Greetings,
with Warmanes recent introduction to counter faction balance issues, the Alliance have received:
- Free faction transfers from Horde to Alliance
- Increased experience rates, from x7 to x10
- Increased honor rates, from x1 to x1.5
However, I believe Warmane does not address the real issue, and what will cause even more players to switch to the horde.
The horde has always been the premium faction for Top raiding guilds and players, due to better racials giving an edge over the Alliance.
This problem has been present and is still present on retail, which almost forces Top Alliance guilds to go horde due to a shortage of members.
I have a character on both Horde and Alliance, and the difference between guilds could not be greater.
Just take a look at the PvE Ladder for example, as of now (06.05) the sum of guilds that cleared Naxx25 (killing KT) is 55 for both factions.
However, upon closer inspection one will realise that out of those 55 guilds, only 1 Alliance guild is in the top 10 kill timer for KT,
in total there are only 7(!) guilds on the Alliance side that managed to slay KT. 7 out of 55 guilds are from the faction that is supposed to be around 45% of Frostmournes
population.
Considering these facts, I believe there will be even more good players switching to the Horde, leaving Alliance in an even worse state.
I don't have the answer to this problem, but it is an apparent one and it will grow bigger.
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Member
A few words about Faction imbalance.
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Member
And because all the good players are on horde, its extremely difficult to pug a raid. The majority of the current alliance players can't follow simple instructions and play the mechanics. Its demoralizing. I switched to alliance for the 1.5 honor and am regretting it. Everyone on horde was so nice and cooperative and played their class with intelligence, alliance have all been smug and childish and cant even play the game properly. If my friend group wasn't so pro-alliance for it's feminine aesthetics and city appearance then i'd pay $30 to go back.
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Member
Alliance for PVP and Horde for PVE. That's it.
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Member
Well i'm sorry but sayin warmane is not addressing the real issue is a total BULL****.
Warmane didn't make everyone to roll horde, Warmane tried to give incentives for playing as alliance. Instead of writing more and more topics about this, you better make sure you represent the alliance at its finest and i'm sure more people will join.
What are you suggesting - Forcing people to play a faction they don't want?
- Locking horde creation?
What exactly?
To the guy who said because all the good guilds are horde, well maybe try to create a good alliance guild instead ranting on forums how hard is for you to pug raids.
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Member
The Horde Blood Elves being better at aesthetics is a bit like "men being better at being women that women are themselves". (It's a joke.)
But on a serious note - what changes would you suggest? Allowing to pick the racials of any race that can play a given class? Afaik, Warmane never went this far.
Maybe give Alliance players abilities and mounts for free? A 30 min CD Hearthstone? 1 free transmog token?
Was the situation as bad (58-42) on Frostmourne Season 1?
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Forum Veteran
I'd say that things are a bit more complicated.
First of all, creating a guild requires a lot of time investment, game knowledge, and responsibility towards other players. Some people (like me) don't want to be bothered with so many tasks just so we do a particular raid. VVe search for guilds, which can meet our expectations, and play with players, who have proven to be skillful and reliable.
Secondly, it's true that most pve enthusiasts went to the horde, which created a deficit in the blue faction. Last season, I decided to play on the side of the Alliance just to see what the experience was. In terms of raiding quality, it was pretty much the same. I've played alongside bad players, and I've meet really good ones. There were people, who had recently joined the game and didn't know anything about the boss encounters, there were also veterans with a lot of background coming from Icecrown, Lordearon, or another private server. Now, if I have to be quite honest, I didn't make a statistics comparing horde to alliance guilds throughout the entirety of FM's lifespan. VVhat I remember was that at some point many people started leaving for one reason or another. Be it Shadowlands, responsibilities irl, fatigue from the double reset, or just moving to horde due to the lack of players. My former guild (<Tranquility>) had to recruit new members every week, because we couldn't form a solid roster. As a result, the success of the raids wasn't always there, and many players (incl. myself) lost interest in playing further.
As I've said, I haven't made statistics of my own, but I remember that somewhere during Ulduar <Knuckles Deep> moved to the horde. In late ToC, <Casual>, the best Alliance guild back then, retired. Now, it's part of the Horde alongside <Summit>, and my former guild (now called <VVild Hunt>). God knows, who else moved here as well.
I'd like to tell you something, and I am going to be quite honest here: I have never been an Alliance supporter, but I miss playing as a Night Elf druid simply because my feral cat had more perks in that faction. But as good as the 1% hit draenei aura can be, it's not enough to ensure me a full clear of the current content. For that, working in a team is all about, and that's why people go to the Horde, where the pve racials are, and thus where the majority of "better" players play. Keyword here is majority. The more pve enthusiasts in one faction, the more guilds to choose from, and the bigger the likelyhood to be accepted somewhere.
Unfortunate, but what can you do? I'd say, that's the result of Blizzard design and the min-max culture. VVhile there might be some, who play wow for the lore and aesthetics, others care about having success and small perks drive the playerbase towards one specific direction. Like Yagamiad said, Horde is for PVE, while Alliance - for PVP. This is how it was made, and is now interpreted.
@ OP
http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=424714
Look at this thread! Here we have one person talking about the disbalance in the pvp playerbase caused by the human's infamous EMfH. If you go to the end of the thread, you will see that the suggestion concerning correcting this design flaw was rejected, simply because warmane wanted to keep wotlk as we know it (*cough* let's ignore some QoL changes *cough*).Edited: May 7, 2021
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Member
The thing is as follows:
1. Hardcore pvpers already chose to play as allies.
2. Hardcore pvers already chose to play as horde.
That being said, how is pvp boosting allies going to make any change, it doesnt make any sense. What would make sense is trying to lure pvers there cause having mercenary mode already ****ed horde on pvp. Also faction imbalance only had meaning in pvp since the factions actually fight there. On pve who actually cares as long as you get in a raid team.
PS: why would you ever pug? It is a horrible experience wherever you are. 1 of 10 pugs is going to worth your time. get yourself in a guild and try to socialize dont expect to play an mmorpg alone.
And 1.5* honor is ridiculous.... Pvp discrepancy is already h
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Member
I agree that it impacts pvp the most, but pve definitely doesn't bypass the hit either. From personal experience of playing alliance last season, we definitely learned our lesson the hard way and went horde to avoid a total disaster again this season. The alliance raiding scene and especially NA raiding scene was extremely barren on alliance. Having a player quit for any reason would legit set a raid back because there's was not a readily available replacement ready to come in. Numerous mergers, player rerolls and in general sub-optimal compromises seemed like the only way to actually clear content. What doesn't help either is that despite a total lack of players there was still too many guilds that only had 15-20 actually good raiders and most refused to merge to actually achieve something worthwhile. We were exhausted after a year of double reset and continuous uphill battle of filling raids and talking to players unwilling to compromise and band together. I know it looks like we took an easy way out this season, but we gave it our all to make it work. I still think PvE can very much be alive on alliance, but people will have to band together to make it happen.
I think the highly invasive options to force faction balance such as refusing horde character creation, faction queue etc.. are not a viable solution to the problem. The incentives proposed so far will definitely entice some players to swap. Perhaps down the line they can be amplified to sweeten the pot.
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Member
The problem about the "pvp is for alliance", "pve is for horde" argument is that for most classes and specs, in order to perform properly in pvp, they need items from raids aka PVE.
The most famous example being shadowmourne, I don't think anyone would disagree that it's the best weapon that you would need to raid for in order to get the Item without donating.
Good PVPers have recognized this fact aswell and so they decided to switch to horde in order to have an easier time getting those items, because without those items they would be much worse off then their counterparts that do.
And so in the end both good PVEers choose to go horde because its more competitive, and also GOOD PVPers go horde because its easier to get what they need, leaving the Alliance behind with guilds that can't even clear Naxx25. Again, if you want proof just look at the PVE ladders and count how many Alliance guilds managed to kill KT compared to how many Horde guilds.
So as the posters behind me recognized correctly, if you are a half decent player and want a good raiding experience, pugging is an absolute nightmare compared to the horde.
Where on the Horde you have a ton of choices which guilds to go to, on the Alliance u will mostly be in a guild that can't clear Naxx.
So the big question is, how would you address this problem? I don't think there is any blizzlike way to fix this imbalance, as it is even a known issue on retail servers aswell.
However, since Warmane isn't 100% blizzlike, there could be incentives to try to balance out this problem:
- Players can choose the racials that they want, meaning a Dwarf can choose Orc racials.
- Just for the sake of progression, let Hordes and Alliance be able to be in the same guild and raid groups, unite Global chat just so they can form groups together.
I know both of these attempts are very controversial especially regarding the roleplaying factor but as of right now we already have the Mercenary mode, allowing alliances to play for the Horde and vice versa. So it wouldn't be a far fetched idea to have Mercenary mode for raiding.
All of these examples are just ideas but seeing that Frostmourne's imbalance last year wasn't as severe as this year, I predict it would also be in Warmanes interest to address this issue because this is not gonna be the last Season of Frostmourne and with the current trend the Alliance might become a dead faction in the future.
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Member
The problem is racials imbalance, simple as that. When players are min-maxing more than ever, it's not a surprise they would do the same to racials. I like that warmane is aware of the problem and tries to solve it, but a permanent solution imo is only to do custom balancing of them, which I think they would never do
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Member
Horde have good racials for PvP, but the conversation between alli and horde for PvP begins and ends with EMFH.
Having said that, intelligence and organization count a lot more for PvP success. There's no cooldown for a brain.
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Member
im baffled at the pve bord holy ****.
we casually cleared naxx with a pug group and the 10 man of our guild on horde last week.
are there really that many new players on the alliance for there to be such a big difference wtf?
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Member
So, horde has literally 10% winchance in bgs because of the human dk/ret/war meta in s5, yet u cry because the easy pve content just gets even easier if u have horde racials? Alrighty..
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Member
hell na get those filthy alliance dogs out of my global and raids.
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