Ranking seems like running toward an invisible finish line. You always hear someone say "I hope I got enough honor this week to go to the next rank." No one knows until they cross it.
 

Aren't the objectives placed an equal distance from both the horde and the alliance? (if anything the stables is closer to the alliance start point than the farm is to the horde judging by the number of times that the stables is assulted first)?

I'm not quite sure how AB can be slanted 1 way or the other???

Can someone explain the disadvantage the alliance has in AB?
 

I wish I was in your battlegroup . . . on my battlegroup Horde loses at pretty much everything. Before cross server BGs Horde on my server generally won WSG and AB, but lost AV. Now we just lose everything. In AB and WSG its always horde pug vs. tier 2 alliance guild group, and that's just ugly.

As to the question at hand, I think it has a lot to do with population pressure. Horde on most servers have low populations compared to Alliance, so a larger number of Alliance have more experience coordinating in 40 man raids. Horde have a harder time getting that many people together, so have more experience running 5-20 man groups. Thus on the smaller BGs the horde have an advantage, while on AV the alliance has an advantage.

Maybe . . .
 

The flags in AB are not an equal distance from each base. The lumber mill flag is 10 to 15 yards closer to the horde side. The mine might be closer to alliance but I am not sure. The lumber mill however is strategically better then the mine because from its over look you can see attackers on the blacksmith, farm, and stables. You can’t see any other flags from the mine. Now the 10 to 15 yards is not super important. It is not far enough to cap it before alliance arrives at the start of the game. Interrupting a flag capture is fairly easy. No denying however it is a small advantage to the horde to arrive first.

The stable flag is closer to the alliance base than the farm flag to the horde base. This gives alliance the opportunity to get the first points in the game. I am not sure if it is this or another game mechanic that gives the alliance an advantage in a very rare circumstance. If both teams have enough current points and enough flags to reach 2000 with the next point tick the Alliance always wins. I think it is just the game checking alliance points first and not who got point first in the game but don’t know for sure. This rare event happened to me twice in AB while going to exhaulted. One time we both had 1980 point with each having 2 flags and the other one in the process of being claimed by the horde but the cap not complete. The other time the horde held 3 flags with 1990 points and the alliance had 2 flags with 1990 flags. In both cases the alliance won, the second case being the more unfair case. I searched for more info and what I could find all indicated alliance wins “ties”.

Paladins make great flag defenders. I single paladin can hold off the entire horde side from a cap with the use of bubbling for longer than it takes anyone to ride from the other 3 closest flags. Defending though is boring so the offensive powers of the shaman end up helping the horde side in AB more than the defensive powers of the paladin.
 

I've managed to play all three of these within the last few months and I'll give you some of my thoughts on why horde wins WSG and AB and loses AV. I play horde and we almost always win all 3 bgs. The hardest for us to win is AV.

WSG - This is about staying together in a zerg group. There are counters to the zerg, but it's hard to pull off and the horde is usually very disciplined about this (unless the players are total noobs or rerolled allies). Once a person has seen the zerg win quickly, they will stick with it. Also, shaman AOE slow vs bubble is no contest IMO...I will take the slow any day of the week.

The reason the zerg usually works is that players are using "aimed fire" which means they fight something until it's dead and then move onto another target. Under these conditions, you use Lanchester's square law which says that assuming rough parity among the qualities of the players' equipment, the power of your group is proportional to the SQUARE of the size of the group, so if you do an 8-2 or 7-3 offense/defense split, your middle zerg force is only about 2/3 or 1/2 as powerful (64/100 or 49/100) as the 10 man zerg. You should get crushed almost every time by the zerg. (Luck and coordination don't make this a lock... and sometimes both FC's get past each other then the stupid allies jump on top of that ledge then you have to cheat and go up there and get them... bleh :P) So, I think the horde wins with the zerg in WSG. The games I've lost are usually those where the allies zerg and we don't.

AB - The horde advantage is that they start near the LM-Farm-BS triangle. Basically in AB you don't have enough people to protect all of your nodes vs the entire enemy army all the time. This means you have to be able to move troops from place to place quickly to stop any large attacks. You also need to be able to send the right number of people (like 1-2 more than the attackers) to stop a smaller attack. To do this, you need to a) be able to see the enemy early, and b) quickly get to wherever you need to go to help out. So you need good LOS and close nodes. The only triple that fits this description is LM-BS-Farm. Stables-BS-LM is not close since you have to cross that river or go the long way between the BS and stables. Stables-BS-Mine doesn't have good as good LOS as LM so it takes longer to find out who's coming and how many so you can't defend as well. The terrain is the horde advantage.

AV - Allies have a terrain advantage here, and I think horde has the +2 wolves advantage in the final chamber...but I'm not sure if that's correct. The 2nd to last horde graveyard (FWGY) is totally undefendable...it's in an open field. Numbers are all that matter here. (See Lanchester's square law above.) The allies can also skip most of the horde shopkeepers and go from FWGY to the two towers directly, and then to the RH. OTOH, the 2nd to last ally GY (SP) is protected by a pass, and the horde is usually too stupid to send a lot of people around the back to take it, so it's a meatgrinder. Then, the horde gets to fight across a bridge protected by archers in towers and NPCs on the other side, and the ally towers and a lot of the other NPCs in front of the final building. All of this means it should take the horde more time to get to the final base.

Most of the games I've been in the allies have lost because they screw around with Galv/IB. If allies wanted to win in 15-20 minutes, they would rush EVERYONE (yes EVERYONE!!!) to FWGY. Ignore IB, (Maybe send 1 to SF.) FWGY is totally undefendable and the horde might have 5 people back there. So assume you send 35 people (because 5 are always late or idle farming rep/honor) and 30 get to FWGY since some die and get stopped at IB. Take it and leave 10 and send 20 to RH. Maybe send a few into each tower and 15 get to RH and you take it and sit there. Anyone who dies is now on D in SP (and since the horde goes for SH and dicks around there for 5-10 mins they won't be at SP that quickly)... Then it's a race except the allies have the final graveyard and have taken down the final towers, and the horde is still screwing around with SP and maybe gone over the bridge to kill all of the NPCs near the ally base. There are risks, however since if the horde does take SP early it can go either way, but usually the horde won't rush SP.

And you might think that if the allies did this the horde would actually send people back to D and send the allies back home, but sadly if the allies start taking graveyards early, the horde just starts screaming at each other for people on D to "take this back" and "take that back"...so pretty much if we don't hold the allies at IB early we lose. And so the horde can only really win in AV if the the allies are stupid and the horde is smart at the same time. If the allies are smart or the horde is stupid, the allies should win.
 

I think it's generally because Alliance has more "Honor farmers" than Horde, which hurts a lot more in WSG and AB, but can be absorbed in AV due to greater numbers.
 

At Sergeant you aren't competeing for honor points yet. So at the low ranks it's just a flat amount you need. I think rank 6 is where you start competing with other players, since only a certian percentage of the server can be knight or above.

I've found as a PUGger, it's easier to get honor in the non-double honor BGS, since during double honor weekend, it's full of set teams who refuse to fight set teams and just roll pugs. But if on AB weekend I go to WSG, I have a lot better chance of winning, and get more rep and honor per hour than getting rolled by premades. But I'm horde.

Curiously, I'm in drinkitt's battlegroup (7) and I find alliance wins a lot in AB. On our horde we have either kids who don't listen, or kids who just complain and tell people they suck instead of offering leadership. I'm thinking about leasing a vent server, it will still be pugs from my server but it will be a little better than the way it is now.