So many people saying they felt AQ was unconnected from the worlds lore and such. And yet to me, the AQ zones and Zul Gurub were *at least* as well connected to the world as the BRM raid zones. Ahn Qiraj because you were constantly exposed to the mysterious silithid from nearly your first levels (ok actually your early teens) steadily through until level 60 and culminating in silithus. Zul Gurub because, imo, the troll lore and storyline was the best long reaching lore/faction integration in the game. It started early but came unto its own with ZF and then leading into the Hinterlands, to the Sunken Temple and finally to Zul Gurub (one fof the top 3 zones in the game) with the promise of more to come (Zul Aman).

It’s obvious that the attractiveness of the alliance characters has what’s made them more popular than the horde, but I imagine that’s not of the extent of it. It’s worth noting is that the alliance early stages of the game are much more welcoming and immersive than horde and this is where a lot of people decide if they’re going to stick playing this game for £10 a month. Elywnn Forest and ilk are just pleasant to level in, the whole thing just oozes charm, and you feel part of a fantasy world; doing some rather nice quests that get you about the place. Durotar and The Barrens are as dull as dishwater, especially with its ”I will kill everything ze the world” quests, even if they are more efficient to level with. And then they have a Thousand Needles to look forward too.

Not to mention the PvP state of things for horde are much, much harsher than alliance, but considering the balance is even more unfavourable on PvE realms this can’t be a major reason. I’ve seen some alliance players boldly state that horde can stay in the barrens until level 30, but what really happens is they go to places like Hillsbrad, Ashenvale and Stonetalon, that contain tonnes of alliance friendly mobs for the higher levelled players to squat in, while Elywnn, Redridge and Duskwood offer near complete isolation from horde until the epitome of PvP: Stranglethorn Vale, where they wonder why horde are such ganking bastards.

But I’m far from convinced this disparity is going to clean up with the expansion, since the new race relies on new players, I don’t think anyone playing alliance is going to go “phwoaar” and reroll horde.

I think lore-wise the horde are all “good guys,” even the Forsaken before you start taking in their antics from WoW itself (killing that Tauren was ace, though). But most people who play WoW don’t even know what an Arthas is and refer to Illidan as “that guy with the wings,” so the lore doesn’t really matter when we’re talking generally.



While the complete blandness of AQ40 may have contributed to its failure, I think it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the “hard factors” of it being a five hour jog filled with the most tedious, mind numbing, and needlessly difficult trash mobs. Maybe the dreary environment emphasises the boredom of the pulls from Fankriss to C’Thun, that seem specially engineered to put as make as many people stick healers on follow as possible, but even if it had exciting architecture it’d still be much worse than Blackwing Lair (and if it wasn’t for the Depression Room and a few too many Technician Packs, Blackwing Lair would be perfect, in my opinion).

It’s a shame because the actual bosses in AQ40 are quite enjoyable; the problem is that’s such a short percentage of the instance. I don’t think loot is the main incentive at all. Though when we go to the point people only needed stuff off Twins Emps+ there was never anyone online when it was AQ40.



I actually went to the Blood Elf starting area during beta, I was basically forced to given the transfer time, and I did notice that everyone was a Blood Elf female and 90% of them were Paladins. The only exception was the occasional Blood Elf male who all had the exact same appearance settings: white, Sephiroth hair – though they were also Paladins, how else would they equip their Ta'Kierthan Songblade? I think the amount of Paladins shows that most of the people experimenting with Blood Elves were horde, though it might just be because every single Blood Elf you see is pictured as a Paladin, to convince us all they’d been thinking of giving horde Paladins all along!

I'm still working my way through this thread, but feel the need to comment on the ZG Spider boss and the trash surrounding it, since I see so many complaints about it.

For the longest time, even before we first entered BWL, my guild has been clearing one single pack on the right-hand side of the room as you enter from the ramp. Pull it down to the ramp, AoE, done. We then fight Mar'li in front of the eggs on the right-hand wall. Sure, you might miss out on some extra Coins/Bijous/reputation, but maintaining the fast pace has been more important for us. I think we end up skipping 3 or 4 packs, which really cuts the time down.

You make some good points Hematite, but I do know plenty of current Alliance players that are sick of the PVP queues and would considering making Blood Elves simply to be Horde, myself included.

I am going to see how the faction balance changes and if the PVP queues stay much the same, I will be making a Blood Elf priest to enjoy instant pvp queues.

To me, the biggest soft factor is the fact that the Alliance starting content is much more polished than the Horde equivalent. When the game was new, this was a big deal on the forums. People eventually moved on to other things to whine about, but the damage was done in terms of population imbalance.

The Horde starting content is flat out unappealing, especially for orcs and trolls. And I say this as a day 1 Horde player who never got past level 18 on Alliance. The new BE areas look very nice, and the race also delivers on the sex and Tolkien factor, but 2 years into this game I do not think that population trends can be reversed.

RE: AQ40. Its not the graphics at all. I admit it would have been cooler if there were more egyptian style bosses in AQ40 and less bugs, bugs are just not visually appealing. The main reason AQ40 suffers is incredibly annoying trash. Not only the number of trashmobs and thier relatively high hp for trash but the sorts of abilities they use. AE fears? AE silence? Mindcontrol? 5 target mindflay + fear that can't be kicked? Hello, whoever thought it would be a good idea to put those abilities on trash should be locked in a room and forced to kill his trash over and over until he realises how gay it really is. Oh, it was cute when the anubisaths were using the entire pool of abilities too. Also viscidus as an alliance guild, nice balace there.

RE: Horde vs Alliance. Horde races are blatantly superior, and it only gets worse in TBC. Blood elves get a mana drain and AE silence, draeni get a laughably small regen (1090ish at 70) WITH a cast time. To make things worse the regen is great at low level so its not likely to be made useful any time soon. Horde has all sorts of little item (Hello rune of the guard captain) and quest advantages, but in the end it doesn't really matter.

People can relate to alliance races. They can't relate to most of the horde races. All the players of the games are human, and alliance has the humans and all the close human derivitives. The most alien race on the alliance side is the night elves. All the other ones are "human but shorter with a beard", or "human but even shorter and penchant for steam tools". Sex sells the night elves no doubt about it, if you look at the male/female NE breakdown its pretty obvious. On the horde side you have some of the most retarded models I've seen in an mmo, trolls for example, they look stupid to begin with and then thier armor makes it look even worse. For the most part orcs look good, undead get screwed up looking armor like trolls and taurens while they look good have messed up legs and are nowhere near as tall as WC lore would have them.

Then look at the starting lands. The alliance lands are colorful (other than the dwarves/gnomes that looks like winter) and have nice detailed houses and things in them. The horde lands other than Mulgore look like crap. They are brown, ugly, uninteresting, dark. That right there probably accounts for a good part of the imbalance.

Then we get to one of the main factors now. People who want easy loots will roll alliance because of many of the other reasons mentioned on this thread. There are more people there, more raid guilds etc. True or not alliance is percieved as being the easier road to lootz now.

TLDR version: AQ40 trash as gay abilities. People relate more easily to alliance races, alliance races and lands are more appealing to players. Now the faction imbalance is self-sustaining.

edit: sorry. Multi post due to database errors )

I can't say I agree. To me, ZG design didn't bring anything new or cool. What is there to see there? The Tigons and Hakkar the first time? I've never been fond of ZG, yet I've been there more than enough for Exalted twice over. Fights there are only okay, the only one that really wakes people up is (new) Hakkar who is a fun fight IMO and drops pretty decent loot. Overall a tiresome instance with boring trash and too many bosses that usually drop just blues.

Maybe it was because my guild did AQ20 very soon after it came out and learned it from scratch on the first few days except for Kurinaxx who we 10manned on test. We don't get too many opportunities to wrap our heads around new content without having it spoiled beforehand. But this is probably my favorite instance when it comes to fight design (except Rajaxx... 10 waves or wtf it is?) and looks. The ruined city is cool and some of the vistas are impressive. Its failing is that it has nothing to keep you coming back, especially on raiding mains.

AQ40 looks like crap. A couple of halls look okay but overall it's just crap. Also a huge pain to run through as we all know. It didn't need to be this big. Over half of it is wasted space. The boss fights are overall fairly well designed (now...). I wrote alot more but what I was going to say was basically that making AQ40 into two wings, with Skeram->Fankriss and Huhu->CT. Can stick Visc somewhere too but who cares about Viscidus except Shaman/Mage alts looking to strike gold? ;) Looks like Blizzard learned their lesson with this instance so we can look forward to never seeing it or its like ever again.

Naxxramas was visually very good, despite the similarities with Undercity. Hell, if I conveniently forget Thaddius disconnects, Heigan making WoW's positional lagg way too obvious, Heigan's gauntlet, the Spiderwing trash (I'm the only one who hates it?) and the godawful potion/worldbuff requirements Naxx is perfect. :P

Hell yes.

I'm actually kind of baffled that so many people are citing the art style of AQ40 as a major factor in people disliking the instance. I love the look of AQ. I still have a screenshot of my character in full striker's garb in ouro's room as my desktop background. I remember seeing Huhuran's room for the first time or the Twin Emps chamber and being downright amazed at how cool it looked. I suppose it is a non-traditional fantasy style, though, and as such doesn't have the same universal appeal as dragons, and similarly the look of the gear is very non-traditional (but again, IMO very cool). I love the boss fights, too - Twin Emps and beyond are still a ton of fun (or were, when we still did them), and the early fights didn't lose their appeal for a while. C'Thun, as many have said, remains one of the best fights in the game.

The problem really is just the grind of it all. I honestly think that if there were half as much pre-Huhu trash and half as much post-Emps trash, the general sentiment toward AQ would be very different. Having to slog through 4+ hours of anything - bugs or dragons or fuzzy bunnies - just gets tiresome after a while.

See I find the exact opposite to be true. I find that horde players on the average are angsty teens/preteens that want to play the bad guy. They tend to pvp (poorly) a lot and don't have the social skills to make a raid guild hang together long enough to accomplish anything.

On the other hand I find Alliance players to be more mature and more likely to be able to get along long enough to run a successful raid guild. Paladins are a nothing compared to the organizational and maturity factors.

The PVP queues seem to be the one balancing force that might prompt some people to reroll Horde characters. Even the general population is starting to see the problem; witness the many "QQ, Horde can get HWL gear faster" threads on the WoW forums.

This is nothing but a good thing; a real and tangible drawback to being on the most populous faction is a great incentive to get a few more people to reroll Horde and balance things out. It's not really onerous, you're not really punished for staying on the Alliance, but it would be a real motivator for some players to reroll and ease the imbalance a bit.

Sadly, Blizzard has dropped the ball by allowing intra-faction PVP in the expansion. If they really wanted to fix the population balance, they'd go back to cross-faction PVP only and give those that want instant queues and 24/7 PVP an incentive to roll Horde. The greater number of PVP-centric players on Horde would then in theory be balanced by a deeper pool on the Alliance, and world PVP would be much less onesided.

This is personally my biggest disappointment about TBC: Blizzard had a great chance to subtly address the population imbalance, and they elected not to. I suspect that means that world PVP on PVE servers will remain a thing of the past, simply because most Hordies will pass on it. We can always go to AV for a stomping, no need to sign up for it in world PVP too.

I think it's mostly because almost everyone was in the same boat as you. While waiting for their chars to copy over they try out that belf start area with a class they are not normally playing... I imagine the dranei start area was/is full of shammies too.


One of my wet dreams is that Ogres one day becomes a playable race. I don't mind leveling up an Ogre from 1 to whatever the level cap is then. I also hope the melee classes gets a special weapon, "Board with Nail. Races: Ogre."


I feel the exact opposite. Orgrimmar is a dump. It's the capital of the Horde, compare it to the capital city of Alliance, ie Ironforge. Look at the detail that went into IF, statues, clever design stuff like the small opening in the wall that the wyvern flies through (I remember the first time flying into IF.. what a cool sight!), the different parts of it and how different they are but yet at the same time feel united.

Orgrimmar on the other hand seems like all other horde cites/villages, just spread out more. Some huts with boring red roofs and some pikes, yey. Orgrimmar is pretty annoying to move around in as it's not a star design as Ironforge (and Undercity), it's more spread out with some choke points that you have to go through. And the level differences makes it very annoying, especially with mounts. You can either go round it all and spend a lot of time, or you can ride into a house and get thrown off your mount and then run up the slopes and remount when you get out.

I really don't like Undercity, I think it's poorly designed and confusing, and it was only a "few" patches ago that it was even possible to mount in there, which always annoyed me to no ends. You can ride around the whole of Ironforge which is as much indoors as Undercity.

I'm too little in TB and Darnassus to give any real oppinion about them, but TB still have the leveling annoyance that Orgrimmar has, to a much smaller degree though.


Another thing that really bugged me was the location of things compared to the cities. Orgrimmar is sooo far away from almost all raid instances, it's annoying (or not as much for me as I'm mage but for the rest). Ironforge and Stormwind are both very close to BRM, and from Ironforge it's just a short flight and a boat trip to get to Onyxia so it's not that bad either. Naxxramas is a quite long flight from IF but still better than coming from Orgrimmar. Where you first have to get the zep and then run into UC through the elevators and then jump on a long bat ride.

Even Ahn'Qiraj isn't that bad as Alliance, boat to Dustwallow and some flights. Compared to a long and boring flight from Orgrimmar.



I liked the Barrens too, and general chat I either just ignore or disable it. Barrens is a great grind zone, loads of quests to do there, but as others have pointed out. The three FP:s used to be one which made it quite annoying, especially as you didn't have a mount. Running from Camp T to Crossroads is looong.


The Ratchet FP is quite weird btw, ever tried flying Ratchet => Orgrimmar? Yepp, you go Ratchet => Crossroads => Orgrimmar. Still not as weird as going Azshara => Winterspring though, where you fly Azshara => Orgrimmar => flying only a few meters outside the Azshara FP => Winterspring. :)

You seem to be forgetting the gnomes... Blizzard's plate armour designs scale down much better than they scale up.

However, the appearance of the Deathdealer helm on a gnome invalidates this. That one piece of complete and utter hideousness means no matter how cool gnomes look in other armor, I will forever be stuck thinking of gnomes in Deathdealer hats.

Understand that the OP is talking about what the average player (hell, average raider) sees in aesthetic designs and not what the diehard number crunchers think of them. Sift through a site like f13.net or corpnews rather than the WoW general forums if you like: sites with avid gamers, sometimes pretty avid raiders, who will flat out say they dislike MC because it's ugly and boring or echo the sentiments about AQ40.

I'll go further and say that I think the aesthetic like or dislike of a place can influence one's opinion of a zone without even realizing it. I certainly realized that part of my hate boner for MC was due to aesthetics only after I'd stopped raiding it; I actually miss it two months after stopping but if I were to go back the "sameness" of the place would add to the tedium of the enecounter design.

I couldn't disagree more, allowing alliance to pvp vs alliance is far from dropping the ball the way I see it. Making people bang their heads against terrible queues until they can't take it anymore and decide to reroll to a different faction isn't really the best way to go about the problem. Personally, I've spent the last 2 years playing with pretty much the same group of guys, and I'd sooner quit the game than go play by myself on a different server/faction. Blizzard are doing their best to fix the queues and make them negligible by allowing alliance to play against alliance, which is a q

It'd be kinda like saying they'll release all alliance raid content a week after they release it for horde so there are advantages to playing on horde in light of people wanting to switch factions. Sure, it might fix one problem over time, but it will cause many more along the way. What you're proposing may in time cause some people to reroll, but its certainly not as good as it seems. Have you ever tried to reroll to a different faction? Its not as easy as it sounds to leave everything you've played for and everyone you've played with behind for some better queue times. Even if you try as a group, the grind to 60 (and soon to be 70) is not something most people can put themselves through all at once. They'll go at it hard for a week and then go back to their 60 to pvp or raid, I've seen many many people try rerolling, and a very small percentage of them actually do manage to hit 60 and start playing that as their full-time char.

As for improving the population balance to improve world pvp, there are other, better ways to accomplish that. Adding blood elves is a good example of that (if indeed they have some studies to prove that there are more alliance because of character appearance) because peeving some of the lore guys is much better than peeving a majority of the population by retaining bad queue times.

Edit: Orcs are the best looking race in the game, especially in tiered armor, so I have to disagree with the armor scaling down theory.
Also, getting to AQ from Orgrimmar is MUCH easier than getting there from IF. You have to do 2 flight paths along with a boat ride, and missing the boat by a few seconds is pretty damn aggrivating. The biggest problem with it though is that you can't click the fp and go afk for a few mins.

I was under the impression that Stormwind was the Capital of the Alliance. While there was intially no auction house in Stormwind, it houses the Champion's Hall for alliant pvp rewards, and has an instance within the city walls, which mirrors the Horde capital Ogrimmar (instance inside city, pvp reward vendors).


Also: Ghostz, you quoted someone that replied to me, but those aren't my words. I am all for the alliance being able to fight alliance in the arena. It just makes sense.

My big gripe with MC/AQ40 was aesthetics and lore. The aesthetics wasn't something I went out of my way to find though - it's just that my mind demanded to see something different once in awhile. I'm the guy that still gets lost in MC/AQ because I can't tell what room I'm in, since nothing distinguishes them from each other. And it's the same with all the bad 5mans too - people *detest* Waling Caverns because the damn thing goes on forever and you have no idea where you are. Getting lost in a cave isn't fun.

Lore-wise, AQ40 has a great story behind it, but other than the temple/war/c'thun, not much else was developed. You only heard about the Twin Emps and the Prophet lore if you did the Nature Resist gear quests in Silithus. Not a single other boss in that zone has any sort of story developed. What the hell is Huhuran a princess of? The wasp people? No books to read in the zone, no wall plates to read, nothing to further the story line.

Now a lot of raiders may not actively think about this stuff, but it all adds up to the experience of the instance. Not many are going to write "a good looking dungeon with a well developed back story" on their wish-list of new instances, but they'll quickly find themselves bored to tears if those factors aren't there.

Totally untrue, and you can examine the 5man instances for proof of this. People refuse to help run alts through WC even though there are very very good quest rewards for characters, but 60s have no problem assisting in SM or DM repeatedly to help get rare drops. SM/DM are listed by Blizz as the most popular instances, while WC and RFK are listed as the most boring - both of which have bland textures and no distinguishing features to the instances.

I'm also pretty confused about people saying AQ40 was crap loot. It had at the time an excellent set for shaman (still extremely good), and what 2 sets do you see warriors DPS in? Conqueror's or the PvP set. Still very relevant gear. Warlock's with the 5pc destroyed T2 locks in DPS charts.

My bad, must have left the wrong set of quotes on it, should be fixed now.

Have you even been to TB on a mount? To get *anywhere* in TB you have to over those bridges that are connected to bluffs via inn-like structures. Those are all still classed as inside, and thus dismount you. At least in Org you only have to dismount when you go up the Skytower (FP, Officer Barracks).

In regard to players tending to choose "good" races over evil ones, and its influence on population, I agree that Blizzard seems to want to flip the classic, Tolkien/D&D paradigm on its head, and right now I think a convincing case can be made that on the whole, the horde is significantly more "good" than the alliance (Blood elf vs. Draeni lore will move this more towards an equilibrium).

Unfortunately, while I believe Blizzard is committed to this idea in a broad sense, they didn't follow it up with some crucial details. Think about the first thing most WoW players see, the opening cinematic. It gives us snapshots of 6 out of 8 races, and, especially for players unfamiliar with MMORPG mechanics, probably has a good deal of influence on initial faction choice.

Dwarf: A dwarf walks towards ironforge with his pet bear. Overall a "good" image of dwarves, friendly with the animal, etc.

Night Elf: An attractive female night elf, scantily clad, is in the forest and hears the sound of battle and takes off running towards it. Another "good" image.

Undead: A rotting undead walks forward, and the grass dies wherever he steps. A demon seemingly under his command roars behind him. An "evil" image.

Tauren: A tauren looking out over a verdant plain sprinkles some magic dust. A "good" image.

Orc: A slobbering, bloodthirsty orc grunts and swings a club while standing in front of a city seemingly on fire. An "evil" image.

Human: A mage atop a tower throws some impressive spells at an enemy. Nothing inherently good or evil about this, I'll give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt and say its neutral.



So alliance gets 2 "good" images and a neutral image. Horde gets 1 "good" image and 2 undeniably "evil" images. Despite all the lore in the game that contradicts it, can anyone fault a new player for making the assertion that Alliance is "Good" and Horde is "Evil."


P.S. The BC Cinematic isn't going to help this. The alliance's noble looking Draeni in shining plate armor closes a book, while the Horde's Blood Elf sucks the life from a cute mana dragon. (Perfectly in keeping with lore at least, however.)

I have nothing to add to this debate other than the reason I chose the race/class I play in WoW. I am 60 gnome rogue. I knew before the beta came out what race/class I would be playing. This decision had not bearing on future imbalance/race issues or even what other people might play and why... it was strictly my personal choice. I would hope that all people would base there race/class choice on their own reasons and not what everyone else is doing. I liked the idea of a gnome rogue for many reasons. I really like how they look (honestly) and also being a rogue was just too cool. The gnome racial as a rogue is awesome. Also their stature lends itself to a rogue in many ways... ie how many of us gnome rogues have used those nice tall bushes to hide in stealthed... or even better run right into the middle of that tauren warrior in any BG and CS them, they are like "WTF where is he?". In the end it is my personal opinion that one should choose their class based upon how they want to play World of Warcaft.


In closing Gnomes FTW!