Population mismanagement (server sizes, faction balance, resource availability, etc) has been the single biggest mistake in Classic’s execution, and I hope the dev team has realized this as well and is working out solutions for TBC Classic.
Server populations and the faction system underpin most of the game’s core mechanics (in older expansions at least, like TBC), and when they are broken, the game as a whole is broken. Left unchecked, TBC will essentially launch with one faction for both PVP and PVE. World of Warcraft is the story of both the Horde and the Alliance, and in the modern era of min-max gaming Blizzard is going to have to intervene with changes to prevent TBC Classic from being DOA. I eagerly await the mobs of Horde opposition below.
Meh. Let people play what they want. If you don’t like min-maxers, don’t group up with them. 75% of the ‘problems’ in Classic are basically down to the fact that PvP servers exist to begin with. Kill those, and you kill most of the problems.
No, most of the game is PvE, and the PvP is a bolt on that some people have claimed is the ‘real’ game. Then they cried when there was too much PvP on their PvP servers, or when people PvPed differently from how they wanted, or when PvP inconvenienced their PvE content, or when PvP stripped their world buffs, or when…
The game will LITERALLY DIE if sweaty PvP servers aren’t balanced!!! Nevermind that PvE servers are a thing, that Alliance congregation on “safe” Alliance-heavy servers aren’t a thing, that flying mounts are a thing. The game will DIE.
Cant lie, the problems really are PvP server related most of the time. The whole racials things and pop balance is of no concern to us carebears enjoying our playtime on Pagle.
Yall PvP folks need to pull yourselves together out there man
Simple fix… dont join a pvp server if you dont want to Pvp… you seem like your a pve’er im not… i like to pvp. Unfortunately the server i started on had 1 guild that raided when i needed a raid time. wanted to transfer to west cost but blizz locked all the ones down with a balanced faction that i wanted to transfer to so i had to go pve…which isnt as fun… everyone has to do whats best for them. I guess. But Personally i want pvp. and dont even bother with world buffs… it wasnt a thing in vanilla… only thing its good for is speed runs.
Honestly, as someone who levelled chars on retail and a bit on classic on pve servers (before the war mode changes) , PVP is honestly the best way to play WoW.
Once you get your first dopamine rush on killing the enemy, and the sweet +20 honor, There’s really no way to go back to a pve server without it feeling like playing in a super padded weenie hut jr. There’s no danger, or threat when running through enemy territory, just mobs.
I will agree tho the sweaties who no life WoW and bask in buffs, minmax and wallow about ‘muh parses’ or screech about being dispelled/killed because they’ll kill a raidboss 10 secs slower are the worst, and they exist in pretty much in all servers.
And with balancing, unless Blizz goes out of their way to make Classic like Runescape and making it Classic 2.0/Old school and adding some QoL updates and balance tuning, the pvp tryhards are gonna mass delete migrate to horde for belfs.
You don’t need to play on a PVP server to experience the effects of faction imbalance. Instant BG queues for Alliance due to being outnumbered have led to some extremely toxic metas that affect both PVP and PVE servers, for example. Not to mention PVE servers still have open-world PVP objectives and minigames. The outnumbered faction has no way of engaging with that content except to get repeatedly slaughtered with no realistic way of fighting back because, again, the game was built around the faction system and doesn’t work when the factions are dramatically imbalanced.
Eh. I’ve tried PvP before, and never gotten a dopamine rush from it. I spend most of my time solo, and I don’t want to deal with other crap while I’m questing, or farming scourgestones, or any of that. That’s not fun, it is just layers of annoyance. Only reason I queued for AV is because I wanted a frost wand from the quest reward to use in AQ40, because the other two good ones are a drop in DM:N (off one of the bosses most people want to leave alive for tribute), or one from a world boss, and there is no way a Warlock is going to get the drop from Azuregos over a Frost Mage. I’ve done AV, got 109 HKs in that one instance, and… can honestly say I’m done with PvP until Wrath, when I’ll at least get in some raids to do For the Horde achievements.
PvP is not most of the game;
Grinding is most of the game
Farming is most of the game
Collecting items in the open world is most of the game
Leveling up is most of the game (Or used to be in vanilla back when it took us a year to hit 60 on average)
Most of the game is vs the environment or the system, Be it the Auctionhouse environment so we can get our consumes or the actual world to go get the items to make consumes to sell. Be it doing the raid and selling a BoE from Gbank or Grinding the gold to buy the item. Even PvP gear requires an ammount of gold you can not mathmatically achieve via ONLY pvp (100ish G for full GM gear + another 30-100g for wep + enchant at R14).
There are PVE rewards in TBC for holding the WPVP objectives which, as any reasonable person has noticed so far in Classic, will lead to even PVE players engaging with the content. I think your personal distaste for PVP is clouding your judgement here.
Outnumbered factions will have limited or no access to large swaths of TBC content unless Blizzard directly intervenes to prevent it.
Funnily enough, most of the private servers, or at least the most successful ones, were only PvP and it was really all fine.
Private servers handled changes and population better than an indi multi dollar company like Blizzard. Imagine
