The Faction Problem – It's Not About To Get Any Better

well it's been less than a month since burning crusade classic has launched and the thing we were all expecting to happen has happened much to the surprise of well some people judging from comments that i've read online and though i'm not surprised that it's happened i am a little bit taken aback at which the speed that it has ladies and gentlemen my name is will e and today we're talking about the faction population problem i don't think it's going to get any better any time soon and it's not to do with the amount of people playing overall that number appears to be very healthy but it's how the players are divided up between the horde and the alliance the anticipated exacerbation of the split between horden alliance has grown exponentially in the burning crusade and there are a number of reasons that has happened which we've been over quite a few times players have really begun the segregation of alliance to pve and horde 2 pvp realms even more so than we'd seen in previous areas of the game when faction population had been an issue such as phase two in classic for example i'm talking about the populations for this video we will be using the website ironforge.pro to reference quite a few times now i admit it's not perfect but it's about the best source that we have to go off of it pulls the player numbers from raid so if you play multiple different characters you could show up as multiple different people but see for yourself the numbers shown on your server and whether they feel about correct i think it does a relatively good job at portraying the population it was clear moving from classic through the dark portal to the burning crusade that the expansion was going to present a new set of issues when it came to open world player versus player outland is a lot smaller we have flying there's reason for level cap players to be in all zones and the issue of population when it comes to pvp has really started to arise as horde players have found that they have an absolutely enormous honor grind ahead of them much to the suffering of the alliance players who are still trying to stick out the leveling when they're being ganked very akin to how life was in phase 2 if you were level 48 on a pvp server cast your mind back to phase 1 in classic when everybody was starting fresh and equal it presented some of the most fair and balanced pvp that's been seen in the game well at least as much as you can say for an open world mmo like world of warcraft they use two roles around and suddenly players are incentivized to farm people level 48 and upwards for honor points and they're encouraged to do so by a system which pits player against player on their own faction to see who can get the most honor which led to a very toxic environment anybody who was not even at level cap yet as well as for the people who were trying to play in the evening at peak time or who were the minority faction on their server at that point in time blizzard opened up free transfers to other servers which led to mass exodus of entire guilds overnight alliance populations vanished from pvp servers in a matter of days much to the chagrin of hall players who have been camping iron forged of course this happened to some horde servers too but just to a much lesser extent i myself decided to make the change from pvp back over to pve which i'd always played on retail around the end of phase five because i knew for tbc seeing how things were in phase two that it wasn't going to be for me if it was anything like phase 2 would have been and that situation has very much rematerialized itself as we start to progress and really settle into the expansion let's look at some numbers shall we ironforge.pro shows archived data for the populations that existed right at the end of classic and you can see that actually there was a higher percentage of alliance players overall when compared to the hall players now whilst we are only a short bit into tbc we can see the population has fully flipped around at this point in time with the horde making up the majority of the player base now if we dig a little bit deeper beyond this and look at how many people are on pvp compared to pve on our classic archive it's fairly balanced actually with a small skew to the horde side looking over at tbc though we can see this number has been an absolute landslide for the reds who have picked up an enormous amount of new players by the looks of things going on to have a quick look at pve here's our classic archive that is about what i expected it to look like an absolutely enormous amount of alliance players and then finally looking at bc at the moment there is actually some new players on the horde side as well but still alliance is very much favored on the pve side of the game so what we can see there is a noticeable shift from there being a majority of alliance over to hoard and for the horde population on pvp to have grown exponentially whilst also increased on the pve side to a certain degree simply put there are more reds than blues now they are finally starting to take over this has been the case in retail for a long period of time as well and there are a number of reasons why you would play either faction of course it's not all down to i want to have the best racials though that will certainly come into it to a certain degree especially when it comes to pvp blood also introduced for the horde which are the most popular race on retail by some margin alongside the paladin a brand new class which many people main as well this is true for the alliance as well when it comes to draenei and shamans but to a lesser extent than blood elves blood elves were sort of that tipping point where back in the day there were more alliance players similar to what we saw in classic and they wanted to give people a gentle nudge to say would you like to play horde instead we've got paladins and we've got elf girls now as well so what's not to like there the faction split simply put is gonna get more and more severe and i don't think it will ever flip around to being alliance favored ever again which sounds pretty extreme but there's a number of reasons for that the quote-unquote better faction situation on classic is repeating itself as it has done on retail and the negative effects that brings when we don't have our cross-server functionalities or sharding are really beginning to rear their heads chiefly with the amount of honor that hall players have to grind to be able to earn their pvp off pieces for the current season now this is a problem at the moment it'll be a problem in season two in season three and in season four because each new season has off pieces from honor horde have to wait a lot longer than alliance to find cues for battlegrounds because they just have more people in them but hold on we just saw a moment ago that alliance actually had a higher overall population than the horde backing classic and what did ford have for battlegrounds in classic still that's right they had queues despite there being actually more alliance players alliance people don't do as much pvp i don't think i believe this is true for retail as well there isn't any substantive proof over that other than gut feeling and well you just look at the queues and that's kind of proof enough isn't it or people on the horde wants a pvp be it casual or competitive or otherwise a big draw to get people over to the horde now would have been the racial bonuses which i still believe firmly are better than what the alliance has i know people will say perception's good stone forms good shadow male can be nice for druids for drinking most of the racial benefits come from the fact that rogues are really broken in tbc whereas things like will the forsaken hardiness are just sort of blanket good against a lot of different classes the real benefit that alliance has compared to horde when it comes to pvp is the hidden ratio called no queue time and what do hall players do when they enter their queue and have to wait for 60 minutes they go back out into the open world to gank people because it's efficient honor that's pretty much it if it weren't efficient honor and they could get instant cues and just rotate between battlegrounds you could do that instead but that isn't the case so that means that levellers are once again suffering i've heard people mention a number of potential resolutions for this issue including the rather controversial mercenary mode which i believe was originally brought into the game of warlords of draenor and i've seen well probably more faction conflict on various forums over the past week than i've seen in game for a long time over this issue now if you've watched me for a while i'm the stereotypical alliance pve guy who does pve pvp hasn't really been the main focus in the game for me for a very long time it used to be but maybe that's a subject for another video but what i want you guys to think about when it comes to mercenary mode is think back to classic you know alteryx valley you know how alteryx valley went for the majority of the game i did exalted three times over the first one i did was in the first week when alliance just won every game and then the pre-mading discords got broken down people went to play warsong or arathi basin and eventually it turned into alliance go to stonehearth semi-afk and then horde win eventually and horde won about 99 of the games i don't think that is even an exaggeration and i played some of those games on my horde shaman and i had to wait over an hour and a half for each of those games but we won them very fast and efficiently and during that time when hoard was winning every single ultra valley i didn't remember a single person asking for mercenary mode then because despite you having an outrageously long queue you're pretty much guaranteed to win the thing is at the moment you do your outrageously long queue and then you get an alliance pre-made and get absolutely rolled pretty much as i've been saying for a while i think pre-mading is still an issue i think now even if you reduce the size of a pre-made the fact that it's existed for so long may have driven away some of the more casual players who make cure battlegrounds for fun because they're just so used to getting rolled at peak times that they just decided to stop engaging with that piece of content again adding to the length of queue times what else do we have well in raph the lich king we had faction transfers they were a paid service of course so i can see that one being popular but if faction transfers were introduced uninhibited can't help feel although it would have the exact opposite effect of what you want rather than getting people over to the alliance it may just in fact make things even worse what about restricted or free faction transfers possibly they could be a thing but it's sort of like the open transfers at the moment blizzard want you to go from a server which is very active to a server which is usually kind of dead or the example given here would you like to go from gehenna's horde to either stone spy and never see another alliance player ever again or 10 storms and never see another reliance player ever again that's not really much of a choice to be honest this is similar to what happened during the three faction transfer days in phase 2. maybe this is just how the game kind of works it'll resolve itself in wrath of the lich king that's when humans get every man for himself and will of the forsaken gets nerfed to share a cooldown with a pvp trinket humans at that point will really become the de facto go to pvp race so will that solve it actually no i don't think it will either because our battle groups are region-wide not well you know your regular battle groups that we had back then people who are very competitive with pvp are highly incentivized to be on a small amount of servers so they'll have people to queue with you can't invite people across servers so you're kind of forced to do this so if anything the population might change from horde majority to alliance on a couple of servers but i really doubt it's going to overall make a significant shift in the player base in fact with the pvp pooling being done entirely region-wide you're pretty much doing yourself a disservice by remaining on a realm that doesn't have a large pvp player base it's a tough one it really is and this is a situation which has grown on retail as well when you look at horde being more favorable for top end players when it comes to pve content you may remember not so long ago i did my video on why i think factions basically suck and just don't work in the long run and this is sort of showing us again why that is the case but this time really fast compared to retail so pretty much as we started with i'm not surprised it's happened but the extent to which it's already happened is a little bit shocking to be honest let me know your thoughts on it or whether you have any solutions at all which you think would be realistic because i'm a little bit sump to be honest as always thank you so much for watching and listening in and i'll see you all in the next one very soon [Music] you

Channel: WillE

Views: 80,504

Keywords: the burning crusade, tbc, WoW Classic, World of Warcraft, Blizzard, MMORPG

Id: Eweiy6hUYnw

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021