One thing you left out is goblin rocket jump on Kil'Jaeden. It effectively spelled the end of high end alliance raiding and outside of the oceanic realms, almost every good alliance guild swapped over to horde between Legion and BfA.
@@hamishcounsell5579 no no it is not, it's literally the opposite 75% alliance 25% horde all servers except frostmourne are dieing slowly and people are moving alliance as it's where all the players are
Remember when the biggest argument against adding High Elf allied race to alliance (or at least the customizations to void elves) was that it would create a massive faction imbalance?
Will of the Forsaken, Troll Zerk and AoE Stomp had a large effect on the perceptions of which faction was better especially in PvP. A much larger ratio of the player base PvP'd in the early days because WoW was fed by both Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest players. Imagine playing a Alliance Priest or Warlock and an entire race of Horde could counter your only defense with a racial leaving their entire class tool kit to fight. The power of salvation did help to balance but the difference was so obvious that when humans got Every Man for Himself the horde did much make of a fuss. The paragon argument about worgen racial power is slightly hilarious considering the amount of goblins used on Denathrius. Could an alliance guild stand a chance even at his world first or is the scenario an issue only when it effects horde negatively? With TBC coming and the majority of the game being horde they were super quick to fix any potential imbalance with regards to paladin seals. You were right though, blizzard did create the situation and overtime it became a social one even after more balance was achieved. By then though the momentum had already started. It wasn't something as obscure as only horde guild were falling apart into 10 mans or at a faster pace than alliance guilds.
Sorry to be so off topic but does anybody know a tool to get back into an Instagram account? I was dumb forgot the account password. I love any tricks you can give me.
My guild can't get past Generals now because we're on the 3rd most populated Alliance realm and we can't recruit someone to fill in a spot after someone left. Until now we've been doing it with exactly 20 but a mythic guild can't run like that, there needs to be reserves. I'd rather leave the game than go Horde. I only switched to this realm because my old realm died bad. There are only 4 guilds raiding mythic on that realm 2 of them are 2/10 and the other 2 are 1/10.
Since the first pirate server, that I've been in, and the first retail character I did, I was Horde. Never cared about pop balance, nor about better racials. The alliance is fcked up. The back story is fcked up. They have 2 "good" races and that's it. (Nelf and draenei) all of the others are the big bad guys, playing saints. I would sooner quit the game than change to those guys. (Yes, I have alliance character, but u needed one for the mount in bfa :/)
@@Kalo66325 Bad guys? What have they done? All the Horde races, except Tauren, are bad. Orcs invade and destroy Undead blight, destroy and do necromancy Trolls invade and destroy Blood elfs kill and consume Goblins are money hungry selfish thieves The allied races have similar stories. Horde bombed Theramore, Invaded Ashenvale, Burned Teldrassil, Invaded Eastern Kingdoms, etc etc. Name what the Alliance have done? You're delusional if you think Alliance are bad and Horde are good. Look at it from unbiased eyes. Everything the Alliance has done to the Horde has always been in retaliation. Horde instigate everything
Blizzard: There is no way we can balance faction populations. Blizzard intern: Give away free faction and server changes to horde players. Blizzard: We need a new intern, also we have no clue how to balance population on factions
They would stick lack the incentive to go to the Alliance. There needs to be an initial push for the first people to go, then the rest of the herd will follow if that 'push' persists for long enough.
Honestly cross faction PVE seems like the most obvious solution. The end of the fourth war would’ve paved a great lore reason for it, as well as build tension for future stories of pockets of the factions still fighting. If it ever happens I know plenty of friends who will throw money at blizzard to swap alliance but still have access to the horde raid/m+ scene. I cared about the faction divide 10+ years ago, but I’m over it.
When they added the horde/alliance symbols to every character in the selection screen late in BFA it seemed obvious they were about to do this, but.. they never did
@@ACO-vv4gu You can still have the war going on in lore and gameplay, while also allowing people to do pve together. They could just leave warmode as it is, blue vs red for those who enjoy it. Lore-wise, the horde and alliance have been working together to kill raid bosses since vanilla, with a few notable exceptions (ICC had the airship fight, battle for dazar'alor was strictly a faction war raid). tl;dr that's an overused and inadequate reason
One thing to add to the deaths of so many big raiding guilds: Guild XP in Cata. Some high end raiding guilds felt the need to lower their recruitment criteria, or to allow friends/family/alts, in order to keep up with guild XP and guild perks to stay competitive in raids. Many of them crumbled towards the end of Cata.
Yup I was out numbered by alliance 5-1 when I 1st started playing wow on Medivh (Irl Friends server). The Human Racial almost brought me over for legion. I ended up just server Swapping to Mal'ganis
I've been alliance since launch and I have no plans on switching over any time soon. However, out of the 60 people on my friends list that play WoW 5 are still alliance and even my entire guild I was in since Vanilla switched over to Horde in BFA to have an easier time getting things done. It's honestly really sad to see and to watch Blizzard let this happen just so they can make some easy money is infuriating. At this point they just need to let both factions que together for any pve content, they already have the mercenary mode for pvp and seem to have no problem with that.
What blizzard doesnt understand is that Wow is not a God. It can be killed with incompetence. Brand loyalty is almost nonexistent anymore. Ever since they ruined old content leveling by streamlining it to a 3 hour 1-50 journey, they lost the altaholics who only kept subs up to roll alts, level and delete, rinse and repeat. That was a substantial number of players from my friends list. i have 2 out 17 that still play. And one of them only plays d3 when logged into the launcher.
for a more recent example of this, you can look at the mass exodus of guilds away from Ravencrest(EU) as like 20 of the top 100 guilds on that realm swapped to horde at the end of BFA
i´ve been saying it´s a social "issue" for a while now. I also remember whenever alliance racials seemed to be OP they were quick on the nerfs, but OP horde racials went on for a lot longer during Cata/MoP/WoD. That combined with the fact alliance players were literally bullied in and out of the game (remember old Blizzcons?) I still remember the first time For the Alliance was shouted at Blizzcon people actually boo'ed them... Also it's worth nothing how big players names like Preach actively make fun of Alliance players for choosing the "wrong" faction, even if it's a joke people take it seriously. Up until Mop the status quo was PvE = horde, PvP = alliance
I heard of some horror stories coming out of Blizzcon and it disgusted me. People being spat on. That's considered assault in many countries (at least it is in the UK). How true these stories are is up to debate. No denying there is more hostility towards Alliance players from Horde players, I've experienced it from my own friends. Even if all my friends would say is "Horde is cooler and better" "Alliance are lame and goody two shoes" it still wears on people. What is the problem? A social one.
Horde orcs and undead in classic WoW both had extremely OP racials. Blizzard wasn’t #nochanges , there was a ton of stuff they changed, they just wanted horde to dominate pvp I guess
@@QuintemTA according to Horde Players there is no Hordie Bias... /s (i believe that if too many Alliance Players leave, Blizzard could just add Alliance NPCs that act like players... Horde sure wouldn't notivce. XD)
@@snoozebutton9996 You could add NPCs to Warmode with the Island's AI and most horde would not notice because it would still be 10 to 1 advantage. They'd die in
the audience booing "for the alliance" is hardly "bullying". it just means there were more horde players in the audience. them choosing to boo is the same reason someone wanted to randomly shout "for the Alliance". like, it's a fictional video game faction for god's sake not someones actual national identity to feel genuinely insulted by
When I started playing it was right about 6 or so months before Wrath launched. And I played Alliance. My mom played Alliance and so did my Dad. My friends also played Alliance. So I went Alliance. And I played a Night Elf Hunter. And a Dwarf Paladin. At the time Alliance was pretty good for finding raids and even completing content in pugs. Same as Horde for the most part. But then PAID services came along. Faction changes, and server changes. And allot of Alliance guilds were jealous of the Hordes racials. And other's just liked the Horde races more. But racial's was the biggest driving force for the slow but steady exodus of PvE players to Horde. But if you PvP'ed then you went Alliance because the Human and Dwarf racial's were pretty broken. You basically got a second get out of trouble button along with your PvP trinks. I ended up eventually going Horde simply because I tested myself whether Horde was better for raiding. And it was vastly easier to find groups and finish raids than it was on Alliance side. This unbalance of the racial's led to many servers actually collapsing. Twisting Nether was my first server. And it had many Horde and Alliance guilds that competed in raiding for server firsts. It was an actual competition and people loved it. But with the paid services in place. Guilds struggled to keep raiders from Ninja looting and jumping servers. Or faction changing. Or simply chasing that greener grass for faster easier loot. Server communities collapsed as well due to all of these issues. And Blizzard simply did jack squat. Because truth be told they were making millions and millions off of these services that cost more than a monthly sub. And people were often transferring entire accounts worth of characters, often totally over a couple hundred or more dollars to complete. So why in the world would Blizzard remove something that was making them free money lol. Same thing with multi boxers. Why would Blizzard crush people who paid for 40 accounts at a time? I think the only reason multi boxing was finally dealt with is due to the truth that very very few people actually did it these days, so they weren't worth the headaches on forums anymore. But yeah Blizzard 100% hand made this issue and happily snowballed the players, anytime people complained or pleaded for things to change.
I'm surprised he didn't mention this or point out when blizzard was slow to react that it caused that push to horde. Then also stuff like seal of blood for blood elf paladins.
@@Kiobao with berserking AND beastslaying, being a troll for ToT was so fun. He has said in later videos that he missed raiding ToT so that might be why. It was at that kind of time that Method went Horde, I remember seeing Sparkuggz in a random bag after he has just transferred but had no guild tag
He didn’t address a lot of really obvious ones like that, also how horde racials were obv waaaay better in tbc where I think this can be traced back to. This is why they added human trinket in wrath.
This feels like an anti-issue, they could just let us do PvE content together, there are solutions to this, does it really matter if a Night Elf player join a Mythic+ or a Raid together with its friends that play Horde? I don't think so, who does it hurt really? I mean lore-wise the Horde & Alliance have come together on several occasions to bring down a larger threat, so why wouldn't a Horde player and an Alliance player be able to queue up together for a dungeon for instance? There's literally no good reason not to allow that.
@@Colaschnittchen Yes and no. WoW's story feels like its run its course, and faction warfare is a reliable tap for story. Even if it just sets up something bigger like MoP or BfA.
@@Colaschnittchen exactly. Eventually there is bigger fish to fry, I mean we're currently in the afterlife trying to essentially save the entire Universe...but after that we're going to go back and my Tauren wants to kill a Gnome?
@@Colaschnittchen The issue is that any time, and I do mean ANY time there is no direction for the story, you can create some excuse for the horde to attack the alliance. Garrosh did it to prove he was 'strong warchief'. Sylvannas did it because she 'wanted the alliance out of kalimdor'. The new council will do it because 'tyrande angry and mean'. You can keep doing it over, and over, and over, and it gives them filler to do something new next time. There is 100% no reason for the horde and alliance to fight now. None. What does Jaina say in torghast if you're horde? "YOU SEND THE HORDE TO FIGHT ME NOW?!" No bitch, what? But they gotta play those beats so in the future they can sell 60 dollar expacs. Even outside of that, there is no reason the player character champion should participate in these wars. We lead our order halls, who we could easily say "Dont take the bait" to. We dont. Because greed.
I’m in 3/10 mythic alliance guild and I’d say, once we cleared heroic, we saw maybe 10-15% of raiders just.....vanish. Not logged on, not switched just vanished. Dunno what to say bar maybe streamers all going horde has got to be an issue too imo.
@@craynak That's not a faction thing, that happens in most guilds at the start of expansions. People get kinda bored of the thing, stick around long enough to kill the first final boss on heroic and say fuck it.
@@Aetherian1 As alliance you don't have access to progression content, not because people suck but because there simply arent enough progression oriented players for it; those go horde for the same reason. It's a snowball effect that can only be solved with cross faction communication and socialization i think, the faction identity doesnt have to go for that to happen, they can still exist in the lore. You also have plenty of cross faction organisations in the lore and that does not make the factions any less relevant.
Goblin Jump was and is still super fine. It's a very bad racial in the big picture off all raid encounters or PVP. The Problem was that blizz designend an endboss fight with 1 mechanic which was almost impossible to deal with on classes that got no good movement cd or blink like ability.
@@virtuousvillain9874 Troll Berserking for literally all of Cata and MoP. Sure, those specific situations helped, but leaving prenerf Berserking in that state for two expansions was the biggest offender, and the problem that really got the ball rolling in the first place. Cata and MoP was also coincidentally the era where snapshotting was at it's strongest and most important. Even if Arcane Torrent and Goblin Jump never had those niche cases, the damage was already done by the end of MoP, and the social problem snowball would have done the rest regardless.
My guild is Alliance and on a dead realm, we're one of 5 Mythic guilds on the server and struggling to recruit. Following the end of server connections and the recent mention that there isnt going to be any more in the near future we've reluctantly decided to move server and faction to horde for 9.1. Not only is the AH completely ruined (Agi pots are like 800g each) there is not enough players wanting to push mythic especially with the mid tier dropouts that are occuring meaning we may not even finish the tier due to lack of players forcing our move early or giving up on CE for this tier.
I remember when Tichondrius was 90% Alliance back in MoP. Then Reckful faction changed to Horde, and within the next week, Tichondrius became 90% Horde. I had to start fresh on Illidan since my Alliance characters couldn't leave the hub without getting ganked.
BE AOE silence made Portal Keeper easy. So Bliz "Nerfed" BE racial to AOE purge and had AOE purge negate of major mechanic of Zul in the very next raid. Horde AOE stun; alliance single target stun. The imbalance is intentional. A lot of new players probably just click alliance because they're "the good guys" with better aesthetics, and don't yet understand racials and faction balance.
Also with the introduction of m+ and blood elfs aoe silence moved alot of players toward horde, goblin rocket jump for KJ mythic, and generally horde racials did more dps if i recall (mostly troll tho i think?) i think thats where it really began to kick of. In terms of PvP they nerfed human racial which used to be one of the best if not the best for pvp players, though i suspect changes to pvp racials got less to do with it and pvp ally players mostly just jumped to horde because more ques to be found.
A social problem needs a social solution is a cop out from blizz. There are lot of things they could do to fix it. Free character transfers, let horde and alliance be in the same guild and raid together, battle groups of servers to improve balance. People should be able to play whatever they like and with whoever they like no restrictions.
The only solution I think Blizzard can do is open up free Faction Swaps to Alliance (not to Horde).. Some of the top members of guilds when asked have stated that they would go alliance, however they don't as there's no reason to and they'd rather use the resources/cost to faction swap to instead be used towards the world first race... Either spend millions upon millions of gold to transfer your entire guild, alts, and support members over to alliance for zero benefit.. or spend those millions towards buying up BoEs, Boosts, etc. So if Blizzard opened up free faction swapping to Alliance, maybe we'd see some of these guilds swap to Alliance
Faction imbalance may have started as a social issue but I wouldn’t pin it that way now. When M+, raids, and rated PvP is the “endgame” and one faction is dominating in all 3 aspects, how is it a social issue that people flock to the winning side?
It wasn't MoP where guilds started doing 10's more than 25's. It was Cata. You also seem to neglect to mention how big of an impact losing the human OP racial was, if you wanted to do serious PvP especially in Cata you were Alliance. After that got nerfed so many went back horde.
I switched back alliance because finding a guild as a CE tank mid tier is INCREDIBLY difficult. No guild not a single guild needs a tank at this time unless they are in some kind of trouble.
I remember back in BC on Magtheridon, it was like 95% Horde and a PvP server, so if you were playing Alliance (like me, at the time) you just could not do things out in the world unless you did it in like the middle of the night, or brought a raid yourself. If you brought a raid, the horde brought 3.
I wonder if there's a belief in their offices that the game's lifespan is limited by the game engine, so there's no point in making decisions that improve things in the long term. It would explain all the short-term cash grabs they do.
Yup, AD is one of the few EU servers that actually has a live alliance tradechat that isn't just bot/boost spam. Take that away and I'm pretty sure most people would either quit or swap horde.
@@harambe4267 I'm on AD and it's crazy how many Alliance players there are. Stormwind at peak times is almost like an actual city it's madness. But I can see how it would suck on other realms if you really can't find groups or guilds.
The depressing state of Alliance won't change until Blizzard gives it the de-facto BiS racials for both PvE and PvP for a couple of expansions - then the pendulum will swing back to the middle.
Completely agree. Balancing things out now will simply keep people were they currently are which doesnt fix the problem. People need to be incentivised to go Alliance and until there is a compelling reason to do so this problem will persist.
Nailed it. This was not something that happened overnight. Horde had a racial advantage overall or on specific fights for a decade and it has just slowly drained the life out of competitive alliance players. It's night and day on US servers when looking for pugs or guilds that can do anything now and really sucks for alliance players since it sucks to know your faction just has no skilled players to do content with.
One thing that annoyed me about the faction imbalance was BoD, as a heroic raider, we look to method, fatboss, limit etc, for boss guides and thefirst 3 bosses were different depending on which faction you were (mainly order and map layout, but still different). As an alliance player, it was hard to find a guide that looked like what we saw when raiding, so it made those first 3 extremely hard progression bosses, for my guild at least.
Honestly, This needs to be fixed, The sheer amount of people on horde doing end game content versus alliance just keeps snowballing. With blizzard not really doing anything about it. Especially if peoples guilds fall apart, The scattered remnants usually just end up going horde to find another guild instead of staying on alliance.
When I first started playing I was Horde on Medivh. That was the server my friend played; Even being surrounded by humans and gnomes I farmed my dallies. I just assumed Alliance had more/older players. I picked horde because I like undead, Orcs & Tauren not because we are "winning" the faction war... The high end players will always follow eachother around and there is nothing we can do about that.
i mean, its not a game issue anymore. good players just want to play with good players and horde has more of them, so if you wanna do endgame, you just play horde. only thing i can see fixing it is allowing cross faction raiding.
I don't see a good way to fix it. They even give alliance players a giant bonus in warmode but people don't care. Of course they could give alliance really broken op racials but that would catch so much hate for it since this would be a gready way to force players to use faction swap. Right now alliance even has slightly better racials for most content but it simply is a social problem. Only cross faction gameplay would work as a bandaid fix but that is a fix you can not take back anymore so it should be a last resort.
Don't forget PVP. Basicly 99% of the player where Alliance in MOP because of the human racial was basicly a free trinket and totally op. And right now u can reach R1 way easier as horde than alliance and Orc is also better than any alliance racial right now. Issue too if u ask me
@@ralfrudi3963 Whats the point of Warmode unless you're on alliance dominated server where 3 scrubs gang up on 1 decent player in order to get a kill? The only place I ever saw Alliance somewhat effectively contest Warmode objectives was AD(EU) due to faction imbalance. Every other phase it just leads to them getting stomped so of course they opt out lmao. 30% more gold and honour is useless if you're looking at a 4min res cd.
I did this once for a few hundred dollars. Blizzard probably thought they made a ton from me. After that I was so annoyed I vowed to never spend another cent in their store. In fact, I quit the sub for half a year too to earn back the money I spent. The store is probably good in the short term, but these things always have a cost.
I remember when I offically switched over to Horde from Alliance (loved my little Dranei warrior). Siege of Ogrimarr had just dropped, and I believe they were doing a "half off faction swaps and server transfers". Went from Cairne to Area 52.
They dident setup so all faction transferred to Horde due to greed if it was they could just do it again and gain for money..... But they have never done it for the Alliance to make people swap to Alliance why.... they want Horde to win and Alliance to die... We all know The Alliance balance is far from equal, last time we saw something Alliance had less than 20% of the player-base in retail... The Alliance is dead everyone knows and blizzard wanted it to happened hence Horde always had the better racials, Classic TBC is now following the same footsteps with Alliance losing from 56% to less than 40% of the player-base now and seemly it keeps falling....
I feel like the average player didn't care much about sims and meta charts until MoP when troll dps got out of hand due to all the beast raid bosses. That and the rise of Streamers which causes players to flock to specific faction-favored servers.
The issue was prenerf Berserking combined with snapshotting, not the niche Beast dmg, and it was very obvious how broken it was from the very beginning of Cata. If you were playing a Warlock, Shadow Priest or Boomkin, you were not competing with Troll players unless your own character was also a Troll... (assuming equal gear and skill etc)
Professions bonuses were awesome. Moreover, the ones you got from the main crafting professions were far more useful than the gathering ones, because they took far more effort. I believe Enchanters were the only ones who could enchant rings, tailors were able to add a spellweave to their cloak, blacksmiths could socket their wrist item. It all went away after Lich King, and that, along with the neutering of Inscription actually granting customized power (for soloing or groups) was pretty much the death knell of professions. They were actually really quite engaging up til Cata. I mean, go back and look at the sheer number of gem recipes to track down in Outland and Northrend. I'd venture to guess their are 20x more of them than what came after.
Cross-faction PvE has to be the solution. It's been a theme of the game since Warcraft 3 anyway, both the factions coming together to defeat the big bads. Make it official in WoW as well, instead of having a contrived war between the two factions every expansion.
Just use dazar'alor race swapping mechanic. If an Alliance player joins a Horde group, he's automaticaly transformed into a Horde race. You keep the faction boundaries intact, whilst allowing for cross faction pve. You'd be playing with member of the other faction and would be none the wiser. No one loses.
They should let cross faction arenas and rbgs be a thing too. It's way easier to find people for those activities as horde. They already let "Mercenaries" or whatever into bgs don't they? So why not rated content?
Game always feels shitter when they force the expansion into a faction war anyway, rather than Legion esk type expansions, in come together to face down a common enemy.
@@calebutterback8528 They already have mercenary mode where horde can que for alliance bgs. For rated pvp there is a similar problem to high end pve. Just making it for pve only isn't problem solved at all. Every rbg night at 2k+ we spend like an hour looking for a decent healer. The other people in my guild also have horde accounts and say it would have only taken them 5 minutes to find a healer.
I love alliance races, cities, lore but I switched to horde. I'm not going to hurt my chances at doing the content I love due to factions. If blizzard just removed the barriers I would 100% play alliance. Let me trade, party up and guild with opposite factions, no half measures will solve the issue and it isn't a racial issue anymore. Every server is already PvE by default. You can already PvP for the enemy faction. There is no reason to keep this up
@@Cynidecia apart from one patch on the previous expansion we haven't been in war for over a decade at least. I'm a horde player and I'm saving Jaina from torghast. Heck I was trying to save Tyrande (on my night fae), who is a massive horde hater. You can still have people fighting and cross faction conflict.
everyone went horde cause blizzard systematically buff their racials each expansion. Remember when they said they were nerfing blood elves in bfa? having a silence was too strong, but having an aoe purge isn't?
This an issue blizzard created to sell a solution to with all their faction and race changes. Blizzard will only fix it though once the printing press is starting to fail as most people spending money go horde. Then they will allow cross faction pve and collect the money as people that were forced to be horde faction change back to their prefered alliance race and continue on like there was no change at all since I doubt very many if any at all remembers the race of the people they group with just whether they liked playing with them or not.
If you put up a barrier, this is how population dynamics work. Same reason you see similar industries clump together IRL, where physical distance is the barrier. If there is a digital barrier of factions and servers (and the cost in time or money to move) then people will clump together who seek to achieve similar things. Especially given the age of WoW. You don't even need racials for it to happen, you just need the barriers.
Back in Wrath I was playing on one of the new US wrath realms (Fizzcrank) because they had done free transfers off of my original realm (Zul'jin) and my guild was having a real heck of a time by the time ICC opened up because most of the decent players had slowly started migrating off server. We had a pretty major guild drama come up and it was decided amongst several of the guild leadership to move realms because Fizzcrank just didn't have the players to support any kind of serious progression. We had heard good things from friends who had moved to Stormrage and the decision was made to move over there. I spent $125 moving all of my "important" characters over, and it was like night and day. We went from being #2 or #3 on Fizzcrank, half progressed through ICC, to having to basically start over on Stormrage, yet still managed to get a full 25 man, with standbys and clear heroic ICC at like, realm #200th before Fizzcrank saw anyone do it once. Having a player base like that available is so powerful. If we had a player who decided to quit playing, or who didn't mesh well with the guild, they were easily replaced on a realm like Stormrage was back then. By Cata we were able to build a guild that rose up to the top 5 or 10 on Stormrage, playing with the likes of Death Jesters, Critical Mass, etc... Hell, we even had members of CM and Vodka who ran alts in our guild. I became the best geared bear druid on the server through that timeframe and had people coming to me asking for advice on being a bear. It was surreal just how much things changed just by moving to a server with a solid player-base. So yeah, I don't think there is any way for Blizzard to rebalance the factions from a "progression" standpoint. Their only option would be to intentionally overpower Alliance temporarily to effectively con people into swapping, then rebalance everything so there's no advantage to going back, but then the overall population would be imbalanced. This is why I feel like Ion was about half a nanometer away from saying "we plan to allow cross-faction grouping" because that's the only way I can imagine them being able to balance out progression between the factions.... eliminate the difference entirely. Personally, I would love this. I would love to be able to have a horde character that I can actually play on with guildmates, people I've spent a long time building relationships with. Though I would hope they do it from a lore-perspective, rather than just a mechanical one. I would prefer having horde and alliance characters in the same guild together. I would love to be able to walk through Orgrimmar on my Night Elf Druid, or Gnome Warrior. Not only would it address the issue of faction imbalance by removing the faction barrier entirely, but it would feel like the peoples of Azeroth were actually growing and becoming more than they once were.
@@tyrannosaurus696 MDI is different thing cause there you can choose whatever race you want On live servers most of the highest keys are done by the Horde, there's literally just more ppl to join and in lfg it can be seen the most with 30+ ppl applying to 18 keys on the Horde and like 5-7 on the Alliance
"I do think racials should be a non combat thing". I've been saying this for years. It pleases me that someone with a louder voice is saying the same thing.
It doesn't matter at this point though, the damage was already done. Unless there was some kind of in combat advantage to encourage switching back you won't get anyone to move from where they are now.
Yep, this is something SWTOR did right in making racials non-combat related (I think they're still pretty lackluster from a roleplaying perspective but that's just getting nitpicky and the nerdy side of my star wars fandom). A roleplaying game at its fundamental level should be about playing something you actually identify with/enjoy/whatever instead of a math game. And as people said, the damage was done years and years ago. Even if everything was absolutely 100% equalized across the board the mass migration has already occurred. Just open up cross-faction PvE play.
@@miatomi that is because they sim about 2% higher but this small difference is not gonna make top end guilds swap to alliance since this would cost them thousands of dollars to swap all their characters and alts to alliance. So if top end guilds won’t swap, the others won’t swap too.
@@jameswayne2907 Top guilds don't swap because it would make them lose access to BoEs in the auction house. In the last raid, they got gear from pvp and from BoEs, so swapping just removes a large part of how they can get better gear. Top guilds rely on huge servers with an active raiding scene.
I appreciate your insight and analysis on this. I would like to point out I have already heard people saying "Preach says Ion is wrong, it's not a social issue" I think because of how your intro goes. To bad, people need to listen beyond the first juicy sound bite.
In essence Blizzard took a wrench to something that wasn't a problem out of greed, let it fester, and washed their hands of all responsibility therefor by calling it now a social issue. I can't wait for the day they implement cross-faction garbage so I can dip. All the pets, mounts and cosmetics in the world couldn't keep me around at that point.
ToT 1st boss had a tank stun, humans coudl trinket to buy 2-3 extra sec of tank dps. It deemed OP and from then on every boss stun our racial didn't work on. Goblin racials making you avoid entire mechanincs? Beast slaying giving advantage on 4 to 6 bosses in ToT (5% extra dps)? Those were all seemingly no problem. Only my owrgen somteitmes uses it racial... when in the Maw. Nice racials on Alliance Blzizard! Only my 3 NE char use their racials in Torghast to pull ahead and shdowmeld mobs away I didn't need to kill anyhow to save time on the 2-3h+ runs. Combat wise? Utility wise otherwise? The racials are better not existing just bloat.
When he talks about castle nathria and top guild moving to alliance you need to understand 1 thing they were planning to move AND THAN COME BACK, big difference from just moving faction
Calling it a social issue is kinda bizzare to me, imho it's a logistical issue. It's not because horde is so nice that people play there, it's because there are more raiders there and this effect bleeds down the ranks (probably one of the few cases where trickle-down is actually working, even though negatively).that it has already reached heroic guilds and maybe even normal ones. As for Blizzard's statistics, I have to wonder which statistics they use, sadly they never tell us, so I can only use my own experience and the old adage "to never trust a satistic you haven't faked yourself". The current situation is kinda ironic to me, seeing how the horde at one point was considered to be dying, because fewer and fewer people wanted to play the "uggo"-races and now even my backwater alliance server has more horde raiding guilds than alliance. Also the tangent with crafting seems a bit forced. It might have added to it in some way, but I can't really make out to be a driving factor. If anything the constant breaking of guilds has added more to this trend, because people that already had to move their character might as well move to the best possible setting, so a large server with the right faction. I absolutely have to agree though that Blizzard's greed was a huge driving factor in this. Paying 20 bucks for a server script an intern could write is ludicrous.
I am super confused on where preach is getting the information on faction balance? Like are we basing this on Raider.io information? are we basing this off Warcraft logs? Wow survey? wow realm pop? Like are we just throwing out 60\40 split with absolutely no basis for that number?
Raider IO for Mythic+ suggests a 65/35 split at the very lowest of levels, even depleted +2s, out of ANYONE with a raider io score (which is anyone who has ever done a key) it's 65% horde, as you get a higher score, the chances that you're Alliance reduce dramatically, eventually to the point where it's like 80/20 at a fairly reasonable level of play
@@ValryshaClips Thats my point though there are people who play the game and never raid or do keys. They just PVP, or farm xmog/mounts. I suppose if we are specifically talking about raiding population or M+ population that would be fair.
@@MrPhyrce Yeah, but the people who dont play content that requires other people don't really matter to a question regarding which side has more people to play with.
8:07 I recently thought about consolidating multiple characters onto a server, but all of them also need a faction change...starting to look like $220 just to move a few, four, save-files. Wtf
There's literally only two ways they can do anything about it. And it comes down to a "Pick your poison" scenario. Do they make alliance have better racial abilities so being alliance is just more optimal which will piss everyone who likes the horde off and in a year the situations will just be reversed and not solved. Or do they get rid of the faction barrier since the faction barrier has meant fuck all to us "adventurers". The adventurers have never cared about the faction barrier even slightly. Oh the worlds in trouble and thrall says he wants to help? Sure bro we really don't care that you are horde. Oh Saurfang felt betrayed so Anduin made him part of the alliance? Yup don't give a shit I'll high five him on my way to the nearest AH. The adventurers haven't given a single fuck who is a part of what EVER!! we just run around kill shit and save the day it's what we do. There can still be "Rulers" for each city like there is now but this "Alliance vs Horde" shit needs to go away in my opinion. It has never meant anything story wise, gameplay wise, or game feel wise. All it does is separate the player base for no reason what so ever. I've played from vanilla all way to shadowlands and to this day I haven't seen a single damn reason for the faction divide. Blizzard haven't wrote any good stories or scenarios where it makes sense in fact IT'S THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE!!! Every time anything happens we all hug each other and group together to slay the big bad dickhead of the current expansion patch. The time of the faction divide is over there's no reason to it. #NoFactions
I disagree on the Vanilla WoW part of it.. the story is most definitely centered around friction between the factions at many points. Much of it has to the do the expansion of Horde and Alliance territories... like Ashenvale, for example.. much of the conflict within that zone is due to encroaching Horde on the Northern Barrens front, threatening the hold the Night Elves have had in Ashenvale. The most classic example of the world itself goading Horde vs Alliance battles.. Tarren Mill vs Southshore.. the geography and questing in this area funnels Alliance and Horde in to the same areas, deliberately, and conflict ensues. The Horde participate in the killing of many innocents in the region, effectively murdering innocent Alliance citizens. There are a plethora of questlines that actually feature this conflict at the forefront in Vanilla WoW... beyond that, it most certainly does become an afterthought, though, or just a convenient device.
WOW will NEVER not have factions. Its to ingrained into the game. Also all of your points just show HOW FUCKING clueless you are. Ever since Warcraft 1 the factions have been a key part of the game. Lore wise getting rid of the factions creates MORE plot holes Why would your Average Alliance Citizen be down with a full on Alliance with the Horde when like 5 years ago there friends and family were killed by a Orc???????? The factions only team up to fight against big threats but they never fully trust each other A Warcraft without the Alliance or the Horde would not be Warcraft
Negative comments aside I believe you are right. I couldn't care less, and usually the worst stories and the worst expansion in the game evolve around faction conflict. Maybe the factions were a big part of the game in the beginning, but have no value add to the game anymore. You can still have PVP, etc. but Faction alliances is just some scared cow at this point. I say kill the damn cow at this point. It will lead to more creativity in the long run.
I agree with both points here but as they said the fact remains that we are separate factions due to differences which started from inception and if u take away the faction line from the game u may as well erase the last 20 plus years of warcraft and the wars that have been started by both sides on any front....and if that happens I'll gladly unsub and delete my account from existence
@@Tj-ji1yz You guys don't seem to understand what I meant. The faction divide shouldn't exist for us PLAYERS. Yes the alliance and horde will always hate each other even tho they literally suck each other off at the first sign of any trouble whatsoever. But us the "Adventurers" literally don't fucking care about their politics or their world views. If Blizzard said "ok next patch the adventurers go back to stormwind and kill Turalyon because he exists." the adventurers would literally just go do it. We don't care and never have cared we are the "Adventurers" not the alliance or the horde.
The reason I don't play WoW anymore is because every time I go to Orgrimmar It takes a teeny tiny piece of my soul away. I just want to play Alliance and do PvE for The Light's sake.
I don't understand how profession bonuses fit in to this discussion, I spent 600k on two race changes since coming back to the game with sl, if professions had mattered like they did in the old days, it's not like I wouldn't have race changed, I would've just race changed AND leveled professions.
Some big gaps in the story. 1. Realm pop is irrelevant since it shows Alts. The alt o holics and less competitive are less likely to go horde aside from making Alts on horde. Better stats are wowprogres to see active raid community or check PvP que, even with mercenary horde still has to wait. 2. You do mention it, the big issue is the braindrain. Even if alliance had more players, the higher skilled players are still scarse. 3. In vanilla their was a much bigger alliance population. That was the entire point of giving horde the blood elves. 4. MoP horde racials were insane and even in wod for at least the start. Once the racials were balanced the damage was caused and than blizzard suddenly didn't want to anything about the issue. 5. An bigger issue than the faction imbalance is the deadrealms. Even if you merged all the small realms into the same size as 4th biggest realm ( continent) it would still lack in the higher skill bracket due to braindrain. ( I am in this situation).
I play Alliance on Gilneas and have noticed an extreme shift to Horde players on the server which is so weird... it's been historically very Alliance bias till now
August 2013, Blizzard launches half price character services, for all services. A ton of higher end guilds decided to move to Horde because they see that the troll racials are going to be extremely overpowered in SoO and there is already a shift in the player base to Horde. In less than two months they also offer free server transfers off of many of the high pop US realms, sorry I cannot say for sure about EU, and the Alliance players on those servers now feel a big push to get off the server since they cannot even complete world quest without getting ganked by a raid group. In that time several large servers that were 50/50 or close to it now skew heavily horde. My server at the time was as close to 50/50 as it could be (Bleeding Hollow US) and by October was unofficially 80/20 or worse. Since there has NEVER been a reason for guilds to change back, there will NEVER be a shift back to an even player base. The only answer is to allow PVE cross faction events like dungeons and raids while keeping PVP separated. This will encourage people to play the lower represented faction if they prefer since they will not feel pressure to play the higher population simply because there are more people to play with.
Funny how it changed: vanilla pservers were/are slightly Alliance focused (although some were even). High end raiding groups - Alliance with Palas... but initial TBC private servers - Horde domination to a 80-90% point (that's why pservers started faction balancing like the both seals for Palas).
@@riklaunim I'm talking about currently on pvp servers in classic wow horde absolutely dominate. Like 90+% on some servers. I agree alli is better for pve but content is so easy it doesn't matter
@@Mr91Jmay Classic has also the retail effect where non-pserver players have their mindset already tainted. On pservers I've seen it didn't happened. Also Classic has multiple servers so some just moved. Alliance moved to PvE or very few realms they dominate. The content is easy but for parses people are willing to do weird things...
Blizzard fails to realise you can have a perfectly fine faction pride just as Ion described and still allow people to do dungeons, raids or even be in the same guild while being in different factions. Allowing one does not mean the death of the other.
Completely agree. As far as the lore goes the factions work together constantly to stop bigger threats. Why on earth is pve raids and dungeons not cross faction at this point ? It wouldn't kill factions at least not in the way they think it would. Just keep Pvp around and make up a lore or story reason as to why we have a truce to raid and dungeon.
I do not think there is much of such thing as "faction pride", because since WoD all the faction concept does IMO is being a cheap "enemy" to overcome, and to praise those who bash, shame factions, and tells how necessary it is to be together regardless of the factions. The whole idea is demonized and stomped over. Or that's how I feel about usage of the theme.
I don't even know why this is a discussion. You can PvP against your own faction. If that doesn't hurt faction pride then neither will PvEing with the opposing faction.
This is one of the big barriers I have for raiding, mythic raiding, and probably ever playing WoW again. As an alliance raid/guild leader, it was incredibly difficult to find players for the server I was on, and that problem simply kept increasing thru the last expansion I played, Legion. If I do want to return and raid seriously, I almost certainly would have to go Horde, which would be HUNDREDS of dollars of server xfers for various characters, which I am not going to do. Greed does seem to be the primary motivation at this point and were I given the magic wand, limitations on faction/realm would be gone for raiding/guilds.
I play Alliance on Argent Dawn because that's where I've been since I was 14-15 years old at the end of TBC and the start of Wrath. It's where all my friends used to play and it's where my "raiding career" peaked during MoP, and it is where I've had the absolute best of times playing the game. All my good memories, even if they're now half a decade old and painfully out of reach, are tied to that, and you may call it a sunk cost fallacy if you want, but I do feel that I'm too old now to start over on a new realm. As such, for the past 4 expansions (SL included) I have spent 1-2 months playing by myself at launch and then quit, because there is no reason to go back anymore. And every cycle, everything gets a little bit worse. Fewer features, more greed, more issues, an increasingly alien company and more bitterness among the playerbase.
I didn't realize the 10man angle in mop. I was still doing 25. But it makes perfect sense. This certainly created a perfect storm heading into wod. What you didn't mention in mop was beastslaying. On the 25 man side 5% dmg vs specific bosses in tot and soo, was enormous. It was enough to force the swap for a lot of guilds. Ours didn't but then continued to regret it on margok (torrent) and kj (rocket jump) until we finally said screw it. Even for a die hard alliance guild in the top 20-40 world it just felt that we only ever failed the racial bonus lottery in 3 expansions. It just never went in a favorable direction once for alliance.
I was in an Alliance Mythic raiding guild, we had problems recruiting, regularly getting up to 18-19 people on raid night due to real life, just couldn't quite get the roster to 25ish. The guild made the decision to faction change to Horde and server transfer - which is pretty expensive. Something went wrong on the guild server transfer, so the guild main tank has been unplayable for three weeks so far - Blizzard customer support is still sorting that issue out.
For PVP it was reduction in cooldown on Faction transfers from 30 days to 3 days in Wotlk and then just to hammer the nail in Wintergrasp on some servers this was nearly 100% in one factions control so the other faction couldn't access the raid. So they transferred. Then again as you mention some racials were just crazy op at certain points. I moved horde for the belf racial for ret because it was basically unplayable in arena without it (before we got rebuke)
I play Alliance because I'm on Frostmourne (the largest OCE server) and prefer having a larger pool of players to do keys and raids with. Shadowmeld is also very OP for keys. Would prefer if racials were purely out of combat effects. Also - maybe it's time to add some more interesting races to the Alliance? Every race in the Alliance feels like a 'Lawful Good' almost or actual Human. It's very boring. The Horde have a much wider diversity of races in terms of their motivations, RP opportunities, and appearances. Back in the day giving Blood Elves to the Horde was quite a brave move (at the time people would have expected that race to go to Alliance). Perhaps it's time for a similarly brave move for the Alliance - Lightforged Undead perhaps? With Sylvanas out of the picture and the Undercity destroyed it would be interesting to see the Forsaken split into two faction-specific groups.
That's literally the only thing that Alliance has going for it, the fact that gear is designed with human male in mind. Everything else barring maybe environmentsand story (and that is heavily subjective) is better as Horde.
@Asterius Boralus wasn't even that great from a gameplay hub standpoint (although the city was great visually, despite being mostly just a setpiece), it was miles ahead of the awful pyramid though.
TLDR: Blizzard won't do anything about the Faction imbalances until they have a formula that clearly rakes in more revenue than maintaining a hard Faction divide. A "Maybe" is not enough because that also could mean Blizz takes a hit to revenue and has to answer to little Bobby K and the shareholders.
It's ultimately a snowball effect. Many top guilds going horde for the racials caused alliance guild recruitment to be signifigantly harder all across the spectrum since the more ambitious players went horde as a result. Once one faction becomes dominant it kind of absorbs the good players in the other one becuase they lack gameplay opportunities elsewhere, this is a feedback mechanism that basically kills endgame content on the other side no matter what you do. It's the exact same reason we have super servers now tons of barely populated servers on the roster.
The answer is really simple: Just do what ESO did and integrate the factions for PvE. They have done a dozen different storylines of the Horde and Alliance working together to stop whatever their big bad for a given expansion is at this point, it's really just beggars belief why characters can't actually work together when they aren't doing faction PvP.
You're skipping issues like on a fight like Jaina being Troll gave an edge. and currently being horde as orc or troll gives much stronger combat racials compared to alliance which has pretty much nothing to compare except for dwarf that could be used on one or two fights each tier. which meant Big guilds like Method would feel forced to move horde because they are fighting for world first and everyone in the community follows them because as a creator you must know that one word from a well known player would sway people to do things like this very easily. This is coming from a player who tried sticking to alliance for the longest time believing blizzard might try to fix it, but at the end half way through the start of SL i moved Horde because there was no point anymore. Try pugging Mythic plus 15 or higher on alliance then try it on horde.
in BFA I never really noticed that much imbalance doing pve stuff but in shadowlands on my server cluster horde seem to outnumber alliance 10:1 just doing questing stuff there are just so many more horde than alliance it actually makes it hard to do some quests due to tapping issues. Not sure what changed between bfa and shadowlands but its been very visible.
Dual faction raidgroups could make sense lore wise, that "the threat" that the raid poses is worth uniting against (kind of like in the MoP trailer when the human and orc fight the panda). To extend this to the entire game though? Would surely feel weird walking about in each other's capitals without being attacked!
I think that your last point at 11:03 is wildly relevant here. I don't think people faction swap their character as often as is presumed. Most people willing to swap out do have alts. Those alts are usually at or close to cap and they would rather abandon an alliance toon and jump on the horde alt than character change, especially at major patches and expansion releases where they have a better time catching up. I'm really curious what the ACTIVE numbers are, because that's where I feel the true balance numbers live.
I don't follow the connection between profession bonuses. Aside from gathering profs being weaker, and engineering being slightly stronger due to CD stacking, the other professions all had equal bonuses, as far as I can recall. Why would the removal of (effectively) static profession bonuses in Mists cause racials to matter more?
Sorry preach, I think you are completely wrong in saying this. Ever since the BE got the silence in legion, the faction shift have been switching more and more to horde and as a hardcore alliance player, we lose more than we win. Blizzard had a chance to correct the balance with Nathria by leaving that dot dispellable by dwarves and I would have been happy there. But no, the horde autism still endures - better comps, more geared players, better co-ordination in battlegrounds. But it doesn't stop there - alliance have been trod in the dirt in every single competitive scene (as you mentioned) and niche racials such as Shadowmeld doesn't do anything to alleviate this - why wouldn't you take a stun/silence/haste increase racial over something that is niche? Blizzard have a clear horde bias (as proven), and Alliance players outraged at this, as I am, is more revenue in this pocket (as they keep playing the game longer in hope that it changes). By the above logic, I don't think you understand the imbalance as an Alliance player does - you play horde from what I seen, and your biases stem from that. The game is nowhere near balanced as you make it out to be.
A 60:40 ratio is not a close-to-equal ratio. 60:40 is massive. To help put it i to perspective, 60 is 50% higher than 40. That is a ludicrous gap in anything. Imagine paying $150 for a product while everyone else pays $100. That's the actual gap of a 60:40 ratio.
Don't forget PVP. Basicly 99% of the player where Alliance in MOP because of the human racial was basicly a free trinket and totally op. And right now u can reach R1 way easier as horde than alliance and Orc is also better than any alliance racial right now. Issue too if u ask me
First of all: During Firelands there was already a discussion about Horde favorite racials because most 2.5 bosses were beasts which meant more DPS for trolls aka the Horde. Nowadays when players return which is a repeated cycle they will look where the chances of getting into a progression guild or m+ pool are bigger. And that has been the Horde so this process pushes a few percent towards Horde each time. Now you have Shadowlands with one of the biggest player returns and with all the systems and information in place most switch to Horde. When it comes to alliance dying out. Locally (per server) that happened from my example much earlier. When everything was about pugging Naxx&Co in Wrath Horde side on our server was popular across all german server to provide tons of pugs all the time. Add to that faction imbalance making Wintergrasp a freewin in the afternoon most of the time and you end up with most players switching or starting new ending up on Horde side and besides Alliance getting the server First on LK hc (because the top Horde guild dispanded a week before they could have killed it with +15%) the faction became completely irrelevant over the course of Wrath. When it comes to professions: Outside of gathering you also had to spend (a lot of) gold to switch. From all the gold moved around that is not always coming from boosts to push professions (for ilvl) last xpac they probably made a pretty penny. If professions and maybe switching them became more important with the current leveling of those you might even have a larger gold/money sink here. There is no difference in paying your faction swap with gold from boosting for tokens or using gold in general.
Which is the reason I want to play Alliance, but I'm not really able to because if I did, I wouldn't be able to play with any of my friends, and my chances of finding a guild and backup options would be drastically reduced.
As a horde player, personally I find the ally races waaaaaay more visual appealing. I think why they’re so many blood elves is because it’s closest to a “normal” human model.
Preach is legit batshit to think the faction balance is only 60/40 , you can tell that since hes horde he just wants to make it seem like horde dont have that big advantage but they have a significant one.
I don't raid anymore so it wasn't a factor for me, but I've switched to the alliance towards the end of Legion after years of being Horde and I must say I do not regret a thing. I find ppl on the alliance much nicer and chill overall. Trade chat is a lot less trolley and a bit more mature. I know it is a generalisation, but it is what I experience.
Oceanic is massively alliance favored - so much so that world pvp is laughably Alliance heavy. This tier many have further swapped to Alliance if they enjoy world pvp as well. Oceanic is included in the NA 'bucket' so our imbalance is largely ignored.
One thing you left out is goblin rocket jump on Kil'Jaeden. It effectively spelled the end of high end alliance raiding and outside of the oceanic realms, almost every good alliance guild swapped over to horde between Legion and BfA.
Im happy i live in OCE lmao its quite balanced here
@@hamishcounsell5579 no no it is not, it's literally the opposite 75% alliance 25% horde all servers except frostmourne are dieing slowly and people are moving alliance as it's where all the players are
Throne of Thunder had like 6/12 bosses beast, so Troll just had a free 5% bonus against half of the raid.
Yeah mythic kiljaeden was really the beginning of the end for alliance raiding
and mythic Jaina with voodoo shuffle.
Remember when the biggest argument against adding High Elf allied race to alliance (or at least the customizations to void elves) was that it would create a massive faction imbalance?
The one time alliance was getting an advantageous racial in a raid they fcking nerfed it
Will of the Forsaken, Troll Zerk and AoE Stomp had a large effect on the perceptions of which faction was better especially in PvP. A much larger ratio of the player base PvP'd in the early days because WoW was fed by both Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest players. Imagine playing a Alliance Priest or Warlock and an entire race of Horde could counter your only defense with a racial leaving their entire class tool kit to fight. The power of salvation did help to balance but the difference was so obvious that when humans got Every Man for Himself the horde did much make of a fuss.
The paragon argument about worgen racial power is slightly hilarious considering the amount of goblins used on Denathrius. Could an alliance guild stand a chance even at his world first or is the scenario an issue only when it effects horde negatively? With TBC coming and the majority of the game being horde they were super quick to fix any potential imbalance with regards to paladin seals.
You were right though, blizzard did create the situation and overtime it became a social one even after more balance was achieved. By then though the momentum had already started. It wasn't something as obscure as only horde guild were falling apart into 10 mans or at a faster pace than alliance guilds.
Love these types of videos, reminds me of the old Preach videos, like the Legacy series. Keep them coming. Also, bring back Holla balla :D
Still waiting for the shaman legacy video
Sorry to be so off topic but does anybody know a tool to get back into an Instagram account?
I was dumb forgot the account password. I love any tricks you can give me.
@Cruz Krew instablaster ;)
My guild can't get past Generals now because we're on the 3rd most populated Alliance realm and we can't recruit someone to fill in a spot after someone left. Until now we've been doing it with exactly 20 but a mythic guild can't run like that, there needs to be reserves.
I'd rather leave the game than go Horde. I only switched to this realm because my old realm died bad. There are only 4 guilds raiding mythic on that realm 2 of them are 2/10 and the other 2 are 1/10.
Since the first pirate server, that I've been in, and the first retail character I did, I was Horde. Never cared about pop balance, nor about better racials. The alliance is fcked up. The back story is fcked up. They have 2 "good" races and that's it. (Nelf and draenei) all of the others are the big bad guys, playing saints. I would sooner quit the game than change to those guys. (Yes, I have alliance character, but u needed one for the mount in bfa :/)
@@Kalo66325
Bad guys? What have they done? All the Horde races, except Tauren, are bad.
Orcs invade and destroy
Undead blight, destroy and do necromancy
Trolls invade and destroy
Blood elfs kill and consume
Goblins are money hungry selfish thieves
The allied races have similar stories.
Horde bombed Theramore, Invaded Ashenvale, Burned Teldrassil, Invaded Eastern Kingdoms, etc etc. Name what the Alliance have done? You're delusional if you think Alliance are bad and Horde are good. Look at it from unbiased eyes. Everything the Alliance has done to the Horde has always been in retaliation. Horde instigate everything
Not keeping the efficacy of Stoneform in Nathria was a mistake after Mythic KJ and Arcane Torrent on Zul in Uldir.
Blizzard: There is no way we can balance faction populations.
Blizzard intern: Give away free faction and server changes to horde players.
Blizzard: We need a new intern, also we have no clue how to balance population on factions
people wouldn't move from Horde to Alliance, there is no reason for them to.
They would stick lack the incentive to go to the Alliance. There needs to be an initial push for the first people to go, then the rest of the herd will follow if that 'push' persists for long enough.
the reason I quit wow, guild after guild leaving to horde, midwinter move was when I decided to hang my shield for good.
Honestly cross faction PVE seems like the most obvious solution. The end of the fourth war would’ve paved a great lore reason for it, as well as build tension for future stories of pockets of the factions still fighting. If it ever happens I know plenty of friends who will throw money at blizzard to swap alliance but still have access to the horde raid/m+ scene. I cared about the faction divide 10+ years ago, but I’m over it.
I'm the same. I prefer Alliance races, but I want to play Horde because all my friends are horde.
When they added the horde/alliance symbols to every character in the selection screen late in BFA it seemed obvious they were about to do this, but.. they never did
@@neruneri same space goats are easily my favourite in game race but I wanna play with friends
world... of... warcraft....
@@ACO-vv4gu You can still have the war going on in lore and gameplay, while also allowing people to do pve together. They could just leave warmode as it is, blue vs red for those who enjoy it. Lore-wise, the horde and alliance have been working together to kill raid bosses since vanilla, with a few notable exceptions (ICC had the airship fight, battle for dazar'alor was strictly a faction war raid).
tl;dr that's an overused and inadequate reason
One thing to add to the deaths of so many big raiding guilds: Guild XP in Cata. Some high end raiding guilds felt the need to lower their recruitment criteria, or to allow friends/family/alts, in order to keep up with guild XP and guild perks to stay competitive in raids. Many of them crumbled towards the end of Cata.
You forget to talk about the nerf of the human racial during Legion which was the only reason keeping the pvpers in the Alliance.
Yup I was out numbered by alliance 5-1 when I 1st started playing wow on Medivh (Irl Friends server). The Human Racial almost brought me over for legion. I ended up just server Swapping to Mal'ganis
Not sure I agree given that the best PvP racials are still generally considered to be EMFH and Shadowmeld.
@@Bluebozzy Talking about best PvP racials and not mentioning Orcs' bullshit stun reduction seems somewhat biased.
@@silith7027 or tauren stun and belf silence, extra interrupt
@@R4G34D0N lmao!! They nerfed belfs racial ages ago... Now it only dispels buffs on enemy
I've been alliance since launch and I have no plans on switching over any time soon. However, out of the 60 people on my friends list that play WoW 5 are still alliance and even my entire guild I was in since Vanilla switched over to Horde in BFA to have an easier time getting things done.
It's honestly really sad to see and to watch Blizzard let this happen just so they can make some easy money is infuriating. At this point they just need to let both factions que together for any pve content, they already have the mercenary mode for pvp and seem to have no problem with that.
What blizzard doesnt understand is that Wow is not a God. It can be killed with incompetence. Brand loyalty is almost nonexistent anymore. Ever since they ruined old content leveling by streamlining it to a 3 hour 1-50 journey, they lost the altaholics who only kept subs up to roll alts, level and delete, rinse and repeat. That was a substantial number of players from my friends list. i have 2 out 17 that still play. And one of them only plays d3 when logged into the launcher.
for a more recent example of this, you can look at the mass exodus of guilds away from Ravencrest(EU) as like 20 of the top 100 guilds on that realm swapped to horde at the end of BFA
i´ve been saying it´s a social "issue" for a while now.
I also remember whenever alliance racials seemed to be OP they were quick on the nerfs, but OP horde racials went on for a lot longer during Cata/MoP/WoD. That combined with the fact alliance players were literally bullied in and out of the game (remember old Blizzcons?) I still remember the first time For the Alliance was shouted at Blizzcon people actually boo'ed them...
Also it's worth nothing how big players names like Preach actively make fun of Alliance players for choosing the "wrong" faction, even if it's a joke people take it seriously.
Up until Mop the status quo was PvE = horde, PvP = alliance
I heard of some horror stories coming out of Blizzcon and it disgusted me. People being spat on. That's considered assault in many countries (at least it is in the UK). How true these stories are is up to debate. No denying there is more hostility towards Alliance players from Horde players, I've experienced it from my own friends. Even if all my friends would say is "Horde is cooler and better" "Alliance are lame and goody two shoes" it still wears on people.
What is the problem? A social one.
Horde orcs and undead in classic WoW both had extremely OP racials. Blizzard wasn’t #nochanges , there was a ton of stuff they changed, they just wanted horde to dominate pvp I guess
@@QuintemTA according to Horde Players there is no Hordie Bias... /s (i believe that if too many Alliance Players leave, Blizzard could just add Alliance NPCs that act like players... Horde sure wouldn't notivce. XD)
@@snoozebutton9996 You could add NPCs to Warmode with the Island's AI and most horde would not notice because it would still be 10 to 1 advantage. They'd die in
the audience booing "for the alliance" is hardly "bullying". it just means there were more horde players in the audience. them choosing to boo is the same reason someone wanted to randomly shout "for the Alliance". like, it's a fictional video game faction for god's sake not someones actual national identity to feel genuinely insulted by
When I started playing it was right about 6 or so months before Wrath launched. And I played Alliance. My mom played Alliance and so did my Dad. My friends also played Alliance. So I went Alliance. And I played a Night Elf Hunter. And a Dwarf Paladin. At the time Alliance was pretty good for finding raids and even completing content in pugs. Same as Horde for the most part. But then PAID services came along. Faction changes, and server changes. And allot of Alliance guilds were jealous of the Hordes racials. And other's just liked the Horde races more. But racial's was the biggest driving force for the slow but steady exodus of PvE players to Horde. But if you PvP'ed then you went Alliance because the Human and Dwarf racial's were pretty broken. You basically got a second get out of trouble button along with your PvP trinks. I ended up eventually going Horde simply because I tested myself whether Horde was better for raiding. And it was vastly easier to find groups and finish raids than it was on Alliance side. This unbalance of the racial's led to many servers actually collapsing. Twisting Nether was my first server. And it had many Horde and Alliance guilds that competed in raiding for server firsts. It was an actual competition and people loved it. But with the paid services in place. Guilds struggled to keep raiders from Ninja looting and jumping servers. Or faction changing. Or simply chasing that greener grass for faster easier loot. Server communities collapsed as well due to all of these issues. And Blizzard simply did jack squat. Because truth be told they were making millions and millions off of these services that cost more than a monthly sub. And people were often transferring entire accounts worth of characters, often totally over a couple hundred or more dollars to complete. So why in the world would Blizzard remove something that was making them free money lol. Same thing with multi boxers. Why would Blizzard crush people who paid for 40 accounts at a time? I think the only reason multi boxing was finally dealt with is due to the truth that very very few people actually did it these days, so they weren't worth the headaches on forums anymore. But yeah Blizzard 100% hand made this issue and happily snowballed the players, anytime people complained or pleaded for things to change.
The troll racial in Throne of Thunder, Beastslaying, was insanely good. So many bosses were beasts. That must have impacted early prog
goblin jump for Mythic Kiljaeden
I'm surprised he didn't mention this or point out when blizzard was slow to react that it caused that push to horde. Then also stuff like seal of blood for blood elf paladins.
@@Kiobao with berserking AND beastslaying, being a troll for ToT was so fun. He has said in later videos that he missed raiding ToT so that might be why. It was at that kind of time that Method went Horde, I remember seeing Sparkuggz in a random bag after he has just transferred but had no guild tag
He didn’t address a lot of really obvious ones like that, also how horde racials were obv waaaay better in tbc where I think this can be traced back to. This is why they added human trinket in wrath.
@@AlmondWillow what is this jumping thing? I joined back in BFA and honestly don't know.
This feels like an anti-issue, they could just let us do PvE content together, there are solutions to this, does it really matter if a Night Elf player join a Mythic+ or a Raid together with its friends that play Horde? I don't think so, who does it hurt really? I mean lore-wise the Horde & Alliance have come together on several occasions to bring down a larger threat, so why wouldn't a Horde player and an Alliance player be able to queue up together for a dungeon for instance? There's literally no good reason not to allow that.
To me it would kinda ruin the alliance vs horde rivalry. Its an RP thing for me.
@@Trashloot but the conflict is kinda over isnt it?
@@Colaschnittchen Yes and no. WoW's story feels like its run its course, and faction warfare is a reliable tap for story. Even if it just sets up something bigger like MoP or BfA.
@@Colaschnittchen exactly. Eventually there is bigger fish to fry, I mean we're currently in the afterlife trying to essentially save the entire Universe...but after that we're going to go back and my Tauren wants to kill a Gnome?
@@Colaschnittchen The issue is that any time, and I do mean ANY time there is no direction for the story, you can create some excuse for the horde to attack the alliance. Garrosh did it to prove he was 'strong warchief'. Sylvannas did it because she 'wanted the alliance out of kalimdor'. The new council will do it because 'tyrande angry and mean'. You can keep doing it over, and over, and over, and it gives them filler to do something new next time. There is 100% no reason for the horde and alliance to fight now. None. What does Jaina say in torghast if you're horde? "YOU SEND THE HORDE TO FIGHT ME NOW?!" No bitch, what? But they gotta play those beats so in the future they can sell 60 dollar expacs. Even outside of that, there is no reason the player character champion should participate in these wars. We lead our order halls, who we could easily say "Dont take the bait" to. We dont. Because greed.
I am on a alliance 6/10 mythic guild, in the last 2 weeks 6 people have left to go horde
I’m in 3/10 mythic alliance guild and I’d say, once we cleared heroic, we saw maybe 10-15% of raiders just.....vanish. Not logged on, not switched just vanished. Dunno what to say bar maybe streamers all going horde has got to be an issue too imo.
@@craynak That's not a faction thing, that happens in most guilds at the start of expansions. People get kinda bored of the thing, stick around long enough to kill the first final boss on heroic and say fuck it.
@@Aetherian1 As alliance you don't have access to progression content, not because people suck but because there simply arent enough progression oriented players for it; those go horde for the same reason. It's a snowball effect that can only be solved with cross faction communication and socialization i think, the faction identity doesnt have to go for that to happen, they can still exist in the lore. You also have plenty of cross faction organisations in the lore and that does not make the factions any less relevant.
@@Midgert89 congrats on not really disagreeing with what I said...?
@@Aetherian1 Want me to yell at you for no reason instead?
Blizz doesn't want a big faction imbalance... Then they brought in Goblin jumps
It's funny that beta testers complained about Darkflight but not Rocket Jump...
Goblin Jump was and is still super fine. It's a very bad racial in the big picture off all raid encounters or PVP. The Problem was that blizz designend an endboss fight with 1 mechanic which was almost impossible to deal with on classes that got no good movement cd or blink like ability.
@@nosek2276 it's a big movement ability... It's not subpar
@@Markus-zb5zd high mountain isn’t far behind
@@jasonhamm7174 which is horde as well
Trolls beast racial in Throne of Thunder.
Arcane Torrent in Legion for Mythic+
Goblin Jump on Kil'Jaeden.
Those moments sure didn't help.
i re-rolled my DH because the aoe purge is so good in mythic
@@virtuousvillain9874 Troll Berserking for literally all of Cata and MoP. Sure, those specific situations helped, but leaving prenerf Berserking in that state for two expansions was the biggest offender, and the problem that really got the ball rolling in the first place.
Cata and MoP was also coincidentally the era where snapshotting was at it's strongest and most important.
Even if Arcane Torrent and Goblin Jump never had those niche cases, the damage was already done by the end of MoP, and the social problem snowball would have done the rest regardless.
My guild is Alliance and on a dead realm, we're one of 5 Mythic guilds on the server and struggling to recruit. Following the end of server connections and the recent mention that there isnt going to be any more in the near future we've reluctantly decided to move server and faction to horde for 9.1. Not only is the AH completely ruined (Agi pots are like 800g each) there is not enough players wanting to push mythic especially with the mid tier dropouts that are occuring meaning we may not even finish the tier due to lack of players forcing our move early or giving up on CE for this tier.
I remember when Tichondrius was 90% Alliance back in MoP. Then Reckful faction changed to Horde, and within the next week, Tichondrius became 90% Horde. I had to start fresh on Illidan since my Alliance characters couldn't leave the hub without getting ganked.
BE AOE silence made Portal Keeper easy. So Bliz "Nerfed" BE racial to AOE purge and had AOE purge negate of major mechanic of Zul in the very next raid. Horde AOE stun; alliance single target stun. The imbalance is intentional. A lot of new players probably just click alliance because they're "the good guys" with better aesthetics, and don't yet understand racials and faction balance.
Blizzard have preferred the horde since Warcraft 3
Also with the introduction of m+ and blood elfs aoe silence moved alot of players toward horde, goblin rocket jump for KJ mythic, and generally horde racials did more dps if i recall (mostly troll tho i think?) i think thats where it really began to kick of. In terms of PvP they nerfed human racial which used to be one of the best if not the best for pvp players, though i suspect changes to pvp racials got less to do with it and pvp ally players mostly just jumped to horde because more ques to be found.
A social problem needs a social solution is a cop out from blizz. There are lot of things they could do to fix it. Free character transfers, let horde and alliance be in the same guild and raid together, battle groups of servers to improve balance. People should be able to play whatever they like and with whoever they like no restrictions.
The only solution I think Blizzard can do is open up free Faction Swaps to Alliance (not to Horde).. Some of the top members of guilds when asked have stated that they would go alliance, however they don't as there's no reason to and they'd rather use the resources/cost to faction swap to instead be used towards the world first race... Either spend millions upon millions of gold to transfer your entire guild, alts, and support members over to alliance for zero benefit.. or spend those millions towards buying up BoEs, Boosts, etc.
So if Blizzard opened up free faction swapping to Alliance, maybe we'd see some of these guilds swap to Alliance
Faction imbalance may have started as a social issue but I wouldn’t pin it that way now. When M+, raids, and rated PvP is the “endgame” and one faction is dominating in all 3 aspects, how is it a social issue that people flock to the winning side?
M+ usually involves people in the raiding scene and during MoP + Legion the best PvP race was Human due to double trinkets being usable.
Because having an issue finding people to play with is literally the definition of a social issue?
@@LlibertarianGalt MoP and WoD you mean? They nerfed it to the ground in WoD when every pvp guy was Alliance and, surprise, they went Horde.
It wasn't MoP where guilds started doing 10's more than 25's. It was Cata.
You also seem to neglect to mention how big of an impact losing the human OP racial was, if you wanted to do serious PvP especially in Cata you were Alliance. After that got nerfed so many went back horde.
I switched back alliance because finding a guild as a CE tank mid tier is INCREDIBLY difficult. No guild not a single guild needs a tank at this time unless they are in some kind of trouble.
I remember back in BC on Magtheridon, it was like 95% Horde and a PvP server, so if you were playing Alliance (like me, at the time) you just could not do things out in the world unless you did it in like the middle of the night, or brought a raid yourself. If you brought a raid, the horde brought 3.
As of this comment only 79 alliance guilds have cleared mythic CN
Three months later, well over 300 alliance guilds have cleared mythic CN.
Actiblizzard is not looking for a solution, they are looking for a solution that bring them a windfall of cash from the dwindling player base.
I wonder if there's a belief in their offices that the game's lifespan is limited by the game engine, so there's no point in making decisions that improve things in the long term. It would explain all the short-term cash grabs they do.
The Only reason its even a 60/40 split is RP servers, if you want to do anything that is more than Raid finder horde is incredibly dominant
Yup, AD is one of the few EU servers that actually has a live alliance tradechat that isn't just bot/boost spam. Take that away and I'm pretty sure most people would either quit or swap horde.
@@harambe4267 I'm on AD and it's crazy how many Alliance players there are. Stormwind at peak times is almost like an actual city it's madness. But I can see how it would suck on other realms if you really can't find groups or guilds.
The depressing state of Alliance won't change until Blizzard gives it the de-facto BiS racials for both PvE and PvP for a couple of expansions - then the pendulum will swing back to the middle.
That'll swing it in the opposite direction, it wouldn't lead to it balancing out.
@@mioo9387 not everyone would switch, actually the majority would not
Completely agree. Balancing things out now will simply keep people were they currently are which doesnt fix the problem. People need to be incentivised to go Alliance and until there is a compelling reason to do so this problem will persist.
Nailed it. This was not something that happened overnight. Horde had a racial advantage overall or on specific fights for a decade and it has just slowly drained the life out of competitive alliance players. It's night and day on US servers when looking for pugs or guilds that can do anything now and really sucks for alliance players since it sucks to know your faction just has no skilled players to do content with.
One thing that annoyed me about the faction imbalance was BoD, as a heroic raider, we look to method, fatboss, limit etc, for boss guides and thefirst 3 bosses were different depending on which faction you were (mainly order and map layout, but still different). As an alliance player, it was hard to find a guide that looked like what we saw when raiding, so it made those first 3 extremely hard progression bosses, for my guild at least.
Honestly, This needs to be fixed, The sheer amount of people on horde doing end game content versus alliance just keeps snowballing. With blizzard not really doing anything about it. Especially if peoples guilds fall apart, The scattered remnants usually just end up going horde to find another guild instead of staying on alliance.
When I first started playing I was Horde on Medivh. That was the server my friend played; Even being surrounded by humans and gnomes I farmed my dallies. I just assumed Alliance had more/older players. I picked horde because I like undead, Orcs & Tauren not because we are "winning" the faction war... The high end players will always follow eachother around and there is nothing we can do about that.
i mean, its not a game issue anymore. good players just want to play with good players and horde has more of them, so if you wanna do endgame, you just play horde. only thing i can see fixing it is allowing cross faction raiding.
I don't see a good way to fix it. They even give alliance players a giant bonus in warmode but people don't care. Of course they could give alliance really broken op racials but that would catch so much hate for it since this would be a gready way to force players to use faction swap. Right now alliance even has slightly better racials for most content but it simply is a social problem. Only cross faction gameplay would work as a bandaid fix but that is a fix you can not take back anymore so it should be a last resort.
Don't forget PVP. Basicly 99% of the player where Alliance in MOP because of the human racial was basicly a free trinket and totally op.
And right now u can reach R1 way easier as horde than alliance and Orc is also better than any alliance racial right now. Issue too if u ask me
@@ralfrudi3963 Whats the point of Warmode unless you're on alliance dominated server where 3 scrubs gang up on 1 decent player in order to get a kill? The only place I ever saw Alliance somewhat effectively contest Warmode objectives was AD(EU) due to faction imbalance. Every other phase it just leads to them getting stomped so of course they opt out lmao. 30% more gold and honour is useless if you're looking at a 4min res cd.
Maybe if it didnt cost a million dollars to swap faction, more people would swap back to alliance.
if you paid a million dollars somebody stiffed you for sure mate
yea transferring a main and a few backup alts is a big investment
I did this once for a few hundred dollars. Blizzard probably thought they made a ton from me. After that I was so annoyed I vowed to never spend another cent in their store. In fact, I quit the sub for half a year too to earn back the money I spent. The store is probably good in the short term, but these things always have a cost.
I remember when I offically switched over to Horde from Alliance (loved my little Dranei warrior).
Siege of Ogrimarr had just dropped, and I believe they were doing a "half off faction swaps and server transfers".
Went from Cairne to Area 52.
They dident setup so all faction transferred to Horde due to greed if it was they could just do it again and gain for money.....
But they have never done it for the Alliance to make people swap to Alliance why.... they want Horde to win and Alliance to die...
We all know The Alliance balance is far from equal, last time we saw something Alliance had less than 20% of the player-base in retail...
The Alliance is dead everyone knows and blizzard wanted it to happened hence Horde always had the better racials, Classic TBC is now following the same footsteps with Alliance losing from 56% to less than 40% of the player-base now and seemly it keeps falling....
I feel like the average player didn't care much about sims and meta charts until MoP when troll dps got out of hand due to all the beast raid bosses.
That and the rise of Streamers which causes players to flock to specific faction-favored servers.
The issue was prenerf Berserking combined with snapshotting, not the niche Beast dmg, and it was very obvious how broken it was from the very beginning of Cata.
If you were playing a Warlock, Shadow Priest or Boomkin, you were not competing with Troll players unless your own character was also a Troll... (assuming equal gear and skill etc)
Professions bonuses were awesome. Moreover, the ones you got from the main crafting professions were far more useful than the gathering ones, because they took far more effort. I believe Enchanters were the only ones who could enchant rings, tailors were able to add a spellweave to their cloak, blacksmiths could socket their wrist item. It all went away after Lich King, and that, along with the neutering of Inscription actually granting customized power (for soloing or groups) was pretty much the death knell of professions. They were actually really quite engaging up til Cata. I mean, go back and look at the sheer number of gem recipes to track down in Outland and Northrend. I'd venture to guess their are 20x more of them than what came after.
Cross-faction PvE has to be the solution. It's been a theme of the game since Warcraft 3 anyway, both the factions coming together to defeat the big bads. Make it official in WoW as well, instead of having a contrived war between the two factions every expansion.
Just use dazar'alor race swapping mechanic. If an Alliance player joins a Horde group, he's automaticaly transformed into a Horde race. You keep the faction boundaries intact, whilst allowing for cross faction pve. You'd be playing with member of the other faction and would be none the wiser. No one loses.
They should let cross faction arenas and rbgs be a thing too. It's way easier to find people for those activities as horde. They already let "Mercenaries" or whatever into bgs don't they? So why not rated content?
Game always feels shitter when they force the expansion into a faction war anyway, rather than Legion esk type expansions, in come together to face down a common enemy.
For real it would be so easy to leave open world pvp, arenas and BGs faction separated and just have cross faction pve. Problem solved.
@@calebutterback8528 They already have mercenary mode where horde can que for alliance bgs. For rated pvp there is a similar problem to high end pve. Just making it for pve only isn't problem solved at all. Every rbg night at 2k+ we spend like an hour looking for a decent healer. The other people in my guild also have horde accounts and say it would have only taken them 5 minutes to find a healer.
I love alliance races, cities, lore but I switched to horde. I'm not going to hurt my chances at doing the content I love due to factions.
If blizzard just removed the barriers I would 100% play alliance. Let me trade, party up and guild with opposite factions, no half measures will solve the issue and it isn't a racial issue anymore.
Every server is already PvE by default. You can already PvP for the enemy faction. There is no reason to keep this up
Removing the divide destroys the core identity of the game and warcraft as a whole.
@@Cynidecia No it doesn't
@@rosco3 is a war a war if there aren't two factions fighting.
@@Cynidecia apart from one patch on the previous expansion we haven't been in war for over a decade at least.
I'm a horde player and I'm saving Jaina from torghast. Heck I was trying to save Tyrande (on my night fae), who is a massive horde hater.
You can still have people fighting and cross faction conflict.
Been following you preach since mid Pandaria and this type of content is what drew me to your channel. Please do more of this in the future
everyone went horde cause blizzard systematically buff their racials each expansion. Remember when they said they were nerfing blood elves in bfa? having a silence was too strong, but having an aoe purge isn't?
This an issue blizzard created to sell a solution to with all their faction and race changes. Blizzard will only fix it though once the printing press is starting to fail as most people spending money go horde. Then they will allow cross faction pve and collect the money as people that were forced to be horde faction change back to their prefered alliance race and continue on like there was no change at all since I doubt very many if any at all remembers the race of the people they group with just whether they liked playing with them or not.
It's not that simple lmao. The faction imbalance wasn't created for Blizzard to make money. It's just something that will happen.
If you put up a barrier, this is how population dynamics work. Same reason you see similar industries clump together IRL, where physical distance is the barrier. If there is a digital barrier of factions and servers (and the cost in time or money to move) then people will clump together who seek to achieve similar things. Especially given the age of WoW. You don't even need racials for it to happen, you just need the barriers.
Back in Wrath I was playing on one of the new US wrath realms (Fizzcrank) because they had done free transfers off of my original realm (Zul'jin) and my guild was having a real heck of a time by the time ICC opened up because most of the decent players had slowly started migrating off server. We had a pretty major guild drama come up and it was decided amongst several of the guild leadership to move realms because Fizzcrank just didn't have the players to support any kind of serious progression. We had heard good things from friends who had moved to Stormrage and the decision was made to move over there. I spent $125 moving all of my "important" characters over, and it was like night and day. We went from being #2 or #3 on Fizzcrank, half progressed through ICC, to having to basically start over on Stormrage, yet still managed to get a full 25 man, with standbys and clear heroic ICC at like, realm #200th before Fizzcrank saw anyone do it once.
Having a player base like that available is so powerful. If we had a player who decided to quit playing, or who didn't mesh well with the guild, they were easily replaced on a realm like Stormrage was back then. By Cata we were able to build a guild that rose up to the top 5 or 10 on Stormrage, playing with the likes of Death Jesters, Critical Mass, etc... Hell, we even had members of CM and Vodka who ran alts in our guild. I became the best geared bear druid on the server through that timeframe and had people coming to me asking for advice on being a bear. It was surreal just how much things changed just by moving to a server with a solid player-base.
So yeah, I don't think there is any way for Blizzard to rebalance the factions from a "progression" standpoint. Their only option would be to intentionally overpower Alliance temporarily to effectively con people into swapping, then rebalance everything so there's no advantage to going back, but then the overall population would be imbalanced.
This is why I feel like Ion was about half a nanometer away from saying "we plan to allow cross-faction grouping" because that's the only way I can imagine them being able to balance out progression between the factions.... eliminate the difference entirely. Personally, I would love this. I would love to be able to have a horde character that I can actually play on with guildmates, people I've spent a long time building relationships with. Though I would hope they do it from a lore-perspective, rather than just a mechanical one. I would prefer having horde and alliance characters in the same guild together. I would love to be able to walk through Orgrimmar on my Night Elf Druid, or Gnome Warrior. Not only would it address the issue of faction imbalance by removing the faction barrier entirely, but it would feel like the peoples of Azeroth were actually growing and becoming more than they once were.
There is one notable exception during Legion. M+ was mostly Alliance for quite a span there because Shadowmeld [NElf racial] let you pull off skips.
Wasn't everyone in the recent Mythic Dungeon International running NELF?
@@tyrannosaurus696 There was also a Dwarf hunter because it has feign death.
@@tyrannosaurus696 still iss a strat
@@tyrannosaurus696 MDI is different thing cause there you can choose whatever race you want
On live servers most of the highest keys are done by the Horde, there's literally just more ppl to join and in lfg it can be seen the most with 30+ ppl applying to 18 keys on the Horde and like 5-7 on the Alliance
And then there was rocket jump and kil jaeden
"I do think racials should be a non combat thing". I've been saying this for years. It pleases me that someone with a louder voice is saying the same thing.
It doesn't matter at this point though, the damage was already done. Unless there was some kind of in combat advantage to encourage switching back you won't get anyone to move from where they are now.
This sentiment has also been around in the community for a decade or so.
Yep, this is something SWTOR did right in making racials non-combat related (I think they're still pretty lackluster from a roleplaying perspective but that's just getting nitpicky and the nerdy side of my star wars fandom). A roleplaying game at its fundamental level should be about playing something you actually identify with/enjoy/whatever instead of a math game. And as people said, the damage was done years and years ago. Even if everything was absolutely 100% equalized across the board the mass migration has already occurred. Just open up cross-faction PvE play.
I actually really miss the profession bonuses
An issue now is if people see a 1% difference they will turn that into a mountain.
They should continue on the lockout system like the covenants have to allow an occasional flip
@@miatomi that is because they sim about 2% higher but this small difference is not gonna make top end guilds swap to alliance since this would cost them thousands of dollars to swap all their characters and alts to alliance. So if top end guilds won’t swap, the others won’t swap too.
@@jameswayne2907 Top guilds don't swap because it would make them lose access to BoEs in the auction house. In the last raid, they got gear from pvp and from BoEs, so swapping just removes a large part of how they can get better gear. Top guilds rely on huge servers with an active raiding scene.
@@OWnIshiiTrolling ah is shared between alli and horde
@@arthurschopenhauer292 Since when? oO
I thought that was only the goblin AH
I appreciate your insight and analysis on this. I would like to point out I have already heard people saying "Preach says Ion is wrong, it's not a social issue" I think because of how your intro goes. To bad, people need to listen beyond the first juicy sound bite.
I think those are his white knights because he's always making fun of people who play alliance.
In essence Blizzard took a wrench to something that wasn't a problem out of greed, let it fester, and washed their hands of all responsibility therefor by calling it now a social issue.
I can't wait for the day they implement cross-faction garbage so I can dip. All the pets, mounts and cosmetics in the world couldn't keep me around at that point.
TL;DR Blizzard left Horde Racials alone to long and any time an Alliance racial was good in raid it got nerfed.
ToT 1st boss had a tank stun, humans coudl trinket to buy 2-3 extra sec of tank dps. It deemed OP and from then on every boss stun our racial didn't work on. Goblin racials making you avoid entire mechanincs? Beast slaying giving advantage on 4 to 6 bosses in ToT (5% extra dps)? Those were all seemingly no problem. Only my owrgen somteitmes uses it racial... when in the Maw. Nice racials on Alliance Blzizard! Only my 3 NE char use their racials in Torghast to pull ahead and shdowmeld mobs away I didn't need to kill anyhow to save time on the 2-3h+ runs. Combat wise? Utility wise otherwise? The racials are better not existing just bloat.
When he talks about castle nathria and top guild moving to alliance you need to understand 1 thing they were planning to move AND THAN COME BACK, big difference from just moving faction
Calling it a social issue is kinda bizzare to me, imho it's a logistical issue. It's not because horde is so nice that people play there, it's because there are more raiders there and this effect bleeds down the ranks (probably one of the few cases where trickle-down is actually working, even though negatively).that it has already reached heroic guilds and maybe even normal ones.
As for Blizzard's statistics, I have to wonder which statistics they use, sadly they never tell us, so I can only use my own experience and the old adage "to never trust a satistic you haven't faked yourself". The current situation is kinda ironic to me, seeing how the horde at one point was considered to be dying, because fewer and fewer people wanted to play the "uggo"-races and now even my backwater alliance server has more horde raiding guilds than alliance.
Also the tangent with crafting seems a bit forced. It might have added to it in some way, but I can't really make out to be a driving factor. If anything the constant breaking of guilds has added more to this trend, because people that already had to move their character might as well move to the best possible setting, so a large server with the right faction. I absolutely have to agree though that Blizzard's greed was a huge driving factor in this. Paying 20 bucks for a server script an intern could write is ludicrous.
I am super confused on where preach is getting the information on faction balance? Like are we basing this on Raider.io information? are we basing this off Warcraft logs? Wow survey? wow realm pop? Like are we just throwing out 60\40 split with absolutely no basis for that number?
Raider IO for Mythic+ suggests a 65/35 split at the very lowest of levels, even depleted +2s, out of ANYONE with a raider io score (which is anyone who has ever done a key) it's 65% horde, as you get a higher score, the chances that you're Alliance reduce dramatically, eventually to the point where it's like 80/20 at a fairly reasonable level of play
@@ValryshaClips Thats my point though there are people who play the game and never raid or do keys. They just PVP, or farm xmog/mounts. I suppose if we are specifically talking about raiding population or M+ population that would be fair.
@@MrPhyrce Yeah, but the people who dont play content that requires other people don't really matter to a question regarding which side has more people to play with.
@@ValryshaClips valid pont i didnt think of it that way
8:07 I recently thought about consolidating multiple characters onto a server, but all of them also need a faction change...starting to look like $220 just to move a few, four, save-files. Wtf
There's literally only two ways they can do anything about it. And it comes down to a "Pick your poison" scenario. Do they make alliance have better racial abilities so being alliance is just more optimal which will piss everyone who likes the horde off and in a year the situations will just be reversed and not solved. Or do they get rid of the faction barrier since the faction barrier has meant fuck all to us "adventurers". The adventurers have never cared about the faction barrier even slightly. Oh the worlds in trouble and thrall says he wants to help? Sure bro we really don't care that you are horde. Oh Saurfang felt betrayed so Anduin made him part of the alliance? Yup don't give a shit I'll high five him on my way to the nearest AH. The adventurers haven't given a single fuck who is a part of what EVER!! we just run around kill shit and save the day it's what we do. There can still be "Rulers" for each city like there is now but this "Alliance vs Horde" shit needs to go away in my opinion. It has never meant anything story wise, gameplay wise, or game feel wise. All it does is separate the player base for no reason what so ever. I've played from vanilla all way to shadowlands and to this day I haven't seen a single damn reason for the faction divide. Blizzard haven't wrote any good stories or scenarios where it makes sense in fact IT'S THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE!!! Every time anything happens we all hug each other and group together to slay the big bad dickhead of the current expansion patch. The time of the faction divide is over there's no reason to it. #NoFactions
I disagree on the Vanilla WoW part of it.. the story is most definitely centered around friction between the factions at many points. Much of it has to the do the expansion of Horde and Alliance territories... like Ashenvale, for example.. much of the conflict within that zone is due to encroaching Horde on the Northern Barrens front, threatening the hold the Night Elves have had in Ashenvale.
The most classic example of the world itself goading Horde vs Alliance battles.. Tarren Mill vs Southshore.. the geography and questing in this area funnels Alliance and Horde in to the same areas, deliberately, and conflict ensues. The Horde participate in the killing of many innocents in the region, effectively murdering innocent Alliance citizens.
There are a plethora of questlines that actually feature this conflict at the forefront in Vanilla WoW... beyond that, it most certainly does become an afterthought, though, or just a convenient device.
WOW will NEVER not have factions.
Its to ingrained into the game.
Also all of your points just show HOW FUCKING clueless you are.
Ever since Warcraft 1 the factions have been a key part of the game.
Lore wise getting rid of the factions creates MORE plot holes
Why would your Average Alliance Citizen be down with a full on Alliance with the Horde when like 5 years ago there friends and family were killed by a Orc????????
The factions only team up to fight against big threats but they never fully trust each other
A Warcraft without the Alliance or the Horde would not be Warcraft
Negative comments aside I believe you are right. I couldn't care less, and usually the worst stories and the worst expansion in the game evolve around faction conflict. Maybe the factions were a big part of the game in the beginning, but have no value add to the game anymore.
You can still have PVP, etc. but Faction alliances is just some scared cow at this point. I say kill the damn cow at this point. It will lead to more creativity in the long run.
I agree with both points here but as they said the fact remains that we are separate factions due to differences which started from inception and if u take away the faction line from the game u may as well erase the last 20 plus years of warcraft and the wars that have been started by both sides on any front....and if that happens I'll gladly unsub and delete my account from existence
@@Tj-ji1yz You guys don't seem to understand what I meant. The faction divide shouldn't exist for us PLAYERS. Yes the alliance and horde will always hate each other even tho they literally suck each other off at the first sign of any trouble whatsoever. But us the "Adventurers" literally don't fucking care about their politics or their world views. If Blizzard said "ok next patch the adventurers go back to stormwind and kill Turalyon because he exists." the adventurers would literally just go do it. We don't care and never have cared we are the "Adventurers" not the alliance or the horde.
man I forgot all about stuff like Lifeblood from herbalism. I feel old.
The reason I don't play WoW anymore is because every time I go to Orgrimmar It takes a teeny tiny piece of my soul away. I just want to play Alliance and do PvE for The Light's sake.
I don't understand how profession bonuses fit in to this discussion, I spent 600k on two race changes since coming back to the game with sl, if professions had mattered like they did in the old days, it's not like I wouldn't have race changed, I would've just race changed AND leveled professions.
Profession bonuses were way, way more important than racial bonuses. It would feel silly to race change for minimal DPS increases.
@@Bramble20322 That doesn't make any sense though, it's like saying enchants are bigger than gems, so it doesn't make sense to gem your gear.
Some big gaps in the story.
1. Realm pop is irrelevant since it shows Alts.
The alt o holics and less competitive are less likely to go horde aside from making Alts on horde. Better stats are wowprogres to see active raid community or check PvP que, even with mercenary horde still has to wait.
2. You do mention it, the big issue is the braindrain. Even if alliance had more players, the higher skilled players are still scarse.
3. In vanilla their was a much bigger alliance population. That was the entire point of giving horde the blood elves.
4. MoP horde racials were insane and even in wod for at least the start. Once the racials were balanced the damage was caused and than blizzard suddenly didn't want to anything about the issue.
5. An bigger issue than the faction imbalance is the deadrealms. Even if you merged all the small realms into the same size as 4th biggest realm ( continent) it would still lack in the higher skill bracket due to braindrain. ( I am in this situation).
I play Alliance on Gilneas and have noticed an extreme shift to Horde players on the server which is so weird... it's been historically very Alliance bias till now
August 2013, Blizzard launches half price character services, for all services. A ton of higher end guilds decided to move to Horde because they see that the troll racials are going to be extremely overpowered in SoO and there is already a shift in the player base to Horde. In less than two months they also offer free server transfers off of many of the high pop US realms, sorry I cannot say for sure about EU, and the Alliance players on those servers now feel a big push to get off the server since they cannot even complete world quest without getting ganked by a raid group. In that time several large servers that were 50/50 or close to it now skew heavily horde. My server at the time was as close to 50/50 as it could be (Bleeding Hollow US) and by October was unofficially 80/20 or worse. Since there has NEVER been a reason for guilds to change back, there will NEVER be a shift back to an even player base. The only answer is to allow PVE cross faction events like dungeons and raids while keeping PVP separated. This will encourage people to play the lower represented faction if they prefer since they will not feel pressure to play the higher population simply because there are more people to play with.
Funny how it changed: vanilla pservers were/are slightly Alliance focused (although some were even). High end raiding groups - Alliance with Palas... but initial TBC private servers - Horde domination to a 80-90% point (that's why pservers started faction balancing like the both seals for Palas).
Horde absolutely dominant Classic servers because of PvP imbalance
@@Mr91Jmay For vanilla it's palas for raids (but a small one) while in TBC it's overall stronger racials and seal - PvE and then PvP.
@@riklaunim I'm talking about currently on pvp servers in classic wow horde absolutely dominate. Like 90+% on some servers. I agree alli is better for pve but content is so easy it doesn't matter
@@Mr91Jmay Classic has also the retail effect where non-pserver players have their mindset already tainted. On pservers I've seen it didn't happened. Also Classic has multiple servers so some just moved. Alliance moved to PvE or very few realms they dominate.
The content is easy but for parses people are willing to do weird things...
@@riklaunim nothing to do with retail, classic horde dominate pvp so pvp servers are horde
Blizzard fails to realise you can have a perfectly fine faction pride just as Ion described and still allow people to do dungeons, raids or even be in the same guild while being in different factions. Allowing one does not mean the death of the other.
Completely agree. As far as the lore goes the factions work together constantly to stop bigger threats. Why on earth is pve raids and dungeons not cross faction at this point ? It wouldn't kill factions at least not in the way they think it would. Just keep Pvp around and make up a lore or story reason as to why we have a truce to raid and dungeon.
I do not think there is much of such thing as "faction pride", because since WoD all the faction concept does IMO is being a cheap "enemy" to overcome, and to praise those who bash, shame factions, and tells how necessary it is to be together regardless of the factions. The whole idea is demonized and stomped over. Or that's how I feel about usage of the theme.
I don't even know why this is a discussion. You can PvP against your own faction. If that doesn't hurt faction pride then neither will PvEing with the opposing faction.
Is more easy now make a neutral faction to about all this garbage. Well is only my I guess.
This is one of the big barriers I have for raiding, mythic raiding, and probably ever playing WoW again. As an alliance raid/guild leader, it was incredibly difficult to find players for the server I was on, and that problem simply kept increasing thru the last expansion I played, Legion. If I do want to return and raid seriously, I almost certainly would have to go Horde, which would be HUNDREDS of dollars of server xfers for various characters, which I am not going to do. Greed does seem to be the primary motivation at this point and were I given the magic wand, limitations on faction/realm would be gone for raiding/guilds.
i play alliance because i feel more at home among them
TRUE! I could never raid above normal again if I stayed alliance and I would still stay. It will always be my home.
sorry to hear that
I play Alliance on Argent Dawn because that's where I've been since I was 14-15 years old at the end of TBC and the start of Wrath. It's where all my friends used to play and it's where my "raiding career" peaked during MoP, and it is where I've had the absolute best of times playing the game. All my good memories, even if they're now half a decade old and painfully out of reach, are tied to that, and you may call it a sunk cost fallacy if you want, but I do feel that I'm too old now to start over on a new realm.
As such, for the past 4 expansions (SL included) I have spent 1-2 months playing by myself at launch and then quit, because there is no reason to go back anymore. And every cycle, everything gets a little bit worse. Fewer features, more greed, more issues, an increasingly alien company and more bitterness among the playerbase.
AMOGUS?
I play alliance because the friend that wanted to raid mythic with me only played ally, and I was rerolling class anyways. Been ally ever since.
Your content has always been good but lately your taking it it a new level. Keep it coming my man!
I didn't realize the 10man angle in mop. I was still doing 25. But it makes perfect sense. This certainly created a perfect storm heading into wod. What you didn't mention in mop was beastslaying. On the 25 man side 5% dmg vs specific bosses in tot and soo, was enormous. It was enough to force the swap for a lot of guilds. Ours didn't but then continued to regret it on margok (torrent) and kj (rocket jump) until we finally said screw it. Even for a die hard alliance guild in the top 20-40 world it just felt that we only ever failed the racial bonus lottery in 3 expansions. It just never went in a favorable direction once for alliance.
If you played Diablo just consider Horde = normal difficulty and playing Alliance = hell difficulty
Vanilla was balanced? Didn't they have to add Blood Elves to try to even it out some? or did I conjure that up in a fever dream?
Dare I say... A Legacy?
I was in an Alliance Mythic raiding guild, we had problems recruiting, regularly getting up to 18-19 people on raid night due to real life, just couldn't quite get the roster to 25ish. The guild made the decision to faction change to Horde and server transfer - which is pretty expensive. Something went wrong on the guild server transfer, so the guild main tank has been unplayable for three weeks so far - Blizzard customer support is still sorting that issue out.
For PVP it was reduction in cooldown on Faction transfers from 30 days to 3 days in Wotlk and then just to hammer the nail in Wintergrasp on some servers this was nearly 100% in one factions control so the other faction couldn't access the raid. So they transferred. Then again as you mention some racials were just crazy op at certain points. I moved horde for the belf racial for ret because it was basically unplayable in arena without it (before we got rebuke)
I play Alliance because I'm on Frostmourne (the largest OCE server) and prefer having a larger pool of players to do keys and raids with. Shadowmeld is also very OP for keys. Would prefer if racials were purely out of combat effects.
Also - maybe it's time to add some more interesting races to the Alliance? Every race in the Alliance feels like a 'Lawful Good' almost or actual Human. It's very boring. The Horde have a much wider diversity of races in terms of their motivations, RP opportunities, and appearances. Back in the day giving Blood Elves to the Horde was quite a brave move (at the time people would have expected that race to go to Alliance). Perhaps it's time for a similarly brave move for the Alliance - Lightforged Undead perhaps? With Sylvanas out of the picture and the Undercity destroyed it would be interesting to see the Forsaken split into two faction-specific groups.
Tbh aestethics is the factor for me. Alliance ftw
Same for me just for horde.
That's literally the only thing that Alliance has going for it, the fact that gear is designed with human male in mind. Everything else barring maybe environmentsand story (and that is heavily subjective) is better as Horde.
@Asterius Boralus wasn't even that great from a gameplay hub standpoint (although the city was great visually, despite being mostly just a setpiece), it was miles ahead of the awful pyramid though.
The Spanish used to have a good mix, but with SL Alliance has been moving to Horde.
TLDR: Blizzard won't do anything about the Faction imbalances until they have a formula that clearly rakes in more revenue than maintaining a hard Faction divide. A "Maybe" is not enough because that also could mean Blizz takes a hit to revenue and has to answer to little Bobby K and the shareholders.
It's ultimately a snowball effect. Many top guilds going horde for the racials caused alliance guild recruitment to be signifigantly harder all across the spectrum since the more ambitious players went horde as a result. Once one faction becomes dominant it kind of absorbs the good players in the other one becuase they lack gameplay opportunities elsewhere, this is a feedback mechanism that basically kills endgame content on the other side no matter what you do. It's the exact same reason we have super servers now tons of barely populated servers on the roster.
The answer is really simple: Just do what ESO did and integrate the factions for PvE. They have done a dozen different storylines of the Horde and Alliance working together to stop whatever their big bad for a given expansion is at this point, it's really just beggars belief why characters can't actually work together when they aren't doing faction PvP.
You're skipping issues like on a fight like Jaina being Troll gave an edge. and currently being horde as orc or troll gives much stronger combat racials compared to alliance which has pretty much nothing to compare except for dwarf that could be used on one or two fights each tier.
which meant Big guilds like Method would feel forced to move horde because they are fighting for world first and everyone in the community follows them because as a creator you must know that one word from a well known player would sway people to do things like this very easily.
This is coming from a player who tried sticking to alliance for the longest time believing blizzard might try to fix it, but at the end half way through the start of SL i moved Horde because there was no point anymore.
Try pugging Mythic plus 15 or higher on alliance then try it on horde.
what ever happened to Holla Ballers and a bro fist to you all! That always made me smile
because it's not friday and it's not drama time stream.
Jesus christ baby, his video from yesterday still had that. Let me go find the world's smallest violin.
in BFA I never really noticed that much imbalance doing pve stuff but in shadowlands on my server cluster horde seem to outnumber alliance 10:1 just doing questing stuff there are just so many more horde than alliance it actually makes it hard to do some quests due to tapping issues. Not sure what changed between bfa and shadowlands but its been very visible.
Dual faction raidgroups could make sense lore wise, that "the threat" that the raid poses is worth uniting against (kind of like in the MoP trailer when the human and orc fight the panda). To extend this to the entire game though? Would surely feel weird walking about in each other's capitals without being attacked!
I think that your last point at 11:03 is wildly relevant here. I don't think people faction swap their character as often as is presumed. Most people willing to swap out do have alts. Those alts are usually at or close to cap and they would rather abandon an alliance toon and jump on the horde alt than character change, especially at major patches and expansion releases where they have a better time catching up. I'm really curious what the ACTIVE numbers are, because that's where I feel the true balance numbers live.
I don't follow the connection between profession bonuses. Aside from gathering profs being weaker, and engineering being slightly stronger due to CD stacking, the other professions all had equal bonuses, as far as I can recall. Why would the removal of (effectively) static profession bonuses in Mists cause racials to matter more?
Sorry preach, I think you are completely wrong in saying this. Ever since the BE got the silence in legion, the faction shift have been switching more and more to horde and as a hardcore alliance player, we lose more than we win. Blizzard had a chance to correct the balance with Nathria by leaving that dot dispellable by dwarves and I would have been happy there. But no, the horde autism still endures - better comps, more geared players, better co-ordination in battlegrounds. But it doesn't stop there - alliance have been trod in the dirt in every single competitive scene (as you mentioned) and niche racials such as Shadowmeld doesn't do anything to alleviate this - why wouldn't you take a stun/silence/haste increase racial over something that is niche? Blizzard have a clear horde bias (as proven), and Alliance players outraged at this, as I am, is more revenue in this pocket (as they keep playing the game longer in hope that it changes). By the above logic, I don't think you understand the imbalance as an Alliance player does - you play horde from what I seen, and your biases stem from that. The game is nowhere near balanced as you make it out to be.
A 60:40 ratio is not a close-to-equal ratio. 60:40 is massive. To help put it i to perspective, 60 is 50% higher than 40. That is a ludicrous gap in anything. Imagine paying $150 for a product while everyone else pays $100. That's the actual gap of a 60:40 ratio.
Don't forget PVP. Basicly 99% of the player where Alliance in MOP because of the human racial was basicly a free trinket and totally op.
And right now u can reach R1 way easier as horde than alliance and Orc is also better than any alliance racial right now. Issue too if u ask me
No they weren't. 99 percent of the player base doesn't even do content where that would matter.
First of all: During Firelands there was already a discussion about Horde favorite racials because most 2.5 bosses were beasts which meant more DPS for trolls aka the Horde.
Nowadays when players return which is a repeated cycle they will look where the chances of getting into a progression guild or m+ pool are bigger. And that has been the Horde so this process pushes a few percent towards Horde each time. Now you have Shadowlands with one of the biggest player returns and with all the systems and information in place most switch to Horde.
When it comes to alliance dying out. Locally (per server) that happened from my example much earlier. When everything was about pugging Naxx&Co in Wrath Horde side on our server was popular across all german server to provide tons of pugs all the time. Add to that faction imbalance making Wintergrasp a freewin in the afternoon most of the time and you end up with most players switching or starting new ending up on Horde side and besides Alliance getting the server First on LK hc (because the top Horde guild dispanded a week before they could have killed it with +15%) the faction became completely irrelevant over the course of Wrath.
When it comes to professions: Outside of gathering you also had to spend (a lot of) gold to switch. From all the gold moved around that is not always coming from boosts to push professions (for ilvl) last xpac they probably made a pretty penny. If professions and maybe switching them became more important with the current leveling of those you might even have a larger gold/money sink here. There is no difference in paying your faction swap with gold from boosting for tokens or using gold in general.
I just play horde because I strongly prefer the races physical appearances and animations.
Exactly the reason why I play Alliance :) that, and the whole faction esthetic, major cities, garrison, etc.
@@tojge as a horde player I'm jealous of Stormwind and Ironforge.
The music in those cities is just sooooo goooooooood!
I play alliance because I'm raciiiist and only play human. Chunky bois are okay too.
Which is the reason I want to play Alliance, but I'm not really able to because if I did, I wouldn't be able to play with any of my friends, and my chances of finding a guild and backup options would be drastically reduced.
As a horde player, personally I find the ally races waaaaaay more visual appealing. I think why they’re so many blood elves is because it’s closest to a “normal” human model.
Preach is legit batshit to think the faction balance is only 60/40 , you can tell that since hes horde he just wants to make it seem like horde dont have that big advantage but they have a significant one.
I don't raid anymore so it wasn't a factor for me, but I've switched to the alliance towards the end of Legion after years of being Horde and I must say I do not regret a thing. I find ppl on the alliance much nicer and chill overall. Trade chat is a lot less trolley and a bit more mature. I know it is a generalisation, but it is what I experience.
"The Spanish servers have a reasonable balance".
Well... about that...
I'm in the spanish servers (european) and they are massively horde favored.
maybe he refers to the latin american spanish servers ragnaros is heavy horde quelthalas is heavy alliance if you combine them they are almost 50/50
@@LightbladeGaming I thought so yeah
@@SacredBlazeXxX and now it will be even more favored with Sloth and Miracle coming to Horde as well.
Oceanic is massively alliance favored - so much so that world pvp is laughably Alliance heavy. This tier many have further swapped to Alliance if they enjoy world pvp as well. Oceanic is included in the NA 'bucket' so our imbalance is largely ignored.
I played alliance since classic and I always felt the odds were stacked agianst me throughout most of the time in wow.
Still mad that they nerfed DID racial. I mean why?! 80% of the playerbase is Horde. I guess they do not want to upset them.