When I first installed Classic I heard that Alliance was popular with kids/casual players because of night elves and humans. I was 19 at the time and wasn’t really interested in playing with the same people I’d avoided from xbox when trying Halo. Whether this was true or not is irrelevant since I played horde anyway. It was a coin toss really.
So i played horde for the first 5/6 years of WoW along with my friends from real life. Then i swapped to Alliance for 2 expansions while it was popular to PVP on Alliance and my friends played the game less and less. I found teams easily though. Then it started dying down again and getting teams was harder. People weren’t interested in PVP and basically every active Alliance server was PVE and Alliance dominated.
So I moved back to horde because:
A) Alliance didn’t seem interested in PVP
B) Playing on PVE servers was boring since you couldn’t even contest nodes in the open world or fight people
C) Aesthetically I liked the horde better.
D) There just seemed to be more active players on the horde doing content that I was interested in.
None of this has changed in the years since and it remained the same for my purposes in Classic - Lop-sided PVP participation didn’t negatively affect either faction, as each faction pvp was competing against each other for ranking points. The issue in TBC is that unranked-PVP participation is required for an Arena player to get optimal gear, which is something they removed in later expansions. That imbalance in PVP participation then becomes an issue, while it wasn’t previously, because both faction compete against one another, not just against each other.
After 15 years of PVP players migrating to Horde, the non-PVP interested players have migrated to PVE servers to play Alliance. If these people don’t want to PVP then they shouldn’t be forced to.
However - if best in slot gear for raiding was Honor gear, this would be an entirely different story. For over a decade, PVP players have needed to raid to get gear that is competitive in PVP, while Blizzard have made it clear that PVP gear should not be optimal in PVE. This is not new. But now PVE players are preventing PVP players from playing the game optimally - This isn’t intentional but seems like something that should obviously be fixed.
But no. Instead we have grown adults throwing around insults like they’ve just found out their childhood bully is in prison. Wishing terrible things on total strangers who don’t interact with them and wont change their experience in the slightest.
I’ve stopped playing BG’s altogether because its a monumental waste of time. Instead I’m getting PVE geared and jacking up the resilience gems on the gear to make up for the off-pieces being more DPS focussed. At the end of the day it isn’t stopping me PVP’ing but it makes the game worse overall for a large number of players. I intended to do all content regardless.
The point is that everything in WoW is supposed to be optional, like any MMO. You can quest, collect stuff, make money, do dungeons, raid, pvp, etc. - And that’s fine… people can do whatever they want to within the game.
Except it doesn’t work that way, because doing PVP to get PVP gear requires people to opt in. If it was just Arena, that would be fine. Horde/Alliance doesn’t affect that - it’s just a gladiator pit where they throw 2 teams of people to battle it out. Instead battlegrounds are the source of the items they need and that’s broken due to nearly 2 decades of slow player migration.
Just add merc mode and be done with it. There is a worrying parallel between people who are against making the game playable for the PVP players base and the endless reddit threads where Americans have no problem with poor people suffering due to lack of socialised healthcare.
We’re all just people at the end of the day - stop making life so bloody hard for each other. The real world is a pain in the but at the best of times, leave the toxicity out there and enjoy some classic WoW together.