War Mode Faction Balance Hotfix and Patch 8.1 Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Blizzard suspects many Alliance players had "rough experiences early on and opted out" of War Mode, and the increased rewards may bring people back in.

Is Ion for real? He thinks that increased rewards will bring alliance back into warmode, when the vast majority of alliance have forgotten that warmode even exists?

This kind of measure is too little too late. A few alliance may turn on warmode, find themselves getting facing repeated 10v1 situations and then turn it off again.

Some time ago we made a hotfix to War Mode which enforces all War Mode shards that have both Alliance and Horde in them to have a stricter, more even ratio. We’ve been monitoring the results and so far we’ve noticed a significant improvement in “fair and balanced” shards. So much so that it’s safe to say that if you are Alliance, and you see Horde in the outdoor world in War Mode, you are a relatively even horde to alliance ratio shard. There are some rare exceptions, such as when a raid of 40 players enter a zone. It may take a bit for the “shard manager” to compensate and balance the shard.

We do have some plans in store in Tides of Vengeance (Patch 8.1) to entice the underrepresented faction with greater rewards to increase participation and create more active Horde/Allianced mixed War Mode shards. The intent of those rewards is not to give the underrepresented faction some “compensation” for being outnumbered in a War Mode shard (since that really can’t happen anymore).

We're also looking forward to what you all think about the Incursions in War Mode for 8.1, since it brings Horde and Alliance to the same location which should create some pretty fun skirmishes.

Raid Testing Schedule - November 15th - 19th
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
On Thursday, November 15th and Friday, November 16th we will be conducting raid tests of the Battle of Dazar'alor. After testing has ended up Friday, we will open the first wing of Raid Finder.

BOTH FACTIONS:
Testing is open for both factions. However, for some bosses, raid members will temporarily re-live events as the opposite faction using a story flashback.

Thursday, November 15th

Stormwall Blockade - Heroic Battle of Dazar'alor
13:00 PST (16:00 EST, 22:00 CET)

Jaina - Heroic Battle of Dazar'alor
14:00 PST (17:00 EST, 23:00 CET)

Friday, November 16th

Opulence - Mythic Battle of Dazar'alor
13:00 PST (16:00 EST, 22:00 CET)

King Rastakhan - Mythic Battle of Dazar'alor
14:00 PST (17:00 EST, 23:00 CET)

Siege of Dazar'alor/Defense of Dazar'alor Raid Finder
16:00 PST (19:00 EST, 1:00 CET)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a test environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the bosses being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Q: How do I get into the raid zone?

A: In Zuldazar, Boralus, Dalaran, Orgrimmar, or Stormwind, you may speak to Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade III in order to teleport into the raid zone while it is open for testing. (The option to teleport into a zone will not be available when the zone is not open for testing.)
This article was originally published in forum thread: War Mode Faction Balance Hotfix and Patch 8.1 Changes, Raid Testing - Nov 15th - 19th started by chaud View original post
Comments 92 Comments
  1. Cudy's Avatar
    Playing Horde with pvp turned off is worse than playing Alliance with pvp turned on.

    They should give horde 10% bonus for turning it off.

    Trying to do wq with hundreds of swarming Alliance instakilling all the mobs takes way longer than occasionally getting killed by Horde.
  1. Softbottom's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tonus View Post
    I disagree. The problem isn’t sharding, the problem is that they didn’t drastically reduce the number of realms 5 years ago. There should only be about 10 us realms. If they did that, cross realm stuff would be unnecessary and you’d have actual servers that mattered. Sharding would actually help in that situation because it provides a solution for the start of expansion influx.
    Too many realms is the main issue at hand I agree. If they compiled all of the realms would we actually have meaningful realms and no reason to have cross realm stuff.
  1. Norec12's Avatar
    One thing I would like to see them change is making easier to enable and disable warmode. Pain in the butt to have to go to Stormwind (Org) just to toggle it!!
  1. Gadzooks's Avatar
    Just another piss poor decision from Ion and his team they have to waste dev time and money on trying to fix.

    They HAD the idea, at the start, for increased wPVP - incursions. Have incursions flip warmode on for everyone, that zone is wPVP for the duration - and don't make it stupid long, like 6-8 hours, and it travels across both islands randomly, like hotspots in a war popping up randomly. Put things into incursions with rewards. Problem solved.

    They could have even played it into the story, with them starting more randomly and spread out, building up over the course of the expansion. Leading to some Wintergrasp type zone, where each side dukes it out for mounts, or something.

    It's puzzling, that for all of the creative power in the company, all of the decisions for BfA have been bad, dull, boring, half-baked, wrong, or just dumb.

    In any other company, I would put Ion's chances at still being employed there by 9.0 at 50/50, but Blizzard doesn't seem to fire people except in extreme cases, and they all are just seemingly institutionally tin eared and so high up in their ivory towers, that they'll reward Ion for his fuck ups, instead of seeing him as the crux of the problems. Ion will probably be there in the future when they shutter the doors in Irvine, and he'll babble to everyone "We need to be better!"
  1. Zechs-cenarius's Avatar
    This thread:

    Alliance are pussies.
    Horde are pussies.

    lol what even is this?

    I welcome the changes to sharding. The player imbalance was pretty bad lol. I just think that because of the ineptitude warmode has officially killed itself off. Nice try though blizzard. Was fun while it lasted.
  1. Phildozer's Avatar
    How bout just like....make Alliance racials better for raiding, lots of guilds would go back. But naw, let's not try to actually fix the underlying issue.
  1. Ganksinatra's Avatar
    Sorry, but while the issue of roving gank squads of horde are a pain in the ass, the real problem is that the most use of warmode comes from the leveling buff, and for some god awful reason, Blizz decided to allow ganking from high level players. Seriously, where is the sport in dropping down off of a flying mount to 1 shot people 90 levels lower than you are? They should have made it like AION did back in the day to both make leveling viable in PvP areas and allow for low levels to hold their own against those that would come and hammer them in one hit. Sure, they could still roll in with a group of 15 and smash your face, but the single griefing dbags stopped playing entirely when the low levels could hand them their asses.
  1. mmocfd328e0b6e's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Gadzooks View Post
    In any other company, I would put Ion's chances at still being employed there by 9.0 at 50/50, but Blizzard doesn't seem to fire people except in extreme cases, and they all are just seemingly institutionally tin eared and so high up in their ivory towers, that they'll reward Ion for his fuck ups, instead of seeing him as the crux of the problems. Ion will probably be there in the future when they shutter the doors in Irvine, and he'll babble to everyone "We need to be better!"
    This Ion kid would have no chance in any other industry. He is an incompetent trash. His non-verbal communications show that he is a psychopath too.
  1. MiiiMiii's Avatar
    So the way Blizzard "solved" warmode was this then:
    Say 1000 horde and 50 alliance has warmode on.
    They put 1 shard with 50 alliance and 50 horde.
    Then all the other 950 horde gets a shard without alliance and free 10% reward bonus.

    Great system...
  1. mmoc29e4727ea9's Avatar
    If the shards actually work like they say they do now, there should be LOADS of shards with only horde in them and 0 alliance since the number of horde players with WM on compared to the number of alliance players with WM on must be very imbalanced right now.

    I would take a stab in the dark and guess that about 4 of 5 shards are completely free of alliance and contain only horde.

    The problem with this system is that horde players that wants to pvp will create pvp groups/raids started by players that happen to be inside shards that contain alliance, to complete their pvp weekly quests or just farm honor. So the few alliance that actually have WM on will almost always face horde in groups or raids that are in that shard just to kill alliance players, they don't care about the world quests.

    Example: Wednesday on EU whole Stormsong area was pretty much a no-go zone for alliance in the evening because of the ganking horde raids created. There were a horde raid going for hours that ran between the west azerite WQ location and the alliance flight master back and forth. It's incredibly hard as alliance to create a raid to counter this, because that means that basically every single alliance that exists in that shard has to join the raid. That is very unlikely to happen. I went to stormsong on 4 different alliance characters and all of them got placed vs the same horde raid, so it seems it was either the only alliance shard up for the moment, or I got extremely unlucky.

    The only way to fix this is to place players inside a raid in their own shard so they only see other raid grouped players. Sure you will still have 5man ganking groups but atleast that is easier to deal with. A 40 man raid running around slaughtering everyone is almost impossible to deal with for alliance players right now there are simply too few players, atleast on EU.
  1. splatomat's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by MiiiMiii View Post
    So the way Blizzard "solved" warmode was this then:
    Say 1000 horde and 50 alliance has warmode on.
    They put 1 shard with 50 alliance and 50 horde.
    Then all the other 950 horde gets a shard without alliance and free 10% reward bonus.

    Great system...
    Given how much they love to talk about how outnumbered the Horde are and what scrappy underdogs they are...

    It should just work like BG. If there are too many Horde for Warmode, they just cant turn it on. Enjoy your 500 hour queue hoping some Alliance turn it on.

    OR

    Reroll Alliance and turn it on yourself.
  1. tttsssrrr's Avatar
    Blizzard was so afraid of backlash from finally nerfing Arcane Torrent that they made a Raid encounter perfectly suited for it and then wonder why Horde has an almost 10% higher population of level 120s than the Alliance does. That catering attitude to the largest section of your player base is why things will never really get fixed, despite all of Blizzard's talk about it.

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