Right now, if you’re playing World of Warcraft: Forever in North America and want to make a Horde character on the PvP realm, you can’t.
Instead, you get all the way through character creation only to be met with a message reading, “This faction is currently unavailable on this ruleset due to population imbalance.” This happens on both the regular PvP realm and the RP PvP realm (I tested it).
You can still play a Horde character on a normal or RP Realm. And you can still join one of the two PvP realms; you just have to roll a human, night elf, gnome, dwarf, or Alliance skyborne.
What’s happened is that there are far too many Horde characters on the PvP realms right now in North America, while the same problem is happening in reverse on the EU side where there are too many Alliance. There are so many of the dominant faction that players of the lesser-played group have been up in arms in community spaces all week, complaining that the imbalance is making the game nigh-unplayable for them. They keep getting overwhelmed by groups of the enemy faction and killed while questing.
Alliance players are also complaining that this problem is dovetailing with a different recent problem (low experience point gain from dungeons) to make it so it’s impossible to level up anywhere: dungeons are deeply inefficient, but out in the world they just get killed again and again:
To be clear for those who don’t play, in WoW, being on a PvP realm means PvP is on all the time. Any member of the opposing faction can attack you whenever, and vice versa. There are some areas in retail designated as “Sanctuaries” where PvP is turned off, but those don’t exist in Forever. And each race’s starting zone is guarded by very high-level NPC guards so that characters at level 1 don’t have as much to worry about, but it’s still possible for a strong enough enemy to break in and cause issues. You’re really not safe anywhere. You could be chilling at a camp and a rogue could pop out of stealth behind you and destroy you before you have a chance to blink. An army of the enemy faction could invade your capital city. Some people are sickos and love this, and more power to them! That’s what PvP realms are for!
Still, even if you opt in, feeling outnumbered literally all the time sounds like it really sucks. And some are reporting that this issue is compounded by the new “layering” system still being a little goofy, resulting in Alliance characters ending up in zones with tons of Horde players and no Alliance players, and thus having no backup when such attacks happen. There’s also a conspiracy theory of sorts that Horde players are using free trial accounts to bolster the Horde population somehow and outnumber Alliance even further:
On the other hand, though, a lot of other community members are responding to these numerous complaints by reminding people that they chose to roll characters on a PvP server in the first place. Dying frequently to other players is literally how the game works. If they don’t like it, non-PvP servers are right there.
You can even go back as far as one month ago, before Forever launched, to find people warning one another about the struggles of making characters on a PvP server in the first place:
The result now is that Blizzard has announced it’s adjusting character creation to block players from making new characters on whichever side’s numbers are too low at the moment, which means Horde for all PvP in North America and Alliance for EU RP-PvP only. In the post, Blizzard confirms that the faction balance is off by 55/45 in the “most extreme” split it’s noticed, and that the trial account problem is not having any impact on the imbalance. But even though 55/45 doesn’t sound like much, it’s “not as close as we want it to be” and is clearly causing some problems. The devs are also making adjustments to how player population on layers works across the board, but exaggerating that adjustment on PvP servers to help even things out.
So PvP should, if all works well, start looking a little better in the coming days and weeks. And if it doesn’t, come join us on the normal realms. You can play whatever faction you want and still opt into PvP when you like, while serenely questing away unbothered the rest of the time. We’re having a great time over here.
