Will Blizzard ever balance the factions?

Community General Discussion
183

You’re playing on a RP-server and asking me about it? Sounds like you’re an Alliance-player who joined the server for the WM-bonus.

The racials were an answer to the faction imbalance to give the Alliance some oomph to even out the active/passive field on both sides. This is why only the HMT/ZT are actually recognized as the useful ones on the AR-Horde side. But did this help the Alliance to favor them? No. DID/KT/MG are somewhat broken in this extend but still nobody plays them.

Unique mounts? Which ones? You mean the horse and gryphon recolors which they have apologized for in an interview because they thought it would make sense lore-wise? Copy-pasting old expansion models on the horses don’t make them any better.

The only unfair advantage the Alliance has is that they can use Kua’Fon and Child of Torcali (which are Zandalari mounts, if you don’t know your game), otherwise everything has been balanced out by now.

Or are we talking about the hippo and bee mounts which is what you actually wanted to discuss about but hadn’t thought about it? The hippo will be reused at one point in the game for the other faction (Draenor TW) and the Kul Tiran Stormsong valley bee is specific to the lore which was never intended to be a player’s mount until they gave it to the players after the horse-backlash?

As you are hopefully aware of the other topics, they do. It started somewhere down the road with TBC to even out the Alliance-favouritism and had its lasting impact on the game. Smirk remarks from Ion and other developers also didn’t help the “cause” to reflect the Alliance as an equal faction, especially when the Horde emblem is below Varian’s grave embedded, don’t you agree? And what about shaming the Alliance-players several times during the BizzCon? Do I need to link the videos for you?

Don’t worry, we have plenty of material for the coming months to discuss. I’ll hand it out for you bit by bit. Pick your poison and we get started.

You’re complaining about the woman who wrote Lord of the Clans? Do you even read the books you complain about, Psygnosis Lemming?

Yes and no - but you don’t contextualize here the specific cases. Given the current status of the faction, it’s easy to see why they did this. Something like MG/KT would have never flied before the faction imbalance.

And they did well to place the Alliance as the good guys, because they are the main characters of the story. Every cosmic threat is linked to them, not the Horde in the grand schemes (unless you want to count Wrathion’s plan to harvest and manipulate several Hordes across the parallel dimensions).

But I give you a helping hand here: It’s simply bad writing on both sides. The Alliance has all the power to destroy the Horde on the whim but for reasons it always evens it out. But don’t worry, you have been blessed with several upcoming storylines where Turalyon takes up the mantle and will bring likely ruin to the Alliance due the prophecy. Given with Tyrande (rip) and Greymane you had some on-going war you’re getting your often requested dark Alliance shades which are still justified by how bad Sylvanas actually is - but this is actually nothing new if you knew your lore beforehand. The original plot stopped with Metzen’s departure and WoD was more or less a side story to bring the Legion back into the mix - which could have been solved in any other possible way just to justify their return, mind you.

But the Gul’dan/Khadgar audio drama was nice though.

I’m a RPer first and foremost, I really don’t care much about the human potential™ and how raids need the so sweet, sweet Azerite. You’re barking the wrong tree up but you would have known this if you actually paid attention to the regulars here on the forum.

If you want to complain about unfairness, well, what’s about the Aussie-servers then? Main servers and favored. Why do I hear nothing about it? Because you actually don’t care about it, isn’t it so?

Oh, I have a lot to complain about but these are private nature about my Horde-characters which does not concern you - unless you’re paying exactly 175 euros to me, my new best friend.

You haven’t “singled” anyone out, you just a rambling kid bored during their summer break.

184

This is the actual answer to the problem.

Yes and no. It’s true that the Alliance needs more diversity but we’re also past the bridge as well. At this point they need to buff the Alliance to bring the competitive scene back and stop the negative feedback loop.

Vulpera attracts several people of different demographics. I think the takeaway is that they just look unique with a good lore behind them.

You can be loyal to both factions, it’s just a game.

This is why the belf-skin colorization has been granted to the Alliance. After the latest allied race disaster they simply had to make up for it. This is nothing new but you’ll get used to the pattern.

185

“Alliance actually have better racials currently for m+ and mostly raiding” Very nice joke :slight_smile: (No it dont)

186

They already have advantage by playing horde becouse better op racials, top guilds said many times that the reason they are playing horde is better racials.

187

It’s like reading 4chan…“no u.”

Wake up and smell the coffee. There is no whining. There’s complaints.

There is favoritism by devs. And it’s towards horde. Since most of them play horde.

Alliance is dying not because of “” the community “” but because of bad writing, bad development, bad allied races, weaker racials for 10years+

188

Back when I pointed this warmode Alliance bonus issue out you were the one who told me that the solution to fixing it was for me to roll Alliance. So now you are giving me crap for what? Following your advice? You are so full of it.

Lemme summarize what you said - Blizzard gave us stuff, but I’m gonna pretend they didn’t.

The fact is the very stuff you collectively complained about was given to you. If it didn’t work on you means the problem is somewhere else. Namely with you because you, specifically don’t really care if it works. You just want to complain about something.

And please spare me the “shaming” of poor Alliance players. You try to shift the focus to a time long ago when some Alliance players got booed by some Horde players to insinuate that you “deserve” preferential treatment. It’s BS and I can see through it. So again, spare me your fictive Alliance fragility, I know it’s just a smoke screen.

And by the way, to point out the hypocrisy, you rip on me for complaining about some writer cause she wrote a good book once about the orcs, but you get to complain about Blizzard in general who gave you the whole game, good and bad.

And there is no yes and no, the racials are favoring the Alliance at this moment in several fields of the game. You are trying to opinion bomb it again like you have been doing the whole post, to defend your whining privilege.

And the only bad writing that’s in this game is linked to attempts to cater to the whiny Alliance masses. In fact the worse writing that came to WoW originally was via MoP and it had a specific task in mind - to make the Alliance feel better. Now they are repeating that same story with very little concern for the Horde opinion. But here you are. Still salting the forum with tears. Give me a break.

And by the way, I’m done complaining about unfairness. Nothing was done to fix the situation on the RP realms. They didn’t care and the expansion is almost done. But I will point this out whenever you talk about how unfair Blizzard is to you.

You have nothing to complain about when it comes to your blue suffering. Everything you complained about has been answered by Blizzard in one way or another. The fact that you dismiss those things just so you can complain some more and entertain the notion that Blizzard is biased, says more about you than it says about anything else. You enjoy complaining, playing the victim card and this is your contribution to the Alliance and I dare say it’s one of the reasons people would rather go Horde than Alliance.

189

What else did you expect to hear? The Warmode bonus is for the faction who is in a disadvantageous situation and not your free out of jail card to justify how unfair things are. Obviously the bonus should have been regional or server-wide but you know it well enough that they didn’t care about changing it.

You have to be more specific.

So, you want to discuss current issues? Let’s get started then. We have all the time the next months we need and several topics to cover.

Why does Horde-players could farm during their first solo warfront their equipment without any restrictions and the Alliance not? Wouldn’t it have been better to have both factions have a full unrestricted cycle before patching things up before the first raid tier opened?

Would you argue that the current competitive Alliance scene is not fragile and all is just a “smoke screen” by switching to the Horde because they simply don’t know how to recruit players and want the easy mode for having the bigger player pool at hands?

“Get to complain” goes both ways, my tragic hero. It’s called having a discussion and if you can’t bring up some valid points, then you will not see any land in this debate. Discussions are usually measured by the developers to get feedback, you know. If your whole point is just “be grateful for the sake of having the game”, then you’re missing the actual purpose of Blizzard-Activision as a paying customer to a service.

We will move on if you have nothing else relevant to add to the initial part.

As I said before, they evened out the fields here. We can go through every racial in a new and detailed topic and you’ll come to the same conclusion as many people have discussed before you: They evened it out with the Alliance AR racials which makes the Alliance a bit stronger in some regards. Still doesn’t change a thing that, besides the velves, nobody plays these new races because they don’t appeal to the casual audience. Even MG are more popular than KTs according to one of our resident. I’m sure Blizzard bet on the Alliance AR to be a game changer and it didn’t worked out.

The MoP-storyline has been in development since BC (source: Pearl of Pandaria interview) and they actually wanted to start with a tourist guide you can purchase in stores. It’s another classic Blue vs Red storyline which should have ended the conflict for good with Legion following it - but they changed their plans and it is what it is now. But the problem is tied to war-fatigue from the player base and another whole beast to discuss about it. In the end, you could argue, that MoP was just another team up in the end to fight for the greater good with the True Horde the aggressor. It’s not the Alliance’s fault that the Horde loses important characters with each expansion.

And again, the Alliance is the “good faction”, if you like it or not. The moral grey™ things have been showed pre-Cataclysm several times but these are side stories. But blaming the Alliance-players for this bad storywriting just reflects on your overall bad habit to blame others for something you cannot work out by yourself. Besides this, you simply generalize the whole situation and see “whine” which is a poor man’s job at posting. There are many layers and different opinions and there isn’t always a true solid answer but a give and take all the time.

I would suggest you stop barking the wrong tree up just because they have forsaken your personal story needs. If you want to be heard, then the US-forums are waiting for you. With a LV10-12 you’re able to post there if you wish to complain about things which are outside our influence.

You can point out whatever you want if this has nothing to do with my reasons to join the RP-community. If you’re so desperate to have the “RP-bonus”, let’s call it what it is, then you need to roll an Alliance-character and contribute in evening out the WM-bonus. Most people will likely level their new character to LV10 anyway from now on in SL which will end some of the minor problems we have on our server too.

What is my personal “blue suffering”, Metaljaw?

I dismiss obvious baits and nonsense which leads to nowhere. And this is such one. Put more efforts in your postings, please.

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191

Oh what? The example of injustice is not quite driving home that point that there is so much injustice towards the Alliance? Well sorry reality is not convenient for you.

And seriously you bring up the warfronts? You do know that triggering them is determined by player contribution yeah? If you fellas had delayed the donations you could have been the first to get those items so please spare me, when you are not given welfare items for being Alliance.

I can argue that the Alliance has become a faction represented by tearful hypocrites crying injustice at every turn. Personally I wouldn’t want to join that.

And what feedback could they possibly take from you? “Horde bias Fix” that’s the sum of your statements. You complained about mounts, they gave you an unique mount, you complained about racials, they gave you powerful racials. But here you are. Telling me how Blizzard is still so unfair to you.

And yeah of course it didn’t work out. Cause like I said, the problem isn’t Blizzard, it’s the players harping on about Horde bias just for the sake of complaining. How about they try getting rid of those and see how that plays out?

And I didn’t complain about the MoP story. I used it as an example of how damaging you people can be with your needy demands. It didn’t do anyone any favors and quite frankly it just ended up making everyone more miserable. Just cause some alliance boys didn’t feel that Blizzard love hard enough. They are doing this again and the end result is as evident as it was the last time. Apparently nobody learned anything.

And again, your reasons for joining whatever you joined are not relevant firstly because I have trouble buying your crap, because you do dish a lot of that out and second because it does not matter, the fact is that there’s a form on injustice that would never have been tolerated if it was in the Horde’s favor. But given the Horde is not as quick to complain as the Alliance Blizzard saw fit to do nothing.

Maybe you should take your own advice and go to the US forums to shed your blue tears there.

192

No, they won’t balance factions, because alliance players are cowards who turned their warmode OFF, disadvantaging THEMSELVES on purpose.

There’s no way to balance this, the only real way out is to diverge from the faction play (as seen in BFA’s dismantling of Horde, all leaders left being alliance sympathizers) and just let players bear each other in guild vs guild format.

193

I have WM on. I tell you a secret, my main rarely gets attacked. Most red ones walking by target me, probably take a quick look at me (HP, class, title, whatever?) and decide to just mind their own business. If I exposed my toons with crappy gear in the same way the toons would be more likely to get camped than remaining unharmed.

Is the definition of WM to take easy fights only? Who is the real coward?

Also there are people who do not care about PvP at all. They simply do not enjoy it. Accept that or don’t.

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194

What is it with alliance players that they can’t even check the facts before they start speaking, is it just part of the defeatist alliance attitude to think you’re behind no matter what?

You can check for yourself on bloodmallet, but if you don’t wanna bother then no worries cause i already did.
Taking the number 1 race for every dps spec, alliance has the best racial for 16/24 and horde has 8/24.
If you take the top 3 racials of every spec, then alliance has 45/71, horde has 22/71 and pandaren are 4/71.

If you’re talking about racials that are not damage based, then it can’t really be measured, it’s all situational, but nelf shadowmeld and dwarf cleanse are borderline broken in M+, where horde’s best is probably rocket jump on goblin, which can be good sometimes, but it’s not measurable what is better then.

Even then the biggest difference i could find in racials was a 1.2% difference on arcane mage, but that was a heavy outlier, and generally the difference was less than 0.5% which is barely an advantage anyways.

This is a blatant lie our delibirate spin. It has been said by top guilds many times that the reason for the change to horde, 10 years ago, was the racials, but not in any modern time has a top player with half a brain said they played horde for the racials.

Limit, the guild that won last tier, even stated that they would have played alliance if it was just for racials, but the expense of moving the guild back and forth was not worth it.

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195

So, you picked the one post based on outdated information and ignored the others. It’s a good thing that you corrected it based on the up to date data from bloodmallet. Let’s summurize what else you did:

  • Bash on 1 post => check
  • Ignore other posts => check
  • Generalizing => check
  • Exaggerating => check

Sir, that’s trolling.

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196

Dunno if this is meant for me since there is no quote or reply tag, but since there was only 1 other dude i could find that mentioned bloodmallet, i think it’s a safe bet.
If it wasn’t for me just say the word an i’ll delete this.

Did not bash on the poster of this thread. I made a calm response, and the only thing that can even be slightly bashing, is that i said that if he had no reasonable fix or even a good idea, then he shouldn’t expect someone else to magically fix it.

This i also didn’t do, i have replied to all the recent posts on this topic, but if you mean i ignored individual comments, then yea i am not about to read 194 comments on this topic. I did read a lot of them, but i saw no valid logical points.
Many things are subjective, and i am not gonna argue about something subjective, cause it’s pretty useless.

Also, i did a big reply to the main poster, and then i have responded to whatever was responded to that. Would never ignore a direct response, and the recent reply was to someone replying to me.

Sure i generalized in the same way everyone generalizes.
I saw the same comment for the around 12th time in 2 days of skimming these posts, and it was the 3rd or 4th time across those threads that it in direct reply to me.
Sorry for generalizing, but it has become pretty clear from these threads that alliance defeatist attitude is a thing. That’s not to say that every alliance player is defeatist, that’s not at all what i said, but pretty much all defeatists i have seen are alliance.

There is no factual exaggeration really. Only thing that is close is i said it was 10 years ago when it started, which is pretty true, but it only got out of hand around 6 years ago if that’s what you wanna go for.

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197

We’re going to keep this up for weeks and months now on a daily basis. Do you really think we’re getting off the train so fast? I just purchased a six month sub. We have plenty of time to spin this topic until Shadowlands arrives.

I was referring to the first solo WM where the Horde got no iLV requirements to do it while the Alliance later on had one? Obviously it was abused to the point they had to place something into the system but couldn’t they just wait until a full cycle went down?

Don’t you think this was unfair towards the Alliance-players, especially just shortly before the first raid opened to make things harder for the blue faction and gearing up alts?

We will get to the topic within the next few weeks, be patient.

This is hardly an argumentation but bias.

Complaining looks a bit different. But as you know it is evident that all their attempts to make the Alliance attractive again failed so far. But let’s spin the blame game towards you for once.

What would you do to improve the faction balancing in Blizzard situation?

It is Blizzard’s fault for not reacting to the problems sooner or not good enough (depends on the pov). The balancing affected every layer of the faction, starting from raiding to player engagement which was evident after they started to dish out the welfare gear. The developers actually anticipated that the WM-ratio will even itself out but as you this never happened in this timeline. The core issue still lies that there are way too many Horde-players in Warmode which simply overran the other faction. You can find more about their initial ambitions here in an live stream interview about it:

The war mode is a marketed main feature of the expansion which failed miserably. You can find more about it in the official preview from exactly two years and one month ago.

You can spin your “Alliance is so unfair”-bias as much as you want to but you have also to level with reality that this is a feature sold by Blizzard and they did not find the delicate approach to balance the issue out despite knowing that the competitive aspect of Team Blue took a nosedive years ago. So, where does exactly starts nitpicking, complaining, criticism and whining to you then, Metaljaw?

Secondly: Get rid of what exactly? You have to be more specific.

I do not believe anything is “damaging” you in the slightest - unless you take the game way too serious for your own good.

They doing exactly what again? Can you please get specific in what happened during MoP and how it parallels to BfA with links and examples? Did they release during MoP also too many horses for you?

Let’s recall your own posting, shall we?

If it doesn’t matter why I joined a RP-server, then why did you brought the issue up in the first place? But then again, I don’t see you complaining about the Aussie-servers either which are Alliance-dominated and are a real issue.

Oh sweet summer child…

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198

I’m pretty sure I won’t stick around to give you reasons to cry about unfairness. I’m gonna say what I think needs to be said, however.

And no, I don’t think it’s unfair cause the Alliance have been given a welfare item weekly. Something the Horde does not have access to. I’m pretty sure there was a raiding guild which changed factions only to get those welfare items and the moved back. So no, I don’t think it’s unfair. But what if the Alliance got the warfront first? Would that have been fair?

I already stated earlier that if I were in Blizzard’s place I’d covertly convince one of the large raiding guilds to switch sides. That’s one thing. The other, I’d remove people like you.

And yes, Blizzard has some of the blame, but Warcraft is a global product. As much as every region wants to believe it, the game does not revolve around them. I understand that, that’s why I didn’t make the injustice of the AAO buff a bigger issue. You however either you understand and don’t care or you just don’t bother to understand at all and take advantage of a chance to cry.

As for war mode, please give me a break. The typical Horde player hasn’t turned warmode off since the expansion launched. Your Alliance buddies especially on AD where they outnumber the Horde at least 3 to 1, turn off warmode after they get their weekly welfare then proceed to complain on trade chat about how unfair Blizzard is and “Hordemode”. But I do agree that they made an error when they designed warmode, the option to turn it off.

And you better believe you are damaging to the game. If Blizzard starts trying to please you at every turn, not only will you demand more, like you are doing now, but you will fake more disappointment to get that preferential treatment at the level you want, which is far above the Horde.

I honestly couldn’t care less about your reasons for joining whatever server. That’s not the point. Make a blog if you want to tell your life story. I’m pointing out that there’s an unfair system that has not been addressed by Blizzard. You want to complain about unfairness towards your faction, I gave you an example which shows that proves that unfairness is not exclusive to you but also that you are overreacting in comparison to the Horde community, which was the point I was trying to make when I said there’s a big difference between the two faction communities. Deal with that however you want.

199

Blood mallet would disagree with you, according to the data from there alliance racials are some of the strongest in the game, notably humans.

So you want to buff their racials further when they’re already strong? That’s a terrible idea and Blizzard apparently know that as well.

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200

Oh, you will. You’re part of the furniture here and will go nowhere.

The very first warfront was shared between Alliance and Horde and I still have the pictures from back then.

Yes, there was a guild who changed to get the gears but this was during 8.1 for the world first , wasn’t it? We’re talking about the very first raid, Uldir. Not Battle of Dazar’alor.

…or you hand out free server/faction transfers to the Alliance and adjust another system based on the WM-design for skills strength in raids to even out the player pool and giving everyone a fair chance.

What happened to your “it’s a community”-issue statement before when it’s also partly Blizzard’s fault? What a surprising twist we got here! But go on, I’m listening.

Speaking logically - and I take you by your own words here - the dominating server-faction (or shards in this case) have no reason to turn the WM off. Also, according to you, the AD-server outnumbers the Horde pretty much at this point.

But you forgot something to mention:

By default, sharding is always disabled on RP realms, except where needed for server stability. When events drive large numbers of players to specific areas, we shard them as needed. Sharding has once again been disabled, but we expect it will be needed for launch events soon.

https://twitter.com/warcraftdevs/status/1022566187266232320?lang=en

And just to make sure you’re on the same page with me: We’re not talking about connected realms here. The reason why you get your butt delivered on Defia’s Brotherhood is because you also get shared with AD. I suppose some dominating people made you realize during Nazjatar how the main servers works for the Alliance, isn’t it so, Metaljaw? Well, that’s too bad then. But you know what they say. Sharing is caring.

Well, this was certainly awkward to read.

You gotta have to be patient, we don’t have even begun with the other topics yet. We will go through everything. From races to skills and of course AR-distribution/requests/outcome. Let’s just discuss the welfare items and the first warfront for now before we change the topic because this still needs some clarification coming from you and what you actually meant to say.

The human racials, in general, are in general a problem poorly distributed to justify the casual beginner character. The power should be shifted to other races to some degree but let’s see what SL has in storage for us (which is likely nothing).

201

I think making raids being cross-faction would help a lot, and honestly it makes sense lorewise. For the most part you’re usually defending Azeroth from some sort of threat, and the concept of faction animosity doesn’t really exist until you’re at peace again. I mean even during Azshara, you have Jaina helping you out there. And I certainly don’t see an issue with both factions teaming up to take down N’zoth.

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202

So you’re ignoring the fact that alliance is over represented regarding the 3 best Class/Race-combos, because it doesn’t suit your narrative?
It’s a fact the Alliance has better racials for PvE but the difference is not high-enough to force player to switch factions, like it was with bloodlust and EMFH a few addons ago.

Right now the only reason why more and more players choose horde is the fact that’s easier to find other competitive pve & pvp player on horde side.
A new player might know this information because he looked it up otherwise he has a free choice which mostly lead to picking alliance over horde in the past and should be a bit more equal after the implementation of AR’s.

There’s no way to balance factions anymore neither with unfair pvp rewards (regionbased system are useless thanks to shards and rp-server) nor with unfair pve advantages. It’s a player choice and if they decide to gather on one faction which is kinda logical because of shrinking player count and content accessibility.
The only solution is to allow crossfaction-gaming.

203

… >

The human racials, in general, are in general a problem poorly distributed to justify the casual beginner character.

I have read your posting regarding this in the past:

Yet the problem still exists and they did nothing to sooth the… let’s call it the “pain”. Problem lies within Blizzard themselves and their habit to change things only up between the expansions which is nothing new to everyone I suppose.

Crossfaction-play is indeed the best solution to it, yes.