Can blizzard find a better way of achieving faction balance than what they're doing?

[Mace]

Again it's been re-iterated by the Devs, Faction balance is very important:

Faction balance
Balancing Horde and Alliance populations is a priority. Current on beta, there is no population enforcement. It’s something we’ll be monitoring and tweaking going forward.

we all know why, a successful pvp environment really depends on it, and a lot of game systems like raids, instnaces, Bgs etc, require a fairly equal amount of players on both sides.

To achieve better faction balance, we saw blood elves join the horde, we have seen a huge storyline push in front for the horde too, cooler stuff, better racials, cooler plot lines, cooler quests etc, the reason for all this is to get you to pick the horde.

With all that, alliance still out numbers the horde overall, i know that it seems different on pvp realms, or at end game level where most of the competitive stuff for BGs /raids are horde majority, but you're only a fraction of the population, and you likely picked horde because better racials gave you an advantage. Blizzard can't afford to change anything, because if they do, you may end up discarding the horde for the alliance, again.

So they have to find a better less damaging way to balance the factions than having this one sided storytelling, and this horde favouritism is my thrust here. So question is thrown to you, is there any other way to attract people to play the horde more without this gross favorism. Is it even possible, or is wow perpetually doomed to this one sided affair? What do you think?

[Raiju]

They're already trying to slightly push alliance racials, but you said it yourself - the population is such a minority it doesn't matter much.

It's a fair bet to say they're switching racials over because they want to give hardcore alliance players the (minor) advantage, or they want to get people to faction transfer for $$.

They also said a few months ago that faction balance wasn't a huge concern (repeatedly), so funny to see teh turn around

And hey, noone complained when the story was alliance centric pre-cata. Well, not many. They honestly could've continued the alliance centricity (back then the books seem largely horde lore based while now position is opposite) and there'd be less complaints because you wouldn't have anyone having anything 'taken' away. People who focused horde wouldn't know better so less complaints.

Too late now. Just gotta yoyo between.

[ravenmoon]

Simple answer is yes. and Humans are the key.

Faction balance has better mitigating factors now than previously.b/c cross realm battle.net tech in realms/battlegroups for BGs/Arenas/LFR/LFG/zones has really allowed a lot of dead realm areas to come alive, it's mitigated the effect on many realms where one side was a ghost zone or you couldn't even play a BG because one side had all the players, and the other side had none, or there just weren't enough people around excpet in peak times to do instances.

That aside, I agree that Blizzard is using the lore and cool stuff to wheen people to the horde, and if they don't, people will stop picking horde and go for the "more like them" races which are already popular.

Most new players pick humans, because all the other options look weird, even elves. When i first played wow, the long ears and eyebrows of elves was really weird despite their human visage. Gnomes were midget, and at 16 you've only just started gaining height, you don't see yourself as one. Pre-pubescents and girls love gnomes tho.. you play human, till you get to know the lore, before you choose other races.

Humans is why the alliance has an advantage and will continue, you really need a more human looking race on the horde. I say, give the horde a human sub-race - they don't need to be human even, they could be undead or unliving like vampires, they just need to look human. You dn't even have to use the allinace human model, why not use the blood elf model humanized? or do a bit more work and humanize the forsaken model, but i think it's easier to simply give the blood elf model human ears/eyes and eyebrows, throw in some extra darker skin tones and facial hair options and voila, done.

end result, people will start picking horde a lot more, especially with attractive humans on it, to add to the blood elves - and if you make them either healed forsaken or some cruel victim of some vampire like cretin attemtping to be a new lich king that invded Tirisfal glades and converted all the remaining lorderon surviors to unliving ..but then he gets killed by Sylvannas, and they're free from his control, and join up with her, or you could even write that a group of Lordaron humans unwilling to become Worgen and no longer that prejudice against the forsaken having some important loved ones now in their ranks, decide to make a pact with Sylvannas in order to fight the worgen, and voila.

Many ways you can do this, the important point is, humans on the horde. Every video game that has a 2-faction system with humans or human looking races on both sides has not had this faction imbalance problem, especially in a game where you get lots of weird/funny looking creatures, e.g Wildstar and SwTOR - this sort of faction imblalnce is non-existent, and you don't see them having to throw all the victories, major focus on plot and lore on one faction, put all the cool stuff on one faction tat all, they got much more ven spread.

Warcraft with only the horde as bestial race does not work in an MMORPG environment where you can pick to sides, because the majority will go for the side with humans. It works fine in a strategy game like Wc1-3 where you are forced to play both factions becuase that's how the game progresses, or an rpg, where you don't need to have equal number of plys on either side so you can play the story from either factions perspective if the game has both..but on this multiplayer platform that enjoys pitting players against players that are based on 2-sides, you can't have this.

The other alternative is that you allow free for all, anyone can fight anyone, anyone can group with anyone regardless of faction, for pvp, raids, isntances etc.

it boils down to two options:
1. Add humans to the horde - as a sub-race/sub-faction (Forsaken best candidates) OR remove humans from the alliance or make them unplayable which is a far worse option

2. Remove faction restrictions for grouping, BGs, raids, instances and pvp, eveyrone can attack anyone like in most MMOs

[DemoBytom]

Get rid of factions alltogether -> problem solved...

[Mace]

it is quite weird though they didn't forsee this if you ask me, - ofc horde was at siginificant advantage - a side that does not have humans.... LOL.. all your playerbase is human..you already crippled the whole faction that way.

human vs orc works well for a strategy game, but on a 2 faction mmo where there is a choice... you'd have to seriously pump the horde up to get people to keep picking them without humans about.. and that's exactly what they did and are still doing. I don't think WoW can afford not to have some form of recognizable humans on the horde - at least for the mmorpg, they can get rid of the humans in the single rpg game or the next strategy game

[ravenmoon]

it is quite weird though they didn't forsee this if you ask me, - ofc horde was at siginificant advantage - a side that does not have humans.... LOL.. all your playerbase is human..you already crippled the whole faction that way.

human vs orc works well for a strategy game, but on a 2 faction mmo where there is a choice... you'd have to seriously pump the horde up to get people to keep picking them without humans about.. and that's exactly what they did and are still doing. I don't think WoW can afford not to have some form of recognizable humans on the horde - at least for the mmorpg, they can get rid of the humans in the single rpg game or the next strategy game

either that, or continue as is for the rest of wow. A massive horde push with no end in sight, and only blood elves as an attractive ways.

imo, add a human sub race, that would get the blood elf population down a bit, and a lot more people playing on the horde without needing a story incentives, espeically if you make the horde humans more attractive by using blood elf models as their base rather than stormwind human models. Sure you'd get lots of blood elf and horde human players, largest player race, but at least you will not have faction balance problems like that. You can then write more balanced plotss

[Mace]

my only problem with having humans on the horde, is that it kinda ruins the whole orc vs human thing warcraft has built itself round

[ravenmoon]

my only problem with having humans on the horde, is that it kinda ruins the whole orc vs human thing warcraft has built itself round

ah you're underestimating the masters of spin, blizzard can by the time tehy're done, make you feel it is completley logical and sane that these humans are about, and that they're very welcome on the horde and they hate the alliance.

the way blizzard spun the blood elves round to be a horde race should show you. it jsut feels weird when you think of stormwind humans. But these wouldn't be stormwind humans, these are forsaken who've got their condition reversed..or even better, they're not living humans, they just look like humans because their body doesn't decay, but they are neither dead nor alive, they are the unliving.

they don't actually have to be humans, altho they could be, all they need to be is

• Look human. - they don't have to have alliance human models
• Have a compelling story to engage with the horde.
• have a compelling reason to hate the alliance.

In fact, it woudl be better if they didn't look like alliance humans this will further distinguish them from being human in the minds of old fans, but new fans will just see oh - looks human, i'll pick that. And it would help if they were once human to but are under some similar curse like the undead and the worgen, kinda gives them a sympathy factor too.

[Kalcheus]

They're talking specifically about Ashran.

They're going to use cross-realm tech to populate it up to 100v100, they just don't have enough active PVP population in Beta right now. Live, it's probably only going to be an issue on RP servers due to their population.

[Mace]

Get rid of factions alltogether -> problem solved...

faction warfare is the whole point of warcraft, this is the special lure to the game i thought.. weren'et most mmorpgs free for all killing till WoW came a lont with it's weird rule of 2 separate factions? altho by thte time we had wow, warcraft was at 4 factions, so i'm suprised they went back down to 2. maybe that worked better.

[ravenmoon]

faction warfare is the whole point of warcraft, this is the special lure to the game i thought.. weren'et most mmorpgs free for all killing till WoW came a lont with it's weird rule of 2 separate factions? altho by thte time we had wow, warcraft was at 4 factions, so i'm suprised they went back down to 2. maybe that worked better.

but what you need is two fighting factions, you don't have to have exclusively orc vs human. In fact warcraft had humans on the orcs side in Wc2, and in WoW undead humans fight for the horde.

you jus thave to keep having two factions and if you wnat the main thrust can be horde orcs vs alliance humans even with a new type of human like unliving human or restored undead human becoming available. and it will go down better if they use a different human model, the best candidate being the pretty blood elves humanized. that will be extremely popular.

esppecially if they made one of their racials vampirism, - they grow fangs and red eyes causing bleed damge to enemies and healing them.. must be in melee range, this would be in replaement of the forskaen racial, they'll then share all the other racials with the forsaken.

[rorian]

There seem to be a lot of mixed views in this thread. While some posters have stated that humans/alliance are more new player friendly and attract more people, speaking strictly PvP on the NA realms, PvP participation/population is extremely one-sided towards the horde currently. At times, horde battleground queues can range anywhere from 8 minutes to 15+ minutes, while alliance you never have to wait longer than 2-3 minutes. This has not always been the case though. The faction imbalance has changed MANY times throughout the life of WoW. As recent as season 11 (last season of Cataclysm) it was the alliance who would wait in 8-15 minute queues while horde had near instant.

I can not speak to EU realms as I play on NA realms, but it seems like things are tilted toward alliance, but again, I do not know.

Speaking to the subject of this thread, all blizzard can do is try to put out balanced content between both factions and let the player-base do what it is going to do. When you try to over analyze and manipulate the player-base to one way or another, that's where you tend to run into issues of over-compensation and it just causes more problems. Faction populations fluctuate, and will continue to do so forever.

[Mace]

but what you need is two fighting factions, you don't have to have exclusively orc vs human. In fact warcraft had humans on the orcs side in Wc2, and in WoW undead humans fight for the horde.

you jus thave to keep having two factions and if you wnat the main thrust can be horde orcs vs alliance humans even with a new type of human like unliving human or restored undead human becoming available. and it will go down better if they use a different human model, the best candidate being the pretty blood elves humanized. that will be extremely popular.

esppecially if they made one of their racials vampirism, - they grow fangs and red eyes causing bleed damge to enemies and healing them.. must be in melee range, this would be in replaement of the forskaen racial, they'll then share all the other racials with the forsaken.

lol.. that would be way too cool.. if they'd do that no one will play alliance. i mean who wouldn't wanna play the new type of unliving human? you'd get every boy wanting to play horde, it would be too good a choice

[Kalcheus]

At times, horde battleground queues can range anywhere from 8 minutes to 15+ minutes, while alliance you never have to wait longer than 2-3 minutes. This has not always been the case though.

That may be more of the result of bg blacklisting, since two of the largest (AV and IoC) are popular for Horde to blacklist. Then again, there was a post/tweet a little while back saying most players don't blacklist, so who knows.

[ravenmoon]

There seem to be a lot of mixed views in this thread. While some posters have stated that humans/alliance are more new player friendly and attract more people, speaking strictly PvP on the NA realms, PvP participation/population is extremely one-sided towards the horde currently. At times, horde battleground queues can range anywhere from 8 minutes to 15+ minutes, while alliance you never have to wait longer than 2-3 minutes. This has not always been the case though. The faction imbalance has changed MANY times throughout the life of WoW. As recent as season 11 (last season of Cataclysm) it was the alliance who would wait in 8-15 minute queues while horde had near instant.

I can not speak to EU realms as I play on NA realms, but it seems like things are tilted toward alliance, but again, I do not know.

Speaking to the subject of this thread, all blizzard can do is try to put out balanced content between both factions and let the player-base do what it is going to do. When you try to over analyze and manipulate the player-base to one way or another, that's where you tend to run into issues of over-compensation and it just causes more problems. Faction populations fluctuate, and will continue to do so forever.

Rorian, that's because the end-game group is predominantly horde heavy.

end gamers are very one-track minded people, anyone not playing at the elder game level is completley ignored, guilds are usually exclusively max level characters, so you could be on a realm that has a higher alliance population overall, but the active level 90 crowd are way more horde popular, and this was because of the horde racials, you wanted the advantages of orc and troll racials.

but when you look closely you see that Orcs/trolls despite their advantage are not the highest played Orc race, it's the blood elves. So aesthetics matter more than racials, but racials do influence the end game crowd, the competitive one, there are some people that only do LFR, but if you wanted to do more and progress, you had to get serious, and those people are a small fraction of the overall population, but they are the ones that use the forums and debate and argue, the majority of the milions that subscribe and play do not. What am I saying? your observation at the elder game level may not always reflect the overall picture on the realm throughout cos you're only looking at the group you interact with, when you add all the other factors in you see a different picture.

they don't pick orc/troll or horde because of racials, they go for other things, looks, story, lore, archietcture, racial theme.

[lunchbox2042]

faction warfare is the whole point of warcraft, this is the special lure to the game i thought.. weren'et most mmorpgs free for all killing till WoW came a lont with it's weird rule of 2 separate factions? altho by thte time we had wow, warcraft was at 4 factions, so i'm suprised they went back down to 2. maybe that worked better.

We haven't had faction vs faction warfare since vanilla. Every expansion we end up teaming up and brofisting each other at the end anyway. It may as well be one faction.

[Deleted]

Last time I checked you can find plenty of Horde race members who co-operate and assist the Alliance and vice versa. It doesn't seem too far-fetched that some would want to go to the other side.

[ravenmoon]

lol.. that would be way too cool.. if they'd do that no one will play alliance. i mean who wouldn't wanna play the new type of unliving human? you'd get every boy wanting to play horde, it would be too good a choice

would it? lets take a scenario should this sub-faction really take off.

People start rolling horde a lot more, fine - alliance is low populated, but then alliance has been having pretty crappy storylines, lots of losses, it's really popular races like the night elves and dwarves being barely relevant because they have previoulsy not been allowed to be cool.

all blizzard needs to do is give back the type night elves we had in WC3, stir up some engaging interactions between the alliance humans and this newly revived Lordearon under the Horde now, push the allinace bit more on the story - oh yeah, nearly forgot, include the high elf playable sub-group as well, that would reverse some of the traffic of the blood elf population towards the alliance, espeically if you write a complelling entrance to the high elf sub-group.

throw in a really cool allinace sub-group .. a sub-group of night elves taht are pre-disposed to become demon hunters, they can be warlocks, they have Illidans philsophy on how to deal with demons, they have a lot of contempt for ordinary night elves because they feel they're too naiive, they also have disdain for highbourne too, did you ever meet the demon hunter night elf in Felwood? he was really cool - well this is a whole night elf sub-group of them.. they have body markings like Malfurion and Illidan on the males, some of them have features - like demon wings or demon claws, or horns - not all features are demons, they have some non-demonic ones as well or you can opt for none.- they all have gold eyes/purple eyes or black magical eyes..both male and female in contrast to the highbourne sub-race group that all have silver eyes, and they also have darker purple skin tones.

so adding a couple of cool sub-race groups like high elves., this new sub-group of pro demon hunter like night elves in addition to maybe an additional cool dwarf sub-group like Iron dwarves or frost dwarves would help immensely.

- - - Updated - - -

Effect = sure vampire like humans arereally cool, and many players will pick them, new players will also pick horde a lot more seeing a human looking race with normal ears/eyes/eyebrows that looks pretty.

but then old players would fall in love with groups like the night elves again with sub-races like demon-hunter night elf group [which don't have to be called demon hunter night elves but something like Ashwood Night elves - who are pre-disposed to become demon hunters, demon hunter can be a class later on - only available to Elves, humans, forsaken, orcs and worgen (don't fit tauren, troll, panderan, dwarf, gnome, draenei, goblin), and like druids, are Elven driven but not exculsive - highest amounts are amongst night elves and blood elves - most of the Ashwood Night Elves - the Hado'Ken-Dorei are demon hunters anyway.

I just feel with the current imbalnace, you're not going to see genuinely cool stuff come the allinace's way because it will keep skewing numbers away that without human-look alike toons on the horde, they won't be abel to afford to make this additions,

[Boottybounce]

would it? lets take a scenario should this sub-faction really take off.

People start rolling horde a lot more, fine - alliance is low populated, but then alliance has been having pretty crappy storylines, lots of losses, it's really popular races like the night elves and dwarves being barely relevant because they have previoulsy not been allowed to be cool.

all blizzard needs to do is give back the type night elves we had in WC3, stir up some engaging interactions between the alliance humans and this newly revived Lordearon under the Horde now, push the allinace bit more on the story - oh yeah, nearly forgot, include the high elf playable sub-group as well, that would reverse some of the traffic of the blood elf population towards the alliance, espeically if you write a complelling entrance to the high elf sub-group.

throw in a really cool allinace sub-group .. a sub-group of night elves taht are pre-disposed to become demon hunters, they can be warlocks, they have Illidans philsophy on how to deal with demons, they have a lot of contempt for ordinary night elves because they feel they're too naiive, they also have disdain for highbourne too, did you ever meet the demon hunter night elf in Felwood? he was really cool - well this is a whole night elf sub-group of them.. they have body markings like Malfurion and Illidan on the males, some of them have features - like demon wings or demon claws, or horns - not all features are demons, they have some non-demonic ones as well or you can opt for none.- they all have gold eyes/purple eyes or black magical eyes..both male and female in contrast to the highbourne sub-race group that all have silver eyes, and they also have darker purple skin tones.

so adding a couple of cool sub-race groups like high elves., this new sub-group of pro demon hunter like night elves in addition to maybe an additional cool dwarf sub-group like Iron dwarves or frost dwarves would help immensely.

people who choose faction based on lore are a minority. The majority play a certain faction because they started with that one or have social connections through that faction on that realm. imo, blizzard can't fix population as much as they would want to, they may be able to affect it somewhat but it will never be 50/50.

[rorian]

Rorian, that's because the end-game group is predominantly horde heavy.

end gamers are very one-track minded people, anyone not playing at the elder game level is completley ignored, guilds are usually exclusively max level characters, so you could be on a realm that has a higher alliance population overall, but the active level 90 crowd are way more horde popular, and this was because of the horde racials, you wanted the advantages of orc and troll racials.

but when you look closely you see that Orcs/trolls despite their advantage are not the highest played Orc race, it's the blood elves. So aesthetics matter more than racials, but racials do influence the end game crowd, the competitive one, there are some people that only do LFR, but if you wanted to do more and progress, you had to get serious, and those people are a small fraction of the overall population, but they are the ones that use the forums and debate and argue, the majority of the milions that subscribe and play do not. What am I saying? your observation at the elder game level may not always reflect the overall picture on the realm throughout cos you're only looking at the group you interact with, when you add all the other factors in you see a different picture.

they don't pick orc/troll or horde because of racials, they go for other things, looks, story, lore, archietcture, racial theme.

That all may be true but that is exactly why I stated my post was strictly from the perspective of end-game PvP, where faction imbalance has arguably the biggest effect. You speak of end-game/max level like it is a small fraction minority but the reality is that is where the focus from blizzard will mostly be. Adjustments can be made to compensate leveling experiences using CRZ and other tech they have developed like some posters have said, but it is the active 90 crowd that consumes the content that blizzard releases, so it is there where the balancing begins.

Again, I re-iterate my final point from my original post as it was mostly the point I wanted to get across-
"All blizzard can do is try to put out balanced content between both factions and let the player-base do what it is going to do. When you try to over analyze and manipulate the player-base to one way or another, that's where you tend to run into issues of over-compensation and it just causes more problems. Faction populations fluctuate, and will continue to do so forever."