I love how you proposed to not have faction transfer service to help with this and it just went live lmao we are definitely on the same path as retail

The faction divide only works if you have 1 giant mega server. Otherwise one side will always dominate a server eventually.

Always loved the fact their were two factions but this is the problem with a 20 year old game that people play at a serious competative level which wasn't designed at a base level to be very competative. I always look back on when I originally played vanilla and seeing anyone in anything other than blues the player was "hardcore" which was

Once upon a time Preach suggested that such strong bonuses like haste or attack power buffs could be tied to professions rather than races. I always thought that was a good idea. I know in classic engineering does kinda do this, but a troll engineer can still double dip on this kind of thing.

I love how grobb has stayed balance between the 2 makes me wanna stay

I finished this video a bit ago and wasn't sure when to release it. However just the other day, Faction Transfer is now an available service for WoW Classic. This service (along with race change which we don't have yet (but should eventually)) was present in original wrath too. Floodgates open moment? Locked servers still remain of course. Other than that, will things go the same way they did on retail... but just at a much faster pace? Zug Zug

I was alliance on a horde majority pvp server. It was absolutely miserable. I was getting griefed and camped for just existing in the realm. I tried my best to tolerate it and play along with the world pvp as I had enjoyed as a kid. But with everyone min maxing stuff now, it's not the same because everyone wants the highest advantage they can get -- which is what I think contributed to the drastic shift in server population balanced. I feel if there was some way to keep server's faction population half and half, world pvp could actually make a comeback. I eventually transferred off to a ally server because I couldn't even play the game anymore.

Personally I've always hated the faction system. The amount of times I'd had someone at school or work and found out they also played wow was way more then I'd had believed growing up but then you are like what do you play and they reply with x class and spec but end with I'm on a different faction then you and instead of feeling I should engage them about this thing we both enjoy I just drop it and completely ignore any more wow talk because what is the point we could never engage with each other online is just sad.

Make racials into birthsigns. Anyone can choose any racial combo for whatever race they want to play for aesthetic reasons and roleplaying reasons. Like in the elder scrolls oblivion, your character was born under a birthsign constellation. So you can get a gnome with orc racials who is primed to be a warrior because he is under that birth sign, ie, born at a specific time for lore reasons to explain it. Like astrology signs. Then there wont be any faction and race min maxing, really, aside from tauren hitboxes or other somewhat minor stuff. I would prefer this. I would rather have my character have attributes based on their birth sign and their character back story, like it is in other RPGs. I like playing certain eaces for the aesthetic based on my mood, and I want my character to have personal birthsign attributes instead of racials that fit their backstory.

Servers and factions are an outdated barrier. Cross-faction grouping will be good for Classic.

Racials in retail are marginally different, and still during sl 60-80% of players in m+ were horde. 52-48 becomes, 55-45 into 60-40 and so on and so forth

Star Wars Galaxies allowed players to change factions within the game through a not-quite-so-difficult reputation process. When the server I played on was imbalanced to far toward the Rebels my entire guild of hardcore PvPers swapped factions and rolled into a massive PvP battle turning the tide for the Imps. It was epic and cost us zero money.

I think they should assign an alliance server with a similar sized horde server and do cross realm, but only between the two realms, that would balance the servers instantly

I absolutely love berserking as a racial... it's so good in so many situations. ... But you'll never catch me playing a troll for it.

I think EVERYONE who played beta and pre alpha(aka Neverwinter Nights WoW) before the bane of why this game went downhill that is chilton took over back then, warned that separating Players on PVE for both factions would bite them back in the future, and faction conflict should stay on PVP, not on PVE because players would need to work together if certain quests or open world or dungeon/raid issue happens. The entire lore has shown that both factions worked together on PVE.

11:35 nice shot of a bot walking into the frame lol

I moved my characters off a mega server during wotlk launch window. I had to take a break from WoW after a few months of Naxx (I had a newborn baby) and now that I have a little time to play again, I come back to my realm (Sulfuras) and see its a 94% horde realm. So all my level 70's and 80 is stuck with no hope of getting them away unless I pay!

I'm so scared that transfer feature is gonna destroy alliance population on my server. It's the only server people play in my region and it's already at 35/65

I think the reason why this happened is a TBC when horde races got a much bigger advantage over alliance races. And then they realised quel'danas isle and that was a fatality to balance on servers. And this happened again in tbc 2021

I remember in the commentary for one of the retail World First races, someone said that the reason why it was still Horde-dominated despite the racials being balanced to basically be no difference in raiding was because there was still no reason to pay money to transfer from Horde because all the try-hard players were already on Horde from when their races were most powerful. So yeah, even if the racials were neutralized, it wouldn't fix the faction balance because your pool of players to play with would still be on the dominant faction

It would be interesting to see of those top 1000 parses what percentage are orc / troll. I think there's a big issue with racials that you use on CD, every single fight for the purpose of increasing DPS. Most racials are minor utility boosts (in PvE) with fractional impacts, orc / troll are the exceptions. Several comments suggesting DPS increasing spells should be profession locked, this makes sense to me too. Especially given that 8/10 racials are mostly utility with only minor HPS/DPS bonuses, unlike orc/troll that are totally overpowered by comparison.

As someone who plays in a private server with crossfaction content, just open the floodgates, it fixes everything, theres pugs for everything, m+ groups, pvp crossfaction, in general the only kind of gatekeep is ilvl

Ya my classic server feels basically dead and it’s really hard to form groups so I just don’t play now. Sad stuff

Splitting your playerbase by faction with zero cross play, is honestly the dumbest thing ever

So... there is this game called Everquest. You can choose if you play with evil factions or not, cool new concept ;)

3:20, "am i a joke to you?" - SWP

Solution is painfully simple: enforce a 45% minimum an 55% maximum faction lock. You cannot make another faction char if the server already has 55% of said faction.

The issue is that the Orcs were the bad guys because of 1 bad Orc that we killed again in Legion. Orcs were corrupted by the Legion. Horde, however, is actually the neutral faction, and alliance is the extremist faction. NE are extremists towards nature, human race has a superiority complex as seen in both WC3 campaigns and in the book, dwarfs have egotistical problems and gnomes were just bitches. The Horde had the undead issue, but that was because of the human superiority complex that was led by the soon to be LK Arthas.

The ONLY thing that would be harmed with this change is world PvP... which is about 99.8% ganking. Especially after the initial run of Wrath I could see them doing it for sure; player numbers will fall when the content is done, or if you make fresh servers... the benefits of not splitting up players is greater.

i am a real alliance andy. never played anything else. only humans or nelfs untill i started a dwarf with classic.

@williE they opened up transfers on my server(maladath new server) and the same day 85% of the alliance player base left the server. Now cant even get a dungeon bg or even get a AH with more than 2k items. if 85% of the players leave why even keep this server open! opening a fresh server was a total bad idea! perhaps you could do a video on this!

Should have never ruined the class fantasies of Paladin only on the alliance and Shaman only on the horde. That was the beginning of it.

Grobb mob supremacy - true 50/50 gameplay o.0 we are the hope

Why does nobody think of the obvious and most fair solution to make both sides completely even, which would on its own balance out both sides of the fence, in both PvP and PvE? Give both sides all racials, lol. Take two races, one from each side, and make them equivalent to each other, let's say Human and Orc for the sake of things. Let both races have both racials. EMFH and pet bonus, for example. Say that Tauren and Draenai were equal... Now both races would have bonus to hit and bonus to herbalism, for example. That way races still retain their "race specific" bonuses, but both sides have the same option as the other, and it wouldn't be a complete immersion breaker. Idk that I've ever seen this suggested before, maybe it has, but it seems like it would be so simple and fix all issues. Thoughts??

The slight % imbalance between A&H seems to align quite perfectly with the % imbalance between males and females.

as Savix said, let any race be able to train any racial at the capital. You can switch whenever you want. Job done.

The trickle down doesn't stop at faction choice its crept or bardged I to just about ever other facet of the game classes and specs. Came back to DF and one of the first class conversations I had (mostly about pugging) ended with "class x is good but if it's not S teir, no one really wants it".

I just want to be able to change my troll to orc! That’s all lol. Great video WillE!

Server balance issues are so easy to fix. Simply give xp boosts/ loot boosts to whatever faction is in the minority faction to encourage balances

@0:45 - You can make your own raid group..

Horde increases your chance to kill Arthas by .01% Alliance: Spend money to transfer!

Grobbulus is literally the last bastion of Wpvp

I have always had to play horde because that's where my friends have played. I prefer the aesthetics of alliance between races, major cities, and pray cross-faction PVE becomes a thing in classic.

What features do yall want for next fresh?

I always wondered why they don't simply block character creation for one faction, like leave a buffer up until 40/60% and when one faction reaches 60% say "Alliance / Horde is overpopulated, more people of the opposing faction must join before a new character is created. And they could count let's say just just one character / account so Altaholics don't influence the base numbers. I know it would be shitty to want to make an alt and have to wait but overall the experience would be much better than forced layers from other realms and cross-faction interacting with untradable and many uninteractable people outside that small one-time enounter with them.

As a retail player who knows a guy who race changed specifically to night elf for high end pvp and then to Tauren for high end raiding this makes a ton of sense.

I play Alliance. But will acknowledge that overall, Horde are just better players, it has nothing to do with racials, performing well comes down to you and you alone. That extra 2 or 3% dps from your racial isn't something the average player worries about. A lot of people stay Alliance because of the fantasy of it. The Alliance models and zones are just more pleasant to look at, that's why I've always stayed Alliance basically. It's like you said, the reason the average player makes the move is because some KZfaqr has told them that X Race is best for X Class. I can't stand it when a KZfaqr says that stuff, because the gain is marginal, and the average player will rarely use their racial. I don't think the faction balance will change that much with regard to server... yet. I think friendships and guilds have become quite tight knit. At least from what I've observed and experienced. I made the mistake of leaving a guild I'd been in for a year and a half, to join something more semi hard-core. And then I quit 3 months later. So word of warning to those moving, if you have ties to your faction, don't move because the grass isn't always greener. It's about more than those dps meters. As for Cata, I don' think that's the way this is gonna go. And if it does, fine Fireland's was great. But I think this is the end of the road for most of us. We'd rather start again and repeat the last three years on fresh servers that tread the path of retail 2.0.

they should just make it so you can cross faction raid and invite people through lfg could benefit dead servers a lot.

Blizzard could fix this in the next expansion if they were actually willing to put in the work to make another expansion. It would be so easy too just have the infinite dragonflight messing with the timeline and finally have horde and alliance work together so there are no more factions.

Just saw the video, I propose this; Racial bonuses, such as skill in a profession, should remain on the character, but bonuses like AP, haste and to a lesser extend, weapon skill (while lore relevant all things considered in WoW), should be profession tied, but instead of the race specific, orc with AP, trolls with haste etc - the professions would each give each race the extra benefit - sure, engineering has the haste bonus so it seems counter intuitive to give that profession the orc or troll racial bonus, it won't affect orc and trolls but other races can benefit from it, or give those bonuses to other professions to try and give more of an equal setting. LW'ing getting a haste boost from troll racial, skinning getting the AP bonus from Orcs, BSing getting weapon and hit skill (from Draenei and various races) or split the bonuses to try and balance profession bonuses, I know it's a bit of a weird thing, but when you want to play a race you WANT to play vs what's BiS, removing racials completely won't work as nicely as say, putting those racials into bonuses elsewhere in the game that everyone can benefit from would be a better solution

I never understood how this could be the case. I don't have exact numbers, obviously, but whenever I would meet someone in the wild (school, work, gym, in a different online game, etc) who played WoW, they played alliance. The statistical distribution of alliance to horde players was *overwhelmingly* skewed towards alliance. Over the 8 or so years I was truly active in the game, I had 12 or so invites to raid with people I met outside the game. I can only remember two instances being horde - importantly, the first one, since it's what made me choose horde in the first place (that entire group later race swapped to alliance, too). Even in later years when my first major guild dissolved, all of the Guild Recruitment forums were majority Alliance (though the skew was not as dramatic, closer to 60-40). Alliance was always the one recruiting for progression raiding. I'd find a horde guild here and there, but I paid for a faction change on 3 separate occasions just so I could raid. And when I was playing horde, it was common to hear from a buddy that they were faction swapping to alliance. I cannot recall a single time hearing the reverse, "hey guys, I convinced my buddy to swap to horde and join our group." And I started on a very balanced server, a small, near 50-50 PVE server. But over the years so many people swapped to alliance or quit that the guild disbanded. From then on, I always tried to choose predominantly horde servers, and still people would leave for alliance on other servers. Hell, I was one of those people 3 separate times.

Faction balance isn't even the only thing that needs to be fixed too, I'm really tired of everything devolving to GDKP and just having money/gold being the META.

easiest solution is just mirror the racials on an opposing faction race.. Trolls get Berserking.. then maybe Night Elves get a spell by a different name but the effect is exactly the same, increases haste by 20%.. Night elves get shadowmeld.. then trolls also get a the same spell but by a different name. and do the same with every other faction exclusive racial.. So just do away with faction exclusive racials and mirror them onto the other faction. doing so will overnight fix the need for players feeling like they are forced to swap to horde to be competitive if Alliance had access to these advantageous or overpowered racials too. Removing racials isn't a solution, nor is pruning, nor crossfaction play.. Just simply solve it by giving alliance access to these desired racials.

One thing you didn't mention is that racials have been balanced in retail for several expansions. It didn't fix anything, the horde migration only kept going. We know what happens at the end of this road and it only leads to one place. The problem reached its critical point during Battle for Azeroth and at that point the racials had been fairly well balanced for three expansions. There are only two solutions to the problem. 1. Make alliance racials more powerful than horde to shift the players back which will fix alliance depopulation but cause the same issue for horde. 2. Enable cross faction play. The problem is caused by a feedback loop in the absence of actual power imbalance. Say one side has 51% of the population so the recruiting pool is 1% larger on that side. This causes a proportional number of groups to move to that side to get a slight advantage when recruiting. This causes the number advantage to grow slightly, which causes more people to move, and so on. At first it's slow but as the disparity grows larger and larger the migration speeds up. Eventually the number disparity grows so large that even casual guildless players find it impossible to do anything and this is where we were in retail until they enabled cross faction play. If they wanted to avoid the problem in classic they needed to fix the racial issue a long time ago otherwise this was always inevitable.

Yeah I was always curious as to why the entire fanbase for decades were saying that Trolls suck and have the worst racials, when Berserking was like the ENTIRE reason why I ran them because it is so ridiculously powerful for all classes. Who doesn't want to do things faster for a short period of time? Faster means more deeps, better heals, faster weapon speeds. Never understood why people hated Trolls, they were the best race by far

Removing racials is boring. What would be best is if half of them are removed then added to a new trait selection, of which everyone can have 1 or 2. As an example, all Nelfs get wisp form and shadowmeld while all dwarves get stoneform and treasure hunting(?)as their racials, and then they can choose 1 or 2 traits from all of those former racials that were removed, putting all races on a more equal playing ground while still feeling unique from each other.

Wasn't World First in Emerald Nightmare done by an Alliance guild as well? Or do we just discount it as an anomaly of a tier in general?

they should put horde on one server and alliance on another, separate them this way, and by population, cross server connect them. when one drops in population, switch it to compete against a more evenly populated server. shouldnt be hard lol but what do i know

FYI Mythic Plus is cross-faction in retail.

I don't think it'll solve the whole thing and I know it's not that easy, but balancing the racials a bit across the factions could help. They don't need to be equally good at everything but in case of PvE content and especially raiding, there's just a lot of racials that are pretty much useless and others that are as good as having an extra trinket slot and are always useful. I'm certain there's potential for flavourful and unique ideas for racials to be tested, especially in classic where we don't have so many races per faction yet.

They added shamans to alliance and paladins to horde because of 'inequality' between the factions; they should make racials = for certain races (one horde gets berserking, one alliance gets it etc)

There is already a 30% off on Wrath faction transfers in the shop...

Cross faction bgs are not really cross faction. They just allow hvh (a a would be a thing if alliance pvped more). If cross faction bgs allowed horde to mix with alliance, that would be interesting for sure. But that's not how it works.

Just remove the cross play barrier and open up rep so that players can visit each others cities and hubs. There problem solved

All they need to do is have each race have a set of racials that have exact performance analogs on the other faction, with a different explanation. And then tweak which races can play which classes so those are also equivalent. So you'd end with with say Tauren being equivalent to Human and Orc being equivalent to Night Elf or whatever.

0:24 phase 2 was the best patch in wows history guys literaly im not even joking even yall pvers will look back nostalgic at it one day.

unfortunately for ICC and ToC, they are unsuitable raids for crossfaction, so it's not the expansion that is needed right now.

The best solution is to treat them like world buffs, disable all racials in arena and raids. Then take a quick pass at trying to make them all interesting. That should be enough to prevent any serious min-max pressures (at least until mythic+ 5mans), without needing to remove them entirely.

So many people moved back to Classic Era servers in the last two weeks. I guess got tired of changes. From empty servers, now they are booming :)

I think Blizzard should adapt classic wow for mobile devices. Retool all dungeons and raids for solo or group play. Add a housing option where all your alts wander within as NPC’S, where you can access their professions for use, trade items gold etc. They can even add new zones tooled for classic, Imagine a classic 1-60 experience in Northrend, Panderia etc. This would make leveling alts so much better. At 60, don’t feel like farming classic dungeons go to Northrend for comparable gear. I know the Elitist types will say this idea sucks, because they have nothing else in their pathetic lives to be proud of or excel at, I just want something that would fun to kill time playing while waiting in line or bored at at work.

The solution is for servers not to allow balance shift, like no server can have 1 faction, 48/52 maximum difference in players being online.

cross faction bgs happened since Alliance have far less players than Horde and Horde did suffer que times. But since in this question the Alliance suffers nothing will be changed.

I have a flavorful solution: give NElfs an Active side to their Wisp passive which will act like _the vanilla classic quest reward item_ Light of Elune on 90 min cooldown.

Allaince can barley fill WG nowadays

nice video mate! very detailed and nicely explained for everyone :) turtle wow (priv vanilla + realm) has made it cross faction so you can party with opposite faction and it's working wonders, especially in HC for finding dungeon groups. Blizztards could easily do this if a priv server can manage it... are they just to lazy? not allowed to invest any time in it? want the £$£$£ from forcing people to faction change is my guess... greed rather than love of a good product

to sum it all up : everybody is going to play horde because the minmaxing forces you to. and here i am : i dont give a fk about any numbers. i want to have fun. then i am at the bottom of the dps meters and whatever .. so what?

I have been playing forever off and on. Started with horde and stuck with it from TBC. Everything I have ever bought is horde related, posters shirts POPs etc. Now you have to play Alliance to PVP due to honor gains and racials. I can't do it; I can't look at myself playing a Dwarf or Human. All my friends made the switch. I just don't play anymore.

Honestly I feel like the real problem with all of this is that there is precisely one way to play the game. Get gear. There is no other incentive. Achievements barely count because most of the achievements worth anything require step one. The solution is to add elements to the game that require something other than raw power or alternative routes to that power. Expand professions, add player housing, more events and things. I want WoW+ at this point. Let casuals have something casual, let average gamers play the full game, and give the hardcore raiders harder shit so they can feel good about themselves. Additions made in retail don’t satisfy this need either because many are pointless piecemeal additions that were abandoned by the next expansion. Many things make retail undesirable, having fun things to do outside of raiding wouldn’t be one, if they just didn’t abandon half of their good ideas.

I mean this politely as someone extremely passionate about the lore of Azeroth; Horde vs. Alliance has been a contrived pile of shit after Wrath that Blizzard tried their hardest to force storywise because... "Reasons." We fight literal world ending gods and still care about Red vs. Blue? What? We've even had major lore characters point out how stupid it is but it stayed in the game all these years because Blizzard would write the most nonsensical reasons for tensions to arise again, and now their stubborn story decisions have come to bite the quality of play in the ass. Unacceptable.

I've said for years and years now that Factions are a relic of a past style of playing MMOs (mindless fun over stats-sheets and simulations), and that WoW would be better off without them. Besides, War Mode is an absolute ghost town on retail now, and I've had to turn it off for the first time in years just because it's too dead to do grouped world content with. But the sad thing is that as long as Factions are a problem, Blizzard can sell you the solution of a faction transfer, which makes them more money.

Honestly, changing the racials to utility abilities instead of dps CDs would be the way to go. Racials have been changed over the years for so many other dumb reasons, I think healthy population balance might actually be a decent reason to change things around. Each one could have it's own racial flair, just remove the damage increases. Or things could just repeat themselves and all the alliance players will just stop playing again because they really don't like playing horde.

Thing is, Blizzard makes money. Blizzard really likes short term profit, so the, have no reason to remove one of the biggest incentives of switching your faction

I think you're underestimating how annoying it is to navigate stormwind. yeah sure it's great to hang out and chill but it's terrible for people who are like "go go go I just want to be here as little as possible so I can quest!" and hit max level

I just took my belf pally to human so i can play with a buddy of mine on his realm. So do know through the power of friendship we can make anything happen.

blizz could have made a faction ratio cap on servers, like lock the majority faction on a server if it gets worse than 60/40. instead they chose to let this shit happen for all the faction change money.

there is 0 chance we're getting a cata classic, no one liked cata enough to warrant it and that world still exists as it was in retail it would literally have no reason to exist.

Absolutely no way they make that decision in classic.

Ahh the 3 eternal certainties of life: 1) death, 2) taxes, and 3) the horde will eventually become the majority faction

factions would be a lot more balanced if Blizzard enforced a balance from the very start. Blizzard chooses weird things to stand on and not the things that actually matter to create a better game/server experience.

Sulfuras was around 30/70 with a horde majority before the change. My guild was alliance and the second faction transfer was up they all switched to horde because of the larger population. Sucks that I have to change faction to be able to play with my friends. Everyone knew as soon as it opened the alliance would move out in droves, brutal.

I can see people mass transferring horde when raids actually become difficult and being a troll/orc makes a huge difference in ability to clear the raid, but as of now and for the next few expansions, the game is super playable even on races that do a few percent less. I think the core issue is warcraftlogs parses here. People obsess over parses meanwhile your parse is a very skewed measure since you could do the same rotation in the same gear in a raid that takes twice as long to kill the boss due to group/race composition and your parse will go from purple to blue. In t7 for example put any class in a raid with 10 uh dks and they will get an orange parse regardless of what buttons they press, simply because the boss fight is so short and it heavily inflates the dps. Appeal to wclogs to go back to being a useful combat analyzing tool to figure out who dies to what, who stands in shit and when bosses cast what mechanic, instead of a very arbitrary best-of ranking site and people wouldn't be as inclined to reroll horde to get orange numbers on lumberjack side. I've been alliance since the start of classic and am not likely to ever reroll to horde, even less pay for a faction xfer. The only competition should be within your raid on the dmg meters since everybody is on same footing and parameters there. Nobody cared about minmaxing,logs,parsing on pservers. Doesn't matter if it was classic, tbc or wotlk. This is definitely a community and 3rd-party issue and not primarily a developer one.

"Blizzard failed to stop". Failure would indicate trying. They were lazy and left it to the players to sort themselves out. They did nothing to combat it for 2/3 of classic's existence.

Faction. Specific. Queues.

glad to know i'm not he only one with the issue of names above players getting bigger and smaller in size, usually while idling on a mount...

I feel like this issue applys to a smaller % of player base. I don't think most people play to parse/aim to perform at peak levels.

A huge number on my server has already transferred not only to a different faction but to another more heavily populated server as well the moment Faction Change was released. I myself will probably have to follow suit soon to play with more people, just sad really.

The easiest fix for racials would just be a "pick your racial" option no matter your race. I'm not concerned with immersion and lore when I'm being forced to play a race I don't like if I want to do the best DPS possible so just make them options instead of hard-coded into specific races

Yes i do think we will reach a head where everyone is basically forced to go horde. And i think the solution is to delete the alliance. Loktar ogar for the horde!

Balancing the servers should have been easy. If faction > 60% no new players allowed on that faction until it balances out. The fact they didn't do it only proves they wanted it to happen to get money from transfers.

Racials really just need to be balanced better. Every race needs access to big DPS racials of some kind. Every race has access to something right now, but some races are just too weak. So buff them. Buff them big.