An interesting observation about the H/A ratio

[UndedoKoleda]

Today I was checking one of the two highest populated with Alliance realms on EU - Ravencrest(with most progressive Alliance guilds when it comes to Mythic raiding) and something struck me while browsing the guild pages- 7 out of the top 10 guilds in the last tier(10 out of top 15) on the realm have/are moving to Horde.

https://www.wowprogress.com/pve/eu/ravencrest

Are we going to witness another "snowball effect" of people moving over to Horde in the new expansion?

Have Blizzard even mentioned anything about trying to balance the factions ratio? IMO, they had a very good chance, given how the expansion ended, to allow cross-faction play in instanced content, but they decided that "its against the very core of WoW- the faction war".

So is one of the factions going to have permanent 10% bonus with no drawbacks again?

Thread Warning: This thread needs to settle down, make your arguments without invective, sniping, or insulting other users.

[GreenJesus]

What are they supposed to do? Make the alliance racials overpowered and force everyone to pay 30 dollars a pop to faction change? You have no idea how much anger that would cause in the community.

Horde has a bigger community to pug and recruit with now. Besides just making horde blatantly underperforming with a -30% damage debuff, how will they compel people to switch instead of just being fine with where they are?

[Khallid]

I think a lot of it is just following the trend, not actual numbers. There was a time when Horde racials were overpowered, but that's not the case anymore.

Sure, Horde has more players, but guilds can't recruit cross-realm. You're not going to find an easier time recruiting as a Horde on a Horde-dominated server compared to Alliance in an Alliance-dominated server. It's not that common for people to realm transfer to join a new guild.

If you want to join the best mythic raiding guilds, then sure, go Horde. But moving an established guild from Alliance to Horde doesn't matter very much.

While it's true that the top guilds are dominated by Horde, the total amount of mythic raiding guilds isn't that lopsided. It's only about 60% Horde.

[Marrilaife]

Sure, Horde has more players, but guilds can't recruit cross-realm.

Lies. Guilds recruit cross realm all the time and it's much cheaper to pay 25$ for server change than 55$ for server + faction change. Plus people leave their alts behind and want to do m+ with them and it's important for them their m+ friends are on the same faction (read: Horde).

Among "mythic" guilds that are somewhere 3-6/12 mythic it doesn't matter it's basically pug level. But in the top 100 there's very very few Alliance guilds left outside of Australia (Alliance dominated) and China. Most US and EU top 100 guilds moved to Horde or are already planning to do so. Most top 250-300 Alliance guilds are also moving Horde or strongly considering it because there's no recruitment pool left. That's basically the cut off for Alliance Hall of Fame, which is mostly filled with Chinese and Australian guilds and maybe 20% from the remaining regions.

If you want to run keys above 20, Alliance is also a barren wasteland.

- - - Updated - - -

While it's true that the top guilds are dominated by Horde, the total amount of mythic raiding guilds isn't that lopsided. It's only about 60% Horde.

According to wowprogress, 1560 guilds killed mythic Nzoth (after 6 months of the raid tier), out of that 469 are Alliance. 60% my ass. There's more than 2 Horde guilds for every Alliance one, and it's already pretty lenient cut off to check guilds that only achieve CE after 6 months of content being out.

[Tradu]

I think a lot of it is just following the trend, not actual numbers. There was a time when Horde racials were overpowered, but that's not the case anymore.

Sure, Horde has more players, but guilds can't recruit cross-realm. You're not going to find an easier time recruiting as a Horde on a Horde-dominated server compared to Alliance in an Alliance-dominated server. It's not that common for people to realm transfer to join a new guild.

If you want to join the best mythic raiding guilds, then sure, go Horde. But moving an established guild from Alliance to Horde doesn't matter very much.

While it's true that the top guilds are dominated by Horde, the total amount of mythic raiding guilds isn't that lopsided. It's only about 60% Horde.

As somebody in one of the guilds mentioned in the OP, we moved for a few reasons:
- we have quite a lot of players who want to play high keys, and Horde is objectively better for that
- recruitment on Horde is objectively better
- a lot of people had friends on Horde they wanted to play with outside of raids
- the server we went to has a better AH, meaning it's cheaper to raid/do keys
- the guilds we had the most interaction on Alliance(<Group Therapy> and <Flawless>, now <The Mandem> or something) went Horde as well, starting the snowball on Ravencrest specifically

As you said, it's not about racials anymore, it's about having people to play with. You're completely wrong about cross realm recruitment, though. The vast majority of people joining the guilds I've been in for the past decade or so have been from other servers.

[Marrilaife]

Are we going to witness another "snowball effect" of people moving over to Horde in the new expansion?

There's is no "another" effect, it's a continuous downhill slide where every expansion more and more guilds are moving towards Horde because it's less and less sustainable to be Alliance and it's trickling down towards lower and lower ranks, it's not just "top 20" or "top 100" it's affecting people gradually more and more down the line.

[Popastique]

Free faction change for a limited time could shake things up, but Blizz won't do that anytime soon.

[Shaetha]

Among "mythic" guilds that are somewhere 3-6/12 mythic it doesn't matter it's basically pug level.

You can come up with whatever numbers you want when you ignore all the data that contradicts the point you're trying to make.

[Tradu]

Free faction change for a limited time could shake things up, but Blizz won't do that anytime soon.

I mean yeah, that would "fix" the problem. By having everybody remaining on Alliance who's even remotely serious about PvE switch to Horde.

[Snorri]

It's mainly because of the racials. Horde racials are better for raiding and if you care about min/max. I wish racials had never been in the game. Selecting a faction and race should be purely cosmetic. You're right about the snowball effect. Even Alliance raiders who don't care so much about racials move over to Horde because the amount of Alliance raiders are dwindling, making it harder to recruit raiders and find raiding guilds. I'm guessing that some people assume Horde raiders are more professional and mature. I'm not a raider. I've always seen myself as an Alliance player since the beginning, and I'm sticking to it because I like the Alliance lore, characters, cities and races better. But I think it's a shame to see Alliance raiding being so small compared to Horde.

[Tradu]

It's mainly because of the racials. Horde racials are better for raiding and if you care about min/max. I wish racials had never been in the game. Selecting a faction and race should be purely cosmetic. You're right about the snowball effect. Even Alliance raiders who don't care so much about racials move over to Horde because the amount of Alliance raiders are dwindling, making it harder to recruit raiders and find raiding guilds. I'm guessing that some people assume Horde raiders are more professional and mature. I'm not a raider. I've always seen myself as an Alliance player since the beginning, and I'm sticking to it because I like the Alliance lore, characters, cities and races better. But I think it's a shame to see Alliance raiding being so small compared to Horde.

This is extremely spec dependant, definitely not some universal truth.

EDIT: I went and checked, on ST an Alliance race is strongest for 16 DPS specs and Horde for the remaining 8. Now of course Horde has Goblin Jump which singlehandedly enables some specs/classes to do certain bosses(DK/priest on Kil'jaeden), but in terms of raw DPS, Alliance is better.

[Fritters154]

Free faction change for a limited time could shake things up, but Blizz won't do that anytime soon.

That would probably only work if it was specifically Horde - > Alliance being free, and even then it wouldn't do much. If just any faction change is free you make the issue 10x worse by causing Alliance to lose absolutely every even semi-serious raider it has left.

[Garymorilix]

Can we put this bullshit to rest already?

Tell me one tangible reason why high-end pve guilds must be split 50-50 H/A. Just one.

It doesn't matter to nobody.
Besides, as someone already pointed this out: How the fuck would you accomplish this?
The only way this could be done is to either give Alliance raids more loot or simply buff their overall dmg/heal output outright. Neither of wich is actually fair in any shape or form.

These guild simply DO NOT WANT TO PLAY ALLIANCE. Deal with it.
Limit showed us this during BoD (I think) when the stupid af pandering "overwhelming odds" quest gave free heroic loot to every mouth breather.

They transferred their whole guild to Alliance just for this one quest and they switched right back after.
They have NO INTEREST in playing Alliance.
If they had they could have just stayed there. They weren't even Alliance for a week because they don't care.
Other guilds are the same.

Nobody cares, and even if you were top 100 doing mythic N'zoth since the WF you shouldn't care either because it has no bearing on anything.

[Schattenlied]

What are they supposed to do? Make the alliance racials overpowered and force everyone to pay 30 dollars a pop to faction change? You have no idea how much anger that would cause in the community.

Horde has a bigger community to pug and recruit with now. Besides just making horde blatantly underperforming with a -30% damage debuff, how will they compel people to switch instead of just being fine with where they are?

Remove all throughput racials and open faction transfers for free for one month (limit one per character).

[Kilik]

It's mainly because of the racials. Horde racials are better for raiding and if you care about min/max. I wish racials had never been in the game. Selecting a faction and race should be purely cosmetic. You're right about the snowball effect. Even Alliance raiders who don't care so much about racials move over to Horde because the amount of Alliance raiders are dwindling, making it harder to recruit raiders and find raiding guilds. I'm guessing that some people assume Horde raiders are more professional and mature. I'm not a raider. I've always seen myself as an Alliance player since the beginning, and I'm sticking to it because I like the Alliance lore, characters, cities and races better. But I think it's a shame to see Alliance raiding being so small compared to Horde.

Its not about racials anymore, even top raiders confirmed it and some even said that alliance has arguably better racials now.

But most top raiders are on horde for a long time and if you wanna join good raiding guild, you have to go horde to increase your chances. So it has been snowballing for ages now.

[Tradu]

Remove all throughput racials and open faction transfers for free for one month (limit one per character).

Wouldn't fix shit, racials are not a relevant part of the equation anymore. Doing that would just make the remaining Alliance players who are serious about PvE go Horde. Initially just the ones who actually don't really care which faction they play, then eventually even the die hard Alliance ones because there wouldn't be enough people left to play with(especially not to form guilds which requires people to be at vaguely the same skill level)

[burek]

There's is no "another" effect, it's a continuous downhill slide where every expansion more and more guilds are moving towards Horde because it's less and less sustainable to be Alliance and it's trickling down towards lower and lower ranks, it's not just "top 20" or "top 100" it's affecting people gradually more and more down the line.

Yes, even a guild ranked around 1500 from my realm went horde because they couldn't recruit anymore. And that rank is not even CE in every tier.

[Schattenlied]

Wouldn't fix shit, racials are not a relevant part of the equation anymore. Doing that would just make the remaining Alliance players who are serious about PvE go Horde. Initially just the ones who actually don't really care which faction they play, then eventually even the die hard Alliance ones because there wouldn't be enough people left to play with(especially not to form guilds which requires people to be at vaguely the same skill level)

That's one assumption, the other is it would even out while people went where they wanted to go rather than where they felt like they needed to be.

Alternatively, let people guild up, dungeon, and raid fross faction, because the faction war is an outdated concept that has run it's course not once, but twice, and hasn't made any sense in the story since Azeroth started facing world ending threats on a yearly basis, the Horde and Alliance would not be attacking eachother under that circumstance. The player characters work with cross faction NPC forces all the damn time, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do PvE content together with cross faction players.

[WintersLegion]

That would probably only work if it was specifically Horde - > Alliance being free, and even then it wouldn't do much. If just any faction change is free you make the issue 10x worse by causing Alliance to lose absolutely every even semi-serious raider it has left.

It would would about as well as the free server transfers they have done to a lower pop realm as in not at all.

[Delekii]

Pretty clearly, the free faction changes would only be from Horde to Alliance.

SMH.

That said, it likely wouldn't work without significant incentive, it's not worth giving up on an active player base most of the time.


At some point they will bite the bullet and merge the factions from a queueing/content point of view.