War Mode Faction Balance Hotfix and Patch 8.1 Changes, Raid Testing - Nov 15th - 19th

[Fkiolaris]

Honestly most objections to War Mode that I encounter in discussions here or there are absolutely insurmountable within any reward structure they could/would implement. In these cases, it's not cowardice, it's pure respect for one's own time. It's a distance from the entire concept of having the uncontrollable variable of other players interfere with their scheduled play sessions, especially in the intentionally solo-attractive open world. They don't care, they won't care, they won't join, and War Mode will never be made "mandatory" enough for anyone holding this mindset to change their mind.

The first comment on this thread pretty much said all there is to be said on the topic.

[Cudy]

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.

[Softbottom]

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.

[Norec12]

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!!

[Gadzooks]

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!"

[Zechs-cenarius]

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.

[Phildozer]

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.

[Ganksinatra]

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.

[Deleted]

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.

[MiiiMiii]

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...

[Deleted]

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.

[splatomat]

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.

[tttsssrrr]

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.