Creating awareness about your decision regarding Outland server

Hey there!

I am quite new to the community. Me and some friends were planning on joining up with some other friends in the wonderful game of World of Warcraft today by using the server Outland. The issue is that you have restricted people from making horde characters, so now my other friends have to choose between staying with their endgame guilds or leaving everything behind and transfer to alliance. This might be one of, if not the, most abrupt and disturbed thing I have heard about in video gaming. There are so many other solutions, and yet you made the decision to include a solution where you are forcing people to do something, removing a big part of the game (you may not even choose a faction on your own anymore, if you are a new player).

My idea is that you guys should faction lock all accounts (the ones who got characters on each faction has to choose which one they want to belong to/give them the ability to transfer level 70 characters to another account) and then you make a faction queue were only around 50% of each faction (7500 horde 7500 alliance or 8000/7000) can be logged in at the same time. This would result in that people who do not like waiting will get the alternative of joining the opposite faction for free (talking about transfering your character/s from horde to alliance here) whilst the people who do not mind the wait as long as they can play with guildies and friends, may still do so without having to decline one of them.

Another one is to give all alliance characters double reputation gain until the factions are showing at least a 40/60 or 45/55 balance. This will encourage new players to roll alliance to easier get into the endgame and old players may transfer their 70 characters so that they may start competing in endgame faster.

These are just two suggestion that I came up with and I am sure that there are even greater suggestions out there that have not been said, but I just cannot approve of your decision about removing the option of creating a horde character. This will only hurt new players/new players who wants to play with horde friends, and will not really change anything except for bringing negativity to your server.

Sincerely,
Martin

It's no secret that faction locking has caused great pain not only to current Horde players who can't alt anymore, but also to new players who want to join Horde. Every time I make a new character, I create it within a set fantasy that I have, so I'd rather reroll Alliance than faction-change a character of mine, disturbing that fantasy and basically destroying the character's feel. Having said that, rerolling Alliance will basically force me to start anew, as if I never played on this realm before. And I'm not even being promoted to do so in any way.

I'll make an Alliance char and start playing it, not because I like Alliance, not even because I plan on doing 70lvl content as Alliance, but because it will, at least to some content, trick Warmane that the ratio is getting better. And if 1k more people do the same as me, the problem will be solved: from currently 9:6 to 8:7. Then I'll get back to Horde, but this time I'll make sure to create 9 Horde alts of every class before they implement another change like that.

The best part? Warmane can't do anything to detect such cases. I might be playing a serious Alliance alt, or I might be trolling - who knows. An openly declared sabotage which they cannot even prevent :P I mean, they are currently sabotaging all Horde raiding guilds by denying us the right to alt, so we might as well return the favour.

Edit: the H:A ratio has barely moved since the introduction of faction change and faction lock. Horde was 9,300, now it's 9,150. Alliance was 5,700, now it's 5,850. Basically there are 150 less Horde online and 150 more Alliance online. That's a 1% switch from Horde to Alliance.

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Originally Posted by taralej

Edit: the H:A ratio has barely moved since the introduction of faction change and faction lock. Horde was 9,300, now it's 9,150. Alliance was 5,700, now it's 5,850. Basically there are 150 less Horde online and 150 more Alliance online. That's a 1% switch from Horde to Alliance.

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That's actually 2%. 300 of 15.000. The thing is to see if the process starts to accelerate and gets to a point where it makes a difference in-game. I personally don't think it will work, although I hope it does.
Anyway, meanwhile you can still enjoy a healthy peaceful gameplay in Medivh.

On a x1 realm, in case I already have a pre-raid BiS Rsham on Outland? No, thanks.

You are suggesting hurting our current players who might play on both factions for the sake of new players coming bloat the problem-population even more. Players with characters on both factions aren't an issue, players wanting to go play on Horde are. A faction queue or some similar measure is already considered, likely even being tested for feasibility already, but it will go on top of there being no new Horde characters. The problem isn't the Alliance being awful or undesirable, but too many people in Horde causing everyone to want to go to that side as well, so giving advantages to bribe people into playing Alliance isn't being considered as anything but last resorts as far as I'm aware.

Either way, the faction lock is just a first measure. It works on a "keeping the problem from getting worse" basis. It was never expected to cure the disease by itself, but just to keep the tumor from growing further, and say what you will, that's exactly what it accomplishes, so I'm setting its removal as a "not up to suggestions" subject.