// KOTAKU — GAMING
Players Say World Of Warcraft: Forever’s PvP Realms Are Super Lopsided Right Now, And Blizzard Is Finally Stepping In
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.
Is this what my pvp realm experience is going to be like? byu/Wawaritas inclassicwow
Way things are going I expect a mass alliance PVP exodus in 2-3 days byu/Backslicer inclassicwow
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:
Can't Level Past 30 as Alliance on PVP Realm byu/redlow0992 inclassicwow
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: