Let us try to be positive and post rational and applicable arguments to fix the issue with faction imbalance. Some people actually like the imbalance because they get 30% more rewards from it (I am one of them).
Now for the suggestions :
1-Remove Mercenary mode
2-Reduce the cost of faction change drastically(Horde to Alliance only)
3-Apply the faction change discount to realms dominated by Horde only
4-Warmode should give an additional amount of Rep to the outnumbered faction.
5 -Warmode bonuses should scale beyond 30% as an incentive for players to have it on or switch factions.
From my experience after 8.1(when they allowed warmode bonuses to go beyond 10%) I saw a great deal of Alliance players, we were still outnumbered but it was not as bad as before so it definitely helped.
Please share your opinions and let us try to be respectful.
Mercenary mode is a system like WM. Itâs to help with imbalance. Both sides are theoretically able to trigger it but granted in recent years theyâve both been much only available to one side.
I donât agree with the faction discount to Horde dominated realms. I think if you are going to introduce a system like promote the Alliance discounts they should be available to all regardless and preferably include a discount server transfer package. There is nothing worse than being the minority faction on a realm dominated by the opposite faction.
Personally Iâm not a big fan of lets make ridiculous adjustments to WM in favour of the Alliance. On the whole I feel itâs a failed system. Iâm either placed in a shard with next to no Alliance or itâs completely dominated by them. Many just turn it on for reset and then turn it off again for the rest of the week. If you are going to make the rewards that high I would expect he Alliance to be forced to be in Warmode for that whole reset week with no option to turn it off. Otherwise itâs just a WM tourism effect that isnât actually fixing anything but makes everyone use the benefits for one or two days.
I think the imbalance is now embedded in the system and has features that are very hard to shift even with economic adjustments. Reducing the cost of faction change is an incoherent measure - the reason for implementing a reduction in cost is that players donât want to play Alliance, but for the cost reduction to work players have to want to play Alliance.
I think the WM bonus will encourage a small number of players to turn on WM, but wonât have an impact on faction choice.
I think faction choice really ends up as a top-down culture, which means - what factions are the leading players and streamers using? Itâs a kind of âinfluencerâ style situation. Blizzard could toggle racials (which caused the issue in the first place) or create different bonuses for Alliance vs Horde guilds. But I think the community has to take the lead, and save itself through recruitment drives for Alliance players, streamers getting behind the issue with Save the Alliance events etc. I donât know. There needs to be some out-of-the-box thinking - I donât think it can rely on Blizzard making Alliance temporarily more lucrative or powerful.
What, not being cynical, is the real issue of the faction imbalance?
Anyways, Iâd argue that we should minimize the impact of choosing a certain realm and faction. We lost that feeling a long time ago, just make big realms so anyone can be in a lively guild. Thatâd help a lot already imho.
Maybe, if at all possible they should just disable active racial abilities when doing instanced pve - Heroic and up.
Seeing as that was the main reason allot of sheep and their min-maxxing idols factionchanged in the first place.
And if thatâs not enough they can do the same for high end pvp aswell.
When that proves not enough, then they can look at giving some incentives(if at all necessary) seeing as how so many posters these days play Horde but itâs apparantly a faction of jerks/racists/noobs/whiners and it sucks so much etc. You would think peopleâd jump at the chance to ditch the Horde in favor of the much beter Alliance.
But is that because of the imbalance or because we are spread all over the realms? I can imagine that it is relatively hard to form a decent raid guild on realms other than like ravencrest and silvermoon.
Good idea, I have a few idea-oh, hang on, whats this?
Well -that- didnât take long to nosedive into the ground did it?
Come on, we all knew this is his catnip and he was going to show up with some nonsenseâŠ
Anyway, on topic,
I really do think that a lot of this is influenced. Horde Racials are really not that good in comparison to Alliance ones if you look at their overall utility Coughs âThanks for that free Mailbox on Nightborne and the Magâhar bonusesâ
Even the âPro Playersâ (a laughable term if ever there was one) swap their faction and race due to the utility of a racial for a specific boss game mechanic. I mean to my mind that is not being a pro-player, thatâs just Min-Maxing, which is generally frowned upon by genuine players, it shows a lack of overall ability, just using statistics to carry you. But who cares?
Who actually cares?
Who cares which faction got a world first, or about some foolish league table as if you could actually âWinâ at World of Warcraft. It has zero impact upon people playing the game.
Who cares?
Streamers care. The Streamers who love nothing more than to sell your own outrage back to you for shiny shiny dollars. Horde -must- have better racials, it is proven! How is it proven? Because someone on YouTube said so.
The problem is, some people are not able to have their own opinions, but must be served an opinion, ready baked by someone on the internet -telling them- what their opinion should be, and getting subscriptions to do so.
The instant people realise that these people are getting actual money for their streams, and that their opinion is as utterly worthless as their own, or anyone elses, then this problem would just go away.
They are reinforcing the idea of bias, because it -sells-. They make money from making streams about how one faction sucks and the other is so much better, and so what happens?
The flock follows.
These people are not next level thinkers, they are not genius minds, sometimes they are actually quite repellent people who make a habit of crashing servers and disrupting the game, but people follow them because they -want- someone to tell them what to think.
Just think. If there were no streamers continually telling people what they should be angry about, no idiotic league tables, and people were left alone to actually just play the game, do you think we would have the faction imbalance?
No we would not.
It isnât helped when you get faction Quislings coming out with nonsense like âWell of course the Horde is better, 96.4% of the Devs are actually members of the Hordeâ (Because, uh, yeah, its a real thing, not a fictional construct in a -game) or â80% of the playerbase is Hordeâ (Yeah, right, and Iâve got this Bridge in London to sell youâŠthe last accurate figures showed a 4% difference between factions)
None of this is player experience, this is all people being told what to think, and following along, which again has the knock on effect of people faction transferring. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. It wasnât a problem until we were told it was a problemâŠ
By people who make money from the problem existing, because they can double down and make more videos about itâŠ
I sometimes wish I could just give some of these people a shake and go âYou can play both Factions! You donât need to mindlessly believe a Streamer, Just play both Factions, have a favourite, fine, but you -can- see for yourself, and make up your own mind!â
The irony being that we live in a world where a word used to describe being unique and individual is a derogatory one, so the inference is that it is preferable to be one of the herd, and not have your own opinion.
That is what led us to this point, people just mindlessly believing that the Horde is better, because someone told them to.
Puny, pls stop trying to spread false information related to this âmercenary systemâ.
Yes it is there to help with imbalance, but in order to make it worse and snowball it. Horde has long queues? You have mercenary mode in which you can troll Alliance teams as a Horde, so why not choose the crowded faction instead of 39% population side full of casuals. I bet on it mercenary damages faction balance by at least 2-3% .
It must be removed from the game, neither Horde nor Alliance must have access to it. They both used it, Alliance in WoD, Horde in Legion-BfA and Shadowlands if it doesnât get removed. Enough with this bs system, it serves only to make things worse and I still boycott random BGs because of it.
The question is, do Alliance players want to play with a Horde on their team? Factions are pillars of this game according to devs when it comes to crossfaction play? but they have a system in game which is exact opposite of what they are talking about.
How reliable and trustable they are? Are they more inclined to troll their own team and send toxic messages to Alliance players or not? 7-8 Months ago one of them was complaining about Alliance in BG, I said gtfo and never turn back then. I wonât even mention about Alterac Valley scandal in which Alliance had 3% winrate because of mercenaries and you are still trying to defend this system.
It is faulty and wrong. It is the easiest thing Blizzard can do in order to prevent this snowball effect. Even if removal of it brings 10.000 players for faster queues to Alliance side, it is a success and I think it will be more.
