We all know Blizzard refuses to acknowledge this and make an official statement about it. I am not here to bash on Blizzard, I am here to attempt to give exposure to an issue which might lead to the eventual downfall of WoW and has been ignored for many years. I will be critical and might sound a bit harsh at times, but don’t get me wrong, I love this game to death and wish for it to continue doing well.
So what’s the issue?
Recently nearly all top Alliance guilds have stated that they are switching to Horde for Shadowlands. While this might not sound like a big deal to most of you, you must understand this event will have catastrophic long term consequences if left ignored, which I will explain later.
This is not even the real issue, but rather a result of over a decade of negligence on Blizzard’s part, which might even not be fixable at this point unless some drastic changes are made.
Due to significant racial disbalance (especially in the early expansions of WoW) most hardcore guilds would find themselves switching to Horde. It is hard to pinpoint where exactly everything has begun, but most players would say it was during the early stages of TBC. This has been an ongoing trend for many years that was only addressed just recently, however the damage has been already done. Very serious raiders and their friends are already Horde since they were forced earlier to switch to Horde due to superior racials. However, things don’t end here. The first thing most new players do is google “factions rankings”. All they see is all top spots being occupied by horde guilds so they go horde. All wanna be tryhards see that horde is on top so they go horde as well. Soon the more casual players that raid heroics follow since there is no opportunity to progress to Mythic, since there are no Mythic guilds. Etc… etc… It’s a chain of events that is in full motion at this point and it will take way more than simply balancing racails to fix it. This is where I feel like Blizzard fails to understand that merely balancing racials at this point won’t be enough.
What will happen if the issue is ignored?
it won’t be long before the entire Alliance PvE community switches to Horde. There is already a huge disparity in guild rankings and population. This will also drag people who do PvP, since a lot of the BIS items (especially trinkets) do come from PvE after all. The mere fact even semi-hardcore guilds are switching at this point due to them being unable to find players should be a big warning for Blizzard. It means we are already at the stage where the good guilds will start dragging the more casual players with them.
Eventually, you will end up with a game where everyone is Horde. Your conflict between the Alliance and the Horde will be over since there will be no Alliance. This will make a huge part of your audience quit. The worst part again is that it is already happening.
The Horde and the Alliance conflict is a huge pivotal part of the game for new players. While this is not what most players play the game for currently, you have to understand that for new players this is one of the coolest features. Just imagine how most wow advertisements would look like? You can’t tell people to join faction wars where the other faction does not exist. With that gone I would not be surprised if we stop getting new players at all.
What can be done?
Racials are already balanced and that clearly did not work. You can’t merge factions due to marketing and the issue I mentioned above. So what can you do?
The underdog faction needs to unironically have a VERY significant advantage for a period of time until things stabilize. We are looking at things like 100% permanent reputation and XP buff, as well as bonus rolls, to encourage people to play the underdog faction. Free faction transfers from the dominant to the underdog faction should be open at all times as well. This is what most private servers did for years when they were faced with faction disbalance and from my experience, it always worked. Server shards must be balanced so that there are is an equal amount of players from both factions at all times and just overflow the rest with shards with no people from opposite faction. This way our favorite zerg trains that completely destroy world pvp would be gone as well (which only ads fuel to the fire)
Conclusion
While things look dire there is still hope as long as Blizzard does something significant about it fast. If not this game will start seeing a very accelerated decline very soon and the World of Warcraft as we know it may end.
