I don’t usually make threads but this made me start one. I know there’s a lot of threads already out there, but I feel they don’t quite capture the essence of it all, and they all derail into the “reroll Alliance” or “that’s what you get for OP racials” or “but Alliance gets ganked in open world, deal with it” kind of comments. So to start off, I want to say that yes, I do acknowledge all of those but let’s focus on the problem at hand, instead of constantly swapping the topic to something else in the same general area and laugh at all Horde complaining.
I also want to mention that this post isn’t only about my thoughts and opinions, but rather those observed on various threads on these forums, and then put together with my personal comments.
The "Issues"
**1) Horde Queues are looooong, as opposed to Alliance queues. Up to 2hrs vs instant **
The cause of this is obvious, however the damage is already done. No Racials change or some people quitting or rerolling will tip the scales, since you can’t force enough people to do that. And it’s only going to get worse as Alliance will start to play less once they get geared.
2) Premades
Alliance tend to premade a lot since queues are nearly instant. Can’t blame them, I’d do the same if I could. But on Horde, one can rarely hold a full team together for more than a couple BGs, and replacing members resets the queue, or at the very least prolongs it by ~30mins. This is discouraging to Horde players and there are far less, if any, premades running. This further slows down the already painful grind.
3) Gearing requires A LOT of Honor Already
To put this into perspective, I calculated that for my character, if gearing full pvp from scratch, I would need ~260k honor (I might be wrong, but let’s at least agree it’s over 200k). When playing BGs ~8hrs a day, I get about 2k honor from that, + the PvP dailies included. Of course this varies from player to player. For the purpose of the argument let’s say you can get 4k a day (which means spamming BG queues all the time, nothing else). That means 50 days (the “best case scenario”) of BG spamming for full honor gear. In my personal case, and I play about 5-8hrs a day, it would take me ~130 days. That is simply INSANE, as I am sure the new phase would release in the meantime, essentially “resetting” the grind. Worth mentioning that while farming this, you can’t really do many dungeons/be social unless you have people that can play all day with you or otherwise queue resets on grouping!
These 3 issues combined create a very difficult atmosphere for Horde in PvP. Not to mention it skews arena towards Alliance, as Horde can barely get the right gear to rank properly. But that’s a whole different can of worms…
This slow Honor grind would have been probably fine back in the day when the pace of the game in general was much slower, but requires some tweaking in today’s day and age, or it will be impossible to keep up in today’s “meta world” where people rush through content. It creates a giant inconsistency between PvE and PvP progression, but also Alliance vs Horde PvP progression to a point where it’s no longer a subjective matter.
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS
These are not my own solutions, but rather what I have seen float around on the forums and have personally found to be “good”, relatively objective ideas for a positive change.
1) Create Battlegroups of more or less equal ACTIVE Alliance/Horde PvPers.
This seems like a decent solution, but I do not have the statistics on these things so it might be a impossible task. But in itself, it doesn’t necessarily involve any non-TBC-like changes.
2) Give WotLK Racials to encourage more people to play PvP as Alliance.
Just putting this out there since it floats around: This would have probably been a good idea BEFORE the release. Now, it would only be a bandaid, and only if coupled with faction change so people actually get incentivized to reroll. Personally I think this would do more harm than good.
3) Mercenary mode
This, as in retail, allows people from one faction play as the other faction in BGs. While solving the issue at hand, it doesn’t really fit well into TBC by the opinions of many on these forums, and I agree to a certain extent. It breaks the immersion greatly, and essentially creates another problem after solving the initial one.
4) Same faction BGs
Alliance vs Horde would take priority whenever possible. But for the Horde waiting in queue, they would be able to join a Horde vs Horde match. That way, Alliance will never have to fight alongside Horde, and likely also never against other Alliance since Horde is the “dominant” faction regarding PvP population.
Personally I like this solution the best, or better as “the lesser of evils”. Lorewise it could be explained as “practice matches” (far fetched perhaps, but still better than mercenary mode), and it would definitely lower queue times for Horde.
5) Increase Honor gain for Horde
Simple; increase the Honor in proportion to queue times, so the gearing goes equally fast. This would probably net the same result as solutions 3 and 4, however it comes across as, at least in my mind, unfair towards Alliance that would have to grind only BGs all the time for the same Honor, while Horde would have the opportunity to farm mats or whatever in the open world while waiting for that 1BG that would net them the same as the Alliance would get for a lot more effort.
None of these solutions fit into the original TBC mentality. I know this, I’m sure we all know this. But strictly gameplay wise, something has to be done to at least mend this queue issue.
TL;DR There is no TL;DR, if I can sit 2hrs in a queue you can read this whole post and appreciate the effort behind it, if nothing else. Thanks 
