⚠ [Faction] It's starting to be urgent to do something!

Community General Discussion
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Greeting forums !

Since December i spend everyday more than 1H 30 over 2H30 in LFG
More than half of the time i play is because i switch to alt and go on random battlegrounds. Today i got like more than 9 alts full geared unranked gear.

Since it’s start to be insane to the point i doubt why i try to play the game, i still wanted to know what happen when i create my own group.
Because in BFA i was playing Marksmanship ( back in BFA MM was worst in Arena) and never got more than 20 minutes queue.

So, What happenned over time to go worst to worst in LFG that maked me such a long time waiting ?

1 - Faction Representation Imbalance

1.1 - Where the Imbalance started ?

For experimented World of Warcraft player, it is not news that we know about faction imbalance.

It started from the beginning due to horde racial being better and that attracted a part of the hardcore player at the start.
And so it attract player.

This advantage the horde got back have started to fill the World First Raid Guild and the top Raiding Guild in advantage to the horde player.

Horde then started to get more population to even more with a 63% population etc and have kept growing to even today. With even more PvErs hardcore player wanting to join the best Raiding guild, or even join Mythic Guilds ( as we know the hall of fame in horde side fill way more faster than alliance )

Due to that advantage, new people keep coming to the Horde due to their increasing overtime number of player.

People attract People.

Due mostly of the Looking for Group systems : More you got people, more faster it gonna be to form a group with the class and experience you want.
It’s clear if you spend 30mn to create a RBG , you gonna think about faction change if you can lower that queue to 5 minutes and go start really playing the game.

The racial of the Alliance is still stronger in PvP today , thank to Human, Dwarf, Night elf, Void elf (caster) that got very good racial in PvP situation when going to the core of PvP. These racial are still strong today.
Blizzard keep it strong to attract more player into the alliance to rebalance Faction Representation to equal.

So what make Horde stronger in Faction Representation is because People attract People

1.2 - What about today ?
As we now know, the Faction Imbalance is due to historical reason. What is the result of history to today ?

To gather these information i took a look on Drustvar, a website gathering Stats, Leaderboard and data . It also show the Faction representation for PvE and PvP. If you got other up to date source, i will gladly edit the post and add more info.

Faction Representation for PvE :
(i miss more data for PvE, i only got that as reference, tell me if you got other data i will edit that part)
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/638335113930866731/828023795808862259/Capture_decran_2021-04-03_a_23.24.52.png

On a sample of 2939 player, we got :

  • Alliance : 664 ( 22.59% )
  • Horde : 2275 ( 77.41% )

Faction Representation for PvP:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/638335113930866731/828023825127047168/Capture_decran_2021-04-03_a_23.24.09.png

On a sample of 43 385 player :

  • Alliance : 11 516 ( 26,54% )
  • Horde : 31 869 ( 73,46% )

I’ve discussed with many people doing PvP on both faction, and that percentage of Faction Representation seems accurate

Fun fact : i am full alliance, and now my battle.net list is now 75% horde, while before 100% alliance.

Even Top PvP player, who know that Alliance got better racial for PvP, is now gone on Horde side due to get more player to play with and get less queue time.

Sadly nowaday for creating a group the difference start to be bigger and bigger (example with RBG making group, number depend on the CR and leader of course.) :

  • Alliance : 35 minutes minimum
  • Horde : 5 minutes minimum

It does not only impact Looking For Group Systems( LFG) but also guilds :
With a such difference, PvE player wanting to go on Mythic Raid got no reason to longer stay in alliance, and so they tend to switch to horde.

Due to guild, people assigned already in a raid rooster tend to stay on their faction to stay on their guild, to play with their friend and guildmate.
So what happen for a PvE player trying PvP is they gonna found at low rating faster people. And since there is no need to get guild to go on high rated PvP they can do both content.
While in Alliance a PvP player tending to do both content will struggle to find guild due to PvE player attracted by the Faction Representation of the Horde.

1.3 Reason of Player tending to go Horde

So as you may know some, we gonna list them for each category of content :

  • Mythic+ : More player mean more group, so you will not lack the options of your key and the level of the key you want. Also more player will tend to faster group creation and more people in hight key to push with

  • Raid : Getting more People mean a easier way to create guild rooster, and if someone is missing it will be faster replaceable due to getting a lot of iteration of people wanting to join. It mean also for the player wanting to join more group to join and getting more chance of being accepted inside a raid. There’s also the number of Mythic Guild in Horde that is way more developped than in Alliance. Due to that if the Mythic guild in Alliance is already full, when you gonna try to create a guild in alliance, it will be harder to gather enought people to get your 20 people to go on Mythic. Meanwhile you gather those 20 people, that mean meanwhile you are not doing mythic raid and you don’t play. That why it is easier to go on horde with already many guild that had gathered many people due to the time of gathering 20 player to go doing mythic Raid.

For the PvE Part, from people idea i gathered, Horde seems better still in term of racial for Raid, but for Mythic+ the alliance racial is better. But since you need a guild to do Mythic raid and not need a guild to do +28 keystone, mythic+ player will also tend to go Horde for that reason.

  • Arena : More people mean to get faster your composition with your class etc. So you gonna need to get more iterration to get not only the right class but the specialisation of the player you want. And also getting more player mean that you can get people closer to your current rating (CR) and so gain more point per win due to being closer/ under of your partner.

  • RBG : Merely the same than Arena, you gonna need the right composition with your strategies, And since you will need 10 player to gather, if you will need 1 rogue due to getting more player itteration that want to join you can find your mandatory spec to you strat class composition more easier. And as same than Arena and raiding thank to get more people you will find group of your rating more easier and you will gather more people faster, reducing the queue time by far a lot.

2.0 - Solution(s)

Over the time, there is many suggestion and arguments made by the community, here some :

Mercenary : The faction 1 can join faction 2 Looking for Group list and his race gonna be changed ( like Dazar’Alor raid in BFA ). If faction 1 is under represented, they got access to mercenary, if faction 2 is underepresented, faction 1 no longer got option to be a mercenary.
Ideology : help the under represented faction with a bit but not too much, not forcing to play with other faction.

Break Faction barrier : There will be no difference between Alliance and Horde in Looking for Group, without race change. An gnome player can be in a horde group without causing trouble and hurting the group he’s in.
Ideology : The faction divide the MMORPG, where the goal is to play together. Faction split our friend and divide LFG slowing queue time for content. Play what you wand with your friend.

Making Under Represented Faction Overpowered Temporary ( i gonna call it URFOT) : Keep the actual systems, but reverse the history until the balance between Horde and Alliance is Equal.
Ideology : The Imbalance of Faction come from the number only, the faction systems is actually good. A push to the other side and rebalancing equally when Faction Representation is equal is the key to the balance.

These 3 options can solve the Faction Representation Imbalance. They got both their good and their bad :

Mercenary :

  • Positive : keep the Faction systems ( lore / faction pride …) and help half the Looking for group systems for the faction who miss people in their faction
  • Negative : Keep the faction split and their Looking for group, only balancing the looking for group for both faction and not increasing the number. Still block to join mythic guild opposite faction until hall of fame complete.

Break Faction Barrier :

  • Positive : Full potential for Looking for Group systems and for hardcore player wanting to join Mythic Guild in the opposite faction. The time we wait is way incredibly better in Looking for Group. Possibility to play the race we want with our friend whatever the faction.
  • Negative : Faction Barrier being down, the elitism upon the racial depending of the specialisation might be increase. Ellitism increase in the verry high top leaderboard of content for strat abusing of racial. Lore only mattering in quest ( might cause issue too if a nightborn do goldshire quest ? ).

URFOT :

  • Positive : Investissement overtime on balancing racial better, not touching to the faction system, and better focus on value of racial.
  • Negative : Period of Time unknow where the Racial Imbalance gonna be insane, consequence of toxicity to blizzard increase to “force” player playing X race to be competitive, and massive exchange to the in game shop for racial and faction change. Still block to join mythic guild opposite faction until hall of fame complete.

For i personnaly opt more for the Break Faction Barrier,

I am more into faction pride in random battleground and epic battleground / Brawl i keep mercenary systems due it’s casual PvP.

But where it come to the Competitive Content like Arena / M+ / RBG / Raid in my opinion the competitive must stay out of the lore and immersion to make the gameplay and friendship more important to play the game and see the maximum potential.

So i stay on Break Faction Barrier, making only lore wize ( but keeping faction for casual PvP).

We already got a part of that in RBG when you face Alliance vs Alliance or Horde versus Horde, one of the team go to the side of the opposite faction.
Or in PvE With Dazar’Alor, PvErs do liked the systems of trying a bit the opposite faction with their racial ( well some complained about the transmog in raid back before :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:).

Today we all know something must be done.

What type of solution will you choose ?

* Mercenary ?

* Break Faction Barrier ?

* URFOT ( Under Represented Faction Overpowered Temporary ) ?

Tell your opinion Below !

Rellated Looking for group Tread :

56 Likes
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I can do keys with you :woman_shrugging:

But yes, the Alliance situation is pretty sad

2 Likes
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i dont think making alliance racials stronger brings anything positive to the table especially not long term and has so many downsides.

hated that i got another asigned race i had no control over in the Dazar alor raid. other than that its a nice idea. it just begs the question whether it will work or not. i mean what is the incentive to actually play pve mercenary mode when the alliance got barely anything to offer? in pvp you at least have faster queues but what would be the incentive in pve besides sheer goodwill? you would probably need to tie like a dungeon satchel to it i suppose or something of that sort.

i wouldnt mind having a complete faction removal for pve activities either.

7 Likes
4

The sheer effort you’ve put into this post warrants a :blue_heart:.

And I’d personally prefer the cross-faction play and guilds.

18 Likes
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You have all my respect for the time you’ve taken to make this very well detailed post, unfortunately the alliance situation is completely hopeless and Blizzard doesnt care one bit

6 Likes
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I think it would help immensely if the gameplay design didn’t focus so much on completion and winning.

I mean, when you look at the LFG for PvP on Alliance, then there are people there!

It’s just the scrutiny that everyone gets subjected to, that makes grouping an issue. You don’t want to risk grouping with someone who might cause you to lose, because then you drop rating points - and who wants that?

It’s the same with PvE. Sucks to spend a key and realizing that you can’t complete the Dungeon beacuse Timmy the healer isn’t good enough.

I think PvP would benefit immensely from having a ladder system where you were rewarded for winning, but you weren’t punished for losing.

And for PvE it also just seems like terrible design to make the reward system so binary. You complete the Dungeon and you get something. And if you don’t, then you get nothing. It’s the same in Torghast. And it’s just bad.
If 50% completion gave 50% of the rewards (currency for example), then success wouldn’t hinge so much on getting to the very end.

There’s definitely a lot to be said for Alliance having less players and that being a problem. But fundamentally it also just seems like WoW is designed in such a way where you get punished for playing with people who aren’t as good (or better) as yourself.
And that’s just terrible design for an MMORPG that should ultimately promote playing with friends and strangers alike, regardless of skill or ability.

4 Likes
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Idk. I never felt having harder to play in less represented faction. Yes sometimes the BG ques are 10+ mins, but that gives you time to do other things either inside the game or alt+tab. We started guild mid/end of BFA, had absolutely no problem getting roster for Mythic. Rather opposite, we had more players than 20. And when we started from the beginning of SL, we had 2 roasters simultaneously running raids and then at one point we stopped raiding because of irl/covid problems mixed with how uninteresting the expansion had become and moved to Classic.

I think worst thing they could do is make game even less factionless. Most unique thing about WoW was the conflict between two faction that made Azeroth great. Every MMORPG you tried there had not gotten this thing so right as Blizzard did. The moment Blizzard stopped design game from world perspective and started choosing accessibility that is when WoW started going downhill and that where these problems like faction imbalance started to appear. If we look into Classic we don’t have that problem at all, because it gets sorted out among the players themselves.

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That could help into making once again the game more of an Adventure instead of just a Venture.

Other than that, I always found the faction split to be too forced

9

Even tho it would make the game unbalanced I think they should just make alliance broken for PvE to make more players play on Alliance(Sweaty tryhards will do just about anything for the slightest that will make their parse better)

PvP wise the community is fairly split

2 Likes
10

I have to say, that’s a good topic explaining faction imbalance in both PvE and PVP environments. This is indeed a hot topic. However, you might get called “naysayer” at best and I would not mention the worst (Because that’s nasty stuff). Here is what I witnessed :

-Casual Alliance players are saying Alliance is still viable for every kind of content, despite the fact they’re not participating in such content (That’s hypocrisy)
-Horde players saying Alliance is viable, despite them not playing Alliance (That’s hypocrisy too)
-Horde players pushing Alliance mains to go Horde, since it’s “just better” or just insulting Alliance players as “crybabies that get everything they want, yet they’re still crying” to then complain there is no more Alliance players left to face (That’s hypocrisy too)

So if this topics helps to make the community more sympathethic towards high end Alliance players, I’m behind you on this. But I bet this topic is going to end up as some sort of war against the afordmentionned factions of the community.

Now, aboot the proposed solutions to that concrete problem :

This sounds good, but this might not be enough in the end, since it’s rather a bandaid than an actual fix. And a certain part of the community would still be angry aboot this idea, since they don’t wanna play with Alliance players…

That’s actually a bad idea. I mean, fixing an imbalance by resorting to create more imbalance the other way around won’t make good to the game. Also, there will be a lot of uproars aboot this since the Alliance already has the better racials of the 2 factions…That won’t sadly work.

I do think it’s the best solution since I still think the faction barrier is not the solution to our problems, it IS the problem. But then again, there is going to be a lot of uproars aboot this from the community, so Blizzard is likely to not go on this path.

To conclude, I sadly think the Alliance is just dead end and there is nothing we can do to save that faction from total collapse in terms of content like low to high end PvE and PVP.

2 Likes
11

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the vast majority of people against cross-faction play are either so casual they barely even do content that requires finding a group of competent players or they’re Horde mains who’re not the less populated faction so they don’t see an issue there. It’s quite telling when these are the two main groups of people loudly against cross-faction play.

11 Likes
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Nobody’s reading your entire OP, it’s too long and boring. Preach has a great video on what exactly caused the population imbalance. He goes over the entire history of WoW to explain how game design changes - including racials, removal profession bonuses, adding 10man raids, etc. - pushed the balance towards the Horde.

Your solution to sitting in LFG for hours is to run your own key - you can bet there’s an infinite number of players in your situation and they’d be happy to apply.

I’m not opposed to buffing Alliance racials, but at this point, the Horde has a HUGE benefit of having Horde players in it.

In general, I’m not a fan of how current WoW server structure works. Originally, a WoW server could hold around 3000 people online simultaneously. In a balanced server, that means 1500 horde and 1500 alliance. Of those, not all will be max level, you’ll have around 1000 max level players of your faction online at peak hours. That is all you need to get endgame going.

You mean to tell me that while the Horde gets 40,000 people online, the Aliance only gets 20,000 and that’s not enough to get a dungeon going? Come on.

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Really nice thread, good job. Lately thinking about switching to horde too, because of Orc, can’t play MW as Alliance unfortunately.

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If you aim to get step into the arena or complete normal/heroic Castle then yes, it’s enough with “20,000” Alliance players, if you want to push yourself farther, it’s not impossible, but it’s really time consuming and annoying on Alliance, because we lack players.

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Realms were rarely balanced though and over time they mostly favoured one faction.

5 Likes
16

at this point making hordes join ally groups as a mercs seems like the most reasonable solution

1 Like
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That has nothing to do with hypocrisy. Alliance is viable. But it’s just not worth transfering 5+ characters from H to A for. Especially not since the A:H ratio on certain realms is still bonkers, so a realm change may be required too. That will be what, 45 euros per character?

It’s just far too expensive and impactful to swap to the Alliance, even without using any game-play reasons.

1 Like
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There’s more players that’ll apply Horde-side though, which matters when you want to attempt higher keys. Even when you do your own key, it’s just easier on a more populated faction.

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There you go again. No, it ain’t. Otherwise, this character would still be a human instead of being a belf.

I’ve already paid 55 € on 2 chars to move from Alliance to Horde. I’m not willing to pay the same amount for going back knowing my game experience is going to significantly worsen. I’ve been told I should be levelling some Alliance toons during down time in order to join back the Alliance. Of course I could do that, but if I’m alone in such crusade, then I’m just going back to square one. I sought to play on the plain superior faction in terms of PVE, sadly, it’s not the Alliance.

Also, once a player has moved from Alliance to Horde, chances for him to go back are really low. I mean, it’s a litteral one life change.

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The only big problems you find in Mythic raiding and high keys, as Blizzard admitted themselves. Neither you seem to do on this char. Yes, the content you do is also easily doable as Alliance.

That’s one of the problems yes, the whole point of this game is to gain social contacts. And as long as the faction barrier exists swapping back and forth is not a viable option. Especially not with these absurd prices.

But for non top-1% content the Alliance works more than fine.

1 Like