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Okay, well not always. Alliance wins the majority of Alterac Valley matches. It is generally accepted, however, that Horde there play at a disadvantage. On the other hand, Horde has a considerable advantage in Arathi Basin since it’s easier for them to take and hold the nearly unbeatable combination of Blacksmith, Lumber Mill, and Farm. But disregarding the two more or less “unbalanced” Battlegrounds, Horde probably wins somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-85% of Eye of the Storm and Warsong Gulch matches. These are Battlegrounds that have been designed to present as little advantage to either side as possible. And Horde tromps Alliance all the way to their graveyards, sometimes backing us into our starting areas.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember world PvP at Tarren Mill and Southshore. On most servers, Alliance had superior numbers and skirmished with much success. We would spend hours on the western banks near Tarren Mill, falling back into the river when the near infinite guards threatened to overwhelm us. Many players describe these times as the most fun they’ve had while PvPing.
And then the Battlegrounds were introduced. Along with them came DKs, which made PvP like that which had previously taken place at Tarren Mill essentially PvP career suicide. Instead, players dutifully queued up for their “objective-based” player versus player combat, running flags up and down the field between the two bases of Warsong Gulch. But something was wrong. The advantage that Alliance once had in superior numbers suddenly became the source of teeth-gnashing, 2-hour long Battleground queues. And while Alliance languished trying to fill their time so they wouldn’t go AFK before finally getting the call to a 15-minute match, Horde lined up and cycled in, over and over and for as many games as they wanted. They racked up more experience, more reputation, more HKs (to be fair, the Honor system at the time made this fact irrelevant) and far less frustration.
Many of the Alliance players for whom PvP was a priority did the only sensible thing they could: they rerolled Horde. I was one of those who rerolled, though it was only by virtue of being married to someone for whom PvP was a priority. My husband wanted to play the class that was widely regarded as one of the most powerful in PvP and so leveled a Shaman. And for two months, he played Battlegrounds nonstop and any time he wanted — Horde queues were instantaneous. And many of his new teammates were also former Alliance players who had rerolled.
Battlegrounds killed PvP for Alliance.
Many of the best PvP players on Alliance rerolled to play with Horde, bolstering their faction’s collective expertise on the field of battle. Horde grew more seasoned more quickly because they could play more often. And once the ball was rolling in that direction, there was no stopping it. As most would attest, PvP is most fun when you’re winning. No one enjoys losing all the time. And so as veteran and newly-minted Horde won more and more games, more and more players were encouraged to reroll so that they too could experience the thrill of victory. Even today, players who are just beginning to play the game are told that, if they enjoy PvP, they should roll Horde characters, both for their superior PvP-based racial abilities and their winning records in Battlegrounds.
And now Blizzard is talking about “balancing” Alterac Valley, purportedly to discourage players from going AFK. What will this mean for Alliance players? It will almost certainly mean that Alliance players will no longer have any source of earnable honor comparable to that of Horde players. Our Arena teams will have harder times getting Battlegrounds gear for those slots that cannot be outfitted through Arena-play. And — at least for Alliance players — all token-purchased Battlegrounds gear will be expressed in the number of losses necessary for their purchase, in addition to Honor that takes much longer to farm.
For those wondering why we didn’t stay on Horde side after rerolling, I didn’t enjoy my class (Priest) nearly as much as I had my Druid, and I really missed having elbows. I think one may have had something to do with the other.
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
Unfortunately the same is true on my server. Unfortunately, because I’m on Alliance.
I’d say we lose 70-80% of everything besides AV all the time. I used to love pvp as a resto druid, playing with my friends. Usually I’d be the only healer but we’d still kick ass. When my friends quit playing, I was left healing Alliance noobs. Even if we had the advantage of good class make-up, the horde will steamroll us. It’s worse on pvp weekends, there are horde teams for everything. I would seriously re-roll if my friends were into the idea.
It’s just no fun getting stomped game after game knowing how much honor the horde are getting and just how *long* it will take me to get the same. When I got my last veteran’s piece, I was done with battlegrounds for good.
Supporting your guess… when an alliance guild decides it wants to play in the BGs a while, there’s a period of clear losses followed by close losses followed by such dominance that when the other side sees “those players”, they log out. They do the same thing the alliance is guilty of most of the rest of the time. It reached a point where so long as half the BG team was Guild, we won – 5 cap, 3 cap, so on and so forth.
It got boring.
And I’ve seen it happen more than once.
I think you’re right about what’ll happen for a bit, but you missed the other part that happens (which fed my guild’s success). Eventually everyone “knows” being alliance sucks so they quit going — and it’s alliance that has back to back runs while horde waits their turn.
go figure.
“I didn’t enjoy my class (Priest) nearly as much as I had my Druid, and I really missed having elbows. I think one may have had something to do with the other.”
Very amusing =)
Also, a very true post.
So basically what you’re saying is that you enjoyed world PVP most because alliance outnumbered horde and could beat them endlessly, and started to not like it after blizzard evened up the numbers a bit by forcing everyone into battlegrounds?
Also, what do you think of cross-server battlegrounds? It seems to lessen up the queue times quite a bit on my server.
Meant to post on here a bit earlier, but blogger seemed to be down.
I linked you on WoW Insider, so you might get a spike in traffic. Just a friendly heads up.
@Mystery Man #4: I guess you could summarize the post like that. =) However, it isn’t the “even odds” that is the problem – it’s the frequency with which Horde are able to queue, thus attracting more skilled PvPers (re: those who enjoy PvP enough to switch sides). No, it wasn’t very fun waiting 2 hours for a WSG match only to go LD or have a power blip right before you got in. Or get in and get steamrolled in 10 minutes only to have to wait 2 more hours again. Anyone who was playing Alliance back then knows how awful it was.
Yes, the cross-server battlegrounds have done a great job of reducing queue times. But long before those queue times were reduced, anyone who cared enough about PvP had already rolled Horde. I’m afraid it isn’t a trend that’s likely to change as no one enjoys playing as the underdog. =)
Thank you for the comments!
@Chris – whoa. Thank you! =)
My 2 cents. Been playing for year and a half now. Hordie since day 1.
PVE server but I love to bg. Rolled an ally to level 40 and then promptly stopped. No offense but I got the impression alot of younger players rolled ally hunters and pally’s. Needless to say I got annoyed very quickly by the immaturity. In my experience its just that. Older mature players prefer horde toons. Not to say mature players equate to skill or non elitists, but they seem to “get it” alot faster. My 2 cents and my experience. Im sure its reversed on certain servers.
Oh and bty we lose 9/10 AV’s on bloodlust battle group.
KK
I have two horde 70’s and two alliance 70’s, I pvp all four about equally. In my experience you’re quite incorrect. Warcraft realms seems to show about parity between the two factions across the four battlegrounds as far as I could tell.
As someone who has been playing since the BG’s were introduced, I cannot agree with your initial premise.
Alliance has better PVP racials for arena really: stoneform, fear ward, shadowmeld, escape artist (haha warriors with escape artist), perception (haha warlocks with paranoia and perception). The horde racials are really just better in 1vs1, which I guess you can say attracts more “duelers.” But I don’t think it’s any coincidence that at ever WSVG all of the top teams play alliance, and everyone who plays pally or priest plays dwarf.
I’m Mystery Man #4, thanks for the intelligent response. That’s a good point. I’ve always been horde, and I’ve never had to wait two hours to get into a battleground. I imagine it’s difficult to gain skill when you can only have a short skirmish every two hours.
The one good thing about AV is that win or lose the difference in honour accumulated is usually not significant, so there are gains for both factions.
I could be wrong but with honour gained being moved to the end of the run it now appears that AV will turn into a winner takes all BG just like the others.
The faction that gets there first and clears gets all the honour.
You’ve made quite a few excellent points, although I’m sure the issue with PvP runs far deeper than the surface we have scratched.
I think your point about Alliance numbers stomping Hordies at Tarren Mill just proves what was wrong with world PvP; It was based on numbers. BG went a long way to fix that problem.
However, you are also right about the problems with BG now, and just like any other updates that Blizz has made in the past, they will come up with an update for this, but it will never be perfect. This is just how the flow works. It is right along the same lines of hunters complaining about rogues handing them their butts (I know they hand me mine and so I run . . . far, far away.), or the entire world complaining about how UMBA Shamans are.
After that is all said and done, we complain some more when Blizzard changes things. Balance is difficult to maintain, and so thats why, I submit to you, the problem is not so much with the game, its with us. The game knows only two things: Win and lose, on and off, charge or no charge. Its up to us to make it a game.
So, thats why attacking the game dynamics is just scratching the surface. When Hordies got stomped at Tarren Mill, we should have sucked it up and organized retaliation. When Allies get owned at BG, they should figure out ways around it.
The game is just a game. And we could be brainstorming ways to overcome the competition, but instead we sit on our hands in forums like these and complain about it. Seems like a severe misdirection of creative energy, wouldn’t you say? Or am I wrong?
I think it’s more a testament to playing the underdog and learning how to seamlessly work with your fellow players out of necessity. This is true for PVP and PVE reasons when populations are lower.
I do not think it’s Alliance “rerolls” that made horde strong. If that were true they would have dilluted the working together mentality some.
I play both horde and alliance, but more horde. I started alliance then quickly became enamored with the honorable faction.
What I’ve noticed is horde are goal oriented (capture flags don’t screw around in the center). As horde, I routinely taunt players away from their objectives. Attacking someone over and over, until they abandon their group objective and go out of their way to kill me. Sometimes I’m able to do this to 3 players at the same time. This puts them at a disadvantage, and it adds up.
As alliance, I tried the same tactic. The horde walked right by me, nothing was as important as the flag cap. I see the difference as strictly an issue of player discipline and coordination, and not any kind of unfair pvp racials.
I agree with Phil, and I think a lot of times this discussion is interpreted as a difference in individual skill at pvp, but in my mind it is the lack of focus as a group that is the issue with the alliance.
I play alliance, and the battlegrounds can be really frustrating. I have a lot of fun in the battlegrounds, but if I wasn’t going into it with set goals in mind I don’t think I would be able to keep doing it.
The battlegrounds are set up with goals that need to be met to win the game. In my experience, the horde is more focused on achieving those goals, and the alliance is playing as a bunch of individuals.
In order to win at Warsong Gulch, for example, one team must capture the other team’s flag three times. Normally on the horde side there are people defending the horde flag, people providing mid-field defence, and people trying to capture the alliance flag. On the alliance side, there is a swarm in the middle of the field, stuck fighting the horde mid field.
This applies to the other battlegrounds as well, and goes beyond a lack of focus on the objectives of the game. When it comes to healing, and buffing, there is almost a total lack on the alliance side. People on the alliance side just do not work as well as a team.
Have you ever wonder if Blizz introduce cross realms BG from the beginning, would Alliance be better players?
What I believe is what happened to Alliance now is because of the long queue times they were facing. Imagine this: Alliance waited everyday for 2 hours just to get in a WSG that lasted for 15 minutes which the horde would win due to the advantage they had from fast queue times. In that game, some would try my best to win by leading and be a team player. But the population of the Alliance is so big, they do not have enough experiences or gear to outmatch veteran hordes. Let’s not count PVE progression the Alliance have as there will always be only a minority of people experience MC or BWL.
Then as the losing continue, people start to get defensive over their own needs. Why be on defend or flag carrier when you can be at the middle killing and gaining HKs. You are mostly likely going to lose anyway. Might as well use as much of your 15 minutes game to rake up HKs. This kind of mentality was slowly spread around and after Cross Realms BG was introduced, it has already become a habit. Alliance get faster queue times but people’s mind are already set and changing it will be hard.
I’ve done a lot of PvPing in my day, particularly in AB (which is very objective-driven) and horde typically wins 9/10 times.
Like Phil said, it’s a lack of playing to the objective. On numerous occasions I’ve trained three, four, five or more players away from a flag. They’re all desperate to kill me – one several occasions I’ve trained five defenders from lumber mill to blacksmith where they’re promptly obliterated by the defense, and a rogue ninja caps lumber mill.
I very seldom see the same happen to horde – they seem to have a better sense of playing to the objective.
Thanks to everyone for all the comments. I think some really excellent points have been raised here, particularly about the lack of teamwork among Alliance players. During the 4 months I played on Horde side, I noticed that Horde really seemed to have a “team” attitude, in part due to cumulative hatred of Alliance. I have not seen such a united front against Horde in the 2+ years I have played Alliance. Before Battlegrounds were cross-server, the smaller population of Horde players (at least on PvE/RP servers) meant that the Horde community was much more close-knit, no doubt fostering improved communication. On the other hand, I was in an Arathi Basin last AV-Holiday where Alliance players blatantly stated their intentions to allow our side to be 5-capped so that we could get our losing token as quickly as possible. Sadly, I was in quiet agreement. I knew chances of victory were slim, and I didn’t want to miss the much larger Honor gains from AV on the off chance of pulling out an AB victory.
I had never considered whether the racials might be better for Alliance than Horde in small scale PvP (Arenas). But, while I concede that Escape Artist is quite useful, I’m not sure how great Fear Ward is, especially since it’s only available to a small subset (Priests) of 2 races. Will of the Forsaken is certainly comparable and is available to every player of Undead. Perception is such short duration that it’s usefulness is questionable. I use Shadowmeld all the time when going to drink, but it’s not kept the opposing team from coming over and knocking me out of stealth (might be my own fault). War Stomp, on the other hand … mmmmm. In my opinion, the fairest way to handle the problem would be to give each side a version of the other’s PvP-oriented racials. Give Trolls Escape Artist (since they are the closest to cortortionists), Draenei War Stomp (since they also have hooves), Orcs Stoneform and Dwarves Stun Resistance. Some of the abiltiies would need to be renamed (like Will of the Forsaken), but it seems like this would be the fairest way to “balance” the two factions in terms of what they start with.
And while I concede that we as players must operate within the parameters set forth by Blizzard, I don’t recall any suggestions in the article which proposed a change (I am fond of the PvP racials swap idea, though). I was, in fact, merely commenting on an issue that I perceive but do not know of a solution for. I can, of course, go into WSG, AB, or EotS with a “go team!” attitude, but it will avail me little if the other 9-14 players are farming HKs in the center. I cannot count the number of times I’ve said over BG-chat “Resto Druid alone at Blood Elf tower. Someone please help me defend and I promise I’ll heal you.” only to be answered with crickets. It’s very discouraging. And I think that this “me, me, me” mentality arose from short skirmishes and long queue times. For so long, you had to get what you could out of Battlegrounds since you paid such a premium to be there. Meanwhile, Horde gained experience achieving their objectives. I think that this is along the lines of what is suggested by poster #15 (darn all you Anonymous posters for not giving me names to refer to!).
In any case, I really appreciate those of you who weighed in on this discussion. This piece was written from my own experience and — because some people’s experiences were quite different — many of the responses on WoWInsider were less than constructive. =)
I’ll disagree a little bit here. I have an alliance hunter and a horde druid on different servers and different battlegroups. I have won and lost my fair share on each side. I have had strings on winning 7-8 WSG’s on my alliance toon. I had so many tokens at level 60 that I got the reward mount (30/30/30) because it just needed tokens and not honor points and I was on the verge of having to throw away tokens.
I have done AV holiday weekends where I didn’t win a single match as alliance (horde has mastered a wall pull on Van). And I have had AV holiday weekends where Alliance went 6-0.
On my horde druid, the results have been just about the same. Even though I did most of my pvping on this character before the expansion, I remember getting slaughtered regularly in WSG by Alliance players that were epicced out in high end PVE gear.
Players of both factions complain and stereotype the other faction. Aside from some strategic differences in AV and AB, I just don’t see a big difference.
The only difference that I am willing to note is it *seems* like the Alliance gives up faster once the horde pulls ahead. But even then, it isn’t every time. I’ve gone from being done 4-1 in AB to 5 capping the horde.
Taz
I think you’re missing something here.
You’re saying that anyone that likes PVP has re-rolled to play Horde because they keep winning.
But before you said that Alliance would troucne Horde pre Battlegrounds.
They why wasn’t the alliance full of people that re-rolled from the horde so that they could win?
I remember pvping back then, it was awsome, we would get trounced by larger numbers and better organised Alliance players but that would make us pushing them back to Southsore that much sweeter.
@Taz: This article was written from my own personal experience. Obviously, the experience of you and other players may differ. I’m glad that you aren’t dealing with the frustration that I face when entering battlegrounds on the Reckoning Battlegroup. I do agree with you that we tend to overexaggerate our own negative experiences, but it’s not overexaggerating when I say that the only battlegrounds that I’ve won in the last two months have been Alterac Valley.
@Benza: When Alliance was “trouncing” Horde due to superior numbers there was no playtime queue associated with playing the opposite faction. No “pressure” to reroll, at least nothing to the degree of that which was imposed by 2-hour queues. I don’t think many Horde rerolled to play Alliance because at least they were still able to play (unlike Alliance after the introduction of Battlegrounds).
Interesting view and perhaps right but my Alliance experience of BG is that it goes in waves. Sometimes I am on and winning 75% of the time. Others losing 75% of the time. But really I am more interested in two comments: “Alliance Noobs” and “mature players prefer Horde”. As an Alliance Noob I prefer anyone with the mindset to use the term to stay out of BG. I prefer to work with people who will forgive my msitakes and instruct me. Not berate me. And I recently rolled Horde toon to enjoy mature play. All I found was the same predominance of inmmaturity. But maybe that is just my server.
It has next to nothing to do with racials. I started out horde with an undead priest and whooped up pretty well there. I was actually involved in one WSG with a full alliance team vs me and a horde priest from the top pvp guild on the server (who was a lot better than I was), and he got their flag and we kept them from getting it back long enough for other players to log in and join the fight. That doesn’t happen because of overpowered racials, that happens because the alliance didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
As a matter of fact, my next character was an orc warlock back before bloodlust was changed to increase spell damage. I never used bloodlust before or after the change. Granted, the stun resist does offer advantages, but it doesn’t make a huge difference against players who know what they’re doing.
Since those two, I’ve also taken an alliance warlock to 70 and an ally shaman to 52 (different battlegroup) before I got completely fed up with the way alliance on that battlegroup performed in BGs. We never won anything. My warlock got most of his tokens from losses. The only time I ever consistently won anything in that battlegroup was when I was playing my paladin and I followed the FC around in wsg and healed him and bof’d him. Doing that I swear we won game after game – and that isn’t difficult, it didn’t take a lot of skill, it just required that someone put in the time doing that instead of running off by themselves after some hunter who’s at the edge of the map.
Anyway, I’m back horde now, and playing a blood elf, and it’s back to the way it always was on horde – we dominate. I’ve lost a handful of matches out of probably close to a hundred, if not more. I can only imagine how many other people like me went to alliance for a while then decided it wasn’t worth the frustration and came back to horde.
While the main contention of this post was not that Horde wins because of racials that are more PvP-oriented, you do help back up the contention that all people who enjoy winning at PvP prefer to roll Horde. I’m glad to see that your personal experience mirrors the observations I’ve made.
I have no idea where the idea that the Horde have ‘an easier time getting’ or hell, even HAVE ‘more PvP gear.’
Am I the only one here who remembers the joke at the start of every BG when it switched to the new honour system? “How do you tell the difference between the Alliance and Horde? The Alliance have Tier 2, and the Horde have HWL shoulders.”
If anything, I think the longer queue times forced the Alliance to group more, and to play together better. I can’t count the number of Alliance pre-mades I played against when the new PvP system came out. It seemed like every 2/3 games.
The only ex-Alliance I see on Horde, at least in any large numbers, play Blood Elves. In fact, I used to ask each BG start who was a dirty alliance traitor. I got a lot more “I am!” comments than I thought I would, hah, but it was really rare back then, and is much less rare now.
u have all made some great comments and each was true. Put them all together and u get the honest truths. So what to do
After having read this, I would love to see proof that Arathi Basin is squarely aimed at allowing Horde to capture it easier. The entrances are equidistant from each factions spawn point so how you draw this conclusion is a mystery to me.
By the way, I play Alliance so yeah …just trying to bring some ‘balance’ to the “zOMGOSH BGs are totally against our pretty faction” claim.
You forgot to mention one other point. Because of the long queue times alliance players are more likely to go AFK and miss the BG after queing up. What this results in is alliance teams almost always starting out missing 10 – 20% of their members. The game waits 2 minutes before trying to bring in more players. In a game like WSG which only lasts 10-15 minutes this means that alliance can easily go the entire match without ever getting a full team. I’ve seen it happen many many many many times.
“After having read this, I would love to see proof that Arathi Basin is squarely aimed at allowing Horde to capture it easier. The entrances are equidistant from each factions spawn point so how you draw this conclusion is a mystery to me.”
Analysis of Horde Advantage in Arathi Basin: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1602494102&sid=1
To summarize what Tseran of Kirin Tor asserts:
Horde can reach Blacksmith 9 seconds faster from the Farm than Alliance can from Stables. The fact that Blacksmith is such an integral part of a winning strategy (allowing you to dispatch reinforcements to one of several nodes very quickly), this is a huge disadvantage to Alliance.
The explanation given is more detailed and I would encourage you to take a look.
This is a bit old, but I would like to point out a lot of why the horde was losing in AV is from AFK’ers leeching honor. Many horde would go AFK in the cave and just leech bonus honor from the players that were actually completely objectives. Shortly before 2.2, there were often more afk’ers then actual players.
After 2.2 the horde in my battle group are consistently rolling alliance like the old days. I would say that I do tend to win about 70-75% of pug vs pug battle grounds as horde.
As a Horde player since launch, this is an interesting perspective which rings true.
I know that I, along with many of my friends, have been avoiding av until recently. A race to see how much honor can be squeezed out before the almost inevitable loss was not much fun.
Wow, what battlegroup are you talking about? Stormstrike is not this way at all. Following the last AV-nerfing patch, the Horde in Stormstrike thought it would be a super bright idea to focus on AV (for honor) and ditch the other three. At that point, the Alliance boycotted AV and made our queues 3 hours long. Then, the Alliance started forming raid groups and rushing the Horde base in AV. So the Horde doesn’t even win there consistently any more (in Stormstrike). That’s what was happening the last time I played in AV, which was about a month ago. It used to be my favorite battleground, but Blizzard’s changes and the Alliance’s hateful, immature response has ruined it. I don’t even bother queuing for AV anymore – not even when it’s a daily. There’s no point, I have 100 marks and am fully exalted – and I’m definitely not willing to wait three hours to get zerged by an Alliance team that has had such frustrating responses to Blizzard’s failed changes.
The other three battlegrounds in Stormstrike are usually dominated by Alliance premades. Sometimes the Horde can win, especially at night I’ve noticed. But in general, the outlook for the Horde in Stormstrike is grim. After a couple months of focusing on AV, the Horde in Stormstrike has found itself outgeared and outplayed in most battlegrounds. After Blizzard and the Alliance both ruined AV, EoS premades became the trend on the Horde side. Too bad Eye of the Storm is totally useless for any player who is maxed on honor and marks and needs WSG and AB for the Conqueror title.
Let me give this to you from the perception of a horde for life player (ive never played alliance, and I have been playing since week 1).
I used to love to BG; there WERE queue times for horde, I can assure you. Maybe not 2 hours but it wasnt uncommon to wait 10-15 min for one to pop. I used to love BGs because the horde were older, saner, less l33t d3wd people that generally had an idea how to succeed at goals. Working together was not a foreign concept.
All that changed when BC came out. For the resons many of you mentioned above, lots of Alliance rerolled Horde. Yes, it is true, we did get some of the skilled alliance PVPers on the horde side. What you dont see, and is the endless source of my frustration, is that we ALSO got the little kids who now wanted to stare at a female BE behind instead of a female NE one. I can tell you with great certainty that the latter FAR outnumbered the former. Consequently the skill of horde PVP *worsened* by a very large factor. For every 1 skilled player that made the switch I daresay we got 20 who were NE hunters and now are BE ones, and I think I am being very conservative with that estimate.
Michael, you’re talking about the vanity aspect of the game. What you did not point out is, this has -always- been a distraction on the Alliance side. Since beta, Human and Night Elf female models have been stared at by often adolescent and usually very lonely people… who either forget to focus on the game at hand, or never intended to, or just suck in general. Enter Burning Crusade. Suddenly the Horde faction has one (1) race with a similar appeal… because, let’s face it: the mothers of all Orcs, Tauren, and Undead are constantly crying over how butt-ugly their children are. You lament those rolling Blood Elves to look at their behinds; my friend, on Alliance side, since day one we have been victimized by the 8 year old girls who roll hunter to play with their pets, the 12 year old boys who roll any NE or Human female to take their clothes off and dance “naked.” This is very old news. Granted, many rolled new Blood Elves immediately upon BC release due to their newness, and many more due to the visual appeal of the model, but after a while this has all balanced out. And the net result is, more races on the Alliance side continue to have this vanity distraction to deal with, and Alliance suffers the larger handicap because of it.
@Michael: That’s definitely an interesting change — and an understandable effect of giving Horde a “pretty” race. (I happen to be of the school of thought that such a change had other, positive benefits like helping the Horde retain players long term since two relationship partners were more likely to find something they liked.) I do think Nelson makes a good point, though; one side shouldn’t get to be asshat free.
I do think the addition of Blood Elves has helped distribute the wins/losses more evenly, even with the superior PvP racials of the Horde side (Arathi is still pretty much pointless, though). I know I enjoy killing BElves more than any other race (even Undead)!
I have been playing the game for about a year now. I started with a BElf mage as my first toon, and although I leveled all the way to 70 and grinded out endless battlegrounds, I really thought this toon was WAY boring to play. So I made a Tauren resto druid. I love this character–I should have started with a druid a year ago. But something is amiss in the World of Warcraft… the horde almost always loses in Alterac Valley these days. I never had such troubles with my mage, every battleground was the same win over and over. Today, I read this post for the first time, right after having lost 19 AV matches in a row. I know that the horde now begins AV a little further to the south, and this could help even the playing field a bit, but I expected more of a fifty-fifty split between wins and losses. What happened?
@Don: Alliance has typically done better in AV than Horde. The most recent set of updates did seem to help even the playing field, though. When I was PvPing after the change, I saw about a 50-50 win/loss record, but admittedly only really lost to premades. (Horde runs a LOT of premades in AV, though!)
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Ive been doing my own research on this issue. I played lvl60 bgs when tbc was allready out and my statistics say that chances for alliance are about 70% to lose in EVERY bg including AV.
ABOUT 60 BG:
When i lvled up to 70 and started 70bgs alliances chances to lose AV was 30% other AVs stayed the same as 60bg.
Reason is that if you kill Galv/Balinda at 60AV you win, killing Drek or Van is not an option at 60. Fact is that Balinda is cloth wearer and Galvangar is plate, Balinda is easier to kill than Galv and thats a well proven fact and nobody can say that its because hordes are more organised and heal eachother or have better gear or something.
ABOUT 70 BG:
Galvangar/Balinda difference is not so obvious because it takes less ppl to kill Galv/Balinda at 70av than 60av and killing them at 60 takes about 3-5 min but at 70 takes only about 1min even less.
Another profen fact is that if you play at midnight you have 50% chance of winning any BG as ally thats a lot bigger chance than playing during the day the reason is that the average age of players of both sides grows at midnight therefore alliance loses their noob kids who only run and attack first horde they see after ress.
Reason why alliance winning AV – map / location / boss spells disadvantage for hordes
Reason why alliance loses AB,WSG,EOTS – lower average age.
So this is why alliance wins AV and loses everything else at 70.
Everything i said are statistics i made, this is not just my opinion those are proven facts. I didnt mention all the reasons of winning/losing (like Galv/Balinda spells and HP/armor count, Hordes starting area at AV, psychologiccal effect in AB map – higher LM-left for hordes, lower GM-left for allys, way to LM/BS from farm seems more straight fpr hordes).
The final conclusion is that hordes win BGs because their average age – therefore skill – therefore better organization and teamplay. They dont win 70AV a lot because the map is made such way (towers/bunkers accesibility, starting area, alliance bridge disadvantage) if the sides were switched im sure hordes would win every AV if the would have the allys side as theirs.
Sorry for my english im not native english speaker.
I think this post is not true why did alliance reroll horde because there was finally something where the alliance couldnt just gank us so we could finally get some balanced pvp in and alliance never had a chance to fight us in balanced pvp. this is not true on all servers but on the 1 i am on it is
P.S. yes my main is a horde xD i tryed to be fair though
I wanted to add (and ask) that I suspect that something may have changed after patch 3.03
I was used to loosing most battles at AB and WSG with my lvl 39 twink hunter. After the patch, we are suddenly winning most matches on AB and many on WSG as well.
Did anyone else experience the same?
1 year later and it’s still the same. I went to 80 on a Tauren warrior and I just hit 50 on a Draenei paladin. Horde seemed to always win on my Tauren and on my Draenei.
Alliance seems to get 2 – 3 shotted while each Horde player takes 3 of us to pull down. AB is always the same: Cap 1 base and lost it, Horde takes all 5 and camps us at GY. At least the matches are quick.