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

[Deleted]

why do I feel like blizz might offer free transfer/faction change to alliance
just like they handle servers that have too many players

[Daffan]

Delete racials

lower transfer costs

What do these two things do? Slow the bleed and give the game A CHANCE to recover in the future.

Still need incentive... Faction achievements and rewards like they are doing.

[Danvash]

They should just remove racials that provide benefits to dps/healing.

[Spotnick]

Problem could be fixed by adding mercenary mode really...

I mean, why can't a blood elf suddenly decide to join the alliance to go with Alleria (and not necessarily the void)

Or even worst, pandarens can chose their faction at level 20 but can't change their minds over time?

[Teri]

Before we suggest mega realms, let's fix the AH/Guild Bank lag problems on Draenor/Silvermoon EU first.

It's been many months now with no fix in sight.....

[corebit]

There is no solution to this player-created problem. All the suggestions either do nothing or make the problem worse.

- Make Alliance racials overpowered. It will just create reverse imbalance with all the raiding guilds jumping to Alliance.
- Lower/free transfer costs. This will only hasten the remaining Alliance guilds to move Horde.
- Remove racials. It's not about racials anymore. It's all about the recruitment pool.
- Free transfers to the Alliance. No one takes them because better recruitment pool >>>>> a small monetary savings.
- Merge/connect more realms. Doesn't do anything. Most top-end raiding guilds recruit cross-server to begin with.

[Feanoro]

player-created problem.

Had absolutely nothing to do with Blizz's retarded decisions, nosirree.

[Feanoro]

GC infamously once replied in the wee hours of the morning that after Blizz had milked faction transfers as much as they thought they could, then they'd look at balancing racials. The amount of back-pedaling that came afterwards was hilarious.

Could they fix it? Maybe. Will they fix it without resorting to OP racials and those sweet, sweet transfer dollars? I won't hold my breath. Otherwise, the damage is done. Anyone who was willing to faction change for a raiding advantage probably doesn't care what size/shape/color his character is.

[exochaft]

There is no solution to this player-created problem. All the suggestions either do nothing or make the problem worse.

- Make Alliance racials overpowered. It will just create reverse imbalance with all the raiding guilds jumping to Alliance.
- Lower/free transfer costs. This will only hasten the remaining Alliance guilds to move Horde.
- Remove racials. It's not about racials anymore. It's all about the recruitment pool.
- Free transfers to the Alliance. No one takes them because better recruitment pool >>>>> a small monetary savings.
- Merge/connect more realms. Doesn't do anything. Most top-end raiding guilds recruit cross-server to begin with.

This is why I think Blizz will eventually cave when it comes to mythic raiding being server locked for extended periods of time. Mythic+ is a great example of how server and faction imbalance plays little to no role in your ability to participate fully in this PvE activity. You have access to your entire region's faction population, and there's no restrictions on who you can invite. Blizz would just have to be okay with losing out on server/faction transfer dollars that are due to mythic raiding, and I'd be curious to see how much of that money is for hardcore raiding alone.

As you mentioned, the damage has already been done, and reversing that damage is nigh impossible because the imbalance extends well beyond hardcore raiders. Blizz can either try to force factional and population balance, or just accept the imbalance exists and allow the players to participate in all aspects of the game in spite of said imbalance.

[Progenitor Aquarius]

Yeah there is too high population on some realms which causes lag, they could just move out some people free of charge to low population realms, and do guilds crossrealm, so it would be mich easier to recruit and raid.

[Garkanh]

Horde is the most populated, because the horde attracts more young players, and most new players these days are teenagers. The alliance population is slowly decreasing, because the majority of the factions players, are at an age where they are getting kids, working longer hours etc, and have to cut down or quit the game.

Have been this way since vanilla. Kids are attracted the horde races, and i doubt that will ever change.

[theyanger]

Horde is the most populated, because the horde attracts more young players, and most new players these days are teenagers. The alliance population is slowly decreasing, because the majority of the factions players, are at an age where they are getting kids, working longer hours etc, and have to cut down or quit the game.

Have been this way since vanilla. Kids are attracted the horde races, and i doubt that will ever change.

That's literally never been the reason. Alliance was FAR more popular for raiding until the horde racials become severely overpowered to a point that even top guilds like Method couldn't ignore it anymore. Kids being attracted to horde don't matter in the slightest - raiding guilds will go where raiders are, and that tends to be a trickle down effect. If there is a compellign reason for lots of top guilds to go alliance, others would follow suit.

[Dangg]

Horde is the most populated, because the horde attracts more young players, and most new players these days are teenagers. The alliance population is slowly decreasing, because the majority of the factions players, are at an age where they are getting kids, working longer hours etc, and have to cut down or quit the game.

Have been this way since vanilla. Kids are attracted the horde races, and i doubt that will ever change.

Is there any proof for that? Back in the Vanilla days when I assume most posters here were young Alliance was alot more popular than Horde.

[asil]

Racials are pretty much completely irrelevant at this point.

The idea that output racials are why horde dominates the raiding scene is fucking absurd. That was probably the cause for the giant shift to horde multiple xpacs ago, but since then racials have become fairly balanced. Everyone already went horde, so yeah, offering free faction changes might even it out. But even then, I doubt it. Raiders are going to naturally gravitate towards one side because they'll want the bigger player pools.

But anyone can go look at sims:

https://www.herodamage.com/

The idea that such a small difference is why so many people are currently horde is fucking absurd and not at all based in reality.

Alliance dps racials compete or beat horde dps racials for pretty much every spec.

There's a reason when you go into class discords and start asking about race they laugh at you and tell you it doesn't matter. Human is well ahead for most dps specs it seems.

[Erolian]

Why would anyone that raids not want to all be on the same faction? Any guild that wants to be competitive would prefer to have the largest recruitment pool. Its better for all of us if we're on the same faction once you get past caring about the character aesthetics.

[Deleted]

Even if faction transfer was free it would be irrelevant. Why move if theirs no reason too.
This is the issue, if one faction raiding community is better; larger, more skill and easier to organise. Than this has a rolling effect of attracting more and more players. The only way to counter this is to make alliance factions racial stronger than horde so that part of the most competitive community change faction which will trickle down to the rest.

Blizzard has done this in the past but I believe the last time they did this was in cataclysm which ended favouring horde racials and has a lasting effect (throne of thunder was ridiculously favouring horde without the next raid tier favouring alliance to compensate).

[Kralljin]

Honestly? because Horde racials aren't just from a numerical POV superior but overall better, at least for PvE.

Remember Cho'gall? He casted a sort of MC on multiple people that buffed him, you had to interrupt / silence / stun those guys.

Horde just had to bring a few blood elves and Tauren, no need for AoE stuns and only stack up before the cast, that's it, unless you were packed with AoE stuns, Alliance struggled way more on that fight.

This obviously comes into play now in M+ as well, Blood elf AoE Silence is amazing, the Highmountain Tauren stun / charge is also great, especially in the light of a lot of AoE stuns being cut.


And this favour of a single racial making a massive difference happened this expansion again, on KJ.

The knockback orb is a massive part of the (mythic) fight, especially for classes that cannot naturally bypass it, such as Paladin,Priest or Death Knight.
A lot of Alliance guilds benched their priest because failing on that ability meant death and at certain points that can easily happen, Pallies had at least bubble to save them once.

Now, what did Horde do with those classes? Every Priest / Death Knight / Resto Shaman (As they rather take Graceful Spirit over Gust of Wind) went Goblin, due the Goblin jump you had a failsafe for the Orb Knockback on a 1,5minute CD.


Now obviously, Alliance has some unique racials as well, with Every Man for himself, Escape Artist, Shadowmeld or Stoneform but those rarely granted as much benefit on an encounter as the Horde racials do in PvE.

[Deleted]

I'd like to add that a huge pool of highskill players is also a factor.
High skill players are more likely to tranfer from alliance to horde or from a dead realm to a populated realm.
This results is that even equal numbers wouldn't fix things, you mainly need to focus attracting those players to the otherside.

For example on the EU their are 2 really strong alliance raiding servers; one is a pvp one and the other pve (silvermoon, he alliance :P).
You could merge all the alliance deadserver together and even if it's twice the population of one of those servers, the mythic raiding community would still be worse than those 2. Players on that skill level are just more likely to transfer.

It's also interesting that it takes a much larger population on the pve server to come close to the pvp server for the mythic raiding community.

For the deadserver issue, the only solution is to have the deadserver merge into the 2e tier realms who are not as good as Silvermoon for example but still very healthy. If i'm not mistaken i'd clasify 3-5 Alliance EU realms being 2e tier on raid enviroment.

[Talhooo]

As an alliance guild that will be transferring to horde in 3 months, I'll chime in, cause I think I have a good idea about it.

It's not about racials anymore, you are wrong about that. (sure Goblin had some utility that was super useful on KJ). The best DPS racial is human anyway atm if I'm not mistaken, because of how well it scales.

The actual reason in my opinion is that we have come to a point of no return. As a top 200 guild it's really hard to recruit anyone as an alliance guild because of the discrepancy in the "top" raiding scene.
I know a top 60 alliance guild that went horde few months ago. They went there with 19 of their raiders. 2 weeks later they were sitting on 28.

I'm a recruiter for our guild and I can tell you it's been 6 months since we've recruited the last person to our roster. Our recruitment posts even says we're looking for 3 dps (while in reality we are not, just 1 or 2 ...). And in the last 6 months we've had about 4 or 5 serious applies.
We've been on this server for 10 years as a guild, and we are still deciding to transfer. We just don't see us surviving another 2-3 years if we stay on that server. (or we'll need to lower our requirements and drop a lot of ranks)

There's also another reason imo, and that is that transfers have just become too costly.
Our guild is on a low populated server, and I'm a recruiter that headhunts a lot of people. And the number one reason for them not wanting to join us is that our server is too small. What if he/she transfers, and then fails their trail ? There is not many guilds of the same ranking on our server. They'll probably need to transfer again ...
I am of the opinion that transfer costs should be lowered a ton. And they'll still make about the same money. Because instead of transferring only your main, you'll transfer your alt's also.

Just my two cents.

[Vargulf the Happy Husky]

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

ayyyyy why haven't i thought of that?

seriously, why the hell haven't i?