The most difficult thing to do is accept that there is nothing wrong with things you don't like and accept that people can like things you don't.
And again no it did not. It happened slowly over time as the players who enjoy wows endgame are drawn more to the horde and those who play alliamce are generally a lot more casul which is why they prefer that faction and playing ff14.
9.2.5 cross faction raiding has made it super clear. 100% of guilds I have pugged with have been the single most casual groups I have ever seen.
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The term fun and ff14 is on oxymoron. It does not make logical sense.
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.05% of players cared about rocket belt. It had no cause for any factio. Changes.
Wrong again. Even Blizz admitted that most hardcore guilds moved Horde. Why? Racials were better and hardcore players looking for every single 0.5% crunch.
Of course Alliance remaining playerbase was more casual because people who follow the meta switched factions.
Denying it wont do any good, since even devs does not bother denying anymore.
And crossfaction is dogshit solution, actually balancing factions through another racials skew and then “freezing” them is.
Also i dont know why are you so mad about FF14… and you ARE absolutely mad about it, no need to play coy, but most Alliance players left are those who mostly only play WoW alone, since once they find an alternative game they leave.
There is many good guilds still on Alliance but the thing is they like to play with themselves as a close group. Pugging is impossible and literally unbearable there which is why I moved horde to play casually and being able to actually do anything. Haha
If faction changes were only $5-$10, the alliance player count would increase at least 25%.
Let's not bring game vs. game derailment to this thread (e.g WoW vs. FF14), pivot back to the actual topic of the thread.
"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see." ― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
The alliance is already interesting. The faction unbalance was caused by player power and player power or a merge would be the only ways to fix it.
The reason the alliance always wins is because the horde's goal is always world domination or the purgation of the alliance. The alliance's is just 'survive'.
The game needs smaller scale conflicts like actually fighting over a continent or something. Then one faction can actually win without meaning the end of the other.
Last edited by Myradin; 2022-07-12 at 04:33 PM.
I'm not saying its easy, I mean, there's a reason why Blizz doesn't do it.
But in order for the HvA conflict to be interesting, there has to be something to actually gain or lose. But if every conflict is just one side going genocidal, its extremely boring, and makes it less and less resonable for neutral factions, much less the other side, to ever put up with them.
The solution is very simple.
1)Have a deep dive on what is defining each sub faction. Set up their internal politics, needs, priorities as a nation. Make conflicting politics inside of Alliance. The Dark Iron Business is different to Worgen. Don't make them all happy, cooperative and holding hands, that is boring and completely unrealistic even for a fantasy genre.
2)I think it would be great to set a story where you follow one narrative and see how it is developing.
In example choice A) Join the night elves in their efforts to rebuilt B) Join the humans and help them in Westfall because that zone is beyond broke.
Whatever choice you'll make you have to stick to it, and provide different rewards. Let there be one meaningful choice in game at least.
3) Give more shady characters, and get them all from just gray to completely amoral and vindictive. Alliance can still be "the good faction" but everywhere are black sheeps, and having some dark clouds inside would still invoke lots of interest. Let's use House of the Nobles again, still some political drama to takeover Stormwind
4) Make players lose at times - similar fashion like in Vash'ir in Cataclysm. I think it was the most compelling way to show that no matter what player did, against impossible odds you can still lose. But from each loss there has to be lesson learned, it has to give you some clue on what is next and how to work around it. I'm not talking about BfA-scale like loss. But something more bearable and something that can be used as a way to build up new NPCs, New Heroes and get some fresh blood. (Altho I'd say Horde needs new heroes far more right now).
I miss Mists of Pandaria
I agree with you, this lack of layers in the Alliance characters, with characters being either good or bad, with opponents becoming corrupt and evil (such as Fandral, Maiev, Benedictus) most of the time is dragging the story and faction quality down.
Not counting the lacks of proper internal politics, progress in the races' story with them staying stuck in the same status quo, and interactions between the races, especially non-human ones.
Also I think that the Alliance should have more and deeper storylines that don't involve the Horde, and where the faction and its races are actually progressing toward something, such as taking back homes or bettering the lives of the peoples or developping relations with neutral races and factions.
Make the Alliance the aggressors and their perception will change.