So, it was just a matter of choosing what story you believed. I did not play during Vanilla, I started early BC. But even then, I remember always hearing stories about griefing on PvP servers. There was at least one thread every week. With that said, a bit of forethought could have solved most these issues before they started.
However, I do think that Blizzard should offer (paid) transfers. Let the PvP servers become what they’ve always become…glorified one faction PvE servers.
Edit: spelling
Not all servers were grossly imbalanced, just like how they aren’t now. But fundamentally it’s impossible to have true balance in a 2 faction system. Even if they were exactly 50/50 there’s tons of factors that would tip them one way or another:
Time of day has pretty interesting effects on horde:alliance ratios
Amount of people actually pvping. Population absolutely does not reflect this number, you can be 75:25 and your wpvp could be 25:75. For reasons I cannot fathom, many people don’t pvp on pvp servers, they just like the fact that it makes pve harder.
Some zones have crazy advantages for one side, for instance the UC/WPL/EPL zone favors alliance heavily, whereas BRM favors horde due to how FPs are placed. As such you’re going to see higher population density for those factions in those zones because it’s more advantageous for them.
The goal isn’t perfect balance, you want one side to be the underdog and one side to the reigning champ. People gravitate to both aspects for a number of reasons. The goal is simply to keep that within healthy limits.
Mootwo! Weren’t you a shammy on Burning Blade in vanilla?
But most got there eventually. Difference is, instead of that process taking 5-10 years like it did in retail, it’ll take 1 in classic because the game has effectively been “solved”.
This is true.
These people are most likely the ones complaining the most. Most of them realistically should not be on PvP servers.
I don’t know if any kind of “healthy limit” is possible with out drastically changing the rule set of the PvP servers.
I honestly don’t even expect Classic to last more than a year. Once Naxx is out and everyone has gotten all the loot and achieved everything they didn’t get to in Vanilla when they were kids… what’s left?
Even getting HWL is going to be drastically easier with the new population sizes. It’s 15 people in top bracket on my server this week, down from like 18 on week 1 (also a good measurement of population decline for your faction).
This is probably true. At some point you’ll have maybe 10-20k really hardcore vanilla lovers and the majority will have just moved on to whatever is next.
Personally, I’m hoping that we get TBC+ instead of Classic+. I just feel like TBC was a more complete game.
Oh big deal, what is three months when the road map of classic is 2 years?
Limited free xfer is how i ended up on a dead server
No thanks
Meto plus Classic plus would be made by same type people that make retail no clue why anyone wants that
I’m sorry to hear that man, I know exactly how it feels. I’m alliance on Fairbanks (30/70 alliance to horde and one of the FOUR realms that are horde only transfers) and I hate it. I’m also primarily a PvE content raider and today we had 40 horde roaming the path to strathholm all the way from Light’s hope to the instance gate and would just sit on your body until you logged out or rezzed so they could kill you again.
Sucks to be the minority faction.
Well blizzard said they cant find pvp vendors too so … 
I have always chosen PvP servers on every MMO I have ever played. And I’ve been playing MMO’s since before WoW. I was almost always in the minority faction. It was never a problem though, it was actually very fun. I never played Vanilla, so I rolled PvP with the assumption my experience would be inline with all the many MMOs I have played in the past. From the stories I heard from friends who played Vanilla, it reinforced that thought.
I was so wrong. WoW Classic PvP servers are actually comical with how horribly implemented they are. It has reached a point that all you can do is sit back and laugh at how awful it is.
That is not a mistake. That is on purpose. That copies Vanilla. In Vanilla, Honor started aout 150 days after the game started. WSG and AV started 60 days after Honor.
And Vanilla was an incredibly successful MMO. So Classic copied Vanilla. Makes sense to me.
WoW wasn’t nearly as popular in the very beginning as it was in mid to late phase. Most people who played Vanilla never experienced the game before honor was even introduced. Not to mention it just wasn’t added because they didn’t have enough time/money to even introduce the system. It’s not because it wasn’t SUPPOSED to be part of the original game. They had to rush a whole bunch of stuff on release and is largely why Horde zones are blatantly unfinished.
But that’s irrelevant because not many people were 60 or geared even by then. In Vanilla the vast majority of people were still in the leveling process when honor was released, in Classic the majority were farming tier gear. You also have to note that vanilla had very little in the way of knowledge available to the player base. People didn’t even know what items could drop, they even thought you could get Ashbringer. Rumors and misinformation were horribly rampant, and often spread on purpose. Early Vanilla was also incredibly different than 1.12 classic. They didn’t copy vanilla. They recreated the end of it and are time gating the content.
But even then PvP servers were different because most of the pvpers came from other games, like daoc and the like, which had more much hardcore systems. They were also not many of them and they weren’t very populated. Most of the complaints were that the pvp servers weren’t punishing/rewarding enough. The faction locked combat and lack of separate pvp system made WoW a PvE centered game, even for a PvP server. You still had the people who had no idea what pvp servers were going to be like, but because of how bad information and progress was, almost none of those people had any actual time invested in their characters and it was much easier for them to start over.
For Classic, there’s no mystery. The game has been ultimately solved and you can look up any aspect of the game and get an answer (knowing what questions to ask is another story). Getting to raid progression on a character before the system is put into place that actually separates it from PvE and PvP is crazy.
I’m not sure P2 honor even really served a purpose. Perhaps to add more content to a phase to make content more consistent in this 1 month release schedule they have going. But it was incredibly short sighted as far as the consequences that would have.
Which is largely why i said the fault is on Blizzard. Had they introduced P1 honor you would have seen a drastically different server comp, as they also added MORE pvp servers because of demand. I think there’s more pvp servers than pve, and that should have raised a bunch of red flags with how truly unpopular pvp servers were and have been. People also would have been ganked/farmed from the get go and would have likely found it unplayable and rerolled to pve. The problems we’re seeing would have fixed themselves and it’s entirely on Blizzard for THEIR design decision.
It’s literally their job to maintain balance and to think of these things. You can also attribute it to the individual’s responsibility, but the sheer scale of people falling into the same trap is probably a good indication that design decisions had a huge impact on the situation, and at the very least they allowed this situation to happen.
Seriously, anyone who’s played pvp servers before should have seen this coming. It was an obvious result. The fact that Blizzard didn’t blows my mind.