Same-Faction Battlegrounds and More

Ofc if the majority faction is benefting from the change it is the unproofable truth that the majority wants that change. However, that doesn’t mean it is the right change for the health of the game.

During that test, we saw the benefits of drastically lowered queue times and less unavoidable ganking in the outdoor world. However, there were a significant number of concerns registered on other related topics.

Ofc queue times were lowered when the majority faction can queue against each other. It’s much easier for the system to shuffle teams. It is kind of ridiculous that this is stated since the ONLY reason HvH BGs are introduced is BECAUSE of the queue times on horde side. I mean what did you expect? That the queue times increased?

We noticed that players were dismayed when the system occasionally launched an Alliance vs. Alliance Battleground. We reduced the likelihood of that a couple of hours into the test, and we think we can do a little more there.

This was a perfect showcase of how flawed your implementation was - The ONLY time I got matched against alliance was when I was in a Pug and I had to play against an alliance premade. I could literally tell from the start on horde side that I have to play against that.

The quick queues revealed that a noticeable number of players were doing BGs in organized raids.

Yeah your system was also structured that even less and less alliance wanted to queue due to the sheer number of horde premades just running over pugs. Not everybody plays on Gehennas or Firemaw. Especially on lower popped server it becomes increasingly difficult to even find a premade on alliance side. On my server Patchwerk (rated as “high” by Blizzard) only 1 occiasional AB/EOTS premade exists at prime time on alliance side. Alot of us are forced to pug or play with 2 or 3 friends max.

Globally, the faction imbalance is small, but the trend over the last few months has been towards a lower BG participation rate among Alliance players.

I disagree. Unless you provide statistical data I trust what my eyes can see and these are 2 things: A) People leave the server to find better shelter elsewhere (might it be a PVE server or one of the bigger ones) B) From week to week more and more horde players are tracked by ironforge pro and since classic the faction increased by more than 10% globally. On my server when I ran through shattrath I actually have to search for alliance players between horde ones. Karazhan is camped by horde raids and from week 1 I died every time I tried to get in because horde was outnumbering alliance at the entrance by a large margin. SO release the data or I call your “minor faction balance” argument a hoax.
And to the people drawing the “Well its only your server card” - UNLESS we have megaservers - faction imbalance is a server problem and not a global one. I don’t care about the faction balance of Gehennas or Earthsaker and they dont care about the one on my server. Blizzard should strive to make incentives that the faction balance stays as close to 50/50 as possible. May those incentives be for alliance or for horde.

Still, we’d like to see what happens when we place a reward for the minority faction into the game.

If you think the faction imbalance isn’t as bad as players make out it to be why do you bend your knee here? It’s stuff like that that smells fishy. Either admit “Holy crap balance became worse and worse and we need to do something about it” OR release the data and say “Hey look its not as bad and all your fears are baseless”. I think you are well aware of the faction imbalance and the trend since launch both for server and horde migration.

And it still boggles my mind that you don’t even consider free faction changes on heavily unbalanced servers BEFORE introducing such a drastic change. It feels like the decision was made by an Activision accountant that valued the revenue of paid server transfers higher than the players enjoyment of the game. It is the same like combining servers isn’t as profitable as paid server transfers.

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roflmaozors

Its not decent since we are not living on a megaserver. You have to look at each server indivudally and that is quite devastating. Most of the servers are not even close to that 50/50 - 45/55 range and the “overall data” which lazy people pull out of their hat is screwed by the fact that some servers are heavily alliance favored while others are heavily horde favored. Does that mean the overall balance is good? No. Do you want to play on an 80%+ Alliance server as horde? Or the other way around - certainly not.
People need to learn how to correctly interpret data and especially without a bias.

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Seriously the honor being as bad as it’s at the moment and still taking ages to farm as horde this should have been increased with both factions.

I spent like 30 hours or over on bg ques and bg as horde between Friday and Monday and yeah… I got like next to nothing honor 6-8k including 3K worth of marks, sure buff only alliance honor gains

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Well they’ve had instant queues for a while, so they’re likely mostly done with Honor gear and only did BG’s to be more competitive in arenas.

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you know ally got better racials anyway. also why would it be fair if ally got instant ques and horde not? i dont wanna wait 50 mins and loose agianst 2 mins premade bg for what 200 honor?

But… your cat :cry:

Great. I’m all for it. Even the alliance bonus. Please dont take so long to permanently implement a solution though.

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I’m happy you didn’t just seperate premades to a complete seperate queue because you would have just killed that community altogether almost like your killing alliance and this is coming from someone who doesn’t premade.

That said those bonuses are not enough to surgically make the servers more balanced or to make me surgically open my wallet to re-subscribe again. The world is dieing on alliance side and this will do very little.

The queues were a symptom of huge population imbalance the small partipation is because of the numbers of players on PvP servers plain and simple adding rewards to get pve server Alliance queue up who normally have no interest in PvP won’t save PvP servers or help with alliance on PvP servers.

It’s good you don’t force alliance to fight eachother because we don’t want that abomination in the game in the first place.

Yeah the majority like same faction battlegrounds because the majority play horde but that’s the problem isn’t it?

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Hooray for bonus to alliance playere that will que but the part about restricting grsp above 5 ppl to que for bg is BS for Ally. The bonus chest will just make more afk ers join the bgslooking for Radu loot and will dramaticly lower our chances of wining the game, that means no chest for them and no honor for the rest of us.
Ally win rate when full of pugs is 10% or lower even without all the tourists that want a bonus chest wich they will never get because they will never win.

Or give that bonus regardless If they win or lose, the incentive is to make them que, and after they will lose 9/10 games ppl will stop queing for what’s basilcy a carrot on a stick.

Let us join as premades, with hvh enabled they cam make their own premades now.

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The Alliance tears are the best part of this change even if it was 2 months too late and Alliance still gets the better end of the deal despite having 2 months to farm this season and next seasons honor.

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#nochanges, #somechanges or #alotofchanges?

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That totally explains the balancing shift from Classic to TBC. Why guilds like NOTA and Salad Bakers switched to horde during Pre-patch. Thats why in each Arena Bracket (2v2 3v3 5v5 EU and NA) the amount of undeads is between 24-30% and thus almost double that of any other race (check drustvar).
People don’t switch to horde and abandon their alliance toons because they certainly feel orc looks much cooler. Every website was praising horde as the superior faction both in pve and pvp and that paid off.

But ofc most of TBC players are casual RP players that only abandoned their human/orc warriors for warlocks and hunters because they wanted a new challenge - kappa.

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Love the changes, time to play again

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FOR THE HOoOrDE.

Now everyone go make arena teams so its eaiser for me to get top 0.5%

Nice gameplan Blizzard, later when everyone is playing horde, launch WOTLK and offer all min/maxers a faction change for only 39.99$. And profit.

This type of thing is exactly what the community that longed for vanilla wanted to get away from. This should’ve been the very last and most desperate option on the table, not the first hand choice after years of ignoring the growing problem of faction imbalance. I have zero faith left in your management tbh.

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We’re planning to end this test with scheduled weekly maintenance next week (28 July). We prefer having a clear beginning and end to it so that we can do more comparative analysis and take care as we decide what would be best for the game and players going forward.

only 1 week though pff

any warrior druid or hunter druid is way better on alliance. not to mention human rogue almost always winning the opener which decides the game in season 1. dwarf priest is also better than undead because all you face on the higher end of the ladder is rogue mage or rogue anything.

if you are seriously blaming racials you are bad and should stick to karazhan.

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It’s hard enough getting a PvP community together, especially when playing on a PvE server. Our server has worked bloody hard recently to get a community of PvPers going where we regularly run Premades as well.

Not only did we build a community of people to play together, people found new people to play with and actually talk to outside of guilds. It’s one of the things that makes Classic/TBC so good, the social aspect of the game hadn’t died like it did on retail when LFG and LFR came out, when you no longer had to talk to people on your server.

The social aspect died on Retail completely. If Blizzard are going to take away the communities that are built for PvP, they’re taking away another social aspect of the game.

Players at the end of the day have a CHOICE to roll alliance or for horde. They have a CHOICE to queue solo, or create a premade. Why are Blizzard rewarding choices players are completely free to make?

If there are problems, there are other solutions than taking away Premades which have been around since BGs launched.

At this rate, you might as well just bring forward RBGs and launch them during TBC, let the Premades battle against Premades and let the solo queuers queue individually.

While you’re at it, what about Dual Spec?

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If the honor wasn’t so slow to obtain items that would allow people to go into the arena to compete without dying in a mace stun, pre-mades may not be so common. This is an awful change and is totally against the spirit of the game, in which a group of players banding together overcome challenges that would otherwise be impossible - like organising a group of pugs afking in a bg to get honor gear so they don’t die in a kidney shot.