An interesting observation about the H/A ratio

[deenman]

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?

well they did this before when nerfing humans,entire pages of the pvp ladder was all humans

either way,this is becoming a big problem again...they rly need to do SOMETHING

personaly i would just like crossfaction,they can just make up some inlore reason for it,like mercenary for pvp

or just completly change the racials,no more output racials,make everything convenience like vulpera,and give free transfers to aliance until the numbers balance out

[Garymorilix]

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 - - -


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.

My argument is pretty simple so you can also understand: It does not fuckin' matter.

So what it if outnumbers? Who cares? Who does it affect? The top 1500 guilds are still pretty much the top 1% by the way.
So I have no idea how this should affect your average WoW player or why anyone should even care.

Here's an idea: Nobody is stopping you from making the best fuckin' Alliance mythic raid guild that ever existed. You just don't want to put in the effort and instead whine here.

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.

Okay, so here is the paradox:

You acknowledge that the best players will use whatever tool available that gives them a slight advantage in order to be ahead of their competition.
Racials being good mean that the choice between either faction is meaningless as you want to be in the one that provides you with the better boost.
In the spirit of healthy competition this provides you as a player OR spectator a reason to actually care about high end PVE competition, as if teams were gimping themselves by choice it not only would be unfair competition BUT also extremely boring to watch one team being annihilated because of a choice that is objectively the wrong one.

Therefore, if you truly care about high-end PvP then factions simply do not matter. What should matter to you is the competition and that you will pick whatever gives you the better chance at winning.
This simply means that you do not actually care about the PvE itself, but arbitrary shit like whether your team is red or blue.

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.

Your inability to organize a stable raiding roster is not Blizzard's, mine or anyone else's fault.

Nobody is stopping you from building the ultimate über hardcore world first Alliance guild. You just can't do it because you would rather have someone else or a council bicker about inviting people rather than doing it yourself.

I was in a few raiding guilds a few times but the sheer amount of incompetence made me quit. I'm a goal oriented person and if I want to clear something then that is what I will work towards, I have no patience for people that clearly suck at the game but are so dependent on each other that they fail to replace the correct person. Which is like 99% of guilds.

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.

First off: there are weeks where certain dungeons are dead. It's just what it is. If you try to force it cuz you like bleed out of your eyes for some reason then it's not the fault of people who would rather not do that.

You can make your own über mythic guild. I'd suggest you do that.

Reality is most guilds are shit. The leadership is either way to elitist for their own skill OR keep friends on the roster who literally cant even play Havoc they suck that much, or they are the girlfriend.
Ofc new recruits won't stay in such a putrid environment.

If you have an issue finding new players then I would suggest looking at why.
And the answer is not that they don't exist, that's a lie you tell yourself to feel better.
The answer is that they do exist but don't give a fuck about your guild for one reason or another. Fix that first.

[Sharnie786]

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.

You're right that removing racials NOW won't change anything. However, i disagree on it not being a problem, it really is, not just because the majority of this post are saying it but because the majority of the Alliance playerbase and even the keen eyed Horde players (of which there are few) would say it too.

[LordVargK]

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.

Pruning was the consequence of people like you crying about "homogenization".

[Marrilaife]

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

Do you have a counter argument or just nitpicking? Because imo CE 6 months into the tier is a decent cut off point for talking about mythic raiding, in the same manner if I talked about marathon runners I would only consider people who actually completed the track and not quit 5km in.

[Oneirophobia]

I don't think they need to do anything with racials or stuff that actually directly affects your performance, it's more that the Alliance really haven't done anything particularly interesting in a while. They have these huge unfinished stories (for example, Gilneas) and I think it turns people off because the Horde seems to get the spot light and have issues explored all the time, while the Alliance never seems to start stories and if they do, they then either become irrelevant in their own plots because the Horde swoops in and does something, or the story just up and stops and never seems to get continued.

It's like playing any of the xeno races in 40k, the story's main characters are obviously the marines. Everyone else is a foil for them.

Hopefully the Night Warrior plot blows the dust off the Alliance faction.

[Saltysquidoon]

My argument is pretty simple so you can also understand: It does not fuckin' matter.

So what it if outnumbers? Who cares? Who does it affect? The top 1500 guilds are still pretty much the top 1% by the way.
So I have no idea how this should affect your average WoW player or why anyone should even care.

Here's an idea: Nobody is stopping you from making the best fuckin' Alliance mythic raid guild that ever existed. You just don't want to put in the effort and instead whine here.

Me and me and apparently the OP and apparently some number of people in the the 1500 guilds in the world (elsewise this wouldn't be a topic of discussion constantly). My guild had to do a faction change at the end of Cata because raiding had become unsustainable, we could not replace players at the rate we were losing them in Dragon Soul.

As for your bullshit "You could just make the best alliance guild ever if you tried" argument. You realise of course that the lack of population (which no one so far as I know in this thread is contrasting is true) makes it objectively harder to make a good alliance guild then a good horde guild. That's the fucking problem.

[Sharnie786]

My argument is pretty simple so you can also understand: It does not fuckin' matter.

So what it if outnumbers? Who cares? Who does it affect? The top 1500 guilds are still pretty much the top 1% by the way.
So I have no idea how this should affect your average WoW player or why anyone should even care.

Here's an idea: Nobody is stopping you from making the best fuckin' Alliance mythic raid guild that ever existed. You just don't want to put in the effort and instead whine here.



Okay, so here is the paradox:

You acknowledge that the best players will use whatever tool available that gives them a slight advantage in order to be ahead of their competition.
Racials being good mean that the choice between either faction is meaningless as you want to be in the one that provides you with the better boost.
In the spirit of healthy competition this provides you as a player OR spectator a reason to actually care about high end PVE competition, as if teams were gimping themselves by choice it not only would be unfair competition BUT also extremely boring to watch one team being annihilated because of a choice that is objectively the wrong one.

Therefore, if you truly care about high-end PvP then factions simply do not matter. What should matter to you is the competition and that you will pick whatever gives you the better chance at winning.
This simply means that you do not actually care about the PvE itself, but arbitrary shit like whether your team is red or blue.



Your inability to organize a stable raiding roster is not Blizzard's, mine or anyone else's fault.

Nobody is stopping you from building the ultimate über hardcore world first Alliance guild. You just can't do it because you would rather have someone else or a council bicker about inviting people rather than doing it yourself.

I was in a few raiding guilds a few times but the sheer amount of incompetence made me quit. I'm a goal oriented person and if I want to clear something then that is what I will work towards, I have no patience for people that clearly suck at the game but are so dependent on each other that they fail to replace the correct person. Which is like 99% of guilds.



First off: there are weeks where certain dungeons are dead. It's just what it is. If you try to force it cuz you like bleed out of your eyes for some reason then it's not the fault of people who would rather not do that.

You can make your own über mythic guild. I'd suggest you do that.

Reality is most guilds are shit. The leadership is either way to elitist for their own skill OR keep friends on the roster who literally cant even play Havoc they suck that much, or they are the girlfriend.
Ofc new recruits won't stay in such a putrid environment.

If you have an issue finding new players then I would suggest looking at why.
And the answer is not that they don't exist, that's a lie you tell yourself to feel better.
The answer is that they do exist but don't give a fuck about your guild for one reason or another. Fix that first.

Your response to everyone was the same, and much like your first response very angry and chaotic.

You fail to see past your own self. Stop and think for a second. Yes, there are players, however they are split among many servers, and there is a smaller pool of people.

If we just take the top raiding guilds as an indicator of what the actual playerbase for each faction is there are 20% fewer players on Alliance than on Horde. It means, you know those guilds you talked about with carries and bad players, they are more common in the Alliance because anyone wanting to push keys and have a higher chance of having more people that share their goals and is a good player will go to Horde, simply because there are more players there.

I am really not sure what's hard about that.

If you really think it's that easy to make an Alliance mythic raiding guild please do that experiment before preaching your unproven nonsense.

[LordVargK]

--snip--

Do you talk about WoW here?
You really seem like you talk about a game, where one player is enough to complete a mythic raid team. Else your "make your own guild" comments can't be explained. I don't really know what is so hard to understand. But I break it down for you:

There are more players on Horde side that want to to serious Mythic raiding than on Alliance side.
If you found a guild on Horde side, you will have plenty of players to build your roster.
If you found a guild on Alliance side you don't have many players to build your roster.
So existing guilds, that are in search of players don't find replacements. Meaning they can't do mythic raid, because you need 20 players. So they a) disband or b) switch factions.
Now there are even more serious raiders on Horde side.

Now explain to me how "just make your own raid" solves this problem?

Also I don't know where you get the "most guilds are shit"- attitude. Most guilds are not shit. Maybe most guilds you were a part of were shit. But that leaves you as the common denominator...

[Nitros14]

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?

That's really how they'd have to do it.

Make alliance grossly overpowered for a bit until it's even, then nerf alliance back to parity.

[Sharnie786]

I don't think they need to do anything with racials or stuff that actually directly affects your performance, it's more that the Alliance really haven't done anything particularly interesting in a while. They have these huge unfinished stories (for example, Gilneas) and I think it turns people off because the Horde seems to get the spot light and have issues explored all the time, while the Alliance never seems to start stories and if they do, they then either become irrelevant in their own plots because the Horde swoops in and does something, or the story just up and stops and never seems to get continued.

It's like playing any of the xeno races in 40k, the story's main characters are obviously the marines. Everyone else is a foil for them.

Hopefully the Night Warrior plot blows the dust off the Alliance faction.

personally, I don't think the lore is pushing people who play competitively away.

Blizzard has done a bad job of selling the Alliance, even look at the BfA cinematic, the "For the Horde" scream gained more attention and if you were a new person to the franchise and saw that cinematic you would think the Alliance are the aggressors and this was intentional on Blizz's part because they do have a Horde bias.

However, the lack of competitive players is attributable to the snowball effect of initially racials and then just the fact there were more players on Horde

[agentsi]

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.

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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.

Good job lying there bud. As of today.. 559 Alliance guilds have killed Nzoth, and only 557 Horde guilds. According to Wowprogress. And this is only in the USA, not globally.

Good job bullshitting your numbers to create a fake narrative. That should be bannable on these forums. That is also just in general a real asshole move.

[Marrilaife]

Good job lying there bud. As of today.. 559 Alliance guilds have killed Nzoth, and only 557 Horde guilds. According to Wowprogress. And this is only in the USA, not globally.

Good job bullshitting your numbers to create a fake narrative. That should be bannable on these forums. That is also just in general a real asshole move.

Bro go back to school and learn to count.

What you're looking at is "US rank at which last alliance guild killed Nzoth" and that counts both factions. So yes, you not only can't read data but also have to go insult others to fit your fake narrative.

Go filter guilds US and you can scroll, there's 10 pages, 20 guilds per page, and 20th page only has 9/20 guilds at 12/12. So that makes 189 alliance guilds in the US region which generously counts Oceanic which is very Alliance heavy.

Out of those 189 guilds 59 are oceanic. That leaves 130 NA Alliance guilds in the pool.

I could link the screenshots from wowprogress but I doubt mods would appreciate 10 pages of wall of text.

Meanwhile US-Horde has 19 pages of guilds at 12/12 with the last page at 10/20. That's 370 guilds in the US region. I doubt many of them are Oceanic but let's subtract that just for the sake of parity. 19 of them are Oceanic. 351 are NA. 351 vs 130.

Yes, 189 + 370 = 559 The number you see is the US rank of the last guild on the list, counting both factions. But you didn't count. You didn't check. You assumed and went to call other people assholes.

[LordVargK]

Good job lying there bud. As of today.. 559 Alliance guilds have killed Nzoth, and only 557 Horde guilds. According to Wowprogress. And this is only in the USA, not globally.

Good job bullshitting your numbers to create a fake narrative. That should be bannable on these forums. That is also just in general a real asshole move.

Get yourself banned then. Because you looked at the overall US statistics. 557 is the US rank of the last Horde guild (trivial pursuit) that cleared Nyalotha. 559 is the rank of the last Alliance guild (Superstars). It's not the number of Horde or Alliance guilds, it's their US rank.

Please don't be so aggressive if you are so incredibly wrong.

[Oneirophobia]

personally, I don't think the lore is pushing people who play competitively away.

Blizzard has done a bad job of selling the Alliance, even look at the BfA cinematic, the "For the Horde" scream gained more attention and if you were a new person to the franchise and saw that cinematic you would think the Alliance are the aggressors and this was intentional on Blizz's part because they do have a Horde bias.

However, the lack of competitive players is attributable to the snowball effect of initially racials and then just the fact there were more players on Horde

You're right, it is a snowball effect, and racials are one small past part of it. There are more players on the Horde because the Alliance is second fiddle and players generally don't want to play second fiddle. Because of that, now you have more people on the Horde. Because you have more people on the Horde, now you have more higher-end players looking to go Horde because there are larger recruitment pools. People see big guilds moving to the Horde, now they want to move too. All of this stuff is connected in one way or another, it's like loving one child more than the other, eventually it will affect them, or if you don't patch a hole in a leaky bucket eventually all the water is gone.

[Steelangel]

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.

Speaking as a long term Alliance player, I don't want my faction overwhelmed with a bunch of twitch-addled sex abusers.

[exochaft]

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.

That's pretty much been my experience, as well. Maintaining a roster for mythic raiding as Horde is drastically easier than Alliance alone, aside from all the other tangible/intangible benefits. Even on a server of Alliance that still technically pops up as high population, the amount of people actually able to raid mythic at a decent level (heck, even wanting to raid mythic at all) is pretty bad compared to my Horde chars on similar population servers. I still maintain the hardest part about mythic raiding is maintaining a solid roster, not the actual raid itself.

Unfortunately, this is the result of many decisions over the years when it comes to WoW as an MMORPG. Blizz has murdered the social pillar of WoW in varying ways over the years to where these issues exist, along with removing almost any incentive to actually mythic raid despite it supposedly being the end-all content of WoW. While the actual solutions to the problem at this point are complicated and varied, I can guarantee there would be a lot of moaning and complaining from the peanut gallery (aka player base) because there's probably no way to fix issues like these without sizable adjustment pains. Admittedly, the pain is the result of Blizz's behavior in the past when it comes to game design and philosophy, but it must be done at some point if Blizz really wants to attempt to solve such issues.

[Danvash]

Why does it matter?

Because it doesn't make sense for Warcraft to be a one faction game.

Because people want to be able to play Alliance races and be successful in high end content.

Because long-standing Alliance communities are fractures when people feel pressured to switch to Horde to be able to play at a high level.

Because in competitive play, if one faction is always favored to win, the other one eventually just quits due to burnout or switches to that side themselves. And then queue times become even longer over time and the W/L ratio skews even further when all the good players are always stacked on one team.

Blizzard can fix the faction ratio; they just choose not to because they'll stop getting the big bucks from faction transfers. The simplest way is to make it so factions do not matter anymore outside of world pvp. Let anyone group with anyone and temporarily just join the party leader's faction. Abolish racial languages so there is one Looking For Group and one Trade per realm shared by both factions.

Another way they can fix the faction balance, but that would piss off the people who already jumped on the Horde bandwagon, would be to buff racials across the board so that instead of a small 1% benefit, everyone either has as large as a 5% damage benefit or a very good survivability on use ability with multiple charges. Doing this would make it so that without question, Alliance is better is at some things while Horde is better at other things. And if you have a very difficult boss where Stoneform trivializes a mechanic, you'll get Horde guilds switching to Alliance when they've hit a wall on that boss. Small things like this in the Horde's favor is what led to everyone going over there in the first place (ie Kil'jaeden). Blizzard just need to add a little imbalance here and there in the Alliance's favor to bring some of them back.

[Echocho]

If they would stop giving all the good looking racial models to the horde we could get some more allys

[MyWholeLifeIsThunder]

But for real, unless the factions "merge" -even if only on a PvE degree- the Alliance pop health will simply not recover unless there are some major incentives, because after the gap appeared, it's not just one factor and it just keeps snowballing.

Because there's just no incentive for being in one side when the other has it so much better, for myriad reasons, as people from the guilds that have transferred have mentioned-

So what should be the carrot? Maybe it should be less about bonus resources and more about... bragging rights like exclusive titles? I really don't know.