Why Blood Elves will NEVER be neutral, and High Elves will NEVER be alliance.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

Mechanically or lore-wise?

Mechanically, for zero factions: The war has no impact whatsoever on the game world, is not needed for instanced PvP, and only serves any real purpose whatsoever on PvP servers (which usually devolve into ganking). I can round up a bunch of friends and go slaughter Alliance cities and NPCs, and it won't make any difference whatsoever. On the other hand, dissolving faction lines would expand grouping possibilities, open up racial possibilities (I'd love to play another gnome, but my guild is Horde so I don't have the option; no, goblin doesn't count), open up collection possibilities, and generally make many things possible that aren't possible now without any kind of real loss, particularly on PvE servers (keeping in mind that I oppose ganking, and don't consider its loss painful).

Mechanically, for multiple factions: Faction imbalances will always exist, and while connected/virtual realms address the problem, there are some great meta-political options for having multiple factions.... shifting alliances are a blast, and far more cutthroat than anything WoW has now or has ever had, regarding PvP. The factions of today are only tenuously held together at any rate, and if the factions weren't clearly separated by race you could have some interesting and logical groupings (Pandaren + Night Elf + Tauren, for instance). Everything that is supposedly great about world PvP would be even better under such a system; just wait until one group becomes dominant, and then all others band together to take it down, just to turn on each other when someone else takes power.

Lore-wise, Horde: While the Horde has backed a new warchief, Sylvanas and Lor'themar have little reason to do so. Their last warchief brought them to the brink of war with pretty much the entire world, and in particular the last warchief's actions painted a giant target on the Blood Elves, and closed off diplomatic options with the Kirin Tor and Jaina... and, yes, with the Alliance as a whole. While Vol'jin never supported Garrosh, and only gave him a chance because of Thrall, that's hardly a basis for trust. Thrall named Vol'Jin as warchief.... great, except he also named Garrosh as warchief, so again, not much of a foundation for support there. For the Forsaken, it's always been a matter of convenience and mutual defense, with questionable value to the rest of the Horde.

Lore-wise, Alliance: I've never understood why any other race pledges loyalty to the Human King. He was, at first, a warmonger, and now all of a sudden is all about peace and honor (game perspective; I'm not paying Blizzard to tell me lore points that should be in-game, so I judge him only by how he's presented in-game). Even if that's an improvement, it's not exactly reliable or consistent... and he has the interests of his people in mind, first and foremost, followed by the interests of the Alliance. Yes, I know, the original Warcraft game was about Orcs vs. Humans, but that's not a reason for the Night Elves to continue to ally with the Alliance over all others. The Horde's capital and dominion is primarily in Kalimdor, they're on the front lines.... now, after the defeat of Garrosh, is the perfect time to use those diplomatic ties through the Cenarion Circle to open new dialogues between Darnassus and Thunder Bluff, as well as between Darnassus and Orgrimmar, for the sake of preventing any future outbreaks of war... something that Varian is clearly not willing to do (he's still taking advice from Jaina, who's gone completely homicidal, probably because Blizzard's plan calls for the second-in-command to be a warmonger for the sake of dramatic tension) since his parting words were not a promise or hope for a better future, but a threat and an ultimatum.

Besides collecting pets, this wouldn't really help me or improve or enrich my gameplay. Why are you on the Horde side if you want to play gnomes? The same goes for grouping. That just makes no sense. You can easily level a gnome anyway; Servers aren't locked to factions anymore.

3+ factions are a different story though.

[Catdancing]

Destroy faction balance? There are already more people playing Horde than Alliance.

http://wow.realmpop.com/us.html

46.4% Horde

53.2% Alliance

so 53.2% is less than 46.4%?

[Ihnasir]

The 15% Tauren must be mostly me inflating those numbers.

[Thelxi]

Indeed. Blizzard would NEVER implement a race that will obviously end up being way too popular.

[majesta]

There is a fatal flaw in your data. It counts characters not accounts and the primary character played on that account. I have both multiple horde and alliance level 90s. I however would claim to be alliance as my true main. If everyone was forced onto ONE character those numbers would look vastly different.

[namelessone]

If there is one reason Blizzard will never make High Elves as an alliance choice is because it's a boring copy-paste of an existing race. If they need to create a new race with new models, they will always pick something ACTUALLY NEW over something that will be viewed by many players as a boring recolor.

Blood Elves will never be neutral either, because that would mean one faction would have more race choices than the other. This means Blizzard will need to add another new race to the Horde, which would in turn piss off Alliance players even more, because the horde gets a shiny new race and alliance doesn't.

[GennGreymane]

my main reason for at least playable high elves is this

They look identical to the B elves. They differ in Ideology and eye color.... its like saying the defias are a separate race.

[Clash the DK]

Here's the deal. If and when they give the option for playable Orcs without the stupid over-pronounced HUNCH, then they will have created the opportunity to introduce High Elves to the Alliance and bypass future faction imbalances. The whole current situation is laughable. Blood Elves as the most popular Horde race..... If they would just fix the damn Orc models and make them look like the concept/promotional art, then that would not be the case. The Horde literally had the most to gain or lose with the incoming model updates. And if it was done right, High Elves would not be a problem.

[HammondQ]

To some maybe. To many not. And I don't see what's so gross about any of the races, except the Forsaken.

Huge, grotesque, distorted features on the trolls, rotting corpses for the forsaken, Tauren are literally anthropomorphic cattle, and the Orcs are a bunch of stupid looking mouth breathers. All that is ridiculously tragic because the lore behind each of those races is actually quality original stuff and often compelling.

If orcs looked like this the horde wouldn't even need blood elves

[hrugner]

Debunked: One of the major reasons for Virtual/Consolidated Realms was to address faction imbalances and low populations. They've intentionally worked to pair servers together to fix faction imbalances. This was also one of the contributing reasons toward Blood Elves going to the horde in the first place. Also consider how often they've bent over backward to make sure things are even: Near Equal number of quests (Cataclysm was full of mirroring quests to fix imbalances in old zones), and giving Worgen mounts when they didn't need them just to make people happy.

They talk about working to address faction imbalance, yes. They mostly talk about it to explain why they aren't currently addressing faction imbalance.

[ttak82]

The huge imbalance of Blood Elves is definitely known by me as a Horde player, most of the Horde on my server are Blood Elf for some reason. While I'd love to pick the brains of players who choose to play as them over every other race in the Horde the reasons seem pretty obvious to me.

Firstly I think it's because they're the prettiest race of the Horde going by the usual concept of beauty most people are brought up believing in, particularly girls. While it not might appeal to most males the idea of playing as a barbie-esque elf or a effeminate boy-toy is probably too hard to resist for most female players when there's no other real option if you want to play with your Horde friends. The same goes for Alliance and Human/Night Elf females.

I feel this concept of beauty extends to the role-playing aspect of the game as those who don't feel they're beautiful in real life want to identify with what they idealize and want to be, and that's absolutely fine. Personally I couldn't be happier with my real life appearance and I feel no need to play as a traditionally beautiful character. I play a Troll.

From a lore perspective I think Blood Elves are pretty cool though I appreciate High Elves a whole lot more. It really just is the difference between purity and corruption even though the Blood Elves never asked for Arthas to fuck their whole nation up. I also see a lot of Blood Elf Death Knights around and I like the concept of that race/class combination. There would bound to have been plenty of elves risen by the Scourge after their invasion of Quel'thalas and Archerus is in the perfect location for it to make sense for them to start their journey there.

On the concept of playable High Elves honestly it would make more sense for the Blood Elves to be cured of their corruption (how many years has it been since we took back the Sunwell again?) and for the Silver Covenant to return to Silvermoon. Literally the only thing Blizzard needs to do is give players the option for Blue eye color and move some npcs around. Not a big deal and it makes sense from a lore perspective. They'd still be Blood Elves, just purified ones.

You forget that Blood Elves pre-Cata were the only Horde race able to play as Paladins - Same case as Draenei Shamans.

NEs are also slected as they were the only possible druid class pre-cata.

Assuming OPs numbers are somewhat accurate, its clear that unlocking new combinations has very little effect on population balance; Taurens are second on Horde side and they were a popular race for shamans, could only be druids pre cata and are also popular as Paladins. Shaman races in Alliance are not as popular as other races.

The idea that Blizzard content team will make a race based on fears of faction imbalance does not have any weight anymore. In fact more faction transfers to Alliance from BEs to HEs only means more cash for blizzard. It would actually be a sensible decision from a business point of view. It would also reduce the proportion of Humans and NEs as some people would also race change. (AKA lol more money for blizzard!)

IMO if blizzard does the following things, we might (keyword: might) see some shifts in population balance:
Undead Paladins: some Taurens and BEs and Alliance players will shift there.
Gnome Paladins/Hunters: more gnome rerollers
Worgen Shaman: This will be a very popular combo

Plus, A race such as Ogres would be an instant hit for horde players so this fear of faction xfers screwing balance is just fluff, really.

[Mirishka]

I love threads by psychics who have some untold ability to see into the future, thus declaring what will NEVER happen in a game that they have NEVER had a hand in developing. /eyeroll

[Steampunk]

WRONG

http://wow.realmpop.com/us.html

46.4% Horde

53.2% Alliance

I'm so glad someone posted it immediately. Realmpop is so great for showing people how their subjective opinions on population are just that...

Helped me decided to roll on Zul'Jin and Stormrage for H/A respectively too!

[cmats4020]

Faction I'm/balance doesn't matter anymore with the cross-server everything and the flying mounts which actually do reduce world PvP. Humans are the most populous race because of their PvP racial, and while the Horde has more players on PvP realms, it's because their races are more for PvP in general; almost all of them. On PvE and RP realms, the majority are Alliance because their racials fit more with PvE. A lot of Alliance racials fit well with PvP, but not as much as the Horde racials. We also have to put into account that more Alliance players are known to roleplay than the Horde players (Hence Moon Guard is more known for the Alliance roleplay and ERP in an Alliance town). Humans are also very popular because people do relate to them (no matter how ugly they look right now). To make it simpler, yes, the Blood elves were introduced to rebalance the factions, but again, that was Vanilla. With all of this cross-server going on we have in this current version of the game, it's irrelevant. We have realms that have a 1:7 ratio and vice versa in terms of factional balance; the argument is void.

Secondly, what makes you think that people are going to leave their guild or friends just to be a High elf? Until we have proper statistics, you can't make a logical claim that a HUGE amount are going to leave their faction for Alliance High elves.

Furthermore, do you work for Blizzard? Yeah . . . no.

my main reason for at least playable high elves is this

They look identical to the B elves. They differ in Ideology and eye color.... its like saying the defias are a separate race.

Except the Defias hate both factions. The High elves do at least make sense as a playable Alliance race as they are on the Alliance.

[GennGreymane]

The raventusk trolls are also horde affiliated. New troll race for the horde?

- - - Updated - - -

The grimtotem tauren made a treaty with the alliance in stonetalon... alliance tauren? Sure it was only in stonetalon, but hey even though some of them are hostile in other zones, they are alliance side at least once. Also they are back stabbing jerks.... sounds like the alliance has their version of the forsaken!

[cmats4020]

The raventusk trolls are also horde affiliated. New troll race for the horde?

As a sub-race they're possible. High elves could be introduced as a sub-race as well.

The grimtotem tauren made a treaty with the alliance in stonetalon... alliance tauren?

A treaty isn't the same thing as an alliance. You can still hate each other even with a treaty.

[GennGreymane]

As a sub-race they're possible. High elves could be introduced as a sub-race as well.



A treaty isn't the same thing as an alliance. You can still hate each other even with a treaty.

Sub race is fine, but dont give a blood elf some blue contacts and call it a new race. Also lore wise the rest of the horde is pretty iffy on the forsaken. just sayin

[Wyrt]

Sub race is fine, but dont give a blood elf some blue contacts and call it a new race. Also lore wise the rest of the horde is pretty iffy on the forsaken. just sayin

Hey, the blood elves would also need blue underwear and nail polish.

[Buxton McGraff]

I'm not buying any of that realmop BS.
More people are playing horde now than ever.
And horde isn't beating out Alliance population wise because of blood elves... It's because of the stupidity that is the racials. Horde racials are far better than Alliance. And WoW for the past several years has been entirely Horde centered.

[Barkhouse]

Thanks for making this. Personally I'd like to see the Alliance ask for something more original and interesting. It would give creative RPers who can RP something other than 'me in Azeroth' more to work with.