While World of Warcraft is known for intense player-versus-player (PvP) interactions on PvP realms, World of Warcraft: Forever appears to have had a serious problem.
Alliance players have taken to the forums and Reddit to discuss their issues with PvP realms post-launch. One thread on r/classicwow goes in depth on what was going wrong here. According to the poster, the increased layer sizes have put more people in Azeroth than ever before.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but the Horde-to-Alliance ratio appeared to be 60:40 at that time, creating waves among the Alliance faction.
Server-wide faction balance, a 50/50 split, would normally combat this issue. WoW: Forever, however, appears to have allowed one faction to lean more than the other. Horde is now overpowering the sheer number of Alliance by allegedly 50%, meaning the game was nearly unplayable for Alliance on any PvP server.
Alliance Players Report Increasingly Difficult PvP Experience
The original poster states,
“You are basically surrounded 24/7, and usually blown up 5v1 every few minutes of gameplay at best. And I get it, the spawns are so bad I get you don’t need the additional competition from the opposing faction.”
Alliance Players Report Increasingly Difficult PvP Experience
Another post from the Blizzard forums highlights the same issue, saying that Alliance players were quitting the PvP server “en masse” due to the severity of the imbalance. In another thread, the player says they couldn’t even get through killing a single mob without getting ganked, rendering the game virtually unplayable if you decided to roll Alliance this time around.
The original poster went as far as to say,
“People aren’t gonna stick around and WoW-F is going to go down the same route as classic where PvP realms became horde PvE realms. We are seriously gonna do this AGAIN? after 20 years?”
Blizzard has come to the rescue, however, as during the November 9 hotfix, the devs lowered the population in overcrowded zones. In a thread from Kaviax on the Blizzard forum, states,
“We’ve made this an even bigger change on the PvP ruleset, following feedback from players that they felt overcrowded in several places. We will continue to monitor how zones feel and make further adjustments as necessary.”
Kaivax goes on to say,
“To better set the stage for the neck-and-neck conflicts we all want, we’ve adjusted the character creation system to better recognize the overall state of faction balance in each region’s PvP rulesets, rather than what may feel like snapshots of points in time. Our goal is to bring things as close to a 50/50 faction balance as possible.”
It’s good to know Blizzard is listening to player feedback and rolling out fixes quickly, as this issue was causing a major uproar and almost rendering Alliance unplayable on the PvP ruleset.
