The real problem of why the raiding scene is becoming more Horde only

[Jastall]

What if they offered cool mount and free faction change to the first hundred 11/11M guilds that swapped? And made racials 100% balanced for all content at same time?

I suppose they could add a mount to Hall of Fame, albeit I doubt a month and an achieve would be strong incentives. Free transfers might be but that's extremely unlikely to happen.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I suppose they could add a mount to Hall of Fame, albeit I doubt a month and an achieve would be strong incentives. Free transfers might be but that's extremely unlikely to happen.

I think free transfers for a limited target audience would be essential to achieve balance. Limited time offer, to however many top guilds/players they need to switch. First come first serve. And some incentive that would not imbalance things but would attract players to swap.

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Maybe a mount + free game time? Just a thought.

[klogaroth]

If you're restricted from playing cross faction, it's in players best interests to gravitate towards a single side, especially if you are interested in something with a relatively small population to begin with like top end raiding or high M+.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

If you're restricted from playing cross faction, it's in players best interests to gravitate towards a single side, especially if you are interested in something with a relatively small population to begin with like top end raiding or high M+.

So much of raid lore is factions cooperating to defeat a greater foe, what if they did allow cross-faction raiding? Not sure how much it would help, with guilds still a thing. Just brain storming here.

[adamzz]

Alliance has by far the best pvp racials and still they complain..

Because PvP doesn't matter. The PvP in WoW is bad, hilariously bad. The netcoding isn't suitable for PvP, it's suitable for PvE.

[Frolk]

No need to fix it, the more alliance that pay for transfer, the more money for them.

[lummiuster]

Most players don't care about pvp, tbh. So we aren't even factoring that in. WoW is 90% a pve game. Most player movement between factions is driven by pve. And for years, that has meant a talent drain from Alliance -> Horde.

But for those PVPing like me, it is really anoying to have a disadvantage because we dont have an extra trinket.

[Delmore]

Anyone actually raided horde side lately? Reminds me of what it used to be like in TBC for alliance. Horde overall, raid wise, seems to be filled with children who have nothing better to do than spout garbage in the group finder. Its way worse than the alliance counterpart. I have a warrior on both sides of the fence, and it literally stopped me from continuing raiding and improving the horde toon. Not fun.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

But for those PVPing like me, it is really anoying to have a disadvantage because we dont have an extra trinket.

Fair enough, but that has nothing to do with the imbalance of skilled players in the factions. If anything, you benefit from higher overall skill level on Horde side, at least in BGs. You may lose more 1v1s, but still win more BGs because players around you are better on average.

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Anyone actually raided horde side lately? Reminds me of what it used to be like in TBC for alliance. Horde overall, raid wise, seems to be filled with children who have nothing better to do than spout garbage in the group finder. Its way worse than the alliance counterpart. I have a warrior on both sides of the fence, and it literally stopped me from continuing raiding and improving the horde toon. Not fun.

That may be your anecdotal experience, but 74 of top 100 t21 raiding guilds are Horde. That is objective fact.

https://www.wowprogress.com/

[Krigaren]

At PAX East an interview mentioned the raiding imbalance at the hardcore level: “The developers are aware of the faction imbalance in hardcore raid guilds and have ideas on how to tackle the problem, but nothing to share quite yet.”

I really fail to understand why this is even a "problem" at all. Does the faction hardcore raiders choose to play have any bearing on the gameplay for others?

With x-realms, racial balances, class homogenization, non-restricted classes, server transfers (many free), and race/faction changes available in the game, in what way could it possibly matter if the majority of hardcore guilds play Horde?

[Chaelexi]

There will never be a reverse of the faction imbalance. It's been here since Vanilla since Alliance had the "kid's side" stigma.
Other than forcing guilds to move over there is nothing to be done. Removing racials from the equation, which started to become the reason Horde was preferred, will at least start to slow the leak. Now Horde is pretty much go to because of racials and imbalance. But outside of giving the Alliance game breaking abilities/racials to bring raiders back, it's never going to happen.

THis could not be more wrong, look in Vanilla the majority of the kills were completed by alliance players for 2 reasons. Dwarf priests had fear ward(OP OP) and Paladins blessings > Shaman totems.

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No need to fix it, the more alliance that pay for transfer, the more money for them.

Using your logic the opposite is more true, they could make more money by making alliance powerful and have these players all transfer back.

[Ningjinq]

I really fail to understand why this is even a "problem" at all. Does the faction hardcore raiders choose to play have any bearing on the gameplay for others?

With x-realms, racial balances, class homogenization, non-restricted classes, server transfers (many free), and race/faction changes available in the game, in what way could it possibly matter if the majority of hardcore guilds play Horde?

Multiple reasons, first, those hardcore guilds are going to have friends who don’t raid hardcore but will have to follow them over regardless.

Second, and I think this is a big one for Blizz now, when the majority of popular streamers play Horde, it’s basically advertising “play Horde”. And even if objectively the racials are balanced, what really matters is the perception. And if people perceive they are better they are going to play Horde. While racials aren’t that powerful, people think they are and is one of the big reasons why in PvP it swapped from in WoD the Alliance winning all the time to the Horde winning all the time. Because so many people swapped.

Third, it’s going to be a big trickle down effect. There’s a lot of “retired” hardcore raiders who are looking for easier raid schedules who wind up in heroic and lower end mythic guilds. So when there’s less of those players around on the Alliance, it’s harder to recruit.

And from a pugging perspective, lots of mythic raiders pug normal and heroic on alts. They are definitely not pugging on the Alliance side. So a smaller pool of players there too.

[Frolk]

THis could not be more wrong, look in Vanilla the majority of the kills were completed by alliance players for 2 reasons. Dwarf priests had fear ward(OP OP) and Paladins blessings > Shaman totems.

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Using your logic the opposite is more true, they could make more money by making alliance powerful and have these players all transfer back.

Good idea, make alliance racials dominant for pve, get all horde raiders to go alliance, then make horde better again in 2 years

MAXIMUM $$$$$$

[Deleted]

Crossfaction Pve. Problem solved. Or a third faction called mercenary or whatever, so if you dont care at all about horde alliance theatre of useless wars you get any race into raids

[Emerald Archer]

They could just disable racials in Mythic raiding and Mythic+. Problem solved.

That doesn't even come close to solving it. People aren't swapping to horde because of racials anymore. That was a past issue, but because a huge portion of the best players went horde, and have no reason to go back, more and more guilds are moving to horde because of the larger and better recruitment pool.

Disabling racials won't help anything at all.

[McFuu]

That doesn't even come close to solving it. People aren't swapping to horde because of racials anymore. That was a past issue, but because a huge portion of the best players went horde, and have no reason to go back, more and more guilds are moving to horde because of the larger and better recruitment pool.

Disabling racials won't help anything at all.

Like I said, racials are the reason it became Horde centric. Moving forward disabling them removes one of the reasons, but the player population will never change without a force move of guilds or making Alliance entirely unfair to play for. So it's not going to happen, ever...

But we can at least stop the reason why people switch other than population. So new mythic raiders that get their start on the Alliance side will just stay with the guilds that they began Mythic raiding with.

[Emerald Archer]

But we can at least stop the reason why people switch other than population. So new mythic raiders that get their start on the Alliance side will just stay with the guilds that they began Mythic raiding with.

No, it won't stop them. Because people don't swap for racials anymore. Racials USED to be the reason people swapped, but now they swap because the majority of the better pve players are on horde. It has nothing to do with racials anymore.

The reason why people switched was stopped a long long time ago.

Yes you're right that the player base won't change back willingly, but that also means alliance will continue to move to horde at the same rate they do now.

Racials in the past were the reasons for changing to horde, that is no longer the case, disabling them will NOT slow down the changes. Do people just not realise that the horde vs alliance raiding racial imbalance is an issue of the past?

[pkm]

Anyone actually raided horde side lately? Reminds me of what it used to be like in TBC for alliance. Horde overall, raid wise, seems to be filled with children who have nothing better to do than spout garbage in the group finder. Its way worse than the alliance counterpart. I have a warrior on both sides of the fence, and it literally stopped me from continuing raiding and improving the horde toon. Not fun.

Funny you should say that. I feel exactly the same way towards alliance. I don't play my alliance toon much anymore but it it was never really a pleasant experience raiding.

[Deleted]

i think most guilds use sellrun money to pay for transfer

[lummiuster]

Fair enough, but that has nothing to do with the imbalance of skilled players in the factions. If anything, you benefit from higher overall skill level on Horde side, at least in BGs. You may lose more 1v1s, but still win more BGs because players around you are better on average.

Absolutely not. The extra 2% damage from the racial cooldown is negligible. When you are about to kill the EFC and you fail to because you get CCed right in front of him, this is what changes everything.