Faction balance is truly hopeless now.

[Zyky]

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.

No thanks. It'll just become the opposite problem at that point. The correct solution is to just open up cross-faction play, keep PvP the exact same, but allow any/all PvE content(open world, M+, raids) to be done regardless of faction. And if you turn on Warmode it disables cross faction play. It's not a complicated fix and the reality is there are very strong Alliance racials that some specs would rather have, but it's not realistic that a whole guild is willing to swap alliance to gimp themselves on recruitment and other activities that require grouping just for mostly even racials.

[T-34]

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.

If you look at the total population then the the factions are quite balanced, but it is skewed at the top, but the top is very tiny.
The number of subs that Blizzard loses from people like you is tiny compared to the number of subs Blizzard would lose if factions were removed as faction rivalry/identity are a huge part of the draw for casual players.

And the casual players who are the vast majority don't give a flying fuck about faction balance. On my shit server there are plenty of normal and heroic alliance guilds, whereas us that do mythic raiding have a problem, but we are a minority.

So use a fraction of your 50 million+ gold to transfer to Silvermoon.

[superbipbip6]

for open PVP they have to introduce covenant war in 9.1 that will totally shift the horde/alliance imbalance and could really be a great feature

[Danuel]

Give alliance major bonuses like War mode 100%, racials so good it's broken (BUT disable them in raids, pvp etc)...

So it's just another thread where allys whining a lot and want more free stuff?

ppl want play horde. That's all.

[JavelinJoe]

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 have to admit, I do agree, it is a massive massive issue at this stage and its something Blizzard need to tackle with radical action. Couldnt agree more. Ive always been in the crowd of keeping factions separate, I hate the idea of merging factions, its a core pillar of Warcraft, said it for years, and thankfully at SL blizzcon Ion confirmed that's their thinking, but here's the thing..

Why cant you just cross faction invite for groups like raids, dungeons, world bosses. Why? I mean when you think about it, we head into ICC to fight the big bad lich king, both Horde and Alliance worked together at stages. We head into Firelands, both horde and alliance surely are willing to fight alongside to defeat Ragnaros? I cant see a reason lore wise that Horde and Alliance arent allowed to buddy up and stop fighting each other for a moment to fight the big bad enemy. I mean hell, you even see it in the MoP trailer where the orc and human fight each other, followed by teaming up to fight the unknown threat. Same in the WC3 cinematic at the start, fighting each other until the infernal falls.

Its time to let me play my Night elf hunter, and Orc warrior, and not have to consider not being able to play with friends in PvE content. Sure, I cant join the guild, I cant do PvP perhaps, but please just let me do PvE with friends cross faction.

I know a lot of people who play on a faction they actually don't like purely because of friends and or historical benefits, I do think if cross faction PvE opened up you would see a hell of a lot of shifting of factions without making guilds fall apart etc.

[Kumorii]

Alliance already get 30%extra which is huge.

[deenman]

So it's just another thread where allys whining a lot and want more free stuff?

ppl want play horde. That's all.

uhm no,its nothing about people wanting to play horde,its the strong racials that made the top guilds swap and everyone else just followed them,and wile racials have seen some nerfs for horde,there isnt much insentive to go back when horde is a much better population now

aliance was always more popular in the past when racials didnt matter as much,besides wrath when every man was op in pvp for humans,even in vanila when shamans were clearly better than paladins,aliance still was more popular

[Cheze]

even in a guild that's raiding at a relatively-casual-CE level it makes recruiting markedly more difficult; our server is alliance dominated and has a plenty healthy population, but asking people to transfer+faction change will always be a tough sell.

if they don't want to get rid of factions entirely there really just needs to be a 'mercenary mode' a la pvp, at least for cross-server activities

[Naoten]

I really want to play alliance but all my friends play horde. If they allowed cross play I would definitely swap to alliance.

I know a lot of people with this problem too

[TheRevenantHero]

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.

Alliance literally has the better war mode bonus all the time. Their pvp quests tend to be way easier too. Not sure what other incentive there really could be.

[Sorrowseer]

My guess is they are doing nothing about it because they are preparing to remove factions as we know it in the future instead of horde/alliance, you will have system like covenants, and PvP will resolve around them fighting each other (but both horde and alliance can join either) while pve will be one big family.

They planted their flag and and will die on the hill of a two faction war system, which is, far more nuanced than dumb but as I am dumb its as far as I can descibe themselves creatively shooting themselves in the foot, neutral factions, faction storylines, changing sides, races not following the same ideals etc, all wasted potential.

I am sorry I cannot give a link but it was stated that wow is and will continue to be a two faction game.

[Saltysquidoon]

I never understood the argument that 'it only matters to the top end so its not a big deal', there's what like 100 people in challenger of lol on any given server but riot makes changes specifically to/for challenger all the time.
If combat racials are a small enough deal that they "only affect the 0.000000000001%" or whatever then changing them (or removing them) would have by your own admission zero impact on johnny casual's experience (if he even knows they exist), so how is "but muh majority" even an argument?

No thanks. It'll just become the opposite problem at that point.

Let's be fair it took the horde a decade to snowball to this point, there's nothing to suggest even if blizzard 100% reversed the racial problem (which they wouldn't) would correct overnight (if at all).

The problem blizzard has is they've pinned themselves via inaction. They clearly don't want racials to be a big deal in combat, almost every change they make to racials is to reduce their impact on combat. But at the same time by not ever buffing the alliance racials is how we got here.

[Broken Fox]

A faction merge would require reworking the game from the ground up. So much stuff would make no fucking sense. Not just systems but quests, locations, storylines. Its never gonna happen.

[Beloren]

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.

It won’t happen. The game will die in this life.

The only reason they shifted focus to the horde so heavily in TBC during the classic era was because such things were vital.

It was before xrealm, even before arenas and then things like allowing same faction BGs, etc.

With all that tech in place, alliance players though much smaller than horde can still reasonably play, that’s the bottom line.

It doesn’t matter if on the end game the horde is 80% to alliance 20%,

Hey are fine with the alliance being the casual faction and forcing you a faction swap if you want to raid on the horde.

Frankly I don’t care at this point, but they don’t either. You can still play and it’s easy to level a horde toon up if you want the greater access. And you can pay if you are attached to your characters achievements and gear.

It’s not hopeless like it was in 2006 and I don’t feel the devs want to pay attention to boring alliance. They’ve settled on the horde.

You are more likely to get alliance races playable on the horde or mixed faction building via communities to do content than you are an alliance push similar to the one they gave the horde from TBC onwards.

[Lolites]

My guess is they are doing nothing about it because they are preparing to remove factions

no, they are doing nothing about it bcs there is nothing to be done...
if there is even 0.01% advantage to a faction top players (and metaidiots) will flock that faction, so only possible action would be remove racials completely, which is tbh stupid, and would not realy lead to balancing, it would lead to leaving it as it is...

- - - Updated - - -

All that's keeping them from balancing stuff is greed.
If they wanted they could create progressively scaling discounts for faction or server transfers, depending on the target realm's faction balance and it'd quickly resolve itself.
Likewise an increase in price for changing to an already overweighted faction could help.
Think of bonusses ranging from 100% discount for switching to the worst balanced shite, to 0% discount for perfect balance, to 150% increase when trying to move ti the overweighted side.

so people are changing factions bcs one is "better" but they would change back if its cheaper? eh... what?

[Danvash]

God, that sucks that we didn't have enough connection issues. On Sargeras-US (Alliance dominated realm), it only took two hours for me to get into the game, and we had only two days of input lag compared to the Horde giants.

...Let's be real. The split is like 60-40 in favor of Horde. Not 90-10. The fact that the top 100 guilds are mostly Horde doesn't mean you can't play Alliance. Blizzard can fix things like PVP imbalance with solutions like allowing players of both factions to Merc and join random teams, or allowing cross-faction play in dungeons and raids below Mythic difficulty. There's no need to make the Alliance overpowered again. That happened in WoD, and all it did was make everyone switch to Alliance while the Horde complained about imbalance instead.

[Joycemiester]

Really? Tell that to the roving kill squads of alliance I've seen in War Mode.

Well yea they have to do that to be able to kill anybody when otherwise they would be outnumbered. It's like "I'm sick of all the horde let's make a group and gank."

[Gorsameth]

If you don't warmode, and you're not top 100, no one gives a f...

For the rest, well, you made your bed, now you get to lie in it.

it matters a lot outside of top 100, the amount of guilds and groups as alliance is much lower and low end Mythic and Heroic guilds are switching to Horde constantly because of recruitment problems that are lessened on Horde.

[Elkas]

A faction merge would require reworking the game from the ground up. So much stuff would make no fucking sense. Not just systems but quests, locations, storylines. Its never gonna happen.

Not really, just make people select a faction to represent during question. Like Pandaran have to, and what the Covenants essentially ask people to do already.

They can then introduce even more factions and write better stories as time goes along. It could've meant that the Blood Elves could've rejoined the Alliance in MoP, the Night Elves leave the Alliance at the end of BFA and the Forsaken split off from the Horde, etc... . For faction raid specific encounters, they can just put the raids on a rotation. Week one, Alliance perspective, week two, Horde, etc...

All without impacting people's ability to play together.

[TerrisT]

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.