I know this may come across as an unpopular opinion, but let me explain before you disagree.
I am a PvPer that exclusively plays PvP servers on every game i’ve ever played that had it available since I was 9.
What I enjoy most is being the underdog. Fighting against overwhelming odds, and trying to take as many people down with me as I can (which is why i’m always solo/2s). I also enjoy competitive pvp gameplay, but my favorite experiences have always been wPvP.
I understand the frustration: the corpse camping, the unfair battles, pve being essentially inaccessible. This is universally true among almost every mmorpg with a pvp server. You sacrifice PvE for more PvP and PvP is often incredibly toxic.
But there’s a charm to it that you can’t experience anywhere else. You can build grudges with people, creating a potential nemesis or rivals, you get to know people purely through bloody chaos. You start to learn their spec, their gear, their strategies, their counters, you start to learn how to fight them as individuals, not just their class.
You can also create a story with your enemies, and that history will continue to develop and expand as you continue to play. Where you first met, what they did to you, what you did back to them, the wins and the losses. And it makes the combat feel personal. If you make a mistake, they WILL remember it, they will judge you, and they will taunt you.
Even if it’s just against a griefer or a group of griefers who goes out of their way to make your life miserable, you will find them later and you will get revenge, and it is SATISFYING.
Sometimes you will get frustrated by an enemy that always seems to win, but that just drives you to improve, to adapt, to get silly creative, and eventually overcome. It makes you look forward to your next battle, and it gives them meaning.
A lot of that is why people like server identity, and it’s why people don’t want cross server bgs.
You can get this from battlegrounds to an extent, but it becomes less about the individuals in the group, and mostly the group. It also limits the type of conflicts you can have with those people and therefore limits the crazy/funny/frustrating experiences that can happen between players. Not to mention that bgs quickly start to feel like a grind. It’s “i have to do this many bgs in this time frame”, and losing is often more a frustration with your team than your enemies. Whereas wPvP is more dynamic than that because you can’t guarantee any type of honor output, you have to adapt to where people are at and what type of wpvp content you want (solo/2 mans/3 mans/5 mans). It’s still a grind, but it’ll make you curse and laugh the entire time. It engages you in a way that BGs simply dont.
Don’t get me wrong, wPvP can be outright AWFUL, last week I was corpse camped for THREE HOURS (they had detect invis so i couldn’t even invis pot), but it’s also got those incredibly highs, where it’s outright hilarious, ridiculous, and fun.
I’m glad I got to experience wPvP again, i’ve got a ton of new memories, but i’m sad that we only got a month to experience it on this scale.