Faction balance is truly hopeless now.

[Mardux]

So looking back last 5 years we all know that the horde has largely decimated alliance in population. But Shadowlands launch truly shows just how bad and dire the situation is now.

Only a SINGLE, O N E , alliance realm globally from what I could gather going through Twitter-Blizzard-tech-rep and blue posts had any queue time or connection issues, and that was Silvermoon EU.

I fear the day I haft to move from Ravencrest to Silvermoon, cause Ravencrest will also die out. Its gonna bloody happen with the way things are going. I had hoped I found a stable and true-high pop realm back in WOD else...Now I see only Silvermoon is true high-pop, the way an MMO should be played.

It's time to be RADICAL BLIZZARD. Give alliance major bonuses like War mode 100%, racials so good it's broken (BUT disable them in raids, pvp etc)...Anything to keep the population alive. Or at the very least offer free migrations once every 2nd year or so.

See thats the problem with only looking for evidence if it supports your claim and dismissing any facts that are contradictory to what you *want* to believe. You usually end up saying some stupid shit.

NA-stormrage and NA- Frostmorne, both heavily alliance favored, were two of the 5 realms that had queue times and connection issues.

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Agreed, that is also a major problem. Would love if they would close 80% of realms, but that wont happen. As you can see in this thread some people dont even think faction merge will come - While others even wanna play alliance, but their friends dont want to.

By now hord is the easy mode faction. I tried for instance hord out in wow classic and ROFL its true - Everything was just so much easier...Farming AV wins with 100% win rate, aka grinding exalted with no losses...Everything was a breeze.

Know what else was a breeze? Farming bgs and rep as alliance with no losses. The only thing that wasn't a breeze was trying to decide which race had the best racials in the game for what I wanted to do; nelf, human, or dark iron.

[Al Gorefiend]

They need to give the Alliance a sexy weeby race, with cat ears or bunny ears or whatever the hell depravity is considered sex appeal anymore. Worked with their blood elf idea to address Vanilla's faction imba

[Oneirophobia]

My guess is they are doing nothing about it because they are preparing to remove factions as we know it in the future instead of horde/alliance, you will have system like covenants, and PvP will resolve around them fighting each other (but both horde and alliance can join either) while pve will be one big family.

The story suffers dramatically from this archaic faction war bs anyway. The game would be far more interesting if all the azerothonian nations had the freedom to ally or war with each other regardless of what their main faction used to be.

[Ryzeth]

I'd love if they divorced game story, from game mechanics, akin to how Everquest worked. In my opinion it made these kind of problems a non-factor, and actually made the game better as a whole.

Opposite factions were still considered enemies, in the sense you couldn't waltz up into their city. But you could guild/raid/dungeon with them etc. PvP was the only thing you couldn't do together.

[Halfaheart]

i play with warmode off (Horde US) but my guild complains constantly about the alliance death squads constantly ganking them. Maybe your server is imbalanced or you just have bad luck with sharding

[Djuntas]

i play with warmode off (Horde US) but my guild complains constantly about the alliance death squads constantly ganking them. Maybe your server is imbalanced or you just have bad luck with sharding

I have no problems with pvp, I welcome it even. Always WM on as alliance. But when im questing in say Uldum, Mechagon or w/e we we're 80% of days always outnumbered.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Faction balance has never been much of a thing in the NA eastern area. The only big alliance server is and has always been Stormrage, while the horde has Area-52, Thrall, Zul'jin, and Bleeding Hollow which once upon a time was 50/50 but that started changing towards the end of WoD.

[Marrilaife]

There is absolutely no "faction imbalance" problem.

Spotted a person who never does higher m+, mythic raiding or battlegrounds.

[Rustedsaint]

Hah, my horde toon been constantly stuck in high alliance population shards to the point I had to turn off wm to level

[Beloren]

God, that sucks that we didn't have enough connection issues. On Sargeras-US (Alliance dominated realm), it only took two hours for me to get into the game, and we had only two days of input lag compared to the Horde giants.

...Let's be real. The split is like 60-40 in favor of Horde. Not 90-10. The fact that the top 100 guilds are mostly Horde doesn't mean you can't play Alliance. Blizzard can fix things like PVP imbalance with solutions like allowing players of both factions to Merc and join random teams, or allowing cross-faction play in dungeons and raids below Mythic difficulty. There's no need to make the Alliance overpowered again. That happened in WoD, and all it did was make everyone switch to Alliance while the Horde complained about imbalance instead.

That was one of my main points in the post a few replies above yours, if you want to check it out.

The alliance is still playable in a 60/40 ratio and in 65/35 or even 80/20 because of the technologies that came in.

The need to improve the alliance from the gameplay point of view I.e to improve the quality of the game isn’t really there, not like it was in classic for improving the horde when none of the technologies like xrealm/LFG/R etc and same faction activities like Same faction BGs/arenas were around.

This was the urgency that shifted the franchise focus to be horde centric to boost the horde and save the game that needed realms far more balanced then than they are now. As long as the alliance has the more human looking races people relate to, it makes sense for the tone of the game to be horde centric as the alliance nature will pull people to it by default before they switch.

It is also a bigger cash cow for blizzard triggering paid faction transfers which will be tolerated as long as the imbalance isn’t detrimental to the gameplay, which so far it hasn’t been, precisely because you can play alliance okay even if it’s just not as busy as the horde.

Finally I don’t think the devs want to, I think pushing the horde first for many years has developed an affection for those orcs and Tauren and trolls and it certainly fits the whole woke theme. Where blood elves and Nightborne give an aesthetic option for those who such things matter.

They can throw the alliance a few bones. I don’t think over powered racials is the answer, but making the alliance feel a lot more majestic might work.

Especially boosting night elves and void elves without affecting blood elves and Nightborne.

What I mean is that focus on making night elves the amazing Kaldorei of the best parts of both their pre-sundering empire and their long vigil period. Give them a Zin’Azsahri type amazing city, great forests with powerful Highborne And Moonguard Alongside powerfull Druids, rangers in nearby forests and Moon Priests operating great in both parts. Make them feel the massive powerful original elf race they were in the earlier lore and War of the Ancients, sort of like how the Zandalari are to trolls rather than just a much forest elf side group irrelevant and on the brink of extinction - this revival would be a powerful incentive attracting many to both the wild and high civilised sides of the Kaldorei and the Much broader fantasy they initially represented

You don’t need to give them Suramar or Silvermoon, just do them up great, improve their models a bit more.

Don’t stop with the Kaldorei, massively develop the void and high elves with new cool ideas and infrastructure and lore building.

Do likewise for void elves. Bring high elves in properly as a thing that is tied to void elves. Like void elves need a high elf pairing to access much more of the void without succumbing to its madness while high elves find their light powers are magnified by being bonded to a void elf as the light surges in reaction opposition. The pairing balances both high and void. Let these elves have the void/arcane, light/arcane focus while blood elves are more about arcane, fel and blood. They keep their paladins but they light/void thing becomes more an alliance Thalassian thing. Which fits the Alleria/Turalyon thing.

You can create a great new city for the void and high elves in 10.0 and a new legacy for the high elves tied to the new ren’dorei. Could be something interesting like a great Thalassian city that has a light and void mirror. The fans would love it, while the blood elves continue as is in Silvermoon and the horde.

Night Elves - the star arcane civilization
Moon and starlight
The night, night religion
High arcane/city And well
Forest wild half
Animals, half animals, World trees
Nature Druid wild magic.

Alliance Thalassians
Void arcane frost magic
Light arcane magic
Ranger wood elf Farstrider vibe

Blood elves have a more arcane, fel, blood crystal magic vibe thing going, much smaller on the paladin and ranger fronts.


This would boost the profile of the alliance as elves are really popular, wi thy out making horde ones feel bad or losing out.

The improved alliance elves will draw a few lore orientated players back to make things work on the alliance.

You need these people cos they are enthusiastic about playing the alliance for the great fantasy not just racials, so they’ll be devoted. And the fantasy of the Kaldorei civilization is the stars combined with it’s wild magic foresty long vigil other half is a very powerful one unique one offering something very different but equally attractive to the Thalassians. So is that of the high elves but in a new symbiotic void elf duality.

This Will be good because humans alone is obviously not enough. And great developments inspire the sort of people who would make their home on the alliance and expend the energy to build it up. Without this sort of inspiration they will not. That’s why you need to boost their elves a lot.

Then they will work extra hard to make guilds work and raids work, fuelled by the fantasy that is attractive and with more raiding guilds working into the alliance it will solve the main problem enough

The horde may still have the majority but the alliance would have options fuelled by the fantasy lovers who are inspired by the cool developments to the alliance elves.

I wouldn’t recommend nerfing blood elves or Nightborne by making them lose stufff, it’s not necessary and may prove harmful - causing damage to your playerbase unnecessarily.

All you need do is just let the elf focus be on the alliance for a couple of expansions in order to build their races up and re-establish their original attractiveness, especially the popular elves for a couple of expansions ( I recommend giving New Zin’Azshari and another void capital in the next expansion and really building both groups up considerably.

Fortunately we are at a stage where we can now afford to let alliance races shine in the lore without fearing people will abandon the horde, the racials don’t need to be changed, nor do the horde elves need to be nerfed.

The alliance elves need major boosting. That’s all

[Zyky]

Let's be fair it took the horde a decade to snowball to this point, there's nothing to suggest even if blizzard 100% reversed the racial problem (which they wouldn't) would correct overnight (if at all).

The problem blizzard has is they've pinned themselves via inaction. They clearly don't want racials to be a big deal in combat, almost every change they make to racials is to reduce their impact on combat. But at the same time by not ever buffing the alliance racials is how we got here.

Let's be fair, no it didn't. Players were having the same discussions and problems 10 years ago in Cataclysm. Literally nothing has changed except the playerbase got smaller and Blizzard has buffed Alliance racials pretty significantly since that point, in comparison.

[Saltysquidoon]

Let's be fair, no it didn't. Players were having the same discussions and problems 10 years ago in Cataclysm. Literally nothing has changed except the playerbase got smaller and Blizzard has buffed Alliance racials pretty significantly since that point, in comparison.

So exactly what I wrote?

[Queendom]

My guess is they are doing nothing about it because they are preparing to remove factions as we know it in the future instead of horde/alliance, you will have system like covenants, and PvP will resolve around them fighting each other (but both horde and alliance can join either) while pve will be one big family.

So far the whole SL experinece points to that.

[Echo of Soul]

Now that Against overwhelming odds don't award gear anymore I see no reason to play alliance.

[vincink]

Just wait a few months. The Horde players tire themselves out and the unbalance is reduced a bit. Horde players are kind of like kids on a sugar rush. Once the rush dies off, they crash in the corner until they can get their next fix, i.e., the next major content patch.

[dcc626]

So looking back last 5 years we all know that the horde has largely decimated alliance in population. But Shadowlands launch truly shows just how bad and dire the situation is now.

Only a SINGLE, O N E , alliance realm globally from what I could gather going through Twitter-Blizzard-tech-rep and blue posts had any queue time or connection issues, and that was Silvermoon EU.

I fear the day I haft to move from Ravencrest to Silvermoon, cause Ravencrest will also die out. Its gonna bloody happen with the way things are going. I had hoped I found a stable and true-high pop realm back in WOD else...Now I see only Silvermoon is true high-pop, the way an MMO should be played.

It's time to be RADICAL BLIZZARD. Give alliance major bonuses like War mode 100%, racials so good it's broken (BUT disable them in raids, pvp etc)...Anything to keep the population alive. Or at the very least offer free migrations once every 2nd year or so.

stormrage-us was dead for several days. its an alliance heavy server as well.

as for blizzard tipping the scales the other way, all it would do is unbalance the game in the opposite direction. doesnt fix anything.

guessing since you are alliance you wouldnt have a problem with that.

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My guess is they are doing nothing about it because they are preparing to remove factions as we know it in the future instead of horde/alliance, you will have system like covenants, and PvP will resolve around them fighting each other (but both horde and alliance can join either) while pve will be one big family.

my guess is you are wrong.

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Racials should have been removed long long ago, only reason they weren't is Blizzard saw dollar signs with whole guilds faction changing so chose to ignore it.

all removing racials would do is...not have racials anymore.

wouldnt fix imbalance.

[Djuntas]

@dcc626 Dead for several days in what way? Queue time or lag? Cause nothing was on Ravencrest and its from what I understand the biggest alliance realm besides Silvermoon, or maybe im wrong here.

[Zyky]

So exactly what I wrote?

Not at all, keep trying though bud.

[Gorsameth]

Let's be fair it took the horde a decade to snowball to this point, there's nothing to suggest even if blizzard 100% reversed the racial problem (which they wouldn't) would correct overnight (if at all).

The problem blizzard has is they've pinned themselves via inaction. They clearly don't want racials to be a big deal in combat, almost every change they make to racials is to reduce their impact on combat. But at the same time by not ever buffing the alliance racials is how we got here.

The problem isn't racials, it hasn't been for years. The problem is population.

There are more raiders on Horde, so Alliance guilds with recruitment problems switch to Horde and get access to more recruits. Alliance characters who can't find a guild switch to Horde because there are more Horde guilds. Its snowballs and has been snowballing for a long time and it WAY beyond the point where its about racials or power.

Its purely a case of player numbers now.

[Kauko]

Just merge the player base and save PVP ques and Alliance competitive PVE... Keep War mode, but everyone for themselves. No more A vs H...