Horde vs Alliance balance, news from first weeks of BFA

[Skulltaker]

Sigh.

Let's do this one step at a time.

Does own usage demographics of the add-on have a faction bias? If yes, show it. If no: are 50k reports per faction enough for a sample size to judge an average? If no, why? If yes, remove your objection.

Here are some news from the first weeks of BFA:



You see that spike up of the red and spike down of the blue near the right edge of the chart? That's leveling characters.

You can see from the rest of the chart how it generally was before: two lines close to each other, with the Alliance line typically slightly above the Horde line. It was the same in the past: two lines mostly close to each other with the Alliance line generally being above the Horde line. This was the case in both expansions favoring (speaking of PVE and/or PVP) the Alliance and in expansions favoring the Horde. The reasoning always was that yeah, racials are not balanced very well, but that only affects top levels of PVE and PVP and the rest of the game is healthy enough to attract many new players and these new players choose the Alliance a bit more often than the Horde.

Well, this is now gone. For the first time, the Horde dominates general activity levels. Which at this moment consists mostly of people leveling characters in BFA. And what a dominance this is: there are 2 leveling Hordies for each leveling Alliance.

WoW is de-facto becoming a game with a single real player faction. This is happening right now and we just witnessed a major turn. The next turn is going to happen with Uldir which the Horde will clear earlier than the Alliance and it is only a question of how much earlier. 1 reset? 2? Maybe 4? We'll see...

Blizzard, if you aren't fine with the game having just one real player faction and want to keep two of them, make all PVE and PVP activities faction-neutral. Allow cross-faction groups for everything.

Dude... nobody uses Census anymore. If you check the numbers for Antonidas, one of the most crowded Realms, it accounted for a grand total of 34 characters. I can Fel Rush once in Boralus and hit more than that.

It also only accounts for 'prime hours' during summer vacation. The only thing this proves is that Alliance players obviously go out more and enjoy the last evenings of summer.

[HordeFanboy]

horde>ally

Lok'tar ogar

[rda]

OK, I am now stopping responding to BS posts with "you are wrong because add-on", these posts invariably provide no details and demonstrate little understanding of statistics.

I have better uses of my time than to wonder whether any of such posts has anything other behind it than the desire to say "you are wrong, because I saw the word add-on and I think I understand how to reason about captured numbers even though I don't".

Those who want to know whether the Horde are really leveling more characters in BFA than the Alliance just go and ask Blizzard. You might get an answer.

[Deleted]

You're wrong and this is a boring topic.

I'm sorry dude, but i don't give a **** what you assert. The other guy presented proof. You presented nothing. Don't think cause a lying fool is in the white house that anyone can say whatever they want and pass it as fact.

[lordzed83]

You're wrong and this is a boring topic.

What part is WRONG ??

[Skulltaker]

OK, I am now stopping responding to BS posts with "you are wrong because add-on", these posts invariably provide no details and demonstrate little understanding of statistics.

I have better uses of my time than to wonder whether any of such posts has anything other behind it than the desire to say "you are wrong, because I saw the word add-on and I think I understand how to reason about captured numbers even though I don't".

Those who want to know whether the Horde are really leveling more characters in BFA than the Alliance just go and ask Blizzard. You might get an answer.

Then, riddle me this:

Why does the graph itself say "18-22 hours", and the description says from 6 pm to 11 pm? Clearly, whomever is maintaining the site hasn't made up his or her mind as of yet what he or she actually wants to represent, and what 'prime time' consitutes.

Why is January listed twice? Does whomever run this page lost count of the months early into the year? And why are there two Aprils? Did we replaces February and March with April and Januarys twin siblings?

Why is there no description of the process as to how the summed up numbers in the little box come to be, when the y axis tells me "Active players" in 200 people steps? 200 what? 200 k? 200 million? 200 strawberries? Or is the graph suggesting that there were, at the beginning of August 2018, a grand total of 1650 players in game? 53823 Horde and 49737 Alliance out of... what?

If this was an actual statistic, presented at a work place, or presented as work in school or at a university, whomever created it would have been fired/poorly graded so hard that not even Anduin could bring them back to life.

Why does the Alliance seem to have a 50% lead for the last trimester of 2017? Why is there a noticable drop in actuve players across both factions when the Argus content was unlocked?

[looorg]

I think I said above that player activity is not by far the only place which shows the skew towards the Horde. In fact, it's the entire point that player activity was going one way before and we now have what seems to be a turning point.

Other sources report more players for specific activities on the Horde side, these are sites like wowprogress, etc, the numbers on many are quite robust.

As regards armory scans, sure, why not, let's do them (or rather, let's wait for them). MMO-C did some before, maybe Chaud will do more. I am not aware of any scans showing general faction bias being Horde before, but that, again, aligns with player activity previously showing slight overall preference towards Alliance. Since this now seems to be changing, that would be an interesting thing to cross-check in an armory scan, sure.

Yes there are, or might be, issues with the gathering. As noted as an example it could be that for a long time you don't really see anyone of the other faction when you leveled. Certainly not for the first day or two. But assuming then that it's evenly distributed among the factions one would assume or hope that it evens out.

I think my main complaint here is the reliance on a third party addon to do the work, this is more or less like being reliant on a self-recruiting panel for answering your survey/questions, which is generally frowned upon by everyone.

Certainly it seems really bad since you could just use the Blizzard Amory API to do it. Get an account, Go to Data Resources, Pick Character Races cross that with Character Achievement of attaining level 120. Do some minor math and groupings of the races into Alliance/Horde and you are done. You could then have that as a whole, or broken down by server, or battle group or region etc. Or you could get Character Profiles and just check the level there, but then you need the input of names.
https://dev.battle.net/io-docs

So I don't see why you should have to rely on an addon that might collect data from doing choice /who requests when you can just get ALL the data from Blizzard. It seems like a horribly stupid idea for data collection when compared to that you could get ALL data instead of a small sample data.

[rda]

Then, riddle me this:

Why does the graph itself say "18-22 hours", and the description says from 6 pm to 11 pm? Clearly, whomever is maintaining the site hasn't made up his or her mind as of yet what he or she actually wants to represent, and what 'prime time' consitutes.

Why is January listed twice? Does whomever run this page lost count of the months early into the year? And why are there two Aprils? Did we replaces February and March with April and Januarys twin siblings?

Why is there no description of the process as to how the summed up numbers in the little box come to be, when the y axis tells me "Active players" in 200 people steps? 200 what? 200 k? 200 million? 200 strawberries? Or is the graph suggesting that there were, at the beginning of August 2018, a grand total of 1650 players in game? 53823 Horde and 49737 Alliance out of... what?

If this was an actual statistic, presented at a work place, or presented as work in school or at a university, whomever created it would have been fired/poorly graded so hard that not even Anduin could bring them back to life.

Why does the Alliance seem to have a 50% lead for the last trimester of 2017? Why is there a noticable drop in actuve players across both factions when the Argus content was unlocked?

"Why does the graph itself say "18-22 hours", and the description says from 6 pm to 11 pm?" -- because the site is easier to update than the code that paints the chart.

"Why is January listed twice?" -- because the data points are per-week, some months end up having 5 data points and this sometimes produces two labels for that month.

"Why is there no description of the process as to how the summed up numbers in the little box come to be, when the y axis tells me "Active players" in 200 people steps?" -- it is not important what the number on the Y axis means precisely, it just has to be a linear measure of the number or players in /who and it is that. We are looking at qualitative changes to that number. Previously, the Alliance was a little higher. Now, the Horde is a lot higher. That's enough.

"Why does the Alliance seem to have a 50% lead for the last trimester of 2017?" -- because the Alliance was about that more active. The 50% has error bars on that and if the number of data uploads for that period was low, these error bars could have been big, but that was the general picture.

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So I don't see why you should have to rely on an addon that might collect data from doing choice /who requests when you can just get ALL the data from Blizzard. It seems like a horribly stupid idea for data collection when compared to that you could get ALL data instead of a small sample data.

Oh, I am all for getting data from an armory scan. Let's do this, by all means. It's not as simple as just getting an account and then scanning data for the entire WoW (LOL), but MMO-C, for example, can do it, sure. As I said, player activity is just one thing, Horde skew shows in plenty of other places, that's just the latest.

[korijenkins]

Should've just merged the factions.

[Mad_Murdock]

Better figures could probably be obtained if you instead just scraped the official wow armory. Don't know why you would want to depend on some people running an addon. The addon might work if you say put people with it in strategic places such as hubs or the mission table where you know people will come eventually. But it will still more or less always be an inferior collection method to just going straight to Blizzard and grab the data from them.

The add-on works by doing a simple /who of classes, levels, races. it doesn't need to be put on someone near something. If a person is logged on when it runs, it will most likely capture them. It is a fun little add-on to look at various trends and get an idea of how many people are on when, how many people on my server opted for a new allied race for their main or stayed with the standard human\Belf.

Sure it would be great if Blizzard just opened up all their data points to us, but since they is probably never going to happen, crude tools like this aren't that bad.

[Beerbill Society]

Idk, it would require more data to reach a reasonable conclusion. The sample period is only a year and does not include a expansion launch, also some people pointed out it's from a add-on and it's sample is not big enough.

Having said that, I can only add my personal experience and speculations.

I think horde has a nice story overhaul, I will definitely be leveling a horde character to see how the brown orcs scenario plays out (got involved with alliance story of Dreanor) and the invasion of stockades.

Personally I like how Kul'tiras campaign plays out, it's nice and enjoyable.

In other threads I have made clear that in my honest opinion, horde as a faction has favoritism, and I have heard many compelling arguments that just reinforce this idea (PvE supremacy with racials for one), however I do believe that this was always like this, even prior to this expansion, so I don't believe this is the factor in play here.

People usually go for the winning side, but since we don't have a full picture is hard to identify this behavior. Blizzard keep record of those numbers and if the balance is hurt I believe they will interfere, having both factions healthy is core for their game.

[Malikath]

What part is WRONG ??

the sampling of the census mod, this is the exact same census mod that's been denied on this site for years precisely because it's been hilariously inaccurate.

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Should've just merged the factions.

this would of been best following MoP, with WoD, legion, and BFA being a series of legion based expacs as we go though several legion dominated and destroyed worlds eventually coming against sargeras and the full scale of the burning legion's swath of destruction.
lvling doesn't go beyond 100 and instead we divert into the path of the titans system for a spec specific talent tree that continues the leveling and player progression from MoP basic skill kit.

[Tidestorm]

Its because of warmode. Horde gets a 10% bonus.

[Alessandro]

So for all WoW history Alliance was the dominating faction in number of players, and no one seemed to care, but now the that Horde has surpassed Alliance people come to complain here?
Interesting.

[Kithelle]

Horde bias is more obvious than ever, of course people want to be on the better treated faction.

- - - Updated - - -

So for all WoW history Alliance was the dominating faction in number of players, and no one seemed to care, but now the that Horde has surpassed Alliance people come to complain here?
Interesting.

So WoW is only one year old? News to me!

Besides if you payed any attention to the chart which you haven't seemed to do, you'd see they were close but now Alliance took a HUGE drop and Horde got a HUGE gain...something obviously is wrong.

[Ragnarocket]

Here are some news from the first weeks of BFA:



You see that spike up of the red and spike down of the blue near the right edge of the chart? That's leveling characters.

You can see from the rest of the chart how it generally was before: two lines close to each other, with the Alliance line typically slightly above the Horde line. It was the same in the past: two lines mostly close to each other with the Alliance line generally being above the Horde line. This was the case in both expansions favoring (speaking of PVE and/or PVP) the Alliance and in expansions favoring the Horde. The reasoning always was that yeah, racials are not balanced very well, but that only affects top levels of PVE and PVP and the rest of the game is healthy enough to attract many new players and these new players choose the Alliance a bit more often than the Horde.

Well, this is now gone. For the first time, the Horde dominates general activity levels. Which at this moment consists mostly of people leveling characters in BFA. And what a dominance this is: there are 2 leveling Hordies for each leveling Alliance.

WoW is de-facto becoming a game with a single real player faction. This is happening right now and we just witnessed a major turn. The next turn is going to happen with Uldir which the Horde will clear earlier than the Alliance and it is only a question of how much earlier. 1 reset? 2? Maybe 4? We'll see...

Blizzard, if you aren't fine with the game having just one real player faction and want to keep two of them, make all PVE and PVP activities faction-neutral. Allow cross-faction groups for everything.

And how do you know this is indicative of a trend and not just an anomaly? For all we know everyone decided to play their Horde characters this week to start in Zandalar and in the next two weeks we will see a plot with alliance much higher than the Horde? I leveled my Alliance character first and am just about to start leveling my Horde characters. You can't just use a single point of data to make an argument.

I mean that's just the analysis of the data...we haven't even discussed the way we are pulling the data and whether it's been cleaned properly.

[Enosh]

What reasons are there for users of CensusPlus UI mod to be skewed towards horde players?

none, people are just desperately trying to pretend the wow isn't turning into a one faction game

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I really don’t see the balance as an issue now, since all servers are PvE with the option to enable PvP. If one faction severely outnumbers the other, well, might want to turn off Warmode. I also don’t think it affects Guilds and raiding as much as you are claiming.

That is not an answer to the question or problem. Its rather obtuse.

[The7]

Good, Horde should be the only faction.

If that ends PVP once and for all, I'm fine with it.

[Lazuli]

More horde for me to kill! Except when I'm on my undead.. ;[