Night Elves > Horde

[jpark]

I gather on many servers the number of people playing Night Elves alone exceeds the entire Horde count.

1.  Can this state of affairs persist and still allow the original concept of Alliance vs. Horde be workable for pvp?

2.  How can this be addressed - I am inclined to think that if one chose Horde - down the road there must be improvements to make this side more attractive? (rebalancing by adding incentives?)

3.  Is there an advantage to playing an under populated side like the Horde?  Or is this really a non-issue given the absence of camping?

[Sable Blaze]

Again, PvP doesn't work in MMRPGs, and we see another reason why. People (including me) just like night elves. I have no desire to play Horde for any reason whatsoever (though, admittedly, the trolls' rastafarian ways do amuse me...maybe that'd be good enough, but I still like elves better).

Now, what Blizzard may or (more likely) may not do is completely open to speculation. My guess is they won't do a damned thing for at least a year. Their previous track record (limited as it is) would suggest just this course, and the player base can simply suck it up or quit. Blizzard's very close-mouthed approach to the game so far would seem to support this view.

I'd say for now if you really like Horde, well, you're just going to be stuck with the present balance. Just have to follow some of a certain Civil War era cavalryman's advice and get to hot spots "firstest with the mostest."

[Paelos]

If Blizzard wanted to move people over to the Horde, they should really consider putting better and more plentiful quests in the horde areas. During Beta I played undead, now I play humans. The disparity of overall quest choices up to level 20 is pretty astounding.

[Rasix]

1.  Yes, elves suck.  Have you seen how easy they die?

2.  Horde is attractive enough. No fucking elves.

3.  Advantage to playing Horde? Again, no fucking elves.  Blue elves at that.  It's like a merger of elves and smurfs.  How can you not want to kill that?

Fuck elves (and people that want to play them, really, what the fuck are you thinking?).  

Everytime you kill an elf, an imp gets its wings. That is all. Carry on.

[ahoythematey]

/agrees with rasix

I think the fact that Night Elves are generally some hue of purple or pink is extremely telling of the people that want to play them and sometimes only them.  Having the ability to kill Night Elves is reason enough to play Horde, but if that doesn't get you over, Horde also has Shamans.

[geldonyetich]

In other words, the hoarde isn't at a numerical disadvantage: They're just enjoying a target rich environment.

Seriously, though, it seems that if The Alliance decides they want to own Booty Bay on my server, they can.   Hopefully there'll be some kind of population control on the Battlefields, or the war's going to end really quick.

[Morfiend]

How about the fact that if you play Undead, you can actually eat a night elf after you kill it?

Ummmm, yummy. Night elves taste almost as good as gnomes do.

[geldonyetich]

How about the fact that if you play Undead, you can actually eat a night elf after you kill it?

You can?  I tried on a player corpse once (generaled when I encountered a Paladin who thought he was a match for a well played Warlock) and it didn't let me.   (Maybe my Undead Warlock doesn't like canned food?)

[jpark]

In other words, the hoarde isn't at a numerical disadvantage: They're just enjoying a target rich environment.

Taken literally - if you're horde you can always find pvp - but if your alliance - it might be hard to find it.  I have not played WoW enough to know if this might be true (more incentive again if there are pvp drops in the game - that would strengthen this whole angle).

I hate elves.  Always have.  But dwarven priests are quite cool.  After that - Undead.

[Big Gulp]

I hate elves.  Always have.  But dwarven priests are quite cool.  After that - Undead.

I don't know, I dug my troll hunter quite a bit.  Something about a regenerating rasta troll with a blunderbus and a pet gator just amused me.

Not a bad game by any means... Were it not for CoH I'd be probably be playing it.

[Threash]

Playing in zones like stranglethorn vale and tanaris that are both pretty much completely neutral and accesible to both sides i have never noticed a number advatange for either side.  I think all this numbers are pulled straight out of some Orcs ass.

[Kail]

i have never noticed a number advatange for either side. I think all this numbers are pulled straight out of some Orcs ass.

Every method I've seen of trying to poll populations shows at least some serious imbalance in favor of the Alliance.  WoWcensus, players using cycling /who queries, people just counting heads at the auction houses... all of it seems to indicate that the factions are imbalanced.  Numbers I've seen range from 3:2 to 10:1 on some roleplaying servers (although according to WoW census there are apparently two or three servers where Horde outnumbers Alliance, like Mal'Ganis).  Of course, none of this is based on Blizzard's actual data, which they don't seem prepared to share.  Nonetheless, it seems likely that the Alliance has more players, just based on the consistency of what I'm hearing.  Personally, when I play Alliance, the allied zones (especially the newbie zones and capital cities) seem far more crowded than when I play Horde.

What I'm wondering about is how this is going to affect battlegrounds.  These are allegedly going to be instanced zones; I've heard that was in order to keep the teams balanced.  If there's three Alliance for every Horde character, how are they going to balance this?  Are Alliance players going to have to sit in some kind of virtual waiting room until enough Horde players walk in the other door?

Personally, I don't see this as being fix-able without adding more playable races, which isn't likely to happen until they release an expansion or something.  There really isn't much to differentiate one race from another (A level thirty Gnome warrior is not much less powerful than a level thirty Tauren warrior), so players choose whichever race they think looks neatest.  There are apparently just a lot more people out there that want to play as elves than as orcs.

If Blizzard wants to fix this (and I get the impression they don't really care), they ought to add some more interesting races to the Horde.  While I agree that a lot of the Alliance quests seem a lot more fleshed out than the Horde quests, I don't know that it's going to really be enough to convince players to change sides.  When I'm rolling up a new character, I'm not really thinking about what quests I'm going to be doing at level ten, I'm trying to decide what race and class would be fun to play.  While being some kind of super powerful uber character would be neat, it would have to be extremely overpowered for me to make a choice based on it, and even then, it wouldn't make me play something I fundamentally disliked (like a priest, for example).

Is there an advantage to playing an underpopulated side?  I don't know.  I know that it seems like I'm finding more mining and herbalism spots with my Horde characters, but I haven't noticed this unbalancing my characters.  My Alliance characters tend to be a fair bit behind my Horde characters in crafting skills at early levels, but I haven't noticed it really making things that much harder.  One thing I did run into was a huge number of problems trying to play a Horde mage on a PvP server; there are just way too many rogues out there to make it viable to solo (and not enough allies to provide a constant escort).  I don't know if this is specific to Horde characters, though, since I don't have an Alliance mage that high.

[jpark]

I am picturing this:

"You are in number 32 in the Que to enter the {instanced battleground} to fight the Horde"

And...

"You enter the {instanced battlezone} to fight the alliance."

Regardless whether the races are population balanced on the server, in any pvp system I have seen numerical superiority is a huge advantage.  To control this if you have an instanced pvp battlezone where there are 10 combatants from each side - you control for zerging.

This is the impression I get from Blizzard's full implementation of pvp.  If they do something like this - being Horde suggests to me easy access to numerically balanced pvp zones to fight and get phat lewts (pvp drops).

[sinij]

I don't see this being huge deal at all. Combat in WoW is based on small-scale ganks - with a organized guild you can get PLENTY of people to where you want when you want and no ammount of random opponents will stop you. If you play underdog you will get ganked more if you try to level by doing quests but easy solution to that is to focus more on instances.

[Fargull]

Mind controlling an opposing player and leaping them off a cliff is wonderful, mind controlling an opposing player and leaping them into lava is priceless.

Nightelves are only good for one thing.  Killing.

[ajax34i]

This is fixable by adding more content to the Horde side, and announcing it, in about two months.

My reasoning is that the average population level seems to be 35 now and fast approaching 40, and in 2 months they'll probably reach 60 and be done with the Alliance side; curiosity should drive a lot of people to try the Horde side.

I know that only the newbie levels are different, since after that it's all the same contested zones and instances they've seen before, but if new quests are added to the Horde only, it may be viable.

[Jayce]

It still seems to me that Sargeras has more Horde than Alliance.  Then again I mostly see the raids when the Horde are all organized and together. I don't know if there are reciprocal raids going on against the Horde areas with my higher level brethren.

And I'm another one that likes Night Elves.  Sorry.  I played them in Warcraft 3 too.

I think it's the mounts that did it for me.  I have a 20 gnome mage, but I couldn't see getting to 40 and having to ride one of those ridiculous mechanical birds.

[Rasix]

I think it's the mounts that did it for me.  I have a 20 gnome mage, but I couldn't see getting to 40 and having to ride one of those ridiculous mechanical birds.

So instead it's Seigfreid and Roy time?  

And you don't necessarily have to like a race to play them in WC3.  Really, you're just killing AI with it (hell, you're sending them to their death!), not dancing around like Michael Jackson, riding white tigers, and contemplating what you love more: trees or tulips.

Parents that play elves, have children that play elves.  Won't somebody think about the children????

[Shockeye]

Parents that play elves, have children that play elves.  Won't somebody think about the children????

I thought it was parents who play elves have children with $10,000 therapy bills.

[Jayce]

Parents that play elves, have children that play elves.  Won't somebody think about the children????

I thought it was parents who play elves have children with $10,000 therapy bills.

It depends on whether you play them in an MMOG at leave it at that, or also attend conventions wearing the long ears.  Or more often.

ESPECIALLY the Blizzard version of elf ears.   Even I admit they are a little disturbing.

[sidereal]

The imbalance is there.  If you're on a non-PVP server, make a toon of the opposite faction and run it up to the AH.  On my main server the AH ratio is at least 10:1.  

The solution if you're Horde is to get off the damn PvP servers.  You can still get plenty of equitable PvP on the normal servers, even pre-Battlegrounds.

The problem I see is that to get a server with enough Horde that a non-guilded player has a reasonable shot of getting in on instanced dungeon runs, it has to be so heavily populated with Alliance that the lag gets unbearable.

[Nija]

Night elves are for faggots.

Faggots play MMORPGS.

Night elves are the most popular race.

Where's my gold star for excellence in scientific theory?

[Rasix]

[El Gallo]

Add Blood Elves to Horde so we can have some hot mangina action too.

[Rasix]

Add Blood Elves to Horde so we can have some hot mangina action too.

You should be anally raped by Shaquille O'neal for even proposing that.

NO ELVES.  How hard of a concept is this to grasp?

[schild]

If I could be a goblin engineer, I'd still be playing. They screwed the pooch on that one.

[Rasix]

If I could be a goblin engineer, I'd still be playing. They screwed the pooch on that one.

No you wouldn't. Stop lying.

[schild]

If I could be a goblin engineer, I'd still be playing. They screwed the pooch on that one.

No you wouldn't. Stop lying.

Sad thing is...


I'm not lying.

[El Gallo]

If you're anti-elf, they could just make the Jania Proudmoor humans Horde-allied and we could have human mangina instead.

[jpark]

In an effort to assert higher moral ground here ;)

I hated Elves the first itme I was exposed to pen and paper DnD (1986).  Forget MMOPRGS.

They got all the bonuses and looked pretty.  Even their demographics sucked of favortism - the average elf reached adult height in 18 years - and then persisted in a state of middle age for the next several hundred.

Bah.

[Paelos]

Elves are ghey, but I hate gnomes more. I dont know why.

[WayAbvPar]

Elves are ghey, but I hate gnomes more. I dont know why.

Gnomes are always the stupidest looking and most annoying race. However, the player types that the fruity elves attract (Drizz't fanbois chief among them) give the title of "Most Annoying" and "Most Likely for Rasix to Spew Vulgarities in a Tell To" for certain.

[AlteredOne]

Easy solution to this:

For the battlegrounds, at least some should be 3-way battles.  Night Elves - Other Alliance - Horde.  Only problem would be that the Night Elves could trash-talk the other alliance players outside the battleground, but that's what /ignore filters are for.

Big bonus:  *everybody* could experience the joy of slaughtering blue elves.

[Toast]

I switched from Alliance on a crowded pve server to Horder on a smaller pvp server. The difference is pretty shocking. Groups are a bit harder to come by for instances. And, there is absolutely jack crap on the auction house. At times last night, the lowest level dagger available was level 24.

Rule of thumb on Dragonmaw is that Night Elves feature the dredges of the server. The dishonorable, unfriendly gankers seem to have flocked to this race, while the other Alliance races are much friendlier.