Open up the raid tabs for Horde and Alliance.
It’s worse if you look for PvP groups.
Check Perky Pugs and other groups for raiding content - Alliance vs Horde.
The faction imbalance is very much so starting to hit the “casual” playerbase.
Maybe it’s just me, but I considering anybody doing heroic and below, and playing below 2k rating to be casual.
The fact I just got my undead to 120 and I’m already getting offers to do arenas, when I can sit in the group finder for 2+ hours with nothing on Alliance is uh…
Yeah.
That may do something for RPers, but will do absolutely nothing to change the balance of players doing serious end-game content. This is the same as the “High Elves would fix it” argument. It may move the needle on general population, which is already a non-issue, but does nothing for the participation imbalance.
Give them good racials.
Increased damage against arcane elementals or something, and then give us a raid with arcane elementals.
People swapped to Troll in ToT.
They can pull that stunt again and do it for a good cause.
(And trust me, I was there. I was getting nagged to swap all patch. I played undead, which was arguably the worst race for warriors back then.)
Most people that complain and rightfully so the Alliance is struggling at end game want to see more of the hardcore end game guilds like Horde has move over to the Alliance those players don’t care about playing a Gnome Paladin they want to play what is best not what they think looks cool.
You can’t fix it with cosmetics because most of the players you want don’t give a hoot about cosmetics.
The main reason I think it is imbalanced is because everyone speaks about how much the horde end game community is thriving, and they have troll mounts. I have always played alliance since vanilla wow, but I am considering switching to horde even though I have like 6 120s on alliance that are all geared to push M+ keys.
Especially with mechagnomes. It’s like there is 10000% incentive to play horde, even as an alliance player, and 0% incentive to play alliance. What is the incentive to play alliance? What should we be proud of? Goldshire Inn?
Right - so overbalance the racials…great. And when a mass of end-gamers flip over for OP abilities what do you then say when the Horde presents exactly the same complaint?
Which is why he immediately jumped to this when I made the same basic comment:
As you say, for serious end-gamers it’s rarely if ever about aesthetics and all about what works best.
The Horde now has a serious recruiting edge because once upon a time they had some OP racials and people flipped from the Alliance. This is not a problem that’s remotely easy to solve because delivering OP racials to coerce serious raiders or M+ runners to swap factions will work…but then immediately create the same damn problem in reverse.
Yeah it’s also a double sided problem. If alliance racials were in balance with horde racials on top of having more flexibility in the class/race combinations, it would help the faction imbalance a great deal. People say they don’t care what race they play as, but in an ideally balanced world of warcraft we would be playing the exact class/race combination we want to regardless of what powers they give. The fact that decisions are being made based on racial strength is PROOF of imbalance.
A small, insanely small % of people race changed. For all the crying people do about Horde racials I would think I’d see Trolls and Orcs everywhere. Yet everywhere I look I see Blood Elves.
That’s no longer the case though. Once upon a time the racials were imbalanced enough to cause people to swap. That’s no longer the case but the players are already gone from the Alliance.
Shrug and laugh because I’ve seen this happen several times in PvP over the years and understand that not everybody’s going to swap, but just having a few people do it helps.
Like seriously.
I played Horde back in MoP - when Alliance was dominating in PvP - because again, PvE isn’t the only thing that matters here.
The busted racials?
We still had a 40-60% ratio going.
You think it’s going to teeter off and it won’t. People will go back Horde after the end of the tier, and groups that wanted to play Alliance have an excuse to stay because there’s (potentially) people still there to recruit from due to the flop.
I’ve been there and done that, and /didn’t/ race change for the bonus, and I didn’t race change in a game mode it truly mattered in either. (PvP. Probably could have squeezed out extra rating if I didn’t have useless racials.)
Because surprise, people care about aesthetics. And yet people are arguing against that when it comes to giving Alliance better looking /anything/ to entice people in general to play it.
Then the only problem is lack of cosmetic options. Horde just has cooler class/race combos and cooler mounts. Why would anyone who wants to raid pick alliance unless they were already established as alliance?
edit: Even for M+, I regret being an alliance player.
No kidding, why indeed? If serious end-game players are a) not primarily driven by aesthetics or fluff like mounts, and b) are already predominantly on the Horde, then there is no reason at all for them to swap and offering them shinies that don’t affect their gameplay won’t fix the problem.
The biggest/most popular guilds deciding they are “better” than they/other people think, accepting the challenge to switch to all Alliance, then finding that they can still actually do the same stuff.
In a perfect world you revert the advantage when things get roughly 50/50 and then kill all faction transfers and character boosts until things settle down and communities gel a bit.
In a not-perfect world?
Well, in a not-perfect world, like the one we live in, imba racials won’t move the needle anymore because a 1-2% advantage won’t overcome the already massive recruitment and activity advantage the Horde has.
If it were me I’d arrange a tier or two or three of M+ dungeons (either increase groups to 6-man, or make cooperative x-faction 10-man dungeons/micro-raids instead of 5-mans) and raids where half of every group must come from either faction as a temporary feature. Then just never allow merc mode and made the over-participant faction wait.
Open up free faction transfers from Horde to Alliance at the same time. Turn the imbalance that one faction enjoys as a benefit into a straight-up disadvantage for a while, then just put the faction cost back in place (with a permanent cost increase from $30 to $50 or 60) the moment things get back to near 50/50 to stop the flow of players.
While some people might stop playing entirely because they’d rather do something else than wait, they’ll come back once they hear that either the populations have evened out or that the game is back to normal 5-mans.
In a not-perfect world I think the novelty of half-horde half-alliance micro raids would entice a lot more people to come back than it would scare away.
Or they don’t want to waste money for a small advantage? the issue isn’t current overpowered racials or underpowered racials its the fact that in the past Horde had the better racials by a long shot now not so much but the damage was already done to the Alliance.
“Fixing” it with giving the Alliance overpowered racials would only flip the problem which is something your in favor of because it would solely benefit your side you don’t want the problem fixed you want the shoe to be on the other foot.