As soon as we saw Alliance popukation go way a few weeks ago, we got to work on our options for addressing the situation. They’ve all been discussed here and elsewhere, as you know, and in addition to following your discussions closely, we looked at game history and data. What was most evident from all of your feedback was: players want to continue to play on their chosen side of the faction conflict, players don’t want to have disadvantages in BGs, and players don’t want to play at a disadvantage because of their chosen faction.
To solve those issues as best we can, we’ve been internally testing a configuration where the Alliance playerbase will have access to Horde racials in an attempt to balance faction numbers. We’re ready to test it in the live game. Here’s the plan:
Starting tomorrow (Saturday, July 3), we’re going to enable Horde racials for Alliance players to pick and choose from.
You’ll play as usual, and will pick an opposite-faction racial for you.
We’ve been thinking of these like military training exercises, and to help get that feeling across in-game, we’re testing putting masks and tabards on the players choosing out of the enemy faction’s racials.
Please note that Alliance racials won’t be available for Horde players, due to current faction imbalance and would be particularly awkward for the Alliance faction that found themselves fighting an uphill battle due to lower faction numbers and inferior racials.
We’ll follow the action closely throughout the weekend, and with scheduled maintenance next week (July 7 in this region), we’re going to return the matchmaker to its regular configuration and analyze what happened.
When the cross-faction racials goes live tomorrow, we’ll open a new feedback thread in this forum. After you’ve played some BGs, please come to that new thread and let us know how it went.
I love the effort you put in, but I don’t really see the racials as that big of a deal. We Alliance have some great racials ourselves.
The problem is that no one is rolling Alliance, the small advantage of Horde racials was enough to incentivize players to go that way. Now Alliance needs some incentive aswell.
This change is an absolute failure and will destroy the Allie faction as whole. Well the good side is that Horde can have their own orgies in BG’s I suppose.
I doubt there are so many people who would pick a race just on racials that alliance will come anywhere near ‘dying out’. I would imagine most people pick race based on what they think looks coolest.