Faction imbalance a social issue? Requiring a social solution?

[potis]

I didnt even read, the imbalance of functions started because of racials 10 years ago buts its a minority problem, it continues because of the population imbalance since then, but has nothing to do with racials/traits etc, or lore, NOW, its just misinformation or old information that hasnt been cleared out when it comes on "searching".

This is what i noticed with multiple people starting WoW the latest years, because of Greek net cafe culture,and the nature of my job to IT support for extra $$, i tend to meet pretty much hundreds of people over the years that play the same games as me at periods.

The slightly already more "Hardcore" gamers, like the people that play more seriously than others, follow/gravitate towards what they are told is better, or what the rest in the netcafe play that they know are "Better", or they do some basic research after asking and they passively gravitated towards what the rest were playing, aka horde.

So you have all these 18-22 year olds, getting interested in WoW (Not that many over the last 5 years or so, maybe 20-30)half are already something like League of Legends Platinum/Diamond/Challenger, etc, CS:GO higher ranks etc, Dota 5K mmr + etc, but of course we are talking about 5-10 people out of all the people starting that are interested, out of a generation of maybe 300 young adults, every 2-3 years.

Guess what the rest 10-20 people pick :> the girl gamers and their boyfriends, their friends, etc..The non-ugly races, aka Alliance.

You know how many times i heard in squeaky girl voice "Ewww why does it have 2 toes" or "Blood elf is so pretty, but the rest are so ugly".

Now you have those 5-10 players hardcore mentality, trying to play catch up in 1-2 months, asking, researching, addons, etc, trying to do M+15 as ~2 month old players, copying the better players around them, they dont learn everything, but their class and the basic things go up way fast, its in their nature.

And you have the rest, literally logging on a few hours every week, taking 20mins to do a quest that takes 45 seconds, alt tabbing into heartstone, and pretty much not giving a fuck about ever learning the game, they all gravitate towards Alliance, very very few go horde, and its usually because out of a company of friends of 5, the 5th is a bit lower skilled/doesnt care, but followed his friends.

I have seen this happen, for every generation 5-6 times now since WoTLK.

[huth]

not really. in order to fix it Blizzard would have to make Alliance Racials OP then completely rework racials again to make things balanced.

That would at best be a short-term solution. As soon as one side gets bigger, it's the same thing all over again.

[Compher]

They could get rid of racials and the problem will likely still exist. If the top raiders/pvpers/whoever are currently horde, then a lot of players will want to go horde to either be like them or see them or whatever. This makes recruiting on the alliance harder because there are less serious players on the alliance, even aotc guilds have problems finding aotc players on the alliance. So, some alliance guilds go horde to have an easier time recruiting which makes the problem worse.

[Raetary]

not really. in order to fix it Blizzard would have to make Alliance Racials OP then completely rework racials again to make things balanced.

That won't solve anything.
All it would do is shift the playerbase to the alliance instead.

And whoops, you end up with the exact same problem but this time it's colored blue.

[Stormspellz]

not really. in order to fix it Blizzard would have to make Alliance Racials OP then completely rework racials again to make things balanced.

ally had times when their racials where superior, specifically in pvp and that made some high end streamers jump over (and followers) didn't move the bar for high end pve content

its is a social issue, for high end content you go where the groups are and that is on horde side.

[clevin]

it's not racials for most people. It is for those on t he serious, hardcore end, but that's not where most are. What's happened IS, I a sense, a social issue. Racials did cause s slight tilt to Horde. So did the Horde's reputation in PVP. This was a snowball... and it grew. Wh did id grow?

New Guy: "Hey, Bob, what should I roll?"
Bob: " Go Horde..."

and then as more and more rolled Horde, it became easier to just default to Horde. If you were rolling on a PVP server and its was 65/35 Horde... why roll Alliance? You're more likely to get ganked, less likely to have people to help, etc. If you're starting a guild, why would you not go for the faction with the most players, especially if you want to build a raid team or an RBG team etc?

IN short, once the Horde had a definite, even small, advantage there's an incentive to go Horde and not Alliance if you don't really care one way or the other. And the more people who do that, the large the incentive.

[Othraerir]

only way they can "fix" it in my eyes is cross faction, and that probably wouldn't go down too well.

[Traveler Voltin]

ally had times when their racials where superior, specifically in pvp and that made some high end streamers jump over (and followers) didn't move the bar for high end pve content

its is a social issue, for high end content you go where the groups are and that is on horde side.

to say its just a social issue is a flat out lie.
if you want to get realistic then so be it.

its a mix of both. people will flock with the min/maxers because blizzard sucks at balance.

[Marrilaife]

The real plan is to milk every single last alliance raider to fork for faction change, and then when finally there's no one on the alliance left except rpers in Goldshire, remove factions and finally tell alliance at heart raiders: see, you can play alliance races now, be grateful and pay us again to change back.

Cba with this scummy strat. The moment my last friends changed to horde, I unsubbed.

[Argorwal]

to say its just a social issue is a flat out lie.
if you want to get realistic then so be it.

its a mix of both. people will flock with the min/maxers because blizzard sucks at balance.

Alliance already have good racials though.

MDI tournaments are exclusively alliance.

Alliance racials are amazing in CN with bleed removal.

But nobody cares because unless the advantage is game breaking, having a large recruitment and guild pool is more valuable than anything else.

[Traveler Voltin]

Alliance already have good racials though.

MDI tournaments are exclusively alliance.

Alliance racials are amazing in CN with bleed removal.

But nobody cares because unless the advantage is game breaking, having a large recruitment and guild pool is more valuable than anything else.

it will never just be a social issue. Balance issues with always cause some social issues and its not just faction imbalance.

I am assuming the MDI is the mythic dungeon thing. who really cares about that? i thought it was mostly hated.
Cross faction play is a nice idea but with Ion in charge we are never going to get it.

[shoc]

Get rid of factions completely on PvE servers.

[Alatie]

not really. in order to fix it Blizzard would have to make Alliance Racials OP then completely rework racials again to make things balanced.

Yeah i rather not go back to the TBC days where everybody plays ally.

[Traveler Voltin]

Get rid of factions completely on PvE servers.

that is all servers.

[Argorwal]

it will never just be a social issue. Balance issues with always cause some social issues and its not just faction imbalance.

I am assuming the MDI is the mythic dungeon thing. who really cares about that? i thought it was mostly hated.
Cross faction play is a nice idea but with Ion in charge we are never going to get it.

The point is right now alliance racials are overall better than horde.

But it doesn’t matter, they aren’t better “enough” to make it worth losing the large recruitment and guild pool horde has.

I only brought up MDI because the players get to just pick their race/faction in a tournament realm setting, so for that the social aspects are not applicable and only performance matters, and they are all alliance.

Also Ion literally said in the Q&A last week that cross faction grouping was no longer off the table. That is the first time anyone in Blizz has said that.

[Stabbyfists]

I always felt like the faction divide was rather stupid. We worked together to defeat Archimonde in Warcraft 3, that should have been enough of a reason for us to work out a peace treaty and start working towards being together.

I get somewhat that it made sense for a RP perspective to have PVP events and world PVP in the early days of wow but after Wrath and Cata the whole "WE HATE YOU CAUSE YOU DIFFERENT FACTION" shit took a back seat to world ending threats like Arthas and Deathwing Its felt forced to keep the faction divide going with Mists only to come together in peace during WoD and Legion then to force ANOTHER war with BFA only for use to once more, work together during Shadowlands.

Solution : Get rid of the faction divide, allow us to play together for the most part, yes you can have Horde and Alliance themed quests and exclusive quests but let us Raid, Dungeon, and daily together and keep PVP in the Arenas and Battlegrounds where its mostly waged. Stop splitting the playerbase in half and just let us socialize in this social game.

[Nite92]

people whined when they had to switch to horde. no matter what people will whine.
there is no other way to fix the imbalance.

And then EXACTLY at the correct time you have to stop it to not create the exact same issue just with alliance being dominant.

[Nynax]

i say they are full of it. they are the ones who created this issues by making horde racials OP.

Well that's easy to fix. Make the Alliance racials OP enough for all the tip tier people to swap, wait for a bit while the "meta" followers also swap over, and then remove active racial abilities from the game

[Monkiy]

not really. in order to fix it Blizzard would have to make Alliance Racials OP then completely rework racials again to make things balanced.

And then when the Alliance racials are OP, the balance shifts entirely in the other direction and the exact same problem persists, the shoe is just on the other foot. What a stroke of brilliance. I can't imagine why you don't work for Blizzard. Congrats on solving nothing.

[Argorwal]

And then when the Alliance racials are OP, the balance shifts entirely in the other direction and the exact same problem persists, the shoe is just on the other foot. What a stroke of brilliance. I can't imagine why you don't work for Blizzard. Congrats on solving nothing.

And Blizz gets to pocket all that transfer money!

His idea is brilliant!!