An interesting observation about the H/A ratio

[Boricha]

It's the smart choice for them. Horde has a much larger community for raiding and m+ (and pvp in NA). The only way I could see Blizz fixing this is to intentionally make Alliance racials OP for 2+ expansions, but I don't think they would ever do that.

[Gorsameth]

When talking about the balance of a two faction system based on participation the core assumption of every normal (read as: not retarded) human being is a 50-50 ratio.
Twist it however you wan to, this is common sense.

Secondly, please explain why that is problematic. Like actually provide tangible evidence that the top 1% (lets say top 100 mythic guilds) being majority H or A diminishes the gameplay value for every other player below them OR even for them.
Saying "buuuuh if u dont see it u stoopid and i wont need to explain why" no, fuck off you actually do need to explain.

These players can play whatever the fuck they want. They want to play Horde.
Limit literally spent money on going to Alliance for one quest reward and instantly transferred back.

You have zero argument other than "but I'm alliance and I feel like I need extra validation that my faction doesn't fuckin suck".

I don't care about the 1% being Horde. But someone that raids Mythic on Alliance will probably care that it becomes harder and harder to find new recruits to replace the usual turnover until they become unable to sustain a 20m roster while other comparable guilds on Horde suffer from this to a lesser degree and the choice becomes between disbanding or switching to Horde to be able to sustain the raid roster.

Heck I wouldn't be surprised if Heroic guilds are also seeing this happen more and more.

[Saltysquidoon]

Secondly, please explain why that is problematic. Like actually provide tangible evidence that the top 1% (lets say top 100 mythic guilds) being majority H or A diminishes the gameplay value for every other player below them OR even for them.
Saying "buuuuh if u dont see it u stoopid and i wont need to explain why" no, fuck off you actually do need to explain.

It helps if you actually read the thread.

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.

Further, are you arguing the snowball wasn't started by racials and belves (and especially Belf racials)?

[RobertMugabe]

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.

Saying they don't care is actually wrong. They aren't playing Horde, because they simply like this faction more, but because their racials give them an advantage over playing Alliance, even if it is just minimal.

No one is asking for 50-50 balance, but some 70% of all raiding guilds being Horde (because they were so OP in the past) is very bad for the game overall and will just snowball further and further. Blizzard must find ways to make it compelling for raiders to switch over to the Alliance and they already kinda do it, just not enough IMO. Alliance guilds at least need to be competitive that's it. If nothing's being done then just more and more people will continue to faction change, while many other people will just quit playing altogether, because they don't want to pay all the transfer costs or for them it's just not the same game anymore if they play a faction they didn't play for all these years.

Worst case is they make Alliance racials quite a bit better for a while and then balance things out again. I am sure it will piss off a lot people so it's not ideal (especially since in turn many will feel forced to faction change), but that's how it's been the other way around for like a decade.

[Marrilaife]

Further, are you arguing the snowball wasn't started by racials and belves (and especially Belf racials)?

It doesn't matter who or what started it. What matters is that it won't end until every alliance mythic raider either quits, stops raiding or forks 55$ for the change. Then it will stop, with the complete eradication of the alliance, which the loud horde fanboys will applaud to. The "faction" system will only exist on paper with everyone actively playing being on 1 faction. But it's the faction that has the voice Blizzard listens to, so this can only go 1 way. It might take another 5 years to end there, but it will end exactly like that.

[Garymorilix]

Sad to say our Ally guild, with history dating back to vanilla ... moved to Horde in anticipation of the upcoming expac.

Now, we aren't anybody important, but I know we are also not alone as you noted. Big and small guilds are making the change. If you are into raiding or M+, then you benefit from the deeper pool on Horde side. What is unfortunate is that the trend has been allowed to continue ... to the point that most of us won't change back even with improvements to Ally, since there is a cost and pita factor that follows changing.

Sad days but true.

I don't care about the 1% being Horde. But someone that raids Mythic on Alliance will probably care that it becomes harder and harder to find new recruits to replace the usual turnover until they become unable to sustain a 20m roster while other comparable guilds on Horde suffer from this to a lesser degree and the choice becomes between disbanding or switching to Horde to be able to sustain the raid roster.

Heck I wouldn't be surprised if Heroic guilds are also seeing this happen more and more.

Can any of you actually tell me anything other then "it's harder to find replacement"?

What the fuck, do you need a replacement every other day or what? I have yet seen someone come up here and actually complain about not finding an Alliance mythic guild...
Oh wait, they are probably busy searching and doing trials, not whining on forums.

Maybe don't kick your healers after 1 death on Maut and you won't have to endlessly search for replacements every single day.

It helps if you actually read the thread.

You can keep being pretentious.
Saying shit like "if you don't see the issue then i don't know what to tell you" is like saying absolutely fuckin' nothing but being smug about it.

You have no actual lines of thought, you just try to shit on people that can actually express themselves cuz they oppose you.

[RobertMugabe]

They should just enable cross-faction play at this point. 16 years of H/A is boring as fuck. If people want faction pride classic is there for them.

IMO the faction conflict should stay, since it is important for PVP, but it is also simply a central part of the game and of the lore. However I do think cross-faction PVE content could and should be possible, such as raiding, especially since most of the time the factions don't play any role whatsoever there.

[Garymorilix]

Saying they don't care is actually wrong. They aren't playing Horde, because they simply like this faction more, but because their racials give them an advantage over playing Alliance, even if it is just minimal.

No one is asking for 50-50 balance, but some 70% of all raiding guilds being Horde (because they were so OP in the past) is very bad for the game overall and will just snowball further and further. Blizzard must find ways to make it compelling for raiders to switch over to the Alliance and they already kinda do it, just not enough IMO. Alliance guilds at least need to be competitive that's it. If nothing's being done then just more and more people will continue to faction change, while many other people will just quit playing altogether, because they don't want to pay all the transfer costs or for them it's just not the same game anymore if they play a faction they didn't play for all these years.

Worst case is they make Alliance racials quite a bit better for a while and then balance things out again. I am sure it will piss off a lot people so it's not ideal (especially since in turn many will feel forced to faction change), but that's how it's been the other way around for like a decade.

You can play the racial card.

Then you can actually go and look at how racials mean absolutely fuckin' nothing.
In fact, the Mechagnome racials are more OP then anything the horde has.

Are you a Mechagnome?

[Saltysquidoon]

It doesn't matter who or what started it. What matters is that it won't end until every alliance mythic raider either quits, stops raiding or forks 55$ for the change. Then it will stop, with the complete eradication of the alliance, which the loud horde fanboys will applaud to. The "faction" system will only exist on paper with everyone actively playing being on 1 faction. But it's the faction that has the voice Blizzard listens to, so this can only go 1 way. It might take another 5 years to end there, but it will end exactly like that.

I was probably unclear. I was using your data to show the other guy his argument about it only mattering for the 100 hundred guilds was wrong.

- - - Updated - - -

You can keep being pretentious.
Saying shit like "if you don't see the issue then i don't know what to tell you" is like saying absolutely fuckin' nothing but being smug about it.

You have no actual lines of thought, you just try to shit on people that can actually express themselves cuz they oppose you.

There was nothing pretentious about what I said, I was just pointing out that your argument about this 'only affecting the top hundred guilds' is objectively bullshit, at least in the top 1500 guilds horde outnumber alliance two to one.

Further, what's your argument? Beyond "that's the way it is", like the problem wasn't caused by OP horde racials in TBC.

[RobertMugabe]

You can play the racial card.

Then you can actually go and look at how racials mean absolutely fuckin' nothing.
In fact, the Mechagnome racials are more OP then anything the horde has.

Are you a Mechagnome?

Reading your other comments in this thread I kinda expected that you wouldn't actually read my post...

I will rephrase it a bit and maybe you'll actually get the point and not write a retarded reply like this again (I don't expect it tho): The Horde has had objectively far better racials for more than a decade and those that actually made a huge impact on the gameplay. This got only worse in Legion where their racials were incredibly OP in M+ too. Now it's not like that anymore, but a decade of vastly superior racials and then balancing out them won't stop the snowball effect that it had caused.

If you think that racials never mattered, then you've never played this game at a higher level. And you've especially never played Alliance.

[LordVargK]

Can any of you actually tell me anything other then "it's harder to find replacement"?

What the fuck, do you need a replacement every other day or what? I have yet seen someone come up here and actually complain about not finding an Alliance mythic guild...
Oh wait, they are probably busy searching and doing trials, not whining on forums.

Maybe don't kick your healers after 1 death on Maut and you won't have to endlessly search for replacements every single day.

You don't sound like someone who has ever been part of a raiding guild.
The game exists for 15 years now. Raid content comes out every 6 months, give or take. It's not uncommon for someone to take a break after progress and some of those don't come back, because RL exists and we all get older. There's a base fluctuation in every guild, it's just that on Alliance guilds you lose members but you'll have a hard time finding anybody new.

I mean, I as a pretty casual Alliance player get regularly approached in mythic plus pugs about joining a mythic raid. The situation has to be pretty serious if some random casual gets approached by mythic guilds.

[Sharnie786]

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.

Your post just reads angry person that doesn't understand the argument.

The reason it matters is because it is hard to play with people altogether with a dwindling playerbase. Try and find a guild to do mythic raiding with. Try and find people in LFG or a guild to push keys with. It's almost impossible sometimes. A Skittish, Bolstering, Sanguine key which is Fortified for TD is dead with barely any DPS wanting it and almost no healers or tanks other than inexperienced ones.

Maybe you're Horde or super casual so you don't see the issue but anyone that plays Alliance and plays it like an MMO instead of just an RPG will tell you that it very much is a problem.

[Marrilaife]

I was probably unclear. I was using your data to show the other guy his argument about it only mattering for the 100 hundred guilds was wrong.

This is a typical rhetoric of horde players and casuals, that "it doesn't matter". First it mattered for top 20 guilds, then for top 100, now it's around top 300, it will come down. It's like sitting on a hill looking at waters flooding and saying "I'm on a hill, it surely won't come as high as here".

The question is, if it "doesn't matter" for horde players that alliance is rapidly depopulating, why even keep the illusion of "2 factions" when the other faction is slowly but surely disappearing?

So far alliance existing in the form it exists now fulfils only 1 function. Stroking horde ego "we're superior and they suck".

But as warmode taught us people don't wanna fight on the losing side. And this will only get more and more pronounced.

No one wants to pay a sub just to play the role of sheep thrown in front of the wolves. And yes, Blizzard can be very short sighted and not care about losing Alliance players as long as they're raking their 55$ for every faction change. But this well will dry one day and the long term outcome is many subs will be lost, because from my personal experience the people who quit, very rarely come back.

[Shaetha]

I literally posted the numbers. 469 CE alliance guilds on wowprogress vs 1091 horde. Now show me "your data".

I was responding to the part I quoted. Where you literally say you ignored data to make your point.

[TheLucky1]

This thematic isn't really new, you can find topics/videos about it during mop and wod already and with the KJ/goblin stuff it only got worse.

It's also way past the racial dps output, alliance has actually better output racials for most specs now if you care to look it up, it's only about the playerbase and amount of people to play with.

WoW is aging and bleeding players (which is perfectly normal for a 15+ year old game btw..) i don't understand why they divide the active playerbase artificially.. it just hurts most alliance guilds, especially during content droughts.

[Thage]

Everyone keeps citing racials, racials, racials, but right now Alliance has some pretty rad racials--void elves are notable standouts as are Dark Iron dwarves and even with EMFH nerfed humans are still your best race for rep-grinding, which means faster access to high-end crafting necessary for raiding, which means a head start on raiding over the Horde.

It's not racials at this point. Yeah, it was a player in the initial problem, but by now it's become its own beast. And honestly? The only way this is ever going to be fixed, permanently, is by removing the faction barrier in PvE. Yeah, I said it. Save your breath, I know most of the counter arguments and all of them pale before one cold fact:

Alliance raiding is a rapidly-dying scene. The raider pool on Alliance in most servers simply isn't sustainable, and on the ones it is, the Horde raider pool isn't sustainable. If your players are de facto forced into playing one faction over the other to reliably experience endgame content because the available pool of players on the other faction simply isn't there, there is a significant failure in your game's design and, for PvE, all roads lead to Rome here. The faction barrier is an active detriment to PvE right now as it removes the majority of the server from your pool of available raiders if you're on your server's underdog faction, and as this disparity inevitably continues to grow due to the disparity existing, that's only going to get worse and worse.

So, yeah. I know everyone's going to have a dozen reasons why they don't want it to happen, but we're coming hard on the cutoff point where removing the faction barrier for PvE is going to be a necessity and not a detriment. I think Blizzard knows this, too, which is why they soft-reset faction tensions back to Classic style where the factions are publicly cooperating without being totally buddy-buddy.

- - - Updated - - -

Maybe you're Horde or super casual so you don't see the issue but anyone that plays Alliance and plays it like an MMO instead of just an RPG will tell you that it very much is a problem.

To be fair, I mostly play WoW as a multiplayer RPG rather than a full-fledged MMO and I still see the problem. I see the problem because it trickles down into my play experience, even on a carebear RP-PvE server: if everyone who does endgame stuff goes Horde, I will either have to go Horde (and put up with arbitrarily being made the villain every time Blizzard runs out of ideas for an expansion storyline) or I will have to be happy with solo world content and the one dungeon group I can scrape together from LFG's sparse listings. That's the direction things are headed in even on Alliance-heavy carebear servers. I can only imagine what fresh hell it's like on lopsided PvP servers.

[Sharnie786]

As I much as I don't like the thought of playing with the toxicity that is the Horde (as proven by this thread) one of the workable solutions would be to allow races to choose their faction. Make every race neutral like Pandaren.

Story-wise it would create an issue because there will be no racial leaders tied to factions, however, gameplay would be better because you now have access to millions of players.

Another solution could be to either remove realms (also has problems such as economy etc) or to remove regions (has problems too because different hours of time means people won't be able to play together, for example in the UK and US there will be between 5 and 9 hour differences).

The final solution is just to allow cross-faction play for PvE purposes. You work together to kill the same boss in raids for similar reasons (other than in BoD) so it could possibly work but the logistics would be hard to control. How would you enable an Undead to talk to a Draenei in instanced PvE but make it not work in PvP and open world?

They could just give Alliance 10% dmg buffs all around for the whole of Shadowlands until the expansion is over, that would be a quick fix.

[Thage]

The final solution is just to allow cross-faction play for PvE purposes. You work together to kill the same boss in raids for similar reasons (other than in BoD) so it could possibly work but the logistics would be hard to control. How would you enable an Undead to talk to a Draenei in instanced PvE but make it not work in PvP and open world?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe that instance chat is language-neutral, so you don't accidentally confuse the hell out of your raid when you forgot to turn off Darnassian while queued up for heroics or BGs. If not, making that change would address most communication issues from a mechanical standpoint.

[guisadop]

Removing racials would only homogenise the game even further.. not everything needs to be about balance, people. Look at what happened after they started removing stuff in cata and finished with the pruning. Ally/horde ratio in top raiding guilds is basically a non-problem.

[Gaidax]

Ally/horde ratio in top raiding guilds is basically a non-problem.

You jest? Or is it your way to say that "duh all top guilds are Horde anyway"?