typical kid reply. “You are wrong” “post too long” “boring” blabla bla
just grow up
Well that the part of Breaking faction barrier then 
Horde and Alliance can join group together without need to be race change
It’s just a terrible idea evident by how much problems this approach has been causing in the past. Just let us play together. Horde and Alliance group up all the damn time but when the players do it it’s treason. But it’s not treason in the faction war (PvP) of course. Only in efforts to bring down common foes! It makes no sense whatsoever and has been tearing apart friendships forever. This wasn’t such an issue when rerolling was tedious and faction change not an option, but nowadays some people will just follow the fotm while people who are attached to their chars/faction are left to rot. Of course I could go horde, too (and abandon all my progress) but is the death of one faction really Blizzards goal here?
Cross faction play.
1 Like
That was a well thought out OP post, pretty concise in it’s organisation. Most definitely not ‘too long’ as some say, which does rather say more about them than you, I mean how do they even manage to read a pamphlet? A Newspaper?
Also it doesn’t matter what Preach says, they’re just a Streamer, Their opinion is no more or less valid than anyone on these Forums.
I would however say that you’re not completely bang on the money on one point. Horde have not been the biggest faction since the start. In Vanilla the Alliance playerbase was significantly larger, possibly even worse than the current imbalance, this was addressed by the Introduction of Blood Elves in TBC, when things then balanced out and were pretty even. The pendulum then swung back during WotLK and Cata, when EMFH was the boss racial. All the top end guilds went Alliance. It has only been more recently that people have swapped to Horde, but people undeniably have.
Now the problem is, that your Top end raiders don’t tend to give a stuff about Factons. That isn’t important to them. What they care about is ‘beating’ the game. That is why people like Method would unanimously swap factions even to beat one raid! Sometimes even just one Tier depending on whether a single racial would give them an advantage against bosses. I mean you can tell this by the fact that they would all roll what particular race gave an advantage against a specific boss.
Now this is just min-maxing, which I personally find a bit pathetic, but then I’m not a raider, so eh, if they want to spend real life money to beat a raid before anyone else, then let’em, it is after all, their money.
The reason I make that distinction is as follows;
Removing the Faction barrier. I can see why -some- would have a problem, your die hard fans of just one faction. I find it amazing that some people will only play one faction, as they really are only getting half of the story (Plus missing out on the cool Wolf for Alliance and Horse for Horde 
)
However these people do exist, which is all fine, different strokes for different folks, and everyone has a preference.
The problems with it are small, basically it will annoy the people who only play one faction, however these days they are a very small number of people surely? The benefits to the majority would offset that, I think.
Also Lore. I agree, at the moment, Horde and Alliance are in a tenuous peace, so this would be the ideal time to do that, however the removal of faction barriers would make any future War expansions an impossibility without replacing it, and potentially causing this problem all over again.
Personally I am neither strongly for or against it as such, but the RP’er in me is like “Well, we -are- at peace, and we know that the factions can, and have worked together before, so uhh, why can’t -we-? This makes as little sense as the language barrier which imply does not exist in lore”
Making Alliance racials OP?
Hard Nope. We tried that already. It did -not- balance factions, it just swung the balance back the other way. I mean when would we stop doing that? “Oh, too many top end raiders are now playing Alliance, we better make Horde racials OP! Oh noes, now they all went Horde, better make Alliance racials better!”
It doesn’t matter to the people who put these muppets on a pedestal. They’ll jump which ever way their heroes do. And -they- will jump ship for the racials.
There are two options here, one hard to implement, one easy.
- Don’t tie racials to races. Now hear me out here, because I know that sounds crazy. But Why can’t a human have Beserking? I mean that’s where our concept of Beserking came from! Viking and Celtic Warriors. Why can’t a non-racist Blood Elf have Diplomacy? That’s surely just a matter of having people skills. Why can’t a Dwarf be good at making money like the Zandalari racial? I mean in our legends Dwarves were pretty famous for making and hoarding money!
The knock on effect of that, is that you would no longer get Top End raiders jumping ship, which means you wouldn’t get Streamers reporting on it, and therefore you wouldn’t get their followers transferring faction also. Basically everyone can play what faction they want, what race they want, with what racial they want (I’d kill for having Diplomacy on Brigante). If they want to swap out their racial, then sure, let them buy it in the store, same as the current transactions.
Or, The easier to implement but less popular idea… Just remove the utility of racials in Dungeons and Raids. All of them. No Racials work in those places, and only hard skills. Then we’ll really see how good these people are, if they have to hard skill it. It also means they won’t flip-flop between Factions anymore, because there will be no point in doing so. The only people who will complain are the ones that need the racials to ‘carry them’ through raids, and not just skill it out, and frankly they are such a tiny number that…they don’t really matter?
As another observation, sometimes it really is attitude. We’ve seen it here already “All these kids who play Horde”.
That makes the Alliance sound pathetic and needy. Please don’t do that to my Alliance characters, I don’t want to be associated with being pathetic and needy.
Firstly. No comprehensive study has ever been made of the ages of the players of either faction. For an obvious reason. Which faction do I count as? Both? I mean I do actually have an equal amount of characters in both faction…So which faction’s statistic would I count towards, or both, in which what is the damned point in trying to work it out!
Secondly, it is simply going to be inaccurate. How can it not be? I mean I’m 14 and even I can see that! Or am I 26 and I can see that? Or am I 46 and I can see that? (I mean the last one is correct…) How on earth would that even work?
Thirdly, as someone old enough to be some WoW player’s grandfather, I always find it funny when younger people call each other ‘kids’, because it is playground mentality. Only point you get to call someone a ‘kid’ is when you are biologically old enough to be their parent. Until then it is actually pretty immature behaviour in itself…
So stop doing it, y’all!
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Remove factions.
If by recently you mean MoP when Horde had strong racials whole expansion, then yeah. Not very recent though, like a decade ago, and it kept piling up last 10 years even after racial fix.
Every cutting edge raider I met during BFA, and even one in m+ this season in Shadowlands, swapped Horde since their guild struggled to recruit here.
They don’t pick Horde because they think it’s cool, they pick it to have more people to choose from.
WoW devs failed to address balance issues at end of MoP and did nothing for next 8-9 years, and now we’re at where we are at.
And still Ion fails to admit mistake. Even now, at this Blizzcon, he says it’s player problem, and can only be fixed by players. Too late Ion, you had many many years, and didn’t address the issue when it was fixable, now all you can do is remove factions.
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I did actually mean MoP, yeah, WotLK and Cata Alliance was king, MoP was when it switched back, and was that really 10 years ago? Oh my Gods I just googled it and it was announced 10 years ago, and released 9 years ago. OK, -Now- I officially feel old!
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Although the majority of the post is probably fair and rational, id say the data immediately brings it into disrepute.
We have no way of knowing how accurate the data is, ultimately unless the data came from source or was gathered by the author its potentially flawed. So we cant use it as a valid judge of the numbers.
Also the dataset number is very strange why 2939 players, is it from a specific time stamp? a specific day?
The representation also seems to be from all regions, yet the pvp representation is from EU only at 1800 rating?
How was this come to? No rationale for the figures.
the alliance racials are already superior to those of the horde for any high end content, that’s why everybody in the mdi/awc plays alliance.
imo, the best thing blizzard could do is “bribe” or convince some high end mythic guilds to go alliance with free transfers so more players will follow suit.
the day they merge factions or whatever is the day i stop playing the game.
nah there is still like 13 alliance guilds in the top 100 guilds ( lol btw)
blizzard can still afford to wait a bit more for maximal profit, then when the time is right, they will make the alliance racials even stronger to a point where all the min-max’er horde have to transfer to alliance and pay blizz a lot of money for it.
easy money. then in the future you could just repeat the process should the horde ever become the underdog.
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@Bozo: You are correct here. WCR had access to several hundred thousand entries during the best times and even then it was only indicative in terms of providing some lower limits to various things. A sample of just a few thousand characters is simply completely insufficient, because it simply can not be representative of all US and EU realms. In fact the necessary minimum would be around 1013 (or all available if smaller than that in total) samples from every faction that currently exists or more than 200 000 characters in total (if we still had older realm configurations the number would exceed 490 000, but after all the connections it is not quite that high as subrealms would not require separate presentation). This is due to the fact that the realms do not follow a common pattern of any specific kind absolutely even though they do tend share certain similarties on a very general level.
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I really really like this idea. I hope something like this would happen:
1- Allow any race to choose any faction ( like we can choose any covenant).
2- Allow all players to play PVE content together.
3- PVP content would still be segregated based on your chosen faction.
Imho the benefits would be:
1- Faction imbalance will likely never be an issue again.
2- Everyone will be able to play their favorite race with their friends ( as they would be able to play all PVE content together, and if they would like to play PVP content together then they can choose any race but will have to choose the same faction as their friends).
3- Faction pride still exists as it determines who you PVP with ( and maybe which cities and questlines you can access).
2 Likes
That’s a really nice post. I would love for the faction barrier to be broken for ALL difficulties in PVE such as in dungeons and raids. It will rekindle the game and my interest in it for sure. So much less queue and so many more raiding and M+ opportunities, plus everyone gets to play whatever they want and still play with their friends on the other side.
2 Likes
We had that once. Then they buffed Horde Racials to compensate everyone being alliance. The result of that is what we currently have.
But at this point so many people are Horde compared to how many were Alliance in the past that even such a change wouldnt change much and people wouldnt feel a difference for at least 1-2 more xpacs.
That.
Pretty much that. We had a time when Alliance racials were just obscene. All the MIn-Maxers flocked to Alliance, which was kinda rubbish, but it happened, then they tried the “Make the other Factions racial’s Better” approach and we ended up where we are now.
The irony being, that right now, at this point, the Alliance racials -are- actually better again than Horde ones. Now I don’t -know- why, but I have a vague hypothesis. Covid. Now before you go “You’re nuts Brigante” let me explain what I mean. A vast, and I mean -vast- part of the workforce cannot work, because of Lockdowns. Many more will have been made redundant. You can’t go to job interviews right now in many countries. Self Employed businesses are going under. The Economy is tanking, worldwide, so a lot of people are basically on benefits. Now that isn’t enough to live life with a quality of life, of luxury, so are you going to spend quite a bit in order to change factions, or are you going to spend that money on something nice to eat, as opposed to just ‘affordable’? You want to get a bottle of wine or two in at the weekend? Gonna cost you.
People simply have less spending power at the moment. Spending money to swap factions in a video game is massively low on most sensible people’s priorities.
So quite a few of those people who want to swap factions simply cannot, because it is an expense on something frivolous.
It is our reduction of money and therefore the greater importance we place on funds, that prevent us from financial frivolity.
Such as changing factions in a computer game to Min-Max characters…
Even if I’m pretty sure Blizzard won’t shatter faction barrier, I still think it’s the solution to that problem, while still maintaining factions for other purposes.
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That does sounds like a sensible solution, yes.
The joke is that this isn’t even the case right now. For some reason of all things PvP is where faction is allowed to not matter. Horde vs Horde BGs, mercenary mode… it’s just uniting against a common foe that is frowned upon. Mix an matching however we want is totally okay in the faction war!
4 Likes
Merging factions will be boring. Its a meh for me.
If you need it fixed ask blizzard to remove racials.
Just give the alliance a free zombie dragon mount , then all the horde will be like oh damn son we love our zombie dragons. Then they will lvl an Alliance char and be like yay i got me a zombie dragon
Faction imbalance is because of the Faction change. In the community which is fetishizing the MIN/MAX approach, people will just switch to the other faction if it gets better racial bonuses. But don’t worry, Activision Blizzard will never remove the Faction change, because it’s a paid service, and money is the ONLY thing that matters to them.