The factions don't define WoW. They're just another system to be adjusted.
"no current short term plans to address faction imbalance" that means that there are long term plans in the works. Good!
Just make Horde and Alliance like Aldor and Scryer in Burning Crusade. You can still group, play, and talk to the opposite faction, but there are some quests and areas (like cities/towns) that are faction exclusive. Turn on warmode to fight each other. Seems like the best and easiest solution to keep Horde and Alliance as separate rival factions but not split the player base down the middle for PVE gameplay.
top priority for blizzard means, "we will deal with it when we feel like it" just like how fixing azurite was a priority and they just gave up in the end
"The factions are balanced as a whole, game wide..." "... in fact, the Alliance had the passive edge on the current raid tier..."
How bout not charging a ridiculous amount of money to change faction?
Alliance and Horde will be able to do all pve content together eventually. Possibly even pvp. That'll be the fix.
Just get rid of this outdated faction system. It reeks of the early 2000s.
Horde has always been more populare no matter the racials, classic is a great example of this, racials there are far more better for alliance. But yet horde was having such a huge player base in comparsion.Sure you could over power alliance racials, but you would still have a major playerbase sit on horde.
"faction identity is paramount"yes sure, thats the reason now the horde i basically alliance painted red
i don't know what people expect from this, the racials are trully for the 1% of raiders, night elf shadowmeld is the best for m+. it's just that the most dedicated players for raiding are on horde, and there's no way you can change that...i've heard too many people who are glad they switched to horde because alliance prefer to RP in Goldshire and stuff like that
Let people choose their racials(obviously don't call them racials anymore) and maybe put a bit of effort into gear and make sick-looking gear that's different for both horde and alliance and things will change.
Just get rid of the factions overall or enable cross-faction group play... !@#$ those "pillars" and "faction identity", it has been over 10 years, the game CAN and SHOULD evolve..
Make faction transfers to Alliance free. Problem solved.
This could have been solved literally years ago if they could stop letting their egos get in the way and admit the faction imbalance is a worse problem than the imagined damage letting the two factions team up for PvE content would do. It's happened countless times in the lore and the only thing that's prevented a fix is how damn hard it is to make the developpers change anything in this game even when it's clearly broken.
As long as they don't treat just "treat the symptoms" again. War Mode AOO buffs was just masking a bad taste - they need to really make the Alliance more appealing by itself. Not with gimmicks
They perfectly know about that problem. They simply dont want to fix it, because of these sweet sweet transfer money. Modern Blizzard is really just became a part of Activision now, with only $_$ look on their faces.
mercenary mode, just extend it to pvp/m+/raid - simple. You don't need to mess around with providing bonuses for alliance or faction transfers or w.e, the solution is to allow cross faction grouping for high end content.and the lore itself supports horde/alliance teaming up to take out big threats. We've done that soooo many times in the story, and are doing so right now in SL. stop hiding behind the dumb "faction pride" excuse that keeps coming up. "faction pride" will not be affected by letting ppl group up for high end content, and faction pride should not come over gameplay/fun. I'm glad Ion at least brought up some of the points ppl have long brought up, and acknowledge some of the realities, but come on blizzard... this is not a hard solution
How about trying something instead of nothing? That would be a start.
