Population split is close to even in EU

[Bewarê-frostmane]

@Nathara-forscherliga

Isn’t the only reason to talk about faction balance/imbalance the activity in any given content?

No, it’s to stop the nonsensical whining about “faction balance” and the suggestions that used to come up for faction queues.

Overall, the factions are balanced. It’s just that because so many more hordes queue for AV than alliance does, this messes with the queue times.

Oh right, and of course the illogical justification some players used for AV premades that their “faction is the smaller one”, which any indication to go by shows that they aren’t really, at least not in any meaningful way. That small difference in the split is well within an acceptable margin of error.

As for why queue times matters, here’s why:

@Bewarê-frostmane

Queue times has an effect on the will to win, on average. It serves as an additional motivation.

For example, horde didn’t start tryharding in AV until queue times rose for them. The first couple of days of AV once BGs had been released in Classic, Horde was INTENTIONALLY losing because it was more honor per hour to lose fast and get bonus honor from NPCs and then queue again with a queue time of less than 10 minutes, than it was to be stuck in an AV to try and win after a long fight.

This was back during the first wave of premades doing those 7 minute wins.

Then the queue times skyrocketed, and more and more became motivated to actually give a damn and try to defend and win.

This is yet another sociological problem permeating the alliance side. Your queue times aren’t long enough yet in comparison to the horde side, so your gratification of waiting to join a BG is still nearly instant.
And we all know what instant gratification does to you.

So the horde side, stuck with that delayed gratification over and over and over again, cares more about winning because otherwise they get sent back into that long queue time with almost nothing to show for it.
So the delayed gratification serves as the ultimate motivation to suck as much honor as they can out of every AV, on average.