With so many posts about people crying or being dismissive of concerns, I decided to detail the reality of pvp in a more constructive way.
I) The amount of wpvp happening right now is going to decline. Like any new content release you will have the majority of the player base showing up and then population density starts to decline until the next content release. So while on many servers population density can be an issue, it’s a temporary one.
II) faction imbalance. This one is odd to me because it should be the people in the majority faction that should have the most complaints. There’s significantly more pros than cons to being vastly outnumbered in a pvp setting (and serious pvpers will try and join servers where they are outnumbered). If you make a premade group, regardless of size, you can steamroll almost anyone in wpvp as long as you stay as mobile as possible. You will also have constant action and a much easier time ranking up.
When you are in the majority, there’s not enough enemies to go around, so you can literally spend an hour fighting over a couple 10 honor tags. It’s not fun, it makes ranking much harder, and you’re largely doing nothing.
WoW will never have faction balance though, simply because they use a two faction system. One will always become larger than the other. This is why pvp based mmorpgs use 3 factions, because no matter who the strongest faction is, the other 2 will just group up and murder you.
There is legitimate concerns about PvE, but as most content is instanced it’s not hard to group up before an instance, and even cooperate with other guilds/groups, to steamroll any resistance. That being said, if PvE is your main focus I recommend transfering to a PvE server. PvP servers are dedicated to world pvp, that’s the entire point of the server. Whether you like it or not is largely irrelevant.
This is actually why I wanted the honor system to be released in P1 (you could have phase gated the gear). Many people said it would make leveling too difficult, but that should have been the point. It would also let people understand what a PvP server actually is before they invested all their time and effort into a character to only find they hate wpvp.
III) That brings me to my last point, PvP servers. As I stated before their sole purpose is to enable the type of wpvp content you’ve seen so far. The draw for most who enjoy this type of content is the fact it’s not fair, it’s a war zone. You will never have all your cooldowns, you will never have fair match ups, you will get stomped, you will get camped, and you will find ways to survive and do the same to others.
In a bg or arena setting, the skill cap only allows you to ever simply beat the enemy team. In wpvp, you can have a 5 man wipe a 40 man raid. I don’t know if you’ve ever won a 1:8 fight, but it’s a blast, literally.
People will get super creative, they will use every potion and engineering item in the game, they will abuse game mechanics like boat respawns, anything and absolute everything to give them a leg up against often overwhelming odds… and win.
As time passes, different zones will start to have different rules. If you want to do 5-10 mans, plaguelands, if you want 40 mans, TM/BRM, if you want 1-2 mans, shimmering flats or other “unpopular” zones. There will be different type of wpvp content for whatever you feel like playing, and people who want that specific type of content will go to those specific zones. I play a on a full server, and even we don’t have constant zergs everywhere. They happen, but the vast majority of pvp is 5-10 mans.
At the end of the day you should do the type of content you want, but understand that just because you don’t like something, doesn’t mean it’s a problem that needs to be fixed. PvP servers are solely for wpvp, if you don’t like wpvp, or if wpvp isn’t what you thought it was, nothing is stopping you from transferring or rerolling on a pve server.