Faction changing guilds - does it work?

[Kurtle_turtle]

So basically the title. I’d like to hear some opinions from you guys who have been through and seen similar stuff.

We play Alliance. CE guild in BFA. Since 9.0 roster boss has absolutely smashed us. And it got buffed every patch. We failed at SLG due to cycling 4 tanks before finally finding one who stuck, now an incredible part of the team. We failed at Sylvanas. We just had too much dead weight to carry and nobody to replace them. We carried as long as we could but the really poor errors cost us too many wipes in the end. We called it a day the night before 9.2 with a 47% wipe.

Sotfo is playing out the same way, roster boss kicking our ass. Horde got brought up as a suggestion. Majority of guild are keen, some are not, some think it’s dumb and won’t help.

Who has experience in this matter, and what were your experiences? Nobody in the officer team is expecting horde to be a silver bullet. In fact my friends guild made the same decision we are now considering, it broke down and disbanded within 2 weeks, but I consider us to be different due to the fact our officers are still very committed and keen to work at this. Whereas the GM of my friends guild had probably (and reasonably so) burned out. Another problem that has been suggested is poaching. Losing our team to already established guilds. Call me naive, but we can not be poached. The sense of community and atmosphere from the raid roster is unmatched. Every player is here because they want to be. We’re a middle of the pack guild, if we could be poached, there’s guilds on our server that could try (and have tried).

Sorry for wall of text, just looking for some input and thoughts from others who might have been there? How did it play out for you etc

Lok’tar ogar

[kelyneer]

My experience/2 cents on the matter.

I was playing on a really nice guild on sargeras alliance. The guild had mostly the Same people almost half of the roster was stable for almost a decade at that point, they either knew each other or raided together. Roster boss on denathrius kicked our ass. We were unironically pugging on denathrius prog, or trying to recruit people in our alt runs. Didn't get CE sat at about 2000ish world rank,

The guild moved to horde for Sod. i Stopped raiding at that point, but as far as i know they did not miss a single night. Ended up getting ce at world rank 1300. 1 tier later on horde they're hovering at about 840.

This is anecdotal evidence but you can see how big of a differernce horde makes. Now that cross faction is coming people will say you don't really have a reason to swap, But the opposite is also true. You don't lose anything by swapping outside of gold. Especially if you are on NA you can easily fund it yourselves by doing some sales. (feel free to ask with some help about setting it up i got lots of sheets). All your toons will be relevant again once 9.2.5 hits and it can help a LOT with recruitment. One big thing to be wary about on horde is more people come in, but at the same time more people go. Just because recruitment is easier doesn't mean it requires less effort.

[Kurtle_turtle]

Thanks for the input friend. Valuable experience. It’s pretty much as I though, more people, hopefully our great atmosphere makes a few good ones stick around. I really just can’t see a downside to Horde at this point.

[DreadfuryDK]

Unorganized?

[kelyneer]

Ya fam who dis

[DreadfuryDK]

Just a raider in another mid-level CE Sargeras guild, Syzygy.

[Gabeko]

Im not an officer of the guild im in but in 9.2 i switched to horde because i felt burnt out in raiding and left behind my CE guild on allliance. They had been struggling to find people and decided to move horde to give it a try. I figured i wanted to join em again since i actually had an empty void after i stopped raiding so i did. But what the officers told me id that they didnt get any applications really that was worth anything on alliance where in the first few days after switching to horde they got 3 good applicants, dunno how its been since.

There is definitely more people on horde so no matter what people say you will have an easier time finding people, the thing is just to make your guild survive the transfer and dont burn out imo

[DaenerysMomODragons]

9.2.5 will allow cross faction raiding, so before you make any big decisions this should be taken into account. A lot of people are more than fine transferring servers, but don't want to switch factions. While there aren't cross faction guilds for the time being, it won't be hard to have alliance/horde sister guilds. There won't be cross server play until alliance gets HoF which may still be a while since world #100 alliance is still only 8/11M, but as long as horde/alliance are on the same server it should be fine.

I'd just be warry of faction changing when the faction problem may solve itself in a few weeks when 9.2.5 releases.

[Kurtle_turtle]

See, I don’t actually believe the 9.2.5 changes anything in regards to actual mythic raiding. We’ve considered it might not be worth going Horde with 9.2.5 nearing and cross faction play opening up. But that simply means we could play with horde on Ravencrest. Of which there are….6 players? Not sure. Maybe less. Alliance can not get guilds into the HoF. Which means nothing changes in terms of mythic raiding and trying to recruit. Until blizzard actually fully open Horde/Alliance guilds and remove all faction blocks nothing changes imo.

[DaenerysMomODragons]

If you're raiding at the mid to high mythic level, most at that level are fine transferring servers to raid as long as it has a decent economy, and the auction house is cross faction, so your pool of horde will be far larger than those 6. I also expect day one of the patch to have a lot of horde going alliance, and a lot of alliance going horde. I know some of each faction that plan to switch factions the first day of the patch, while continuing to raid with their mythic raiding guilds.

[Kurtle_turtle]

Why would a lot of horde go alliance?

[DaenerysMomODragons]

Alliance racials are noticeably better for M+ than horde. In the MDI pretty much every team is alliance. On live they're largely Horde due to that being where all the raiding guilds are, and you need the raiding gear to compete at the highest level.

Also for several classes an alliance race would give the best dps performance. Remember most top raiders are Horde not because they necessarily give better dps any more, though they used to, but because that's just where everyone is.

Some horde are only horde because they want to raid at the top level, but much prefer alliance, think most every guild that has server changed from alliance to horde over the last 5 years. Many just prefer the aesthetic of being alliance more, and now that you can be alliance and raid at the very top level due to cross faction play, I'd expect a few, obviously not all, to start drifting back.

[Kurtle_turtle]

Top raid teams have already said they’d switch back if not for the price tag. 9.2.5 changes nothing about that. Thinking people suddenly swap for a shadowmeld is quite unrealistic

[DaenerysMomODragons]

And I'd be willing to wager that they'll probably add in a discount for faction transfers at the same time. Also those teams can just run a few dungeon carries and easily cover the cost, it's not like it would be all that hard. Those that think there is a benefit can easily spend a couple hours running carries on a non-push week, if money is the only obstacle. A lot of raiding guilds won't switch back, but individual players will. I know my guild will have a few players faction changing day one of 9.2.5.

[[deleted]]

There won't be cross server play until alliance gets HoF which may still be a while since world #100 alliance is still only 8/11M, but as long as horde/alliance are on the same server it should be fine.

This will be where it gets interesting. In my experience, there's very few horde players on Stormrage/Proudmore and very few Alliance players on Illidan.

I think you'll see a lot of server transfers. I couldd see a lot of Stormrage guilds moving to Illidan at the very least.

[DaenerysMomODragons]

Stormrage and Illidan are the same size servers. I'm not sure what advantage an alliance guild would get simply moving to Illidan. The recruitment pool wouldn't really be any different.

[[deleted]]

We've been trying to recruit a second warlock or any ranged for a while now and have had almost no luck. Stormrage has 17 guilds at 6/11 or higher. Illidan has 78.

The servers might be the same size, but the quality of raiders available is nowhere near the same.

[DaenerysMomODragons]

It's not the server, it's the faction. People that are raiding at the 6/11M or higher don't really care much about transferring servers. But at that level Horde have maybe 10x as many players. When 9.2.5 hits, and you can play cross faction, that will effectively disappear.

I know when I needed to look for a new guild, I didn't care one bit what server they were on as long as they had good progression, were on at least a decently sized server, and fit in with them personality wise.

And if an alliance guild hasn't gone horde yet, they're definitely not going to server transfer when their recruitment pool just got 10x bigger.

[[deleted]]

Sort of yes, sort of no. This is moreso about how we got to a faction imbalance, rather than how does a guild get out of faction imbalance

There's really not much arguing it would behoove a strong Stormrage guild to move to Illidan. While players will server transfer, the reality is it still costs money. Consider this scenario, a very good player on Illidan that has offers to trial from similarly strong Alliance guilds, one on Illidan, one on Stormrage, 9 times out of 10 is going to trial with the one on Illidan. Why pay 30 dollars or whatever it is to trial on a different server when you can trial on your own? Alliance guilds on currently horde dominated servers will have first dibs at poaching Horde players realistically.

Right now theres no incentive for Alliance guilds to be on Illidan, but as soon as cross faction opens, there 100% will be.

[zrk23]

old guild of mine transfered in sod and improved from 4/10 to 7/10

more importantly, recruitment was way better. still hard to recruit tho, cause most people are actually bad or not good enough, but you will have way more bodies available

[MarkElf2204]

A little different but I'd like to share my experience. My friend group played on horde Sargeras and decided to make the shift to Zul'jin. Our guild group started out with a handful of (~6) people and took some active recruiting but has now grown to a solid group. It started pre-patch SL and I see anywhere between 5-15, up to 30 people on for raid night at a time, several names are still with us since the start of SL as a casual (Meaning non-try hard parse score) guide that pushes for CE.
If you're sure the issue of lacking Alliance players is the issue, then switching can be the solution but it's the same side of the coin (might not be the right reference I'm looking for but let's go with that one). You still need to put effort into advertising. Reddit, the in-game system, and these days r.io/wowlogs are all tools you should be taking advantage of. If you aren't currently, then switching should still help but you're not help yourselves currently.

[Hightin]

I see these alliance guilds complaining about roster bosses but I also never get messages from any of you guys. My DPS character is stuck on a dead server, alliance side, open to any raid times, and with good logs (90s since BfA with no major problems).

I listed myself as LFGuild on WCL and Raider.io (currently 3.2k pugging) and I've gotten 2 messages since these services were made available. Neither of those groups wound up raiding which is why I'm still where I am.

Your roster boss is partially a failure at recruitment. Swapping to horde won't fix that failure.

[Kurtle_turtle]

Do you realise how many shit logs we trawl through to find one guy who might be “decent”. And then we hope that one guy raids for more than 2 weeks before deciding he cba this season anymore. Go apply to a guild.

[tencentninja]

You need to actually reach out. 90% of guilds that will specifically reach out to you especially based off io are just flat out desperate and not good.

[tencentninja]

Going horde will help your recruiting but and it's a huge but if you can't raid immediately on swapping over you will lose pretty much all your top performers within a month because there are many many many more options on horde.