Will people leave alliance in cataclysm

Q u o t e:
Do you think many people will leave the alliance for the horde in cataclysm due to the changes that are beeing made, clearly horde are in favor in this expansion

Why do you think that the Horde is being favoured in Cataclysm?

And to answer your question: No, I do not think everybody will go Horde in Cataclysm. In fact, not too long ago, someone feared that everyone would go Alliance because of the Worgen, and in that thread I posted several reasons why I don't think that will happen, and I think those reasons will apply to this thread as well: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=10711183490&postId=107097109638&sid=1#44

Q u o t e:
Well Blizzard can't exactly outwardly label one faction as being over/underpopulated, it would have negative ramifications. Even back in vanilla where Horde was the undisputed underdog they said little if anything about it. It therefore falls to players who experience it, and from what -most- people can gather, Horde is rather overpopulated PVPwise. This is the case for most battlegroups, as evident by Horde having to wait in line to fight Alliance for 15 minutes while they rush right in.

Simply too few Alliance players queueing for BG's, and thus leading people to conclude that the Alliance faction is not that populated. Which while an obvious conclusion, is dubious- my server is nigh-on 50/50, and yet Horde wins WG 95% of the time. Alliance simply don't care about PVP, as a result the ones who do suffer, and less and less bother.

Which leads to the problem- we can't say for sure whether Alliance is underpopulated or just bad/lazy as hell when it comes to PVP. Worgen seem to be catering to both eventualities- ridiculously OP PVP racials and an ''appealing'' race in itself.

On the topic of battlegroups, it is true that some are more unevenly balanced than others, but it is not as grave as some people are trying to make it look. That being said, we do acknowledge the frustrations that some people are experiencing in regards to queue times and skewed win to loss ratios.

The matter of fact is that the PvP culture from battlegroup to battlegroup and realm to realm is very different, and in some cases the PvP culture can be very different from faction to faction on the same realm or battlegroup. Most battlegroups have a decently balanced Horde to Alliance population ratio, but if the players in one faction is not so much into PvP as the other faction, then there will be fewer players from that faction organizing themselves into strong PvP groups, and additionally there will be less people of said faction queuing up for the battlegrounds in general because they prefer raiding instead. Things like these can most certainly help give the perception that one side is heavily outnumbered, or that one side always wins.

The trouble is that we cannot force people to play PvP if they do not want to, and we can certainly not force people to change faction either. Since we cannot force people, the best thing we can do is to offer choices and to broaden(or merge) the pool of available PvP players, something we have already done to some degree… People can now change faction if they wish, and people can transfer to another realm as well if they wish. Also, when we pooled all the realms together into battlegroups, more players were able to be matched together in the battlegrounds, and as a result we saw massive improvements to the queue times. Things improved even further when we merged the different language battlegroups into larger cross-language battlegroups, but all that being said, there is of course still room for improvement.

In Cataclysm, we are planning to make both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup within each region, which basically means that all European players may face opponents from any other European realm and battlegroup regardless of language. In addition, we are working on a "war games" system that will allow one group of players to challenge another group of players to one or more battles in the battlegrounds, and this system will allow for same-faction battles to take place as well... This will for an example make player made tournaments a possibility :-)