War Mode faction imbalance the last week.

[Kagthul]

Its pretty straightforward: lets take 70:30 ratio, or 60:40 it doesnt matter, its more horde than alliance by significant numbers
A) every shard splits all players equally, so 70:30 in every shard, alliance gets ganked, ehm I mean defeated in honest balanced world PvP (because its balanced now, you only meet people who also opten in, same as you), so alliance opts out because its not worth it, more horde opt in
B) at first shards are made equally, so 30% horde vs 30% alliance players, rest of the shards are filled with remaining players (40% horde only), I dont think it works this way but even if it did more horde would opt in because it would give them 50/50 chance of phasing into world of free XP

Im not even going to touch the rest of your fever-induced conspiracy theory, but ... B is correct.. ish.

Lets break it down with numbers instead of percentages.

Lets say there are 1000 Horde Players flagged for War Mode, and 500 Alliance Players flagged for War Mode, all in the same zone.

The game Generates 10 phases/instances of said zone, that look like this: (these numbers are for show, since im not sure how many it will allow in each zone, it may be less. Im guessing 100 because during the Darkshore kill-trading fest, you could only get about 2 full raids into the same zone, which is 80, and its fair to assume there were probably an additional 10-20 on each side just faffing off somewhere else not participating in the trading).

1 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
2 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
3 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
4 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
5 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
6 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
7 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
8 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
9 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
10 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance

Then you come along, Alliance Player Number 501!

... and the game assigns you to Instance 6. Enjoy.

Until 99 more Alliance players flag for War Mode (and enter the same zone), you're going to be outnumbered.

Game does the best it can, but unless more Alliance players flag, thats that.

There was a blue post about this during the pre-patch (Darkshore) shenanigans. He outlined EXACTLY how the game filled instances. The above is how.

Not saying it isn't stupid. It kinda is. But its the least stupid option available. You cant force people to choose one faction or the other to PvP on, and you cant forcibly flag people. Considering the -actual- total populations of Horde and Alliance are pretty evenly split across the entire service in each region, its a player problem. Blizzard cant fix issues that are caused by the players choices.

[Deleted]

High Elves would not fix anything. If you believe so, you are just clouded. The damage is done and cannot be repaired. Factions will NEVER again be even remotely balanced in this game. And BFA was their hardest try so far to push even the last Alliance player to the Horde.

They fractions are balanced, but not in WM. A lot of alliance players simply dont care for PvP.

And Blizz doesnt favor the horde, they favor humans. No wonder so many alliance players are sick of playing stupid side kick races. The NE were the second popluar race of the alliance and they could have been are more aggressiv race in the alliance, but blizz decided to trash them.

[et1mark]

I know I've had my fill. I gave war mode a try. I'm not a PVPer and it looks like I'm not going to be, war mode bonus or not. Don't care for the leveling ganking, disruption to questing, or the incessant camping. Something of a power bonus for each death, I get an increase to survivability or power for each death to level the playing field, would really bring me back. I want to try it but I just hate the game so much when I feel I'm constantly on the loosing end of a three man molestation.

[cparle87]

the horde have had OP racials since launch, what are you smoking?

EMFH being a thing and WotF being nerfed over and over would like a word with you.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I love warmode, but it sucks maining Alliance. I see 1-2 Allies and 10+ Horde at each WQ... doesn't matter which zone or island.

[MisterBigglez]

I love warmode, but it sucks maining Alliance. I see 1-2 Allies and 10+ Horde at each WQ... doesn't matter which zone or island.

I find it to be the same for Horde. It is especially the case in Vol'dun, theres 20 alliance players camping each flight point on a regular basis.

[Kagthul]

EMFH being a thing and WotF being nerfed over and over would like a word with you.

Not to mention Shadowmeld being insanely OP for NE Rogues and Druids, the original version of Stoneform being brutally effective against rogues.... i could go on...

Horde had... at launch...

Will of the Forsaken.

Orc and Troll racials were complete trash, and War Stomp was... OK (and still is).

Compared to the Alliance racials, though, especially EMFH as of its revamp into a free trinket and now its (buff - anyone who tells you losing it as a trink but turning it into a short-sympathetic cooldown STUN breaker is a nerf is a fucking moron) change into a stun breaker... Alliance racials are FAR better for PvP.

[Blur4stuff]

I enjoyed warmode last week. There was some ganking, but there was also some good fights spontaneously happening with roughly equal numbers.

It's been all downhill since then, though. Right now I'm considering it a failure and will no longer be using it. It's devolving into nothing but huge gank packs that will never, ever face any kind of challenge.

[Deleted]

Since when is ganking efficient in this pvE farming game?

Warmode is just like how PVP realms were the last 13 years - some people are wasting time for nothing while everyone else is doing reputation gating or preps for M+/raiding whatever.

Get ready for the complain threads about reputation gating or raider.io rating or whatever the smart WPVP players skipped.

The +10% more FARMING bonus to AP/ressources means nothing when you dont FARM. ^^

well you missed the point, you dont gank, because you are alone just farming your stuff in your own little shard giving you extra rewards

Im not even going to touch the rest of your fever-induced conspiracy theory, but ... B is correct.. ish.

Lets break it down with numbers instead of percentages.

Lets say there are 1000 Horde Players flagged for War Mode, and 500 Alliance Players flagged for War Mode, all in the same zone.

The game Generates 10 phases/instances of said zone, that look like this: (these numbers are for show, since im not sure how many it will allow in each zone, it may be less. Im guessing 100 because during the Darkshore kill-trading fest, you could only get about 2 full raids into the same zone, which is 80, and its fair to assume there were probably an additional 10-20 on each side just faffing off somewhere else not participating in the trading).

1 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
2 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
3 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
4 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
5 - 100 Horde, 100 Alliance
6 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
7 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
8 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
9 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance
10 - 100 Horde, 0 Alliance

Then you come along, Alliance Player Number 501!

... and the game assigns you to Instance 6. Enjoy.

Until 99 more Alliance players flag for War Mode (and enter the same zone), you're going to be outnumbered.

Game does the best it can, but unless more Alliance players flag, thats that.

There was a blue post about this during the pre-patch (Darkshore) shenanigans. He outlined EXACTLY how the game filled instances. The above is how.

Not saying it isn't stupid. It kinda is. But its the least stupid option available. You cant force people to choose one faction or the other to PvP on, and you cant forcibly flag people. Considering the -actual- total populations of Horde and Alliance are pretty evenly split across the entire service in each region, its a player problem. Blizzard cant fix issues that are caused by the players choices.

I have never cared how it really works, its not even that important...I basically copy pasted what I wrote at the time of this announcement and I was (obviously) spot on because you cant cheat basic mathemathics

and of course I disagree with conspiracy theory, they had the knowledge when they implemented it, people respond to incentives so this is not really a player problem when someone else decides the rules, they created this specific problem by introducing extra PvE rewards for turning it on which will only further increase faction imbalance

[Nathasil]

They fractions are balanced, but not in WM. A lot of alliance players simply dont care for PvP.

And Blizz doesnt favor the horde, they favor humans. No wonder so many alliance players are sick of playing stupid side kick races. The NE were the second popluar race of the alliance and they could have been are more aggressiv race in the alliance, but blizz decided to trash them.

Please show me ONE, just ONE, area in the game where the numbers are even. Everybody keeps saying "oh, the numbers are totally balanced overall, it's just that the Alliance players are too stupid/lazy/carebear!"....and then you take a look at ANYTHING: Raiding, Battlegrounds, Mythic+....seriously, in what area of the game has the Alliance a higher or at least equal number of players? I see NONE.

Both factions being roughly the same size is a myth. In ANY activity this game offers Horde outnumbers Alliance by far. And yes, that is mostly caused by players who join the faction that is already larger...but why did it start to be like that? Racials are a part of it, for sure. But also the narrative Blizzard created about the factions.

And this has never been as bad as it it right now. Currently in BFA there is just one faction in this game. And it is not the Alliance. Apart from this one faction that exists there are 3 or 4 NPCs that occasionally get an in-game cinematic, and that's all.

[DechCJC]

This seems to me to be the new "X always loses bgs! I'm re-rolling!" type of complaint that we're going to be seeing for the next few years.

There's problems with the game, this isn't one. It's not as bad as you make it out to be.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Ion said in Q&A that sharding was unbalanced by players being brought into groups. I suspect (but can't know) that the players choosing to level Horde toons first might also be more likely to go for PvP cheevos and titles, and are starting groups to go for those titles. This could result in server imbalance, if I understand it right.

Personally, I play Alliance, play a poor pvp spec (Brewmaster), and I still keep WM on all the time. But I don't expect to win many encounters. I mostly enjoy having to sneak around to do my quest because it seems like what I should have to do in a world at war.

Still... wouldn't it be more fun for everyone if the WM shards were more balanced? Doesn't it get boring for Horde crushing 5v1s all the time? Maybe fun in a ha ha way for a bit, but gets old fast? Seems like it would, to me.

[Deleted]

I'm playing horde and I've definitely done more ganking than being ganked. Something I've noticed is that during the first week if you made a world PvP group the Alliance would rally and come back with an even bigger group, it seemed like everything would always escalate into a 40v40 lagfest. Now though, I'm halfway through farming out Conqueror of Azeroth now and I can easily go 5-10 minutes without seeing an ally, and my 5-man groups are rarely challenged. I'm hoping conquest/gear will become an incentive again once the season starts so I don't need to run into Boralus with a bounty on just to coax alliance groups out.

[ydraw]

This seems to me to be the new "X always loses bgs! I'm re-rolling!" type of complaint that we're going to be seeing for the next few years.
.

The difference is that who won BGs didn't used to affect people who weren't interested in PvP at all.

Now changing to the winning faction actually gets you PvE bonuses, something that has never been true before. It's different.

[DechCJC]

The difference is that who won BGs didn't used to affect people who weren't interested in PvP at all.

Now changing to the winning faction actually gets you PvE bonuses, something that has never been true before. It's different.

My point is it's not actually an argument.

The factions aren't really that imbalanced; It's just bias.

[EpicCycle]

The solution to me would be to provide better incentives for people to play alliance in the first place or big enough to pay money and switch factions. As far as correcting the WM issue now a simple fix would be to create a que system similar to battlegrounds. If there are to many horde players currently in WM once you leave a main city they have the option to quest with WM off while waiting for a que to pop or faction switch as they do in battlegrounds. This is a short term solution but would even the numbers on a given shard.

[Kiri]

Ion said in Q&A that sharding was unbalanced by players being brought into groups. I suspect (but can't know) that the players choosing to level Horde toons first might also be more likely to go for PvP cheevos and titles, and are starting groups to go for those titles. This could result in server imbalance, if I understand it right.

Personally, I play Alliance, play a poor pvp spec (Brewmaster), and I still keep WM on all the time. But I don't expect to win many encounters. I mostly enjoy having to sneak around to do my quest because it seems like what I should have to do in a world at war.

Still... wouldn't it be more fun for everyone if the WM shards were more balanced? Doesn't it get boring for Horde crushing 5v1s all the time? Maybe fun in a ha ha way for a bit, but gets old fast? Seems like it would, to me.

That reminds me of what happened to my Brewmaster on Saturday. I had to run an errand and logged out at the entrance to Corlain, where I needed to finish the last 3 quests in Drustvar. Once I logged back in, I was immediately deathgripped into a horde raid farming everyone trying to finish that quest. Since they knew that allies need to kill like 4 of those big summoned guys, they just camped those spots, making the quest impossible to complete in Warmode. That was when I turned it off forever, since there were only like 10 allies in the zone, compared to at least 20 horde.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I'm playing horde and I've definitely done more ganking than being ganked. Something I've noticed is that during the first week if you made a world PvP group the Alliance would rally and come back with an even bigger group, it seemed like everything would always escalate into a 40v40 lagfest. Now though, I'm halfway through farming out Conqueror of Azeroth now and I can easily go 5-10 minutes without seeing an ally, and my 5-man groups are rarely challenged. I'm hoping conquest/gear will become an incentive again once the season starts so I don't need to run into Boralus with a bounty on just to coax alliance groups out.

I'm in an Alliance guild, and even my guild mates who love PvP have turned off WM. There's so much 5 on 1 and so little in the way of balanced fights, they got tired of bothering with it. When it's 5v1, regardless of whether you're the 5 or the 1 (I've been both), it's boring either way. I've had maybe 2 really good world pvp skirmishes since BfA launched. I like the idea of War Mode, just not how it has worked out.

[Nathasil]

My point is it's not actually an argument.

The factions aren't really that imbalanced; It's just bias.

There is bias...Horde bias. It's called BFA.

Seriously though: Do you have ANY sources for your claim? Because all the census sites show a growing numbers advantage for Horde. BG-Qs are 3-5times longer for Horde, the Merc recruiter is active 24/7 for Horde, wowprogress is 90% red for raids and ~70% for M+. Those are the sources i know. Which are yours?

[Deleted]

auchindoun EU
Feels like 10 : 1 even on OUR islands i get ganked by horde everywhere... I like pvp but not 3-4 v 1 !!!!

Yeah I'm on your realm and it's just a pure gank fest, there's only been one time where I've seen alliance outnumber horde and that was at a dungeon entrance where a few alliance groups were waiting.