We’re at the point where the majority of high end raiding guilds have either left the alliance or simply disbanded. The recruitment pool is small for the remaining guilds, the pvp community is dead and there are only a few mythic guilds to pick from for returning players. That is on the larger realms, the smaller realms turned into wastelands.
When 6 high end guilds from Ravencrest threw in the towel it pretty much showed how bad the situation became 5 months ago, and it has gotten worse with Shadowlands. Returning players roll horde, streams play horde and slowly the casual crowd shifts to the horde as well.
My own high end raiding experience has been that a lot of players quit after yet another alliance raiding realm ’ died out’ . Officers usually burned out as they couldn’t keep up the recruitment which resulted in sub optimal raids or canceled raids.
Recruiting people from other realms just to tell them 2-3 months later they wasted their Euro’s as the guild fell over felt demotivating.
While high end Mythic raiding is competitive a lot of these guilds tend to be social. Once an older guild disbands a good chunk of its alliance players just quit all together.
Throw your alliance raiding customers a bone and just allow cross faction guilds/ raiding. We get it that it’s good money to have all these people pay for an xfer, and we get it that the majority of the devs enjoys playing horde.
The different factions was fun 15 years ago but now it just doesn’t work game wise, story wise it can all be kept the same.
We’re having mercenary mode already, NPC’s speaking to each other and working together. WOWs story is all over the place so lets not even bring lore into this .
Just allow xrealm guilds/raids so the remaining guilds get a nice recruitment boost and alliance players have just like the horde a large player pool to do content with.
It’s either that or more players will simply reroll.
The core problem the alliance is facing and the horde will inevitably face as well, is the casualization of the game. You have people who want to do heroic and mythic raids, but don’t know you HAVE to set 2 evenings out of your week, dictated by your guild, in order to do that. And if you don’t show up twice - you get gkicked.
I really wish Blizz would stop giving people the illusion, the lie that you can do everything without committing to the game. It makes the game worse for everyone - those who don’t commit are disappointed, and those who commit find themselves playing with deluded people and end up miserable as well.
I think cross faction raiding and mythic plus should be allowed at this point. I know some object because they like the faction split but alliance isn’t competitive at high end anymore anyway so I’m not really sure those people aren’t losing what they value anyway…
On a more serious tone, either they merge faction or they don’t, in both cases, all raiders would be under the same banner.
Well…Actually, being a Mythic raider is hard ever since they added those systems that require farming, more especially in BFA. Playing 2 hours a day so I can be up to date, doing unfun content was NOT FUN AT ALL. It was boring, I was annoying and all my efforts are being thrown in the bin once we’re going into the SL.
You MUST commit to the game if you wanna raid HC and MM.
Totally. But it’s not harder, it’s more time consuming, and here’s the thing - Blizz lies to you. They tell you that if you put in the time, you can do everything. What they don’t tell you is that you totally need an active and good guild to be even close to enjoying the endgame. This idea that WoW is viable as a solo game is a lie. I know some people do it, and they’re constantly complaining how much they hate it.
Which is something I never believed because…I still need a good guild management to recruit enough people so we can play every raid night.
On the same time a MMO should push that. Blizzard should have never pushed Pick up.
Because it’s not supposed to be a solo game, even if they are desining wow in a solo RPG game.
I’m doing that unfun content because every single player in my roster is doing so, hence why I must do it to respect their efforts, since raiding is closer to collectivism rather than individualism.
Would love for some more incentive to play Alliance.
As much as I love horde races I started Alliance and after my Legion break I returned as Alliance.
Likewise I’ve told people as long as I can have a team ready for raiding w/o bigger issues in recruitment we’re in blue, but if things continue as they are I doubt I’ll have that for more than an expac or two.
Just get rid of factions outside questing/PvP (as such also get rid of mercenary mode as well). It serves no purpose and it being a “core element” is a bad excuse from a bunch of incompetent devs.
Make it a bit like servers in GW2 where it literally means nothing except for when in World vs World - the second you enter that one game mode, it locks you into your servers for chat, grouping etc. The second you leave? Play with whoever you want
Maybe change battlegrounds to Wargames (like real life military do with allies) too?
When the horde had long queues for pvp because of the faction imbalance they came up with mercenary mode. Any sort of ‘lore’ or ‘Alliance vs horde’ was thrown out of the window to reduce the queue.
Besides as Shihiroki stated if this keeps going we’ll all be playing horde anyway since the alliance faction will be dead.
PVE shouldn’t be influenced by what faction you play especially when WOW doesn’t have a player base that can sustain two factions.
After all the stupidity WOW has pulled of lore wise, we’re really going to draw the line by people just trying to kill a boss together?
The same boss that lore wise gets killed by horde+alliance npc’s joining together.
Basically that sums up the stuff. I gave a final shot for mythic raiding in bfa, but the time to spent to prepare for it, its just simple not worth it. And for what?
Some bigger number i lvl gear and a mount from every 2nd tier?
You can totally pug raids. I did it as well. But you have to deal with… massive rejection if you’re a dps class, you have to deal with looking for new members after almost every boss, the downtime this entails, waiting for everyone to get there, after every boss. If the raid doesn’t have a warlock, it becomes a slog.
Even then, I’d say right now, pugging is only viable for tanks and healers. For dps’s it’s a miserable experience where you wait for half an hour to be taken into a group and if the group is miserable and you drop it, you have to wait another half an hour. Where as a tank or a healer, and especially tank, you’ll get insta-invited to a new group.
But even then, the amount of viability and fun in pugs is about 50% of what guilds have to offer. Running raids with people you know is immensely better.
Sure, but 2 evenings a week? That’s overkill for heroic. I would not enjoy raiding with a guild that requires 2 evenings a week for heroic when I can clear it with a pug in 1 evening.
I said ‘heroic and mythic’ though. Heroic is easy, you can clear it with a pug in 3-4 hours tops once the population progresses enough. But if you want to do mythic as well, which is what I said, you’ll need to set aside 2 evenings for raiding.
I’m on kazzak, as horde: so my pool is PLENTY.
However: I agree. It’d be nice for alliance, and perhaps some people even reroll alliance because they know they can still raid/ do M+ easily, etc. Might be good for the faction balance!
