You just mentioned the end game factor but totally ignored the fact that many horde players say our lore, races and other things are not good.
Don’t just comment on the issue of endgame participation or anything else about alliance racials being good, when not in the horde they are seen as appealing.
It’s not just ally’s opinion, it’s also horde players that ally isn’t interesting to be playing at.
Ally has no glamor like the horde. And if kept that way, soon, it won’t make any difference anymore because we’ll be making all the relevant content in the horde, since in ally we only have lame races and lore.
If there is nothing wrong in racial terms, we cannot say the same about the rest.
Especially if Aunt Blizz only widens the gap between Ally and Horde, giving vulpes to the Horde and nothing as relevant as Ally.
A cohesive Alliance story thread would be nice. BFA really dropped the ball on that. Zandalar felt like a cohesive set of stories whereas Kul Tiras was completely unrelated, even inside zones. Think the randomness of “The horde has attacked a major city… go kill some quill boar.” … Wut…
And that annoys many horde members, who to this day complain about having their capital invaded left intact as if it had been the subject of a rain, but we have 3 of our alliance capitals being destroyed by the horde, and the horde never having any negative repercussion of these acts certainly does not make the alliance seem like a useless faction run by idiots.
Of course this does not affect the way ally is honored by players.
Then why do I see so many threads made by alliance? It’s clear that they care, hell they bring it up every chance they can get, like that annoying uncle at Thanksgiving.
The race choice “problem” is mostly cultural, I think. We do have a couple of races that are legit kinda lame (LF Draenei) but the whole idea of Horde races being perceived as “cooler” than their Alliance counterparts is mostly a North American thing. If you look at other realm groups you don’t see the same sort of strong preference toward Horde races – people for the most part are more than happy to play more traditional fantasy races.
It’s hard to know the actual cause but I take it to be a reflection of US pop culture’s obsession with individualism (choosing the “mainstream” option gets you labeled as lame/sheeplike/etc, which pushes people to choose the “offbeat” option, which then ironically makes the “offbeat” choice mainstream) and being tough/brutal/edgy.
Until this expansion, though, there were always more Alliance players than Horde players; culture didn’t change overnight.
The more likely explanation is that, during the attrition that has been happening to the game’s playerbase, a larger percentage of Alliance players were shaved off than Horde players.
Why? Dunno. Maybe the same folks attracted to generic fantasy races were more likely to play other games coming out? FF14 perhaps?
The only solution that will fix it is taking away the faction restriction. There is no point in having it anymore, hasn’t been since the end of WoD. You could argue since the end of Pandaria. It just doesn’t make sense to have these constant full scale wars from a lore or gameplay pov. Skirmishes here and there of course, there will always be differences, but entire kingdoms, makes no sense.
Merging more realms or x-faction guild recruiting is only a band-aid on an amputated limb. It isn’t going to solve the problem that everyone goes Horde and is currently on Horde for raiding purposes.
I think the damage is too far done. Realistically there’s no reason to play blue team when red team has pretty much everything you’d want baring race/class/story preference.
Come 8.3 im probably done with Alliance baring my Worgen, im not a huge M+ or raid or anything but the alliance story this xpac combined with some other decisions (diaper gnomes for me lol) has me bored of the faction.
Stop focusing on stormwind. I was alliance until they killed ironforge. The writing for alliance went to absolute crap the day Stormwind got a remodel. Never have been alliance since. Getting new writers would help a ton in general though.
Have some of the core dev team play alliance mains, the lack of interest from the dev team really shows in their work, fix some of the racials and maybe stop being such horde fanbois at events and going out of their way to throw shade at the alliance?
Imagine if there were two main football teams but all of the suits openly loved one team, the referees loves one team, the stadium was like a shrine to that one team and the executives/stars openly mocked the weaker team. How big do you think the fan base would be after a decade of that? lol