Shortly before 8.2, only 13/100 Alliance cleaned CoS

[RaZz0r]

You'd be surprised.

most likely but what is really the point from a game play side point since pretty much forever the story has come down to lets put a side our differences and fight the big bad i just don't see why players cant decide to do that from the start in stead of faffing about with this whole we are at war because reasons stuff.

[MoanaLisa]

I understand why factions exist, why designers once thought they were important, etc. I also understand the reluctance of the developers to let it go. At heart some of them still see this as primarily a PVP game. PVP games are popular right now so they're trying (unsuccessfully) to plug into that still.

I get all of that and can still say that divisions of players based on their faction needs to go. It's tiresome after this many years and it feels to me like we're at the end of a very long tail of diminishing returns that benefit the game because of its existence.

[KaPe]

most likely but what is really the point from a game play side point since pretty much forever the story has come down to lets put a side our differences and fight the big bad i just don't see why players cant decide to do that from the start in stead of faffing about with this whole we are at war because reasons stuff.

Not to mention that there was a grand total of three bosses that were slightly different, based on faction - Faction Champions back in WotLK and Grong+Jadefire in BDA. And "different" just means "different models and names", while having the exact same abilities.
E: And Gul'dan had *slightly* different intro lines depending on faction.

[Schizoide]

I would make non-PvP Warfronts cross-faction too, just use the mercenaries/BoD faction-switch mechanic to switch the minority over to the majority. Everything but PvP should be cross-faction.

That doesn't mean alliance should be welcome in Orgrimmar, the world doesn't need to change, that conflict is central to their stories, such as they are.

[seleri]

The real question, that none of us have the answer to, is how many Alliance guilds are even trying to do mythic CoS?

100+ Horde guilds cleared mythic Battle of Dazar'alor in the time it took 14 Alliance guilds to do it.
100+ Horde guilds cleared mythic Uldir in the time it took 12 Alliance guilds to do it.

Yes, CoS is probably more drastic because it's a mini raid that's a pain in the ass, but it still fits a pattern.

Horde is where you go if you want to PvE seriously. It's only going to get worse as people continue to realize this and jump ship from the Alliance.

[deenman]

Nothing will ever solve the faction imbalance. The only way to fix it is to get rid of it and allow cross faction play.

Edit: in fact, I'd be surprised if cross faction (at least instanced) PvE isn't a feature of the next expansion.

they can fix it by completly removing performance racials,make them only visual or small profession bonuses etc,and give free horde>aly,and monitor it so it doesnt swap to much

[seleri]

they can fix it by completly removing performance racials,make them only visual or small profession bonuses etc,and give free horde>aly,and monitor it so it doesnt swap to much

What incentive would people have to go from Horde to Alliance when their guilds and all of the other players that want to PvE seriously are already Horde?

[Azzurri]

Just make cross faction play. Honestly, who cares about faction pride, I actually prefer race pride and let me choose who I play with. As for PvP, arenas, BGs are like sports anyways you can compete against someone and still be friends

[agentsi]

I feel like this is just a preference thing. The racial skills are fairly even, Alliance was broken in PvP for years (humans, shadow-meld) but in PvE, it really doesn't make or break Mythic guilds.

I just think people hate playing as the alliance, and they're super PC world. I prefer the style of horde races, art wise, ( troll for life ). But I've also played/raided as alliance in the past. I personally have always just preferred the horde side of things. As do most people in my guild, and those that I've talked to about this specific issue.

If you want the alliance to be played more, make them appealing. I don't want to be the follower of a man-child who cries all the time. Varian was awesome, little lion, is not. nor is the way they handle things, they often forget the past and label horde as the bad folk. When half the raid bosses we have, came from alliance story at various points. The burning legion coming to this world? alliances fault. That's most of the game right there, but for some reason, horde are still the bad guys.

[seleri]

In my eyes there is no incentive you could realistically give while also keeping the balance (performance wise, ie racials etc), can you expect people to pay anywhere from $50+ dollars to change one or more chars over without doing broken racials. Blizzard need to bite the bullet and offer free transfers back to alliance and then do them in batches, something where you register your willingness to move over, if enough people sign up to it on a given realm, upon hitting that number they will activate that transfer for a large number of people, that way people dont move over alone and feel like they regret it because its dead, everyone will go in one go and blizzard can calculate the numbers required to move to make things balanced, for huge servers you could do it in multiple smaller transfer groups.

I doubt this would ever happen and not as in "I doubt Blizzard would ever do it" because I actually think they would if they thought it would help. There's no reason to risk moving from something that's working for you (Horde) just to try out something that has a track record of mediocrity at best (Alliance).

That isn't even mentioning how it could fail spectacularly. Say you're thinking of moving your guild to try to go for a Hall of Fame spot but you're worried about a lack of experienced players on Alliance. You see that the free transfer is getting close to the threshold required to trigger the move and think enough Horde are moving to maybe make up for lack of an Alliance player pool. Except when the transfer goes through, you find out that most of the people that moved were just fifth-tier alts that people took advantage of the free transfer (for whatever reason) and don't plan on raiding seriously on them. Now you're stuck on Alliance and still don't have a decent pool of players to recruit.

Cross faction play is the only actual fix.

[Has lost its way]

It is a combination of issues from the alliance getting the short end of the stick with racials for to long and the ever increasing time sink walls blizzard is putting up around raiding with grinds like ap.

Raiding as a whole has been in decline for a while.

[Cæli]

always thought that combat related racials were bad design... I'm not the only one to think that.

allowing cross faction play already exists as far as I know with mercenaries; but this sounds weird.

there has always been two "sides", where the other is completely hidden (where you get killed if you get into an opposite faction city)

so I have a hard time imagining cross faction play, but maybe it's all about implementation;

like mercenaries feels fine to me

maybe some kind of "pact" could be made by the players (or by blizzard by default) that allows players to enable cross faction grouping and talking, while keeping the horde npcs hostile, which would normally keep the "mystery" on what happens really in the other faction

removing factions completely would feel so weird imo.

if the main reasons behind faction switching is the player "network" and not the game's environnement, then playing with the UI might be enough to put everything into balance.

[Nathasil]

It really should be a huge warning sign, and presenting that data to the players to see is really not such a great move.

Sure there is a massive unbalance in factions, yet there are more than enough players on alliance said that actively raid. 21% of heroic CoS logs on warcraftlogs are alliance. Now it's always the argument that the best players switched to horde long ago. But does a raid make sense when you need the best 1% out of the 1% that can actually beat it?

That means that the raid is vastly overtuned, that it's simply not worth the effort, raiding is in steep decline overall, or a combination of that all. But is actually someone wondering when you can get very close rewards as mythic raiding from doing 5 player dungeons, and then to even make the problem worse which was still rather controlled in Legion by class sets by removing those?

If you subtract the 7-8 "worldfirst guilds" from the Horde numbers the Mythic mode is actually not that far off from the 1:4 A:H ratio you see for HC. It#s not that the raid is overtuned (which is may be!)....it's just that "nobody" plays endgame on Alliance. And that is not limited to raiding either. It's the same for M+ (only in MDI they swicth to Nelf, in their normal season playtime almost all of them are Horde only) and PvP.

[MatadorMedia]

We are at a point where the faction war needs to be tossed out and let guilds do cross faction raiding.

Or it will just keep getting worse

I keep ranting about how Legion presented the unification of the factions as the next logical step, and then Blizz backtracked with azerite and an entire expansion built around a faction war. It was the opposite of what made sense. Hopefully they get it together and unify the factions next expansion.

[dekal]

This concerns the very best guilds in the world (less than 1% of the total population). While it is indeed a problem, I highly doubt this would be something that they would prioritize allocating any resources to fixing as the return on investment is just too minuscule.

Even if they did want to fix this, they would need to provide an incentive for going to the Alliance. They tried small incentives, but it was not enough to sway top Horde guilds, and the community responded negatively by complaining of favoritism. If suppose they buffed the Alliance's racials and offered free guild transfers, the community would go absolutely nuts; and even if that worked, the pendulum would now swing to the other way.

I just hope they can introduce a new "mercenary" or "pacifist" faction comprising of both factions that want to focus on PVE content. Maybe have it driven through the story with one of those non reversible choices? (faction changing still allowed for those who want to pay).

[Temp name]

It's a result of a cascade effect that's been overlooked for several expansions...

only way to "fix" it, would be giving stupidly overpowered racials to the Alliance for like 2 expansions

That would just reverse the effect, meaning Alliance would be vastly overpopulated with high-end raid guilds. The only way to truly fix it, would be to get rid of the faction barrier in gameplay. Most of the raids we do are "Stop this primal evil or the world fucking ends" anyway. It's not like "Stop this random dude or he'll take over Stormwind" like it was with Dead mines, it makes no sense for only 1 side to send in their soldiers lore-wise (Especially not for an expansion like Legion that was built on everyone coming together)

[rogoth]

This concerns the very best guilds in the world (less than 1% of the total population). While it is indeed a problem, I highly doubt this would be something that they would prioritize allocating any resources to fixing as the return on investment is just too minuscule.

Even if they did want to fix this, they would need to provide an incentive for going to the Alliance. They tried small incentives, but it was not enough to sway top Horde guilds, and the community responded negatively by complaining of favoritism. If suppose they buffed the Alliance's racials and offered free guild transfers, the community would go absolutely nuts; and even if that worked, the pendulum would now swing to the other way.

I just hope they can introduce a new "mercenary" or "pacifist" faction comprising of both factions that want to focus on PVE content. Maybe have it driven through the story with one of those non reversible choices? (faction changing still allowed for those who want to pay).

that's where you're wrong, it affects everybody, we are getting to the point where you play horde if you want to actually raid 'properly' and alliance if you want to collect transmog/battle pets as your end game because the player population for high end content on alliance side is almost all but extinct now, you're going to get to the point where the horde will fill the hall of fame and not even a handful of alliance guilds will have managed it and by the time the next expansion comes around there might not even be any high end alliance guilds left (talking ones that can make it on the front page of wowprogress).

[schwarzkopf]

To be fair, I didn't feel it my responsibility to clean an evil shadow lair.

I did however clear CoS, but am in the 13 you list.

Curiously though - 4 of the 7 US guilds on your list of 13 are Aussie guilds

[Gigantique]

They could easily do this lorewise by having dungeons and raids not tie directly to factions, and instead go back to the good old days of «A band of adventurers» doing the clearing. Just because the factions themselves are at war, doesn’t mean a band of adventurers can’t comprise of an Orc, a Blood Elf, a Human, Night Elf and a Gnome. Sure, there could be tensions, but just because the armies of the Horde burned Teldrassil doesn’t mean every orc was part of that/approves, and so the Orc and Night Elf in the merry band of adventurers that cleansed *insert dungeon* could still be a thing.

They already have our characters bounce back and forth between fanatically following the orders of our Horde commanders to doing the opposite and helping rebels, so the duality of our allegiance if we raid with the opposite faction then fight them in a BG/Horde v Alliance questline doesn’t even have to be explained.

Of course, that means our toons would have to somehow go back to being an unnamed adventurer/mercenary, and not the pinnacle of our faction, the champion of its cause and hero of the goddamn world.

[shadowmatrix]

Nothing will ever solve the faction imbalance. The only way to fix it is to get rid of it and allow cross faction play.

Edit: in fact, I'd be surprised if cross faction (at least instanced) PvE isn't a feature of the next expansion.

And the second they do a bunch of people will claim it is the death of the game, breaks their immersion, and is the end of the game as a RPG.