Massive migration from Alliance to Horde

[Hinastorm]

Thats the issue - they really can not do that anymore. From an Alliance POV there is no greater threat than the Horde. We have seen in BfA that is not their leader that makes them do evil things, its their inherent nature. It never was only Sylvanas that is an "enemy of life", it is the whole Horde.
There simply is a point where "there is a greater threat, lets band together" does not work anymore, and when the horde, after dropping the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on one of your cities, commits a genocide in an unprovoked war and then commits atrocity after atrocity (e.g. impaling people on walls and let their children watch as they die in Brennendam), you can not just dissolve faction borders anymore. It already made no sense so bond together agains N'zoth, because the Horde still was the bigger threat in 8.3, it makes no sense to work together in Shadowlands and REMOVING the factions NOW or after Shadowlands is the most incoherent and stupid writing they would ever do.

Cool mmo lore, but I still think the health of the game is far more important.

Most of us don't care about all that. We just want to play a healthy PvE mmo.

Reading about all the problems ally guilds are having PvE wise is concerning.

I'll add that i'm pretty sure in the inevitable void expansion, it won't be that hard of a sell to band together.

[Lazuli]

I used to say this in vanilla/TBC days as a joke (minus the dead thing), mostly, to tease some friends who were playing alliance. Still, every joke/tease has some dose of truth in it, so...

Sadly, I don't think they can be any easy solution. It would be cool if they could somehow allow cross faction guilds and PvE grouping, so people could choose their faction based on what seems better to them (RP, aesthetics, story, whatever wise), but I don't think bliz would want to risk with such a big and fundamental change to their game. They'd get so much hate from RPers... For me, RP in such games should be a secondary thought, an afterthought at best. Gaming experience should be the top priority.

Before cross-server grouping and linked servers, people were transferring to more active servers. Like I had transferred to an active PvE server early TBC, from a low pop dead for PvE raiding server, and it was money well spent. The gaming experience I got in that server was nothing like I could ever get on my old one.

Now that we have such things, people are transferring to more active factions... People are looking to improve their gaming experience. That's normal and natural. That doesn't mean that you can't find a good gaming experience in alliance, especially if you are in a nice guild and you are playing with nice people. But still, there will be a time you'll need fresh blood to fill in your ranks for PvE raiding. And when you realize that this is way harder on alliance side, you'll get thoughts of migrating... Over time, a lot of guilds will choose to migrate, like they used to migrate from low pop servers to higher ones. Now it's between factions.

And sadly, until the problem becomes big enough, I don't think bliz will address it. So, if you can afford the extra cash to have a better gaming experience, why not transfer? Can start with just 1 character, maybe even start fresh if you don't want to pay for a transfer. When many more do it and the problem becomes too big and apparent, maybe they'll take serious steps towards fixing it.

After all, if we all transfer to horde, they'll either fix this problem or delete Alliance, like you delete and empty folder, after you've moved all the files to a different one. Not much thought required, just hit delete. :P

I transferred one of my rogues to horde and I can't even play it due to aesthetic differences, did do all of horde pve zones and some raid and pvp but didn't seem any less clown fiesta than alliance. I guess it only matters on the very top end, cuz I don't mythic raid or anything. Plus.. dazar'alor is easily the worst fucking hub ever made that made me instantly regret the transfer.


Realistically ally wont die but I wonder if blizz is really ok with horde being the only mythic raiders? I guess they don't give a shit cuz I sure don't, if I did I would be playing horde too.

[Marrilaife]

I was wondering what is the reason for this.

Have you been living under a rock? Alliance was slowly depopulating since MOP and Troll racial advantage but it really sped up in Legion with belf racial for m+. Since then only the most stubborn m+ players or mythic raiders stuck to alliance but after no faction merge announced for shadowlands many of them lost hope and decided to give in and go horde.

[fwc577]

Recently I started looking for a new guild and I was quite suprised to see that on my server which is one of the highest populated EU Alliance realms probably 15 out of top 20 raiding guilds has moved or is moving to Horde on either Kazzak/Twisting Nether/Draenor etc. I was wondering what is the reason for this.

Surely it is not going to make things better with the faction imbalance at the moment but I think there is anoher reason which might be bigger number of customers for PvE boosting. Does anyone have any "internal" info on what is happening ? This is not a coincidence of just a couple of people deciding to play Horde because they like it - it is a massive migration of high end raiding guilds and there must be a specific reason for this.

Nobody wants to play the evil characters (alliance)

[orsraunia]

Noooo....when BL came, Alliance could play shamans..this is simply not true.

Pala bubble was a big deal for raiding in classic and there were also other pala abilities that were a big help. Shamans had.... totems. Alliance side always drew more RPers and casuals than horde side, but you can blame the racials and shamans if you like... And tbh, the faction/raiding imbalance wasn't big in classic. There were enough alliance guilds competing at a very high level.

Racials had a role in all of this, but mostly some expansions later. Still, not as big as people think. No1 reason for faction imbalance was that horde had more raiders that were active, dedicated, hardcore. And thus, bigger pool for recruitment, easier to fill the missing spots in the roster and even improve its quality. So, it kept on going like this until... until the snowball effect that had been happening became obvious to players. I mean... bliz had to know this had been happening for a long time now, no? No way they don't have metrics about transfers, etc. It's something that contributes to their income, so I am pretty sure they pay close attention to what gives them money.

Blaming shamans is burying your head in the sand. I know a lot of raiding guilds that would prefer having palas instead of shamans in classic. Horde always had more dedicated raiders, alliance had more RP events and nelfs dancing naked on mailboxes. Depending on how you like to play the game, you choose your side. Most people choose horde, is that odd?

Finally, it's so easy to tell the rerollers. We had a warrior tank joining our guild as a trial early TBC. He asks "what are we raiding today", we say "Gruul" and he responds "Lets go in his cave and judge him"... There you go, alliance pala rerolling warrior, so obvious haha. No hate ofc, just saying. All welcome to horde

[Kithelle]

Hopefully many still stand with her, death to the alliance!

Well the Alliance isn't dead, and you were pawn that was used, abused, and abandoned by her. Hope you know you were meaningless to her and failed your task

[korijenkins]

Like others have said it used to be because of racials, but that hasn't been much of an issue. But since most of the raiders started the migration there is a lot more people to pick from Horde side, so naturally guilds migrated. Don't know how you can really fix it outside of maybe allowing cross-faction raiding.

Just eliminate factions altogether because realistically they serve no purpose.

[Kithelle]

It's because Ion has been too busy designing cool stuff for the Horde over the past few years.

Which he happens to play...isn't it just funny how he is a Horde playing raider and the game is biased towards the Horde and raiding? Total coinkydink right?

Gotta love how the man in charge doesn't care about the game or the players, just what he wants.

[Cæli]

what's really annoying though is that when you purposefully play on an alliance dominated server, you're often phased with countless hordes from random servers, that steal your mobs or kill you in groups of 5, when there's like only you on the phase
blizzard shall really start to look at their game for once

[Faeris]

what's really annoying though is that when you purposefully play on an alliance dominated server, you're often phased with countless hordes from random servers, that steal your mobs or kill you in groups of 5, when there's like only you on the phase
blizzard shall really start to look at their game for once

Servers haven't mattered since war mode was introduced. The game automatically tries to balance out the amount of alliance/horde in 1 phase.

[Schattenlied]

That actually sounds really metal, really cool... This game needs some darkness. Too nice, too chipper. This is the world of WARcraft, not the world of mercycraft.

You realize that Azeroth is under threat of total annihilation literally constantly, right? We don't need a faction war for it to still be WARcraft, we're always at war with some external threat trying to destroy the world.


Not that that matters... Almost every time we go into a raid to destroy some major threat it's under the flag of a neutral organization, it makes perfect sense that even if the Alliance and Horde were engaging in occasional skirmishes that we should be able to party up for dungeons and raids because in the lore, both factions are fighting that threat for the same neutral party anyways.

The "war" will still exist in war mode, everyone wins.

[Cæli]

Servers haven't mattered since war mode was introduced. The game automatically tries to balance out the amount of alliance/horde in 1 phase.

yes, tries is the word

[shise]

I played Alliance Darksorrow. Always raided on the realm top 3. Even in BC we had some Horde guilds pushing.. I think it was from WotLK that the realm started to become a clear Alliance realm, and form there on specially. I recall the realm being a pretty competitive Alliance realm too.
Somehow guilds started dying out, forming new ones.. eventually there was no Horde at all.

Ironically, the realm died Alliance wise as well, having really few guilds raiding at all. Everyone I knew vanished. I was quite casual and not raiding for nearly 3 whole X packs anyway.. but as I came back to playing more in Legion, I realized that I needed a realm that is alive. It was hard but in BfA I went back to the Horde, where I once started before BC. But I also moved to Draenor. At least here you know nearly 100% that you will always have community for anything for the rest of wow´s life, most likely.

Switching ream and faction after so many years is not easy, but these are scale factors. Few people moving pushes others. I dont think it is something new.

[Kalisandra]

Sad truth the answer to that question is Bloodlust.

Already in Classic that pulled the hardcore raiders towards Horde and the Alliance side really never recovered even though Bloodlust became avaviable to both sides.

One problem with this theory - Bloodlust/Heroism was introduced in Burning Crusade, so both factions got it at the same time, though of course it took a little while for the Alliance's Shamans to hit endgame, just as it took a while for the Horde's new Paladins to hit L70. As in BC good DPS were still threat capped, getting Paladins with BoSalv into their raids mattered at least as much for Horde as getting Hero did for Alliance, probably more.

[crusadernero]

In this day and age where min/maxing is everything, the only logical choice would be to play horde if you want to push higher content - especially in raiding.

With the horde racials being better than alliance and the fact that the best guilds played them, people leaned towards that faction.

can anything be done to it? Yeah, give both factions equal racials. Racials that can be called something that fits each race, but does the same thing. Will it happen? probably not.

[Kuja]

True. Alliance always gets 30% exp boost from war mode, so there's definitely lots more horde.

Horde racials are more powerful when compared to Alliance racials, and from my experience people playing horde seem to be more skilled in random groups. So I'm probably making my main be horde in Shadowlands.

Except leveling dungeons are an exception. People just don't understand how to play their characters usually. Like arcane mages not even using arcane blast always. But maybe it's just the influx of new players and affects alliance as much.

[Raelbo]

Then you have the opposite problem. It doesn't solve anything it just cycles where the issues are.

Why would you say that?

If the buff goes to the faction that is has less numbers, and is proportional in power to the disparity, then then incentive would always be for people to try to get the faction balance to 50/50, and once it is there, there would be very little incentive for people to switch. So you'd never have "the opposite problem"

Without such an incentive, being imbalanced favours the side that has more players, which results in the imbalance getting worse.

[Accendor]

You do realize they aren't real don't you?

? And because they are not real completely derailing any sort of coherent story is ok? Did you also enjoy the last GoT season?

- - - Updated - - -

Hopefully many still stand with her, death to the alliance!

Just to make this clear, this is a completely viable way of looking at it (with the exception that she also wants death to the Horde, but Ill get what you mean).

[Kauko]

I am fine on Outland and Maelstrom as Alliance. Both healthy servers, nice communities, many PVPers, more than solid PVEers. What more do you want? And besides that, I am not the 1% nor the wannabe 1% so I don't need to follow others like a sheep...

[Tiwack]

They'll make ally racials the better ones for pve soon for that extra $. As OP says, more players buying boosts is also a factor for faction change.