Faction balance is truly hopeless now.

[rrayy]

I don't remember running with one Alliance leader (Jaina) to save another (Anduin) as a Horde character in any expansion before SL. There's nothing left of Horde anyway, because Blizz are killing more and more Horde leaders. So yeah, they're not removing "factions", they only remove one.

Evey expansion has had both sides team up to kill a big bad. Yet, the factions still exist. ALso, there is still plenty of the Horde left. THey now have a council.

They aren't removing factions. End of story.

[Relapses]

Then there should be no problem no?

I and nearly everyone i know switched to horde because it was easier to find good people for raiding and mythic+.
This whole thing created the snowball effect for Raiders and other people who care about group content.
No idea why you think everyone runs aroudn alone. Simply not true.

This created the disparity between hrode and alliance rading guilds. Hell my old alliance server once was one of the best raiding servers in germany. Now their top 20 guilds would maybe be in the top 100 of my new server with horde.

I have no reason to switch back to alliance. The only reason would be if alliance would be so OP i would not have a choice. Which would create the problem in reverse.

Players who run high M+ and raid Mythic are an incredibly small percentage. Since this is the only content for which a perceived faction imbalance would impact it seems rather silly to make arguments that Blizzard is "ignoring" a problem that is far more pronounced for one specific subsection of players that also has an incredibly high likelihood to also be the kind who posts on fan forums.

[Jessicka]

Shouldn't be a problem since zones are sharded anyway.

[VinceVega]

Players who run high M+ and raid Mythic are an incredibly small percentage. Since this is the only content for which a perceived faction imbalance would impact it seems rather silly to make arguments that Blizzard is "ignoring" a problem that is far more pronounced for one specific subsection of players that also has an incredibly high likelihood to also be the kind who posts on fan forums.

Saying it only affects high mythic+ and mythic raiding is the same. But hey. You allready have your opinion. Endgame PvE is easier on horde side as the pool of players is bigger. Not just high end. Every level. But you seem to be one of the people who think onyl 0,0000000000001% of players do anything in groups anyway no?
So good day.

[kaid]

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.

I fully agree. In BFA it did not seem that bad at least on the PVE side of it but in shadowlands its serioulsy 10 to 1 horde to alliance when I am running around questing. It actually makes stuff hard questing and especially in the maw where the horde are just stomping around and its hard to find untapped mobs it almost feels like classic wow given how outnumbered the alliance seem to be.

[Relapses]

Saying it only affects high mythic+ and mythic raiding is the same. But hey. You allready have your opinion. Endgame PvE is easier on horde side as the pool of players is bigger. Not just high end. Every level. But you seem to be one of the people who think onyl 0,0000000000001% of players do anything in groups anyway no?
So good day.

What the fuck is this mythical "pool of players" you're speaking of? As of 2019, the balance between Horde and Alliance was almost 1:1. But hey, why base your argument in actual measurable data when you can appeal to emotion and use completely anecdotal evidence to make the problem seem more impactful than it is in actuality? My opinion isn't that a faction imbalance doesn't exist -- it's that if you only base your argument on the shit you read on forums you'd mistakenly believe the problem is a lot worse. For the content 99% of players do, the faction imbalance is completely meaningless.

[erifwodahs]

What the fuck is this mythical "pool of players" you're speaking of? As of 2019, the balance between Horde and Alliance was almost 1:1. But hey, why base your argument in actual measurable data when you can appeal to emotion and use completely anecdotal evidence to make the problem seem more impactful than it is in actuality? My opinion isn't that a faction imbalance doesn't exist -- it's that if you only base your argument on the shit you read on forums you'd mistakenly believe the problem is a lot worse. For the content 99% of players do, the faction imbalance is completely meaningless.

This.
People imagine that top 500 scene represents whole WoW population where alliance guilds are 1vs5 horde. It gets way more level if you look at top 3k guilds.
It's like War Mode. There must be a combination of underlying in game and psychological reasons for people who play alliance not to participate in world pvp and high end PvE. It's not just "Horde has better players" or "Horde has better racials".
I for a lot of people I know - we would quit wow before we really joined the alliance. That is how it goes for us.

[jazen]

Either eliminate factions or make racials mirror image. Tauren/Draenai same, night elf/blood elf same, human/undead same, etc....only way I can see to eliminate the imbalance caused by real and/or perceived benefits.

[Darien Stegosaur]

Either eliminate factions or make racials mirror image. Tauren/Draenai same, night elf/blood elf same, human/undead same, etc....only way I can see to eliminate the imbalance caused by real and/or perceived benefits.

That ship sailed a decade ago. Parity cannot fix the problem.

The issue is that the Horde already has all of the high-end players, so being equal means Horde is still objectively superior. Alliance would need to be as favored as the Horde has been for almost two decades.

[Adam Jensen]

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.

Racials are almost pointless and guilds faction changing are just the top 1% vying for world first. For the incredibly vast majority of players, racials are ignorable.

[bloodwulf]

Server stability and queues being a shit metric, but Stormrage-US had both and is Alliance dominated. It is also eligible for free transfers off. The faction imbalance is not going away. Even racials won't solve them. Stop with the stupid whining. Warmode as Alliance can often be a lot of fun even when numbers are against us.

[Triceron]

There is absolutely no "faction imbalance" problem.

There is a huge low /medium pop servers problem, due to the corporate greed of blizzard who refuses to:
1) forcefully merge low pop servers together
2) make server transfer much cheaper (like 5 $ per character)

I'm pretty certain that blizzard lost alot of people over the years due to this problem.

The problem with server merging is that the population spikes and wanes depending on content. Servers have to accomodate for the spikes, but the content is not consistent to the players enough to keep them around. There's a huuuuuuge population of people who only play for the story content and leave once that's done. If they merge the low pop servers then it leaves those returning players no where to be, and many who are already in guilds would not expect themselves to be booted off server just because they happen to play casually.

It's more complex than you might think.

[bloodwulf]

Either eliminate factions or make racials mirror image. Tauren/Draenai same, night elf/blood elf same, human/undead same, etc....only way I can see to eliminate the imbalance caused by real and/or perceived benefits.

If you think any factual difference in number of players is due to racials presently, you are delusional. The Horde is where it is at in PVE level due to the fact that they were historically the superior faction for a decade or more. At this point in time racials are typically a sub 1% difference at Optimal/Sim level of play, which 99% of the players are not at. Racials no longer provide any real meaningful difference, its the fact that the high end players went horde a long time ago, that gives them the advantage in PVE. They have access to a better quality recruitment pool, not a larger recruitment pool. For average players, Faction+Server transfers is still too expensive to justify moving, so everyone stayed horde. That is also why the best guilds are on a limited number of servers, and not spread across servers.

[crusadernero]

Just turn WM off. Its not THAT big of a deal now anyway. Most stuff we need to complete is a weekly thing now. In BfA the extra % was nice everyday, but its not like that now.

The faction balance is truly and utterly a huge dumpsterpile of shite, but Blizzard wont do anything with it.

And really, what can they do at this point? its gone to far without Blizzard stepping in and try to fix it.


The best solution would be if every alliance player turned on WM, and kept it on at all times.

[sponge5307]

Blame the player base. Playing on horde people seems a bit more mature. On alliance if a wipe happens during a pug oh my god all hell break lose. At least on horde peoplea re mature enough not to to start pointing fingers. Thats why I left alliance.

[Djuntas]

dude, auchindoun has always been dead, it was a backwater server to get pvp titles on, I was there on one of my alts to hunt down some glad dodgers back in wrath, and it was already dead back then. you obviously have no idea what you are talking about lol.

Also if u want faction balance, u want something that speaks to the casuals who have never done a +15 or set foot inside a raid outside of LFR, since that is 90%+ of the player base.

the entire faction balance issue is fairly deep and lengthy but you just simply understand nothing about it. do some reasearch first maybe?

o.o Bro, chill the fuck out. What does my server choice has anything to do with this topic? I went to Auchendioun back in like 2013-2014 or so (End of cata) because I finally had enough of my old vanilla realm, which I still miss, and then I moved to this high pop realm (It said high pop back then...Also stop thinking fan sites was as good back then as they are now...) mainly due to having a guild opportunity that I did not want to pass on...

Also we all know that its casuals that drive the growth of wow, your not smart for typing the obvious reddit shit. But what do you want blizzard to do...Give a transmog set for demon hunters or boob lift to humans? Racials back in TBC already made a lot of people go hord - Back in vanilla my realm was one of the biggest in EU, at one time it had queu time AND it housed some of the best guilds in (16# world Imba, iirc) and best pvperes...But what ya know, first Blizzard made faction migration, which drove all the pvperes to hord, and then in WOTLK the final nail happened when alliance side was so dead guilds like Loot FTW (former worlds top 10) just went to our server to have it easy.

- - - Updated - - -

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

Also this is such a good point. We need bonuses. Its the easiest thing blizzard can do right now and here.

- - - Updated - - -

Statistically speaking island expeditions were 9001% more popular than raids and dungeons, so blizzard should just scrap raids and dungeons and focus on island expeditions?

The thing is, in reality, statistics in this case doesn't mean shit. At least not character statistics.

Want some more stats?

hall of fame Ny'alotha, the Waking City:
100 ally: 04/14/2020 8:20 PM CEST
100 horde: 03/15/2020 11:23 PM CET

month difference

EP:
100 ally: 10/16/2019 6:40 AM CEST
100 horde: 09/05/2019 5:43 PM CEST

month and 1/3

COS:
ally didnt even finish, last place was 42 - 07/09/2019 9:40 PM CEST
100 horde: 06/16/2019 4:24 AM CEST

bit less than month difference but...

BOD:
100 Ally: 04/10/2019 4:37 PM CEST
100 horde: 03/13/2019 2:14 PM CET

another month (warning, retarded date format)

M+ leaderboards dominated by horde. Out of 200 places on all run leaderboards in season 4, only 23 (11.5%) are ally.
Season 3: 17% of top 100.
Season 2: 9% of top 100
Season 1: 5% of top 100

(those are way too low amount to actually calculate statistics but you get the idea).

Also thank you. What more do we need. But blizzard will never tell us the numbers...Also its so fun to play random BGs and have 80% loss rate...I dont care what the numbers say, thats what I get when I try.