Some actual numbers on faction animosity

A month-and-a-half ago, I posted a rant of sorts about how I, as an Alliance player, always felt marginalized by Horde players for my choice to play Alliance in spite of the fact that I held no such animosity towards them. Though I did my best to avoid generalizations in my post, I did fall into their alluring trap more than once, so I decided that, since my blog now has a readership and occasionally gets linked to by major sites (i.e. WoW Insider), that I would set up a poll to see how the two sides really view each other. The poll generated a moderately impressive (in my mind, at least) 76 votes before WoW Insider linked to my post on the absurdity of feat-of-strength panic, at which point the number of results in my poll instantly shot up to more than four hundred in one night. Now, with the other three polls I put on my blog in the past, I was only trying to get a better idea of what kind of players comprised my readership, so I never talked about them. This one, however, deserves some discussion.

The most obvious conclusion we can make the majority of those who voted who play Alliance exclusively do not hold any animosity towards the Horde at all. Almost sixty percent of Alliance players who voted in the poll are like me, and have no issue with Horde players. Among that remaining forty percent, there is an even split between those who feel superior to Horde players and those who flat-out dislike them. This data stands in pretty stark contrast to the votes from Horde players, who had an approximately one-third-each split between indifference towards Alliance players, feelings of superiority to Alliance players, and flat-out animosity, with slightly more players leaning toward hostility than indifference. This means the ratio of Horde voters who weren't indifferent to a player's faction choice to Alliance players who weren't indifferent to a player's faction choice was more than three to one. In other words, it seems the Horde voters were more than three times more likely to judge a player for choosing Alliance than the Alliance voters were to judge a player for choosing Horde.

What interested me more, though, was that players who play both factions were also almost evenly split between those who like the Alliance more, those who like the Horde more, and those who like them both equally (there was a slight leaning towards the Horde, but it was still much more even than I expected). While my initial impression was that this means that the two factions aren't that different after all, if that were the case, there would have been many more votes in the "I like both sides equally" option (an option which I just realized has a horrendous typo in it; the horror! the horror!). The fact that there was an even split tells me that the two sides are, in fact, quite different, but not different in such a way that one is clearly superior to the other. Which one voters like more seems to be just a matter of preference. While I'm quite interested in knowing what those who chose either the seventh or eighth option prefer about their respective preferred faction, we can't make any conclusions about that from the poll alone.

You'll notice that in discussing these numbers, I always talk about the people who voted in this poll rather than WoW players at large; that's because we can't make any significant conclusions about the general WoW-playing populace from this poll. The people who voted in the poll are comprised entirely of people who read WoW blogs, which is the only way they could find it in the first place, and are likely comprised mostly of people who read WoW Insider. While WoW Insider is a pretty faction-neutral website, the general attitude of the readership it cultivates could certainly have a big effect on how those readers voted when they came to my blog. After all, I have never seen many posts on WoW Insider encouraging people to have more faction pride and trying to cultivate faction animosity, while I'm sure there are other WoW websites that do encourage that kind of thing. There are probably also websites that cater to players of one specific faction and make no attempt to hide their animosity for the other faction, which would certainly cause their readership to be comprised mostly of people who would pick option one or option four in the poll. Had one of those less neutral websites linked to my blog instead of WoW Insider, the results of my poll could have been very different indeed.

Another hint that this poll doesn't reflect the general WoW-playing populace is that 24% of those who voted play Alliance exclusively, while 40% of those who voted play Horde exclusively, yet according to Warcraft Census, there is an almost even split between total Alliance characters and total Horde characters. If the poll truly reflected the general WoW-playing populace, then shouldn't those numbers have been closer? There must be some sort of explanation for the inconsistency. A few pop into my mind upon some basic reflection; the cause of the inconsistency between my poll's data and Warcraft Census's data could be any one of them or a combination of some of them.

One, voters who play both factions tend to have more Alliance characters. If this explanation alone accounted for the difference between my data and Warcraft Census's date, this would mean that, assuming Alliance voters, Horde voters, and double-dippers have the same average number of characters per an account, the double-dippers would need to have, on average, about seven Alliance characters for every two on their account, or two and a half for every one Horde character. While I could see this happening if the double-dipping voters liked Alliance players more, and thus favored the Alliance in general, the fact that the double-dipping voters seemed to like both factions equally makes this possibility unlikely in my mind.I f this possible explanation had any impact on my data, I predict that it was minimal.

Two, the Alliance voters have more characters per account than the Horde voters. By my data, if we assume that double-dipping voters have, on average, equal numbers of Horde and Alliance characters, then that means the Alliance voters would need to have almost twice as many characters per account as Horde voters, on average (the real number is closer to seven characters per Alliance account for every four on a Horde account, so like I said, almost twice as much). This is an explanation I find somewhat more believable; if the stereotypes about the Horde being a more close-knit community than the Alliance are true, there would probably be more incentive for a Horde player to keep playing his high-level character. A cohesive community means more successful raiding, giving the high-level character more longevity after he reaches the level cap, and if Horde players just like talking and being around each other more than Alliance players, well, they certainly don't need to roll a new character to do that. Conversely, if it's true that the Alliance tends to have a less cohesive community, that would imply that raiding would be less successful on the Alliance side, giving players less incentive to stick to one character and keep him well-geared. With less incentive to keep playing at the level cap, it's easy to see how Alliance players in this situation could find leveling alts more attractive than sticking with one character. Now, it would be a converse error to assume that, because these conclusions make sense, the assumption they are based on must make sense too, but it's still an interesting possibility to ponder.

Three, voters lied in their answers. Since the poll is anonymous, I don't imagine people would have been motivated to lie about which side they play, though I could see the subjectivity of answers seven through nine creating this unbalance. Allow me to elaborate: if being an Alliance player is viewed by the blog-reading community as being more shameful than being a Horde player, as my results seem to indicate, then perhaps the Alliance players who happen to have one Horde alt that they don't play all that often were more likely to vote as double-dippers than the Horde players who have one Alliance alt they don't play all that often. Conversely, if being a Horde player is something to be proud of, then perhaps Horde players who have one Alliance alt voted as full Horde players for that reason. If this were the case, however, it would mean that more of the double-dipping voters should have, theoretically, favored the Alliance, since that would mean that more of the double-dippers would have been players whose primary faction was the Alliance than players whose primary faction was the Horde. Since this wasn't the case, I don't find this explanation very likely.

The fourth explanation, and the most intriguing and likely one in my mind, is that players involved in the WoW blogosphere are more likely to be Horde players. This is certainly supported by the old stereotypes that Horde players are more serious about the game than Alliance players, since serious players are more likely to be involved in the WoW blogosphere and the WoW internet-community at large. After all, if they are serious about the game, they probably seek out information to help them become better players. Since many sources of information about WoW have associated communities (the comments section of blogs or the forums of informative websites), it's not a big jump to make that serious players are more likely to become involved in WoW-based communities than less serious players. It could also be that Horde players are more likely to be opinionated and seek out the opinions of others than Alliance players, since opinions are what differentiates blogs from other online WoW resources, like databases. This would certainly help to explain why Horde players seem to have more pride in their choices than Alliance players, since being opinionated would support that kind of pride.

Again, this is all conjecture, as we can't make any definite conclusions from this data alone. However, my own guess is that the inconsistency between my data and Warcraft Census's data could be explained by the fact that Alliance players are more likely to roll alts and/or the fact that there are more Horde players in the WoW blogosphere than Alliance players. Another poll could certainly tell us just how much that first possibility factors into the difference between my data and Warcraft census's data, but that would be too specific of a poll for my sensibilities, and the fact that it would involve a different pool of data (i.e. votes from different people) could lead to it telling us less about the original voters than we think it would. And truth be told, such information gathering is beyond the scope of this blog and my intent for it. I do these polls as a diversion from writing, and a follow-up poll like that would turn this issue from a diversion into a full-on project. While that might be something good to do to occupy my time in between now and Cataclysm (as well as giving me something to write about), it's not something on my radar for now. Maybe some day, though.