Those people who played Classic from Da y 1 can tell you how PvP servers worked out in the current age. And I was there, on a PvP server, from Day 1.
For the first couple of weeks there was world PvP, due to the high population of players. People would get characters to a certain level and make their way to the opposite faction zones and proceed to camp and kill lower level characters. The majority of them used an addon called Spy; it gave lower level characters a bit of a warning of an enemy nearby but since many of those higher level players had mounts it was nearly impossible to get away from them. And if the lowbie called for help, by the time any help arrived the ganking player had fled.
About the only place mass pvp happened was at the entry to raids, when opposing raid groups met up. And gawd help you if you were a cloth wearing because you stood no chance against a bunch of warriors. It wasn’t ‘me v you in the world’, it was slaughter, especially on overbalanced servers.
People such as the OP live in a dream world where this magical vision of a PvP server exists. The game has changed, computers are faster, the internet is faster, people have changed. And if players want pvp servers, Classic WoW is there for you to experience that. But you want it in a modern game with all the QoL and none of the choices that WM provides.
I played in pvp servers back in the day too and had great experiences. I suppose everyone sees them differently. And if you didn’t like them you wouldn’t have to join. And like you said, classic has pvp servers and they work fine. Retail can too.
I remember back when pvp servers were a thing. I was on Alliance Eredar during Legion, which was HEAVILY outnumbered by Horde. I couldn’t even use flight points the game was so unplayable despite my best efforts to find alternative ways to do my quests. Specifically I remember trying to do my quest in stormheim where you need to SLOWLY carry something over to Odin who was right next to the flight point and just getting endlessly ganked lol
I like the idea of a pvp server but really it got so bad I ended up just quitting wow until warmode was announced and that’s when I came back. A singular pvp server if unbalanced would be a hot mess probably.
No, they don’t work fine as many others have already told you. They can swing wildly out of faction balance, and with only one server players would have no choice if that happened. Blizz has not been able to correct that problem for all these years, its rather unlikely they could manage it now. Which is why they introduced warmode.
People need to realise that things like this are a player issue. If people wanted warmode to work, it would work. The same sort of things that happen on pvp-locked servers could happen on warmode, if players wanted to put in the effort. You could have guilds created for it, Discord communities that organised world stoushes, etc.
I realise Blizz has changed its mind on many things in the past, but if they could not see sufficient value, moneywise, in such a project, they wouldn’t do it. So, just either play in warmode and organise yourselves, or play in Classic on a PvP server. Both options are perfectly viable if the players choose to make them viable.
They have a stop to a faction gaining too many people in the classic servers now. Can’t imagine they can’t put that on a retail server.
I get it a lot of people had bad experiences with pvp servers and just for anyone new to the thread I’m not saying that getting rid of them was a bad idea. However Warmode isn’t a pvp server, it isn’t the same thing and a pvp server would be an option that people who’ve had bad experiences with it and never want to do it again can avoid.
It might be an unbalanced dead server with in a month and? How many bloat servers do we have that are dead that just stick around? I’m baffled by how many people in this thread, not necessarily you, have had a bad experience with pvp servers are dead set on no one else able to have the experience.
By forcibly preventing players of the dominant faction from logging in until balance is restored. This is fine for a transient mode like SoD - Blizzard has made it abundantly clear that progress is temporary and players should not expect their progress to be stored long term. It falls apart when the server IS intended for long term progress and you’re essentially preventing players from making progress because of a decision they made potentially years earlier (depending how long it takes the faction imbalance to reach critical mass).
To make sure my position is clear, I am in favor of PVP servers coming back for those that want it. Players have the ability to learn what the true experience on PVP servers is from over a decade of them being in the game; there isn’t the plausible deniability of players following friends onto a PVP server back in vanilla without any way of know how miserable their experience might become several expansions in if they happened to be on the minority faction of a heavily skewed server. For those that want PVP servers, they should exist.
I just don’t think the “restrict faction login” method of balancing the servers is a well thought out solution for intended long-term PVP servers. A possible solution might exist to the faction imbalance problem, I just don’t think what Blizzard has currently in classic is such a solution.
Era pvp cluster has been balanced since 2021 and many of the servers it comprises were well balanced from 2019-2021… 5+ years of balanced pvp servers. This is with zero management from blizzard. Only the servers that get populated with ‘pve / warmode’ players end up unbalanced because they gravitate to servers in which their faction is dominant so that they can complete their pve goals uncontested.
PvP players are happy to get ganked.
PvP players respect other good pvp players.
PvP players enjoy the 1 hour fight to get to the raid more than the raid itself.
PvP players never roll on a server in which their faction is dominant, there is no point.
PvP players will laugh when you corpse camp them and remember your name to get you back you in a few weeks.
I remember good wpvp well into TBC, even a few of the regulars I used to see out and about. SS v TM was usually good for one or two battles a night, etc.
Sure, but where’s the harm in giving people something extra to try out? You don’t have to do it and nobody’s asking for anything to be taken away from wm.
I did do it, for quite a while in Classic. I am not someone who has never tried creating and playing a character on a PvP server. I recall people saying there was a sense of danger about it; fact is, in Classic there was far more a sense of danger because levelling was tough and early on you could only take on one mob at a time because you’d die. I was generally too busy surviving some mob trying to eat my face to worry about if some higher level player was lurking around waiting for me to get engaged in the fight so they could come along and kill my character when they were weak. Which happened a fair few times. Apparently that gives some people some sort of satisfaction.
You can try it out - as I repeatedly say - by playing on a Classic PvP server in one of the variants provided. Plus you have the extra challenge of levelling in a game that is far harder than retail. There’s a challenge for you right there.
Anyhow, I’ve said my pieces, useless repeating them. Fact: I think it’s a bad idea. Opinion: I don’t think it will happen and if it did it would likely be a failure. But ultimately its not up to me, its up to Blizzard.
I think a lot of us already do play classic. I do. But I already had my fun with classic back in the day. It’s all recycled content now. I want to enjoy the new stuff blizzard puts out with a pvp server.
Classic players represent the bigger half now, and that’s important where it concerns PvP. Sorry to burst your bubble that Retail ain’t it. When it used to be it, the Retail community QQ’ed. Remember how War Mode during BFA went, and how the Alliance winked out? Started getting the 30% WM bonus while the Horde only got 10% and NO chance at Against Overwhelming Odds?
You could have seen the beginning of the end from there.
I feel like people knowingly or unknowing conspired to promote changes that push away good pvp players so that those who remain are automatically better since there is nobody good left to pvp against.
I was talking about unable to create characters on the already over populated faction, which I’ve encountered. this is literally first I’ve heard of not being able to log in. I feel there would be a lot more complaints.
Being on the losing end of PvP against someone better isn’t pleasant. It’s worse when you know it’s not a mere matter of skill. Not everyone wants to follow the FOTM meta either, especially those who just want to play their one class/spec.
It’s harder to push for a better experience with less people. I remember how sad people were about the turnout of the Stranglethorn fishing derby events. I forgot what xpac cycle(may have been after Wrath). Something that depends on mass participation hurts without mass.
So while one might get better with less around, the experience degrades. People would get bored of stomping on the same people. Always winning is just as bad as losing.
Oh yeah, I’m not against the idea of them making them again, I just don’t foresee them being very popular. Population/faction imbalance really stands with specific ruleset servers like that historically in every game I’ve played, but if that’s the sandbox people want to play in and make the most of I don’t see why anyone would be against it.
I feel like that’s an unfair comparison. Any server type that offers any appeal to a decent sized group of players that is at a 1 to 200 disadvantage is likely going to be the most popular one because all players looking for that experience have to flock to that one option. If you expand that to 20 servers, however, that would be a more interesting case study.
But that’s the whole point of this. There is a clearly a want for this type of server, and all we are asking for is 1. We don’t need 20 because we will all gather in one realm with like minded pvp players