Because that's stupid and it's already outrageously difficult to keep people from playing the most normal human looking characters. No one is going to play a different race when it means being worse in every way.

>>345123134
You can blame pvp(mostly) for this.
Even with a perfectly balanced game pvp players will find a "flaw" to complain about, now imagine with actual flaws and advantages if you use this or that race.
I don't play wow but i remember hearing about human being more used in pvp because of their racial ability, any wow player can confirm?

>>345123134

People cry enough already about the small racial passives present in mmos, imagine the non-stop whining if every race was completely different.
"Tauren's are so fucking strong, they don't have to put any effort into gearing"
"Gnomes' racial technology is fucking broken, it's not fair on races that have to rely on their own strength"

See where I'm going with this, balancing would be fucking impossible.

>>345123134


MMOs existed before WoW, games like FFXI had fairly decent stat differences between races.

>>345123134
can someone explain to me why there is so many people playing as blood elfs?

>>345123545
Doesn't necessarily have to mean its worse.

When you watch shit like the Warcraft Movie, or play WC1,2 or 3, you see Orcs as naked hulking fucks who get really angry and humans as armoured knights who use tactics, yet in WoW, the MMO rendition, this is represented by human and orc warriors being exactly the fucking same.

>>345124450

They have the most attractive females, MMOs have an abnormally high ratio of female players, they pick the prettiest female.

It's literally that simple.

>>345124253
Yeah they were, only in wotlk though (I think) and maybe after.

The thing I don't get though is why they have to take such a symmetrical approach to balance.

In the WC series factions were balanced against each other but completely unsymmetrical. An orc could take on 2 humans and win, but costed way more.

I don't see why they abandoned this in an MMO, when it'd be just as easy to take the symmetry out (e.g lower raid group limit for Horde & they get less players in BG's)

>>345124265
Yeah thats true, but then you think about games where everything is balanced by being OP, realise they are the funnest games, and wonder why no MMO tried it.

>>345124457

They have to be or else people would play the best one, you don't seem to understand that in anything remotely competitive, there are tests and engines that identify the strongest build to the smallest percentile of DPS or efficiency, and then everyone uses that.

If races were different, even if they were masterfully balanced, then there would be one race which would be 0.001% better than all the rest, and everyone would pick that because that's what websites like Icy-Veins tell them to do.

>>345123134
Because if that was the case then every race would have a very optimal class and vice versa. I shouldn't have to play as an ugly ass ogre just because I want to play warrior class. (I want to be a slutty girl no matter what class I play)

>>345125129

Those games people can usually change what they're playing after every round, plus they usually have a really rapidly changing meta as balances are constantly adjusted. in MMOs you're expected to drop 100s of hours into one character, they can't afford to be constantly changing up mechanics and specs of races, people whine enough when they do it to classes which you are able to change, imagine if they did it with races too.

Balance reasons. Imagine an FPS where your hit box was based on character size. Obviously everyone would pick the smallest character for advantage.

>>345124926
>I don't see why they abandoned this in an MMO
Because players don't want to fight someone stronger than them, never. They say they do but once they get asswhooped you can be sure they'll complain.
Have a recent example, go check the overwatch general or forum threads and enjoy the salt.

A lot of players pick the most optimal race even when differences in performance are less than a percent.

Now, there are possible designs that would provide reasons to pick a variety of classes/races but most players care about cosmetics too much so they'd rather have homogenized races such that they could play their favourite without feeling too bad, and that kind of designs would be a polar opposite of the design paradigm Blizzard has used. For example, suppose warriors in World of Warcraft had a fourth racial talent tree (Tauren Chieftain, Orc Blademaster, Mountain King or what have you, each with something unique that would make the class-race combo at least situationally optimal: for example, prot/blademaster might be the most ideal threat or avoidance spec for Horde while prot/tauren chieftain would have the highest effective health) but Blizzard has been busy removing everything unique and something to this effect would be inconceivable in WoW.

There's also an even more radical approach of not making the game a themepark revolving around progressing through a set of max level content and instead making it more sandbox where minuscule differences in performance don't make or break the game like they do in progression raiding.

>>345124926

If an Ork was twice as strong as a human, who the fuck would ever pick a human, no one wants to rely on another person just to be strong enough to take down one other player.

Likewise I doubt Ork players would enjoy always having to fight against double the amount of humans, it makes every bad player all that more damaging to the team.

>>345125149
I'm not sure how much I agree with this.

Even on vanilla-wow private servers people seem to pick race/class for flavour reasons first and worry about optimisation later

>>345125597
ummm, i'm guessing you haven't played Overwatch, the most popular fps of this year?

>>345126218
>who the fuck would ever pick a human, no one wants to rely on another person just to be strong enough to take down one other player.
this is pretty big part of MMO's really.

Just as it can be fun sometimes to gank a bunch of lower level players, it can also be pretty fun to team up and take down the higher level player who's doing it.

>>345123134
Nigga go play some EverQuest.

>>345126798

But it wouldn't be fun if you were max level and every max level orc player was literally twice as strong as you, the fun comes from it being a unique experience. Not everyday will you have to band together with other weaker players to take down a higher level, if every single PVP fight you ever had to do involved having to team up to take down one person your equal level I promise you the novelty will quickly wear off.

Losing a fight will no longer be down to the other player being better than you, or having spent more time than you gearing up, it would literally be blamed on them being twice your power by default and your teammates didn't work well enough together.

>>345126434

Unfortunately vanilla wow no longer has a competitive raiding scene, unless you count a handful of legacy guilds.
Modern Wow doesn't have distinct racial differences.

It's hard to tell, however Alliance has a higher winrate at PVP than horde, whilst Horde has a higher raid cleared rate at PVE, PVP and PVE specialist players tend to pick Horde and Alliance respectively.

Why is this? Have a look at Hordes racial bonuses compared to Alliances, Hordes all benefit PVE and Alliance benefit PVP.

It's a minuscule difference but it still influences what people pick.

>>345125149
To a large extent that's a problem related to symmetric balance.

One race being straight-up stronger than another to a major degree (like orc and human warrior units in WC3 you mentioned) is one thing without dramatic changes to the game structure, but consider how tank classes worked in TBC for example: each of them had a very pronounced set of strengths and weaknesses and all were ~required (and not just in terms of overall progression raiding, "we need prot pally for tanking Hyjal trash", on many encounters like Kael'Thas and M'uru the most ideal tank setup was one of each).

It wasn't until homogenization efforts set in when certain classes start becoming truly worthless (for example, in WotLK 3.3.5a prot warriors were only good on LK offtanking duty since Safeguard talent was good in mitigating Soul Reaper damage and as far as their tanking performance itself was concerned, they were a direct downgrade to prot pallies because the classes no longer had distinct roles so few percent lower numbers ended up making them "not viable") and races could work in similar manner as long as your goal is to make them ideal at least in some circumstance rather than making sure each race/class combo can perform every role roughly equally well (which is a misguided approach because min/maxers will only use the optimal one).

>>345127549
I miss classic EQ. P99 doesn't cut it because it's buggy, uses a database with tons of inaccuracies and most importantly, uses a client that is incompatible with the classic UI.

Too bad EQClassic died.

Wasn't Tera full of Elin initially because they had the smallest model hitbox for PvP until they removed that?

>>345129119
I remember a similar thing with Gnomes in vanilla WoW.

Elder Scrolls Online is good in this aspect, each race has it's own bonuses, not huge differences, but noticeable.

>>345124387
Ultimately the only difference was that some races had to gear more for one stat.

My Mithra could go a little easier on accuracy since she had high Dex already.

>>345129709
Not really, the TES series is one of the few where race matters very little.

TES races are more like 9 different flavours of human, unlike WoW or some other games.

Even with the minimal differences between races in WoW people complained.