Some interesting World of Warcraft forum discussions, and as with anything involving the WoW forums, there’s a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat.
A post-Burning Crusade take on a perennial topic: Alliance vs Horde, maturity level, EZ-mode, moronic public convos. “How to tell which BE’s are ally rerollers” I’ve never really bought into the theory that Alliance has more immature players than Horde, although I’ll freely admit I haven’t spent much time playing Horde. Certainly public chat is equally stupid on both sides.
On my own server, guild vs guild shit-talking mostly originates with Horde. However, the larger Alliance raiding guilds are rather prompt about booting ill-behaved players; we have the population numbers in our favor, after all. Seems to me that Horde probably doesn’t have that luxury.
As far as PVE EZ-mode, fear ward is a powerful thing. Although, when it comes to racial abilities, the racials you don’t have are always more attractive than the ones you do. Unless you’re human like my rogue, then the other racials actually ARE better.
Over on the Guild Relations forums, this convo pops up occasionally, “Website Critique” — guilds post their link for others to evaluate the usability and design. Several players offer detailed suggestions and Do’s/Dont’s for guild sites, which is rather useful — designing a guildsite to satisfy both recruiting and membership needs is a challenge.
I’m not a fan of splash pages, but I had run across this guildsite while researching my own guild’s redesign and rather liked it: Pirate Ninjas. They’ve integrated their pirate theme superbly throughout the site — corny, but well done.
Finally, an older thread that still has some life in it: “Worst reason/excuse you’ve seen for a /gquit”. Some people are actually thinking of original material for a /gquit, which is encouraging.
Also encouraging, that my guild has somehow missed guilding these quitters — narrowly missed, probably.
The Alliance EZMode thing has been rehashed so many times and any reasonably arguments, if you ever believed them (which I did), are now moot with TBC giving horde paladins. Now it’s just down to racials, and really those aren’t very important in PvE.
The theory is most kids and noobs (in the true sense of the word) will pick the familiar, aesthetically pleasing, ‘good’ race, and anytime you have population imbalance you always always always want to be on the down side. Obviously there are all kinds on both side, but personally I think when comparing horde/alliance, Albion/Midgard, Glorious Lord vs Dread Lord, etc, the less mainstream faction will tend to be more polarized between good, mature players and total asshats just looking to grief. This is always a good thing, compared to the other side which is the middle ground of players who are more whiny and immature but basically decent.
From what I’ve seen, the immature players are most often the lowbies. People under level 40. Both sides have immature players like this, but as you go up in level, the immature players seem to weed themselves out, maybe because they’re the type of people who don’t like spending a lot of time playing a video game or the type of people who can’t deal with an MMO’s lack of instant gratification, I don’t know; but there seem to be far fewer immature players that are level 60(and now, 60+).
I will say, however, that there seem to be more immature night elves than any other race, and I constantly see them insulting the Horde senselessly(“lolol the whorde r pussies they need gud racielz cuz theyd suk @ pvp w/o em”). I will admit, most shamefully, that my first character was a night elf druid, and my first days in Teldrassil were far from pleasant because of the extremely immature atmosphere. I only venture into Teldrassil past Darnassus if I have reason to believe there’s a flagged Hordie in there, otherwise that place can kiss my ass.
I’ve now played one year as Horde and one year as Alliance. And I can definitively say… they’re both a wild mix of maturity. I gather it does differ a bit depending on server; if you happen to get a crowd of very loud kids who all roll on your server at once and pick the same side, well, you’ll hear them loudest on general chat just by nature, so that side will seem particularly bad. Perhaps there are slightly different kinds of maturity and immaturity, but even there that’s an over-generalization; at most it’s a slight tendency rather than a real trend I think.
As for re-rolling to a BE… *shudder* I can’t stand the idea. From what I’ve seen so far of the appearances/emotes/etc., they just make me think of cheerleaders gone bad (wait was that redundant?). On the other hand, I love the Draenei.
The EZ mode discussions always amuse the hell out of me. I’ve seen each side claim the other one has it easy. I can’t count the number of “well everyone knows Blizzard prefers Horde” things I’ve heard on Alliance side, and vice versa. Grass is always greener and all that, like you said. It reminds me of a player I know. He’s a die-hard pvper, and he’s always on about this or that class which is overpowered in PvP. As soon as he levels that class up though, it’s suddenly a different class that’s overpowered.
Eh, I never really bought into the whole one side is easier than other arguments. They both have their downsides. Personally I like doing fights without fear ward. Nef on alliance side is boring, Nef on horde side is fun. Zerk rage rotation actually makes tanking that fight interesting.
There’s immaturity on both sides, the trick is to keep it out of your guild.
Eh. I’ve played both Horde and Alliance sides to 60 twice, on multiple servers, (EQ turned me off the raiding/guild drama scene for good) and I’ve never seen any evidence for the maturity thing. Both sides are full of idiots.
Horde has the rep for more mature players, but Barrens chat has its reputation for a reason.
tks for the effort you put in here I appreciate it!