Shortly before 8.2, only 13/100 Alliance cleaned CoS

[Gaidax]

It's just a snowball effect now, at this point racials don't matter anymore.

Like unless Alliance gets vastly superior perks that will make it a legit thing for guilds positions in the world, the trend will continue. It seems though we are after all going to get some sort of merged activity anyway with this whole Thrall and Jaina faction flirting thing.

[Twdft]

Like unless Alliance gets vastly superior perks that will make it a legit thing for guilds positions in the world, the trend will continue.

I don't even think this would be enough to restore faction balance. The top 3 guilds would faction change for the world first race and change back after the kill, everyone else wouldn't bother.

If the perks were so vastly superior to justify widespread faction change, the negative PR would be too big. WoW has a player base who shout "cash grab" at the top of their lungs for a store mount that's free with a 6 month sub.

[Gaidax]

I don't even think this would be enough to restore faction balance. The top 3 guilds would faction change for the world first race and change back after the kill, everyone else wouldn't bother.

If the perks were so vastly superior to justify widespread faction change, the negative PR would be too big. WoW has a player base who shout "cash grab" at the top of their lungs for a store mount that's free with a 6 month sub.

We had plenty of cases like that in past. There was always this racials pendulum swing that causes one faction to be objectively better than the other. They could make the same thing intentionally and even declare that as such and I'm pretty sure it would work out.

People would bitch and moan, there will be a prominent guild that will make drama, tear-filled headlines of quitting in protest. But the thing is - people bitch and moan regardless, while this would work.

They are pretty much already trying to give alliance perks and IMO it's a good way to do it - another "overwhelming odds" type of thing for PvE, some select racials uplifting and they could actually swing the pendulum to the Alliance favor.


Of course, indications are that we're on a way of some frenemies mode where 2 factions will remain but will be able to cooperate in in-game activities. That could work out too, depending on restrictions in place. (I highly doubt they will allow mixed Horde/Alliance guilds progressing current Mythic raids, but who knows.)

[Marrilaife]

I don't even think this would be enough to restore faction balance. The top 3 guilds would faction change for the world first race and change back after the kill, everyone else wouldn't bother.

If the perks were so vastly superior to justify widespread faction change, the negative PR would be too big. WoW has a player base who shout "cash grab" at the top of their lungs for a store mount that's free with a 6 month sub.

You mean basically what happened in the US with BODA that guilds transferred to Ally to grab the "ally incentive package" in the form of WPVP item + warfront item then instantly fucked off back to horde? There's no possible incentive left in this game to actually stop the landslide. Oh, and horde cried so loud "ally favouritism" that the "incentive package" got nerfed after less than a fortnight.

And yes, hard not to notice Blizz got double faction change fees from like 2-3 guilds 25 people each + possible alts if they did it on alts too. Ez money. In long term lack of healthy alliance playerbase will probably make more people quit than fork for the payments, but quick cash is the name of the game, not the long term prospects. Otherwise they wouldn't be laying off Q&A and CM teams if they cared about long term goals.

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There is Horde and Alliance because this is Warcraft, just like there is Zerg/Terran/Protoss in Starcraft and fucking Republic and Empire in Star Wars. It's a core of the franchise.

Yep, and they could have merged more servers in the last 5 years when population was dropping and majority of medium pop servers went all the way down to ghost town. They could have implemented more support for cross realm guild activity rather than leaving guilds crippled and taking the route of "just pug it 4head" and letting last remnants of communities dismantle itself. They could have offered free transfers, but they didn't since wotlk or maybe cata. They did absolutely nothing to help consolidate the populations so we could still have 2 functioning factions instead of leaving 4-6 high pop servers per region and rest ghost towns, and if all these servers were 90%+ horde well who cares? Nothing bad will come out of that sure...

Alliance raiding was underpopulated for years, but since the population overall was higher, it didn't become a gamebreaking issue until basically Legion. They could have remedied it before it went beyond the point of no return.

[Gaidax]

but quick cash is the name of the game, not the long term prospects

That's kind of nonsense I keep seeing in MMO-C I'll never understand.

WoW is quite literally top Blizzard earner, you really, like really think that is what they seek? I mean really? If that would be the bloody case, you'd long have anime schoolgirls outfit mogs in a fucking store by now (and trust me, weebs would buy these in DROVES) and not 8.2 which is one of the best content patches we had in years.

Frankly?

Cut the crap.

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Alliance raiding was underpopulated for years, but since the population overall was higher, it didn't become a gamebreaking issue until basically Legion. They could have remedied it before it went beyond the point of no return.

It became a gamebreaking issue with BoD being so hot on faction strife which involved WPvP being a thing. This is where things snowballed.

And yes, they could have reacted earlier, they didn't. The signs were there. I don't claim they are infallible angels or something, but there is also no need to go full retard to extreme and look for evil Actiblizz cashgrabbing plot in every fuck-up that happened.

[Marrilaife]

This is where things snowballed.

Nope, the thing broke in Legion. There was a mass exodus of alliance guilds into horde because of cross realm m+ promoting everyone to be on the same faction, while not caring about server, and having 2 years of broken OP blood elf racial that got nerfed way too late, after the ratios for top end players went somewhere in the region of 85:15 H:A split.

8.2 which is one of the best content patches we had in years.

Yeah, full of low effort rare camping and world quests, and rng benthic gear casino that will keep people grinding because this shit can surpass mythic gear from Azshara's Palace with 30 ilvls less as long as you hit +socket and correct tertiary. So yeah, maximum timesink with minimal dev effort.

If that would be the bloody case, you'd long have anime schoolgirls outfit mogs in a fucking store by now (and trust me, weebs would buy these in DROVES)

And tbh, I'd rather have them sell slutmogs and cat ears headbands in the cash store than making people pay for server transfers and faction changes when they're stuck in a dead end server.

Also most games with robust cash shop with cosmetics and whatnot don't ask a sub fee in the first place. Personally I'm not sure if f2p would ever do well for wow, first it would have to drop really, really low in subs to make sense, and second, it would probably end up being p2w which is really bad. Very few studios managed to stay away from the temptation to not make f2p games revolving around top cash shop spenders.

And anyway, how is it conspiracy when it's a fact ATVB laid off 800 employees at the start of the year? Cost cutting at its finest.

[Gaidax]

Yeah, full of low effort rare camping and world quests

...

And tbh, I'd rather have them sell slutmogs and cat ears headbands in the cash store...

Right, you're just a meme machine. Blizzard ate your cat, gotcha.

[Marrilaife]

White knights gotta white knight. /shrug

[Muthep]

Horde is zug zug animal faction. ALliance ftw

[Sharein]

Yep, and they could have merged more servers in the last 5 years when population was dropping and majority of medium pop servers went all the way down to ghost town. They could have implemented more support for cross realm guild activity rather than leaving guilds crippled and taking the route of "just pug it 4head" and letting last remnants of communities dismantle itself. They could have offered free transfers, but they didn't since wotlk or maybe cata. They did absolutely nothing to help consolidate the populations so we could still have 2 functioning factions instead of leaving 4-6 high pop servers per region and rest ghost towns, and if all these servers were 90%+ horde well who cares? Nothing bad will come out of that sure...

Can't agree more. It's really down to Blizzard's greed and complacency.

[danbertarelli]

Why do you think?

Horde tends to be better at pvp too, tbh

[Yunaqt]

Npcs gotta npc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MrExcelion]

Yep, and they could have merged more servers in the last 5 years when population was dropping and majority of medium pop servers went all the way down to ghost town

Fully agree. They stopped doing merges. At this point people have probably forgotten that they existed.

[Raelbo]

White knights gotta white knight. /shrug

Just because you don't like his opinion doesn't make it white knighting. Hell, he's not even defending Blizzard, all he's doing is pointing out the massive flaw in your lazy argument.

The cost of server transfers has never been about a "cash grab".

• there is zero evidence to support the notion
• the idea makes zero logical sense
• there is a far more rational rival theory

If Blizzard were trying to use server transfers as a revenue generator they'd make them half the price and quadruple their sales. Server Transfers are costly in order to serve as a deterrent against their use on a whimsical basis. They allow server transfers because they recognise that, for some people, it's a really big deal. But the simple fact of the matter is that Blizzard want to keep the number of people who use them to a minimum because their objective is to have stable server communities, and people being able to transfer on a whim breaks those communities.

I am not saying that there isn't a real problem with low population servers. I am not saying that Blizzard have even done a particularly good job of addressing the problem. What I am doing is trying to illuminate the reasons behind their actions, which are certainly far more reasonable than your primitive "hurr durr, greedy bliz just wants more cash grab" narrative.

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The entire reasoning behind their server connections was faulty to begin with. They connected low population servers together. They should have from the start connected low pop servers to a high or full server instead. If e.g. they had connected the low population RP servers to Argent Dawn, those servers would have easily survived (especially for RP since our communities know each other to an extent already).

I would argue that what you're not considering is the other side of the problem, namely server capacity limitations.

I play on Argent Dawn. Every new expansion, and even with new patches, there are server queues. I think if people better appreciated the nature of the problem, they'd probably be less likely to be as smart-ass about preaching their perfect solutions.

It is a difficult balancing act to get right because the playerbase is not consistent. You have massive spikes in interest with new content to the point where servers can't cope which is very bad, and then during the lulls you have dips in interest where there aren't enough players to create the desirable atmosphere which is also very bad. This is why there is sense in the idea of a dynamic solution that adapts according to conditions.

[Raelbo]

I play on Argent Dawn too. A connected server player still plays on their original server, they just can make a guild and raid mythic with people from other servers in their connected group. It wouldn't impact Argent Dawn as much, if anything some people might roll on the connected servers instead.

Fair enough. The person you were you replying to though was talking about server merges.

[OokOok]

It's very possible BOD was a test for this, to see if it was possible to race change horde/alliance for a raid and see how the people liked it. It's possible in the future we'll have cross realm/faction raids where you turn into the faction of the raid leader and turn into whatever race is set up for you like in BOD>

[Soluna]

and 100/100 for the horde

which prevents the alliance to play cross server as it was intended, and the majority of the guild feat of strength to be delivered worldwide

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/ga...ction=ALLIANCE

I don't know about you but to me it feels like something is terribly wrong or broken, what are you thoughts?

Lol, I find it funny how you care about whether alliance plays CoS cross realm or not. Absolutely NO ONE wants to go do that raid, even if cross realm, since it offers no rewards, no titles, no mounts, no cool mogs, literally nothing. Nobody cares.

[Toppy]

More and more I'm fairly certain that the rumors are true and they're dropping the faction barrier next expansion. It's becoming to costly and more pointless. Splitting dev attention isn't a good thing and "faction pride" doesn't require barriers. Getting new and old players is harder and harder if the race you want isn't on the right side as your friends. PvP and PvE are both notably skewed and all in all I see no reason to keep it.

[Lawlhero]

Leave it to the horde to kill all the big bad guys while Alliance tries to take some credit. FOR THE HORDE, Protecting azeroth one raid boss at a time.

[Marrilaife]

If Blizzard were trying to use server transfers as a revenue generator they'd make them half the price and quadruple their sales. Server Transfers are costly in order to serve as a deterrent against their use on a whimsical basis.

And if it wasn't a cash grab, they would allow it for free on a lengthy cooldown (3-6 months let's say) to prevent people "from using it whimsically". It is a goddamn cash grab and proof is they lowered the cooldown to 3 days which was much longer in the past, allowing shenanigans like Limit faction changing to alliance to grab 2 items and changing back to horde within the same week. So basically use it frivolously as long as you give Blizzard the $$$. It didn't even cost them a raid reset. If you care to prevent something from being used whimsically, you put meaningful consequences, not just a "barrier fee" that basically means "if you're rich - no consequences, if you aren't - well too bad for you".