In PvP participation, the leaderboards were mostly Alliance.
In raids, there have been more Horde raiding guilds than Alliance since Burning Crusade.
The critical factor was Blizzard adding Hall of Fame, which just brought that to the attention of a ton of Alliance players who don’t even raid but suddenly felt bad about their faction choice and felt they must make a big stink about it.
The only problem with the Alliance is how ignorant most of its players are regarding facts like these. There’s no fix for that.
P.S. And as for PvP now, look at all that blue.
“Balance” to Alliance players has always meant “almost entirely Alliance”.
Alliance players are most likely going to hand-wave that away…but we can’t fully find fault with them for that, because Blizzard’s quest developers and writers contradict each other as to whether or not that purge actually took place. It makes sense that it happened, because of how readily the Vulpera joined the Horde…but one of the development leads (I don’t recall which one) is actually on record as saying the faction assault quests in BfA were not canon.
Merc mode was added in Warlords of Draenor because of ALLIANCE players’ demands, since ALLIANCE was overwhelmingly dominant in PvP, to the point where ALLIANCE players had enormous queue times because everyone was playing ALLIANCE, and merc mode was only available to ALLIANCE players.
My Horde druid would likely be happier in the Emerald Grove than in any Horde Town or city, as would any druid in terms of lore. Druids were doing shared-faction towns since day one of wow, and have been ever since.
If it were a “true to lore” type scenario, the inhabitants of the dream would likely be killing off half the characters from both factions coming in - there is no way warlocks belong in there, for example. Corruption of the dream has lead to 99% of the problems druids have faced in the history of wow.
More reasonably, some stories can’t reasonably be told in the context of wow without some suspension of disbelief, and the Emerald Dream was always going to be one of them, for this exact reason. It is a faction that realistically should exist almost completely outside of the alliance and horde, where warlocks would be actively hunted and orcs would very likely be outright banned without an extremely good reason, but gameplay comes before feelz.
Yes, it was, right around the time they nerfed Every Man for Himself.
Then, what happened? BfA saw AAO, why?
I SAID those changes were based on participation data. Guess what? THEY WERE.
EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THEM.
Jesus guy; Blizzard didn’t just wake up one day and decide to screw one faction or the other. They make those types of changes based on the data. And yes, Alliance has been on the decline since 2015.
Yep! Blizzard is even officially on record as saying gameplay will always come before the story. Which is interesting, because some of their worst story-telling has been the guiding force behind the weird things we’ve been required to do in-game.
Wowsers. Both of you, try to relaaaaaaaax. Go touch (or smoke?) a little of the Peacebloom.
Could this not have been due to the huge drop in the player base and the lack of groups/people to do things?
Or was there a change in the team about… well, I’m going to have to use that expression for the sake of the subject here, but has the “woke” culture taken over the team? Did they end up bringing a vision of “more peace, less war, more love, more colors”?
There are some things I miss about the horde…
I keep looking at this art by Metzen…the tauren should be a little different, both in terms of the fur on their neck and that head “almost” in the middle of their chest that they have nowadays.
They were more “minotaurs” in the arts.
The higher head…the more interesting snout…I don’t know, I think tauren are very “cute” and not very “scary” in the game…i would like to make a tauren like in this picture…
the horde should be something really scary…
But I don’t know, the trolls we have today, the orcs seeming to be the same size as humans (I’ll never understand why orcs are flat), the tauren with their heads down and furry like teddy bears…meh
And there was this violence in art, wow was supposed to be something brutal, classic was a bit brutal. Although they took a lot of Metzen’s arts and transformed it into something very light.
and this has gotten worse over the years… with the new cultures…
Tell me you don’t know Warcraft lore without telling…How long have you been around Warcraft or even know any of it’s lore? I have been around this franchise since I was 8 years old with Warcraft 2, I’m now 36 so if you want a lore lesson of what the Emerald Dream is then pull up a chair.
If you still want to plant your feet and exclusively play one faction and go "REEEI hate the other faction and everything that has to do with them!", then fine whatever, but that’s on you for ignoring half of the game/player base for 20 years.
Most of that art was definitely from WC/WC2, which was during Metzen’s edgy phase, but Blizzard (and especially Metzen) generally started moving away from that style in WC3. Apart from the Scourge (who were a clearly evil faction), the message of unity and breaking the cycle of violence has been a major component of Warcraft since then. And it’s been on-and-off present in WoW since Vanilla too.
It has definitely been dialed up since the tail-end of BfA, but considering that we’ve had to endure two absolutely terrible faction wars (and WoW’s population continues to dwindle), I’m totally okay with it, and it really isn’t out of place.
Also that last picture was a Hearthstone fan art submission, which is obviously deliberately silly and much more kid-friendly.
The unfortunate truth is that the Alliance has a far better and more interesting cast of characters since the days of the RTS since back then the Alliance were literally “the good guys” til Warcraft 3. Thrall and Sylvanas are exceptions. People need to get on board with that reality.
That being said, the poster for War Within may be more Alliance-aligned on the surface, but I’d say Alleria is supposed to be more of a neutral consideration here rather than for the Alliance.
She’s a Void Elf from Quel’thalas, which is Horde. As always, Blood Elves and their kin (High/Void Elves) have had connections to both factions. The second expansion is set in Quel’thalas. I imagine that’s going to be a sanctuary zone for both factions, etc.
The problem with the game the last few years is that there aren’t “two halves”.
The game is more and more about the Alliance characters. This was most pronounced in Legion, when the Horde just went M.I.A. for 2 years, but it’s continued since then in BfA (Magni as the main focus), Shadowlands (Jaina/Bolvar/his kid/Tyrande as the main focus), and now (more Tyrande).
And then again next expansion (Brann, Alleria, Anduin - Thrall might make a cameo).
If there were really “two halves” then Horde players would do their Delves with a Horde character.
If this happens and Horde lose a capitol it’s definitely Alliance favoritism.
And people saying Alliance characters are more interesting while the story keeps being called boring while focusing on Alliance aligned characters will never not be funny.
Perhaps but this is where we are right now due to their failures and most of the remaining characters that have people invested in them are Alliance-aligned. The Horde characters are mostly just background characters at this point besides Thrall and Sylvanas.
I imagine they will work to rectify that, possibly making the Blood Elf characters MUCH more prominent in Midnight. I’d love to see some Lor’themar development.
The Alliance “lost” Dalaran to the Horde… twice. It’s fairly normal for the center of a world-ending event to be the hub of both factions.
Personally I’d much prefer to see the human kingdoms of Northern EK serving as the actual Alliance hub (esp with Arathi humans making a comeback), but in reality, since Quel’thalas is instanced, it’s far easier to just make the entire region the center of Midnight with Silvermoon serving as the hub. Maybe the currently unused section could be used by the Void/High Elves or w/e represents the Alliance quarters.
They need a Horde writing team to write Horde stories with Horde characters for Horde players.
(They already have an Alliance writing team.)
But they won’t do that because they’re in cost-cutting mode. Same reason they don’t have thematic questlines anymore for both factions. Now it’s just one-size-fits-all (and it’s always an Alliance-themed narrative).
More cost-cutting.
And people (well, Alliance players, anyway) cheer them for being cheap.
“Half as much content? That’s awesome!” - Alliance players
