That’s it.
I never see the most obvious answer being addressed in any of the wpvp criticism threads.
Back in Vanilla, even on the most unbalanced pvp servers, it was never this bad, simply because there weren’t enough players to do it. Zones are so huge that even on a high pop Vanilla server, world pvp would never completely shut down one faction.
High pop in Vanilla was 3k players- let’s say the imbalance was 2k Alliance, 1k Horde. Out of those two thousand, maybe 1k would wpvp at the same time. The others would quest, raid, etc. And out of those 1k doing wpvp, only 1/2-3/4 would be organized enough to shut down entire quest hubs and zones at a time. Sure, a popular zone like Tarren Mill or BRD would be a gankfest, but there were still places a player could go and quest without an entire 40 man gank raid camping you.
In Classic, high population servers are way, way above 3k. An imbalanced pvp server is facing thousands of opposing faction players. Not about 1k, spread out all over the world. THOUSANDS. More than enough for even half of the opposition to have the capability to shut down every major flight path and zone.
I don’t know how Blizzard didn’t see this coming before rolling out phase 2. They refuse to release their internal population numbers but it’s obvious to us, the players, that pretty much every server is overpopulated. You can’t quest anywhere without a dozen people camping mobs. Gathering professions are a joke, as there are bots and campers on every spawn point.
Who thought world pvp would be any different?
So please, the next time someone comes here to vent their frustration at Blizz, to complain about a very legitimate issue on pvp servers, don’t mock them. Remember how frustrated you were when you tried to finish a quest and it took you over 2 hrs to kill 5 mobs because there were 10 people there all trying at the same time. Remember how you rode through an entire zone looking for ore/herbs and never saw a dot on your map, or as soon as you did, saw a character materialize right in front of it because someone has the spawn time memorized and a character logged at that very spot.
The POPULATION is the issue, not people rolling pvp and not knowing any better. It’s an issue on PVE servers as well, just in a different way.
The game is almost broken for a lot of people due to overpopulation, and that’s on Blizzard. Many people transferred multiple times before launch to try and avoid it and it still happened.
Stop blaming the players.