I was originally against High Elves being playable as we now have four (count that) bloody flavours of elves that are playable in WoW.
I’m a Horde player, have been for 14+ years and have no intention in ever playing a hypothetical High Elf race.
However thinking about the current cirumstances, High Elves are the perfect solution for the faction imbalance.
It’ll reduce Horde PvP queue times and give us one more elven race to kill.
And the biggest bonus - it should theoretically convince some Blood Elf players to go Alliance. I have spoken to many Blood Elf players and they do not care about the gameplay mechanics or ethnic statistics, they cite they’d rather be Alliance so they can have Stormwind, Boralaus ect as “pretty cities” to stand around being AFK.
Perhaps I am insane, but this seems like a very easy win-win-win solution that makes everybody happy in the end.
Think of it like trying to microwave something that says 30 minutes, but you instead go for 30 seconds at 10,000% power. (One awesome microwave by the way)
And now that it’s there? You can’t take it back anymore either. You have to be careful with something like High Elves or it might damage one faction irreversibly.
I do agree that it will have a large impact, however they opened that can of worms with Allied Races and despite Blizzard’s faults, I am sure even they had the sense to realize that.
Zandalari Trolls were much more anticipated than Fat Humans, which will further exacerbate the faction imbalance.
Rationally, I expect the next set of Allied Races to give the Alliance something high in demand and Horde something less popular, however Blizzard are not always rational.
Common sense would tell us that the next set should be High Elves for Alliance, and Sea Goblins (yeah, I don’t like it either) for Horde. Perhaps at one point, a couple of years ago, Vulpera may have been the plan. But at this point it would be stupid and I believe Blizzard acknowledges this.
Because they would just be Blood Elves with blue eyes. And before you point that out, Kul Tirans are not just “fat Humans”, they actually have a unique skeleton and multiple special animations. Out of all the allied races, they are the ones who come closest to a core race in terms of complexity, despite just being “fat Humans” in concept (they are not even supposed to be fat in the lore). Would High Elves get the same treatment? No.
Nah, respectfully I’ll decline. That is an echo chamber of those who want to have elves with pretty blue eyes, I would rather talk about the actual statistics and logistics of sorting the faction imbalance.
And I say this as somebody who plays War Mode on RP server links. There are 4-5 Alliance for every 1 Horde, and yet they get 20-30% bonus while we are sitting at 10%.
I want Blizzard to stop turning a blind eye when such a simple solution is available, which I wager thousands will support. It’s time to do it. Push the High Elf button.
Do you really think that your idea is that original to have its own thread?
There are many repetitve topics on the forums but at least this one is contained in on thread…
Your idea is to give those quote “elves with pretty blue eyes to the Alliance side”, so what is actually different about it? We’ve come with many solutions for this topic in the megathread.
Then I will less than respectfully tell you to stop being special and fall in line.
We don’t care if you’re for or against, the mega thread exists for a reason, to prevent the endless spam of new Helf threads.
This thread will soon devolve into an echo chamber, they all do, nothing will stop that.
I can assure you, Helf won’t fix faction imbalance in any serious way. The factions are already broken and there is no honest way to fix them.
Horde have the perceived “better racials” and therefore more people flock to them, this created a meta in it’s own right.
The Horde now has an ultimately sized population because of this reason.
Removing racials will do nothing major apart from annoy people. Buffing Alliance racials will do nothing major.
Removing racials all together will do nothing, this is because the population will still remain. Why faction change when one side still has all of the players?
As for WM, it was dead on arrival, they killed it by adding reward incentives to it.
It should have been for PVP only, no extras, no rewards, you WM on because you want to PVP.
Helf will fix nothing in any major or long lasting way.
Keep it to the mega thread.
Yes let’s totally discard lore and story and have blood elves join the alliance as high elves -_-
And no the fact that you see helves here and there ingame friendly to alliance in the mmo doesn’t mean it’s cannon.
You play on Argent Dawn man! The Alliance already have 70% of the player base!
I highly doubt that, to be honest, the people who wanted to jump ship are playing Void Elves now, those who are still playing Blood Elves are doing so because they want to…
Hang on, you play on a realm with a 70% Alliance Ration to 30% Horde, you play War Mode on an RP Realm, where the Alliance -massively- outnumber the Horde, where the Alliance get a ridiculous bonus despite being the majority faction, and your solution to this is to theoretically -Increase- the number of Alliance?
I mean how does that help anyone?
That’s not a simple solution, that is exacerbating a problem. A solution would be for Blizzard to go “Oh, things are pretty imbalanced in the Alliance’s favour on the RP Warmode shard, maybe we should give the Horde the bonus to encourage them?”
I mean to be honest, the reasoning there doesn’t make sense, you yourself give a reason why they should -not- take players away from the Horde, what were you trying to do, was this satire?
Oh sweet summer child. Next race is likely to be the Vulpera for the Horde while the Alliance might get the Mechagnomes because they put much more work into the KTs instead the Zandalari Trolls this time. The Vulpera have been datamined long ago as a playable race (simply because they put too much work into them for simply being NPCs) and Mechagnomes are just reskins.
@Naoth: Granted the fact that WCR stats are badly incomplete… But actually, on realms we have data on, the overall situation looks like this…
EU and US combined (levels 20 to 120 only, verified known active characters, past 30 days):
Alliance: 503 872 Horde: 458 926
Kul Tiran vs Zandalari: 18 707 vs 38 781
For a bit of additional insight… Blood elves 155 548, humans 130 463, night elves 131 663, orcs 51 467, trolls 47 766. So effectively, humans and Kul Tiran humans cancel out blood elves… and night elves cancel out the Zandalari and orcs and any one other non-blood elf horde race mostly.
Because there is so much data missing, I can not guarantee the relative ratios are accurate… But the available data by itself does not suggest the balance would require even more alliance bias (and before you say anything more based on my posting race, I have a total of 67 charactes, almost half and half in terms of factions).
Because the High Elves have never been depicted as anything other than Blood Elves with blue eyes. Unlike the Kul Tirans who were never featured since Warcraft III and thus allowed a lot of creative freedom for the writers.
Also, I love how OP berated the Kul Tirans by calling them “Fat Humans”, while ignoring the fact that they are the most unique and complex Allied Race by far. Much better than purple Blood Elves, uglier Night Elves, Tauren with different horns, and Draenei with a lighter skin tone.
Because let’s be real, the only reason why Kul Tirans are not played that much is because they remind a lot of players of what they are in real life, even more so than normal Humans. If people chose their race based on their background and complexity, the Kul Tirans would be the most played Allied Race by far.
Exactly my thoughts, let those pesky blood elves play high elves too, you’ll see good 10-20% horde swap to alliance and poof, balance achieved. Also Cough wildhammer dwarf tattoos please.