This is where the common horde argument breaks down and they stop facing reality in order to defend their unfair social advantages.
Most players don’t “pick a side” in the way of “I play X and only X”. I do, but I am a part of an extreme minority.
Most people play a variety of things on both sides. And while they will have their “main characters” that they spend most of their time on, they are free to spend time on either side. There are not usually any penalties to jumping the faction fence.
If I want to spend a few hours playing a horde toon, there is nothing stopping me. No the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing alliance. Not the eleven alliance toons I have at 120. Not the guild I’m a member of on the alliance.
Hell…we even have a horde branch.
The problem we’re facing as Alliance is one of participation, but it’s not what the horde posters are painting. People don’t “prefer alliance to do non-consequential content”, which is what they’re really suggesting both as a way to hand-wave the whole argument and also to get some kind of insult in to make themselves feel better (hint: if you didn’t think we were right at some level, you wouldn’t feel the need to belittle the argument in the first place and be so dismissive).
The participation problem the Alliance is facing is one of “Activity Monopoly”. The horde has a monopoly on end-game activities because it’s where people are playing those activities.
If you want a mythic group, it is far easier to find on on the horde side.
If you want to raid, it is far easier to find a raid on the horde side.
If you want to PvP, it is far easier to find a PvP group on the horde side (which, funny enough, works against the horde because it requires alliance participation as well)
As has been pointed out, the best measure of imbalance is in Queue Times. PvP will be the best measure overall because it, in a way, compares faction participation against one another. When the alliance have instant queues, the horde queue is 8-10 times longer.
On the flip-side, you’ve got dungeon queues, LFR raid queues, movement on the mythic+ group lists, and raid hall of fame placements. In all of these, horde queues are far shorter than alliance queues, the group list is far longer and moves faster, and the horde mythic raid hall of fame fills in half to a quarter of the time.
So the problem we have here is that horde posters keep trotting out wowcensus stats like they mean anything when they don’t because they either don’t understand how statistics work, don’t understand what the census figures actually mean, are being dishonest to protect the status quo, or all of the above.
Here is the actual problem: WoWCensus doesn’t tell us anything meaningful because it deals in character data, while queues and other markers of meaningful participation deal in player data. I hand-leveled 11 alliance toons to 120 this expansion, 2 horde toons with tokens, and a 3rd horde toon with my shadowlands 120 token. There are people who are complaining that 50 character slots is not enough.
Character data is not a mark of player data because we lack some very important information.
We don’t know how many toons your average player has, and how many of them tend to be what faction.
We don’t know how many players tend to favor one faction over the other and to what extent.
We don’t know how much time players tend to spend on a single toon, and what the average breakdown is, in minutes played, between alts, between factions.
All of that is data we would need to have in order to WoWCensus to be anything other than trash data, and we have none of it.
Queue times are the best data points we have. The Mythic raid leaderboards on the WoW website are the second. The combined mythic+ leaderboards on raiderIO is the third. PvP leaderboards are also in there somewhere.
The alliance has plenty of characters, but nowhere near enough players spending time on it. Groups are harder to find and content is completed less often because of it. And this isn’t because more people just happen to “choose red”. This is because people are making an active choice with little to no barrier to that choice, to go where people are spending their time.
The key word there is “spending”. It’s a valuation proposition. Time on the alliance side is less valuable than time spend on the horde side because of various reasons. This is also why it’s a solvable problem.
The original PvP quest, back before it got nerfed due to horde QQ, was the correct way to go about getting people to spend time on the alliance. The fact that people playing horde felt it was unfair is proof that it was working.
When you are in a superior position anything that brings equality at your expense is going to feel unfair, and the problem here is that the wow population, due to the fluidity of faction participation, is zero sum. Especially with expansion pre-orders giving you a 120 token and free ilvl 388 greens. Barriers to faction participation right now are at an all-time low.
…and there is zero real incentive to play Alliance. Other than the social costs of losing access to friends.
So, when is faction imbalance going to be addressed? My guess is never. They’ll try to fix it quietly, and continue to fail because the lead dev is a horde fanboi.
How can it be fixed? You have to increase valuation in the under-valued faction and make it worth people’s time. If there are no meaningful differences between the factions, incentive is the only way. …if there are meaningful differences, say the devs enjoy developing one faction more than the other and it shows, then the incentives are going to have to be even greater to compensate or the devs are going to have to start actively caring about the other faction. Good luck there.
“But…giving the other faction free things isn’t fair!!!”
Put on your big-boy pants for once in your life.