My latest World of Warcraft incarnation is as a Hordeling, mostly because I’ve done much of the lowbie Alliance questing twice before and fancied a change or scene and most importantly didn’t really want to do all the Westfall Defias stuff again; it probably loses its charm the third time in fairly quick succession.
I’m almost certain that the Horde wasn’t designed as the obviously ‘Evil’ team, but I suspect a great many players choose to see it that way, as on the whole, the Alliance towns and villages seem to be much busier than the Horde ones. Oggrimar, the Horde main town seems much less crowded than Ironforge, the Alliance main hub. It’s not surprising really – the majority of gamers seem to want to be the Hero, and much fewer like the idea of being a comic-book villain. Population disparities generally confirm this. Even without hard numbers, casual observation in major player hubs in a game will often grant interesting insight into players and their goals and dreams.
Everquest initially launched with three evil races, and nine good, proportions which turned out to be quite foresighted, and when the Team PvP servers were thought up, the good races had to be split up into three arbitrary teams, just so the poor Dark Elves didn’t get a continual battering. Evil was mostly an exercise in roleplaying for the more advanced timewaster.
Anarchy Online offered the struggle between a corporation and rebels, and the perceived struggle for freedom tended to appeal more to players than the austerity of corporate domination, leaving the Clan side generally more numerous than the OmniTek side. Current Land Control maps show that the balance is a bit more even these days, and the deliberate ambiguity of the back-story helped reduce the exaggerated imbalance.
Eve Online and Planetside neatly steered away from any black and white choices, and most people’s choice of ‘side’ in these games is generally rooted in game mechanics, or simple aesthetics. Although ideologies differ, Planetside team numbers are generally fairly even, but any movement is almost entirely determined by equipment nerf and buff cycles, and the choice of race in Eve is somewhat irrelevant, as about seven hours of offline training will negate any racial bonuses you might have had.
Everquest 2 offered a much more stark choice than its predecessor; the Good City and the Evil City. I never dabbled much with the Evil city, as almost all the NPCs were loaded up with unrelentingly abusive dialogue, which pissed me off very quickly, but from the short time I spent in Freeport, it seemed a much more empty place than Qeynos, the Goodly City. I suspect that being Evil involves more than just Torrette's Syndrome, but may be wrong.
Star Wars: Galaxies was perhaps the most interesting example of the subject. Here you had two sides with absolutely no ambiguity. The Empire is clearly Evil – we’ve now had six feature length films explaining this concept to us. Players minds are made up for them before character creation. The Rebels are the Heroes, who have all the fun, and do all the cool stuff and have interesting and attractive people and The Empire just fly around facelessly killing helpless folk, badly. The situation is not helped by the time-setting – between the victory at Yavin, and the battle at Hoth. We know the Empire is going to have a small win in a bit, and then lose spectacularly soon after, so even ambivalent players will pick the side they know to ultimately be the winners. They recently added factional city capture, and I only saw one city, Bestine, that didn’t have Rebel banners everywhere, and I suspect that one is hardcoded anyway. Obviously, players like being the good guys, but in SWG especially so.
Back to World of Warcraft then. Although little I’ve seen so far as a Hordeling implies anything but honourable lifestyles and a rough-but-fair society of hard done-by beings just trying to get on with life, it is a side made up of Orcs, Minotaurs, Trolls and Zombies, all creatures with decades of bad press.
I’ve seen reports and graphs suggesting that Alliance generally outnumber the Horde by about 3:1, and I’d say that matches my observations. Of course players who actively choose an ‘evil’ side are often more interested in expressing that choice in a meaningful manner, meaning that although the Horde is smaller, a higher percentage of those members of it are likely to be interested in PvP, so the picture isn’t quite so bleak for Factional warring – the Alliance might outnumber the Horde, but it’s more likely that it’s members won’t want anything to do with fighting.
However, hearing tales of how Alliance folk have to queue for hours to get into a Battleground, while Horde go straight in, and of course, hunting and levelling near The Barrens Crossroads for the last few nights, seeing raid after raid, and the field of bones surrounding the place, I’d say there’s probably still more than enough goodly crusaders out there to keep the pressure on...