have? I don’t know. However, by producing massive PVP battles at invasion points - there are plenty of Horde raids too, quest or no quest - it’s adding excitement to the game at a time when many people would be getting bored. That’s a good thing too.

Bottom line, I think what Blizzard did was a better solution than any alternative except getting rid of merc mode entirely, and probably is getting less objections from the Horde than getting rid of merc mode would have.

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18

What did Blizzard do for the Horde?

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19

I’m really enjoying the PvP! but I wish it was equal on both sides. It gets annoying wondering around than all the sudden you’re getting ganked by two 40+ raid groups of alliance. lol

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Several things:

  1. Nerfed the Alliance uber-racial
  2. Introduced superior horde racials (according to Ion)
  3. Created Belves to accommodate Alliance players who wanted a “pretty race” to transfer to.
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