Those are facts, sure… but they don’t correlate or support any point you were making previously.
Blood Elves is a big detriment for anyone strictly looking to play a paladin… but by that logic, anyone looking to strictly play Shaman is forced over to Horde – This may not be an equal trade but one that is still close enough to undermine the significance of that fact.
No DKs, Monks, DHs – This applies to both factions equally so it seems irrelevant to the topic.
“Private Server Data” – The first thing that comes to mind is if p server census shows more Horde than Alliance than that already undermines your first point about Blood Elves since it demonstrably did not sway the population in the Alliance’s favor. Secondly, private servers are a sample of the ‘WoW Player Population’; it doesn’t matter if you personally weren’t counted in that sample because that’s not how averages work.
To the pay argument: There has been no ‘pay Blizzard for Vanilla’ option during the height of private servers. You can’t conclude that the people who played on private servers did so because it was free. I know many who played on private servers yet still wanted Blizzard to offer it themselves (in fact, that is what a large majority of the p server community was asking Blizzard for). I don’t know if you’ve taken a look around in the last 10 years but the subscription model for MMORPGs is antiquated. WoW maintains it because it can but anyone looking for a free MMO doesn’t have to look far. The gameplay of Vanilla is the biggest draw, not the price.
What do you mean by better zones? Contested zones? Well, since they are in fact contested, they belong to nobody. Starter zones? Can’t be serious right? You’ll only spend a couple hours there. Major Cities? Maybe. Depends on the player I guess. I like good old Org way better than SW for instance. I also dig the creepyness of UC way more than the thousand rooms in IF.
Played on Dragonmaw PvP server during vanilla. Not sure if I’ll do it again this time just because I feel like I value my play time more now. While ganking nubs in world PvP was great fun since I don’t have endless hours to play like I did back then I may end up going PvE server.
I don’t believe that it will effect the overall balance too much. I watch Esfand because I find that I like his content and that he has fun while doing it. He plays alliance and I am a die hard horde player. In the end, my suggestion to anyone worried about faction imbalance would be to either avoid streamer servers, or wait to find the most balanced server.
Levelled a Tauren shaman on Ursin, a legacy PVP server. So you got ganked, sometimes repeatedly unless you logged out and got payback on another toon. That’s a PVP server for you, back when you could not transfer from a pve to a PvP realm, when you could not have characters of the opposing factions on the same server.
And, it wasn’t uncommon that raid groups would be heavily delayed by being camped at the instance entrance for MC & BWL
My server is so imbalanced I have to log off. The horde literally control every zone, level 60’s killing low levels to the point they have no choice but leave the game or sit in a capitol hub. I would say the server is 30/70 and very few level 60 alliance. I would love to server transfer or faction change. i have spent a lot of time invested in this character just to not be able to play.