Horde x Alliance, PVP x PVE x RP

[Hikari]

Now that we reached 2 months of WoW I decided to get some data available here at Warcraftrealms to analyze which are the differences between horde and alliance.


I've collected the data of total population, alliance population and horde population, besides paladin pop and shaman pop, from all WoW servers and from all PVE, PVP and RP servers. From all them the high lvl (55-60) and total (10-60) pop.
With this data I wanna compare differences between the server types, and confirm if it's true that paladin/shaman are overpowered and if they have advantages over other classes.

It's very important to note that this data is just a sample, so don't get it as it was all WoW population! Since I don't know what fraction this sample is of the population I'm not able to calculate variations.
I'll consider high lvl as the initial population of WoW, the people that played the most, and who is not high lvl I'll consider new players, and players with alt. It creates errors on results too.

Comparing today high lvl pop with total pop we are able to see how the server changed these 2 months.

I'll start comparing server types. PVP servers have the largest high lvl population, but now the total pop of PVE and PVP is equal, suggesting that in the begining people though PVP servers were the best and now they are migrating to PVE servers. Considering that there are more PVP servers than PVE servers, it indicates an even larger migration from PVP to PVE servers.
RP servers also increased population faster than the average.

Horde and Alliance pops should be equal, but only at PVP servers it happened, which tends to equallity. PVE servers are stabilized with 2 alliance for each horde, and RP servers have 2.5 high lvl alliance for each 1 high lvl horde and 2 alliance for each horde on total pop. It's a shame that Blizzard didn't take providences in the begining, but at least I hope that this unbalance decreses.

I though the PVE high lvl pop would be the largest, since at PVP server there is more worn-out time pvping and at RP there is more worn-out time role playing, while at PVE server pvp is much less common and role play is extremely rare.
But I was wrong, while 3.71% of total pop is high lvl, it's only 2.81% at PVE and almost 5% of PVP servers!! But high lvl pop is only 1.7% of RP servers, which means they are having fun role playing


Now, finally the differences between Alliance and Horde's difficulty of playing.
If the proportion of alliance/horde in high lvl is equal to total pop, than alliance is as difficult as horde to level up.
And look this discovery, while high lvl alliance are 3.48% of all alliance pop, horde high lvl are 4.1% of their pop! Will it be that horde is easier than alliance??
NO! I CAN'T say that. Because at PVE servers both high lvl are exactly 2.81% of their total pop, at PVP servers it's 4.58% for alliance and 5.39 for horde, and at RP servers alliance are 1.83% while horde are 1.49%. So that difference is larger only at PVP servers (wich have the largest high lvl pop), which only may suggest that alliance pvp more often than horde.
No conclusion, unfortunately.


And now comparing the paladins with the rest of alliance and shamans with the rest of horde. This is the hardest information to get, since there is not balance between classes (there are fewer priests and druids), at the same time that the choice proportion may have changed in these 2 months (I THINK that more people are playing with paladins now than in the begining).
What I did was just get the high lvl/total pop proportion for these 2 classes.
In all type of servers paladins are 17% of alliance and shamans are 16% of horde.
Also in all type of servers the high lvl paladins are 22% of high lvl alliance, should it means that few people are playing with them?
But with high lvl shamans there is difference between the servers. In the average they are 7% of high lvl pop, at PVE they are 18.6%, at PVP they are 20% and at RP they are 16.8%...
I leave for you to take your own conclusions


In my opinion I don't see in the statistics any advantage Blizzard could have done to any faction, I think they are balanced. But excluding the average of PVP servers I see a great unballance of people preferring to play with alliance and consequently a higher alliance population at almost all the servers.
Blizzard SHOULD have made anything to rebalance the pop, and now it may be harder for the horde to invade territories of the alliance.
At least it seems that inside Battlegrounds Blizzard will force to exist ballance. Let's wait and see.

For the supposed advantage for paladins and shamans I really can't confirm any.
I let here the info I got for future comparisons.


I hope it was worthy to u ^^

[Rollie]

Honestly, I think the reason there are more Alliance than Horde is purely aesthical reasons. I suppose we could do a survey to see but this is often the main reason I hear behind people preferring Alliance. I don't know that I've ever heard that people chose Alliance because they perceived it to be easier to level up as an Alliance character.

I am also of the opinion that you see more high level Horde PVP because I feel that IN GENERAL, the more hardcore PVP players choose horde. Again, this is almost purely aesthics. PVP brings out the 'evil' in people. The badassness so to say. And the Horde just emenate more 'badassness' than the Alliance. Of course, this is all purely speculation and my own personal opinion, so take it as you may =)

[Guest]

I would have to go with Rollie here, I would also add that Alliance having humans and "knights" of a sort feels closer to us (king arthur etc.) This is something recognized from DAOC for instance (albion being the most populous). This draws more of the "casual" and rp crowd (generalization).

As for ease of levelling, several people that have levelled to high levels in both Horde and Alliance have said to me that Horde has a better "infrastructure", it's easier and faster to get to and from grind and quest locations at high levels on Horde side. What's interesting is if this will be offset by large numbers of alliance players out ganking them on PvP servers with a large alliance numerical advantage.

It's a lot of fun to play around with numbers and trends, I wish Blizzard would supply us with core data in the same way Mythic has for years already but we can only humbly hope that they will learn the management side of MMPORG's and strive towards being as good as they are at developing games in the first place.

[Guest]

I would think that you would get more 'information' from these analyses by choosing 3 different categories, not 2. I would make 60 a class of its own, then high level would be 50-59, then total server pop 10-60.

There is an appreciable spike at level 60 developing now and I would consider these end-game characters. These characters may have been 60 for over a month, or just made it last night. The overall graph by character level is sloping generally down in player numbers, so I would assume that the 50-59 bracket would give a more consistent sample of player development than including the 60 bracket. You can see from the 60 graph the 'maturity' of the server, with the original servers (like Blackrock) having over 5% of the played characters on 60, while new ones (like Azjol-nerub) have barely a spike at all.

After about 3 weeks after release you could quite clearly see the 'bubble' of players coming through like a std deviation graph. I would guess that this was a representation of playing time as there was a severe shortage of saleable copies of the game during this time, so virtually everyone started on release. Now that you have a new generation coming through the std dev bubble has collapsed into the XP ramp you can see now.

As analysis of Horde vs Alliance goes, I would agree that it is largely psychological as rollie pointed out. To show another way to test this is to look at the discrepancy in ratios between servers dependant on server name. Servers with typically 'bad' names or horde related names have a much higher horde ratio than others. EG. Archimonde is an Undead name and has a 1:1 ratio and 21% undead count rather than the average 15%. Tichondrius is the same with 1:1.3 ratio in favour of horde and a 22% undead average. Cenarion circle has a 2.5:1 ratio and an elevated NE average as well as Cenarius with 2.2:1. As the name of the server has no bearing on the actual gameplay, these discrepancies can be largely attributed to psychological effects. I know that if I was thinking of playing an undead then Tichondrius would leap out at me as a server of choice. If these discrepancies exist purely by server name, then a 1.7:1 ratio for what is virtually good vs evil would be entirely plausible.

I would also agree that the player movement is going away from PvP. This could be for 2 reasons.
1) The more hardcore MMORPGers would have known about WoW coming and would also have a greater chance of getting a copy on release. These players would also have been drawn more to the PvP side as most other games have had PvP as the pinnacle experience. I would expect that a few of these original players have been disillusioned to the PvP experience and have found out the PvE is more suitable to their play style. The min/maxers would have also been burned by PvP in its current state and headed to a more sane PvE.
2) The vast majority of players now approaching the game would be casual gamers, so I would anticipate that they would naturally gravitate toward PvE unless directed by a friend also playing PvP.

There is also an interesting anomaly at 20,30 and 40, where there are more players at these levels than at the preceeding levels on most servers. My guess would be that these are more your 'defining' levels where you can see the direction of your character evolving. If you don't really like the direction, or you are drawn to another character, I would guess that these levels is where you abandon them (or at least more likely than 19,29 and 39). At 40 you also have that 'horse' prestige factor, where people are more likely to hang around town or gatherings of people on horseback than going grinding. I guess you can chalk up vanity as another psychological effect.

VRBones