For those unaware, currently the PvP scene is dominated by Alliance, the top few thousand players are 95% Alliance, and about 65% human. With Horde players being in the double digits.
This all started a few years ago when racial abilites got reworked, notably the humans gained 'Every Man for Himself', which breaks ANY form of Crowd Control (Stuns, roots, polymorph, etc). This meant that whilst every other race would have to use one of two trinket slots to do the same thing, humans were free to use BOTH trinket slots for damage orientated trinkets as the anti-CC and EMFH racial shared the same cooldown.
A lot of people claim that the racial alone won't win you games, which is true for casual play, where it becomes a case of skill or whoever spent more time gear grinding in extremely casual play. but the top plkayers, those that want every edge possible, were practically forced to go human. The fans of these players also went human to mimic them.
As more people went Alliance, Horde players gradually struggled to get decent partners for arena teams or battlegrounds, as all the players that wanted to be the very best had made humans. This led to -more- people re-rolling Alliance, not for the racial, but just to have decent players to play with. This point simply rinses and repeats, as more and more Horde moved sides just to be able to have competent partners.
Since Mists of Pandaria, the last expansion, this had begun reaching dangerous, game affecting levels, but in WoD it's straight up become critical mass. On one hand, the Horde gets instant queues into Battlegrounds and Arena, but their winrate has become 30% between the US and EU, and on Alliance, queue times go from 15 minutes to 40 for a BG, and over an hour for Ashran (The open PvP zone).
In the past, people have always whinged that X faction was dominating, but at best the ratio was 60-40 or thereabouts. not ideal but not unplayable. Now however, with a monstrous amount of faction imbalance across the globe, not just one region, both sides are having their enjoyment hampered.
Some more short-sighted idiots love to go all "Whoo Alliance time to shine cuz Horde always dominated lelelel XD". Now ignoring the fact the ratio never broke 60:40, it's worth noting that while there was mild imbalance leaning towards the Horde in the US, the EU has always been Alliance biased. So I myself have never had a moment where the Horde had the numerical upperhand. And even then, the 90% and over ratio is just absurd.
Onto this... "fix".
It's a band aid, nothing more, and it might not even fix anything. Until I know how it works, all I can assume is that Horde players will play as Alliance for the easy wins, and Alliance... probably won't budge, because they win the vast majority of matches (In my experience, 20 matches on either faction since the last patch, Alliance won 20/20, Horde won 1/20. Other players have reported similar cases. Basically Alliance have to wait much longer but are almost guaranteed a win. Horde player morale is also rock bottom, as soon as things go wrong, people just say 'gg' and AFK, or go 'Welcome to Horde' -then- AFK). I mean... why would the Alliance be Horde? Quick queue times followed by a rapid loss?
If anything, this fix will make Alliance queues -longer-, as everyone still playing Horde will just jump over for the easy wins, more than likely, and the OP human racial which Blizz...
For those unaware, currently the PvP scene is dominated by Alliance, the top few thousand players are 95% Alliance, and about 65% human. With Horde players being in the double digits.
This all started a few years ago when racial abilites got reworked, notably the humans gained 'Every Man for Himself', which breaks ANY form of Crowd Control (Stuns, roots, polymorph, etc). This meant that whilst every other race would have to use one of two trinket slots to do the same thing, humans were free to use BOTH trinket slots for damage orientated trinkets as the anti-CC and EMFH racial shared the same cooldown.
A lot of people claim that the racial alone won't win you games, which is true for casual play, where it becomes a case of skill or whoever spent more time gear grinding in extremely casual play. but the top plkayers, those that want every edge possible, were practically forced to go human. The fans of these players also went human to mimic them.
As more people went Alliance, Horde players gradually struggled to get decent partners for arena teams or battlegrounds, as all the players that wanted to be the very best had made humans. This led to -more- people re-rolling Alliance, not for the racial, but just to have decent players to play with. This point simply rinses and repeats, as more and more Horde moved sides just to be able to have competent partners.
Since Mists of Pandaria, the last expansion, this had begun reaching dangerous, game affecting levels, but in WoD it's straight up become critical mass. On one hand, the Horde gets instant queues into Battlegrounds and Arena, but their winrate has become 30% between the US and EU, and on Alliance, queue times go from 15 minutes to 40 for a BG, and over an hour for Ashran (The open PvP zone).
In the past, people have always whinged that X faction was dominating, but at best the ratio was 60-40 or thereabouts. not ideal but not unplayable. Now however, with a monstrous amount of faction imbalance across the globe, not just one region, both sides are having their enjoyment hampered.
Some more short-sighted idiots love to go all "Whoo Alliance time to shine cuz Horde always dominated lelelel XD". Now ignoring the fact the ratio never broke 60:40, it's worth noting that while there was mild imbalance leaning towards the Horde in the US, the EU has always been Alliance biased. So I myself have never had a moment where the Horde had the numerical upperhand. And even then, the 90% and over ratio is just absurd.
Onto this... "fix".
It's a band aid, nothing more, and it might not even fix anything. Until I know how it works, all I can assume is that Horde players will play as Alliance for the easy wins, and Alliance... probably won't budge, because they win the vast majority of matches (In my experience, 20 matches on either faction since the last patch, Alliance won 20/20, Horde won 1/20. Other players have reported similar cases. Basically Alliance have to wait much longer but are almost guaranteed a win. Horde player morale is also rock bottom, as soon as things go wrong, people just say 'gg' and AFK, or go 'Welcome to Horde' -then- AFK). I mean... why would the Alliance be Horde? Quick queue times followed by a rapid loss?
If anything, this fix will make Alliance queues -longer-, as everyone still playing Horde will just jump over for the easy wins, more than likely, and the OP human racial which Blizzard -refuses- to fix for some asinine reason. You can't even claim it's for the race change money, as everyone's a human now anyway. The only people not playing humans are PvE folk, diehard Horde fans and peoplep laying classes humans can't be. If humans could be druids, I'm sure they'd go from 60% to 90%, as an example. They claim that people still disagree on how potent the human racial is, which means it's balanced... but I've not seen one person say the racial isn't any good. Anyone who comments on it straight up says it's an incredibly good racial that blows the other races out of the water. The additional DPS trinket can add a massive chunk of damage, and with PvP being burst damage orientated, every bit of damage is crucial.
Personally I'd rather they gave every race a CC breaking racial like EMFH and give humans something else, something more interesting and preferably not as straight up required if you want to PvP seriously beyond casual play.
Here's a good write up from a user from Reddit.
Read FullHonestly it sounds more like they'll allow you to queue randomly into Horde or Alliance.