Yeah, on an ideal realm where everyone wPvPs, but that is the problem, the majority on PvP realms don’t go out into the world to wPvP, or they are hugely biased to one faction, usually the horde 90:10 or worse faction split, leading to 24/7 ganking for anyone Alliance in the open world. And people wonder why the Alliance don’t wPvP, blame the horde gankers.
Arena is a competitive combat sport in that analogy
PVP, fighting over a mining node for example, is different.
One has no real lasting impact, the other is over a resource that will impact one faction by having less of it than the other, which can/could drive player behaviours, such as grouping up to control resources.
This is a 20+ year old concept and retail wow has clearly erased peoples memory of why PVP used to exist. It’s not supposed to be purely an annoyance, it’s suppose impact gameplay in a way that drives different player behaviour socially.
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Yes. Which is why the technology of “servers” doesn’t make sense anymore. One huge mega realm with smaller pockets of player balance based around location makes much more sense.
The technology Blizzard use does not support that.
Yes, it’s like one boxer in the Blue shorts taking on 7 in the Red shorts for wPvP.
I know PvP isn’t designed to be fair but come on.
Which is Why world PVP is a bad analogy as a combat sport. if you read the next paragraph you’d understand the difference.
It seems you stop reading as quickly as you transfer servers.
I have not moved any of my characters off firemaw, and they are horde.
Well no, before WoW PvP realms normalized the concept, “PvP” players were known as PK’s, player-killers, and they were always considered the most no-life, sweatiest of nerds. Like that guy in the famous South Park episode. That’s what PvPers were in the original conception of MMO.
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Well the good thing is they disabled the faction limit on PvP realms, so everyone who complains about imbalance is now free to help solve the problem on their server by making alts.
On that note, I wonder how long it takes before on PvP servers that are now fully Alliance or Horde, bored people start to make a rogue or druid alt specifically to start gank people of their own faction in their downtime.
A lot already are, well 90-99% single faction.
Berny born into Berny faction.
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Yes, but I imagine some people started there with the specific goal of being able to gank other people, when there was still another faction to gank. You couldn’t create an extra rogue on the other side without a second account.
Now as an alliance players on a 99% alliance PvP server, you can just make a Horde rogue to gank people for fun, then simply switch back to your alliance main for the raid. I think this is something that will expand in the coming months.
WoW didn’t normalise PVP. I’ve been playing MMO’s since that meant 30-50 people on a text-based RPG, on dial up internet. The PVP interactions and player drama (in character) around that where the thing that made those games great.
the “World” part of World of Warcraft is supposed to be a big deal. PVE makes the world just a series of linear events that you do to reach max level and then do instanced content.
With new world and lost ark and classic wow we saw millions of people interested in playing an MMO again (a “dead genre according to many”). But the issue is that the balance between PVP and PVE isn’t there in any of them.
We have the technology now, and we have the experience. But people still act like the way they play the game is the correct way and everyone else should join. MMO’s are about choice, and probably the only one even close to making that reality is FF14, which would probably own the gaming industry right now if they could figure out PVP in a way that integrates with the game constructively.
Even dungeons and dragons is “PVP”, the DM is what makes it compelling because it’s a live, honest interaction between people - not a scripted dragon that never changes.
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Does a 99% Alliance PvP realm with a decent population actually exist (Excluding Firemaw)? And if it did would you level a Horde there without being ganked all the time?
I and most of those on the PvE servers have not “left” anything. We rolled PvE from the start despite being called carebears and worse exactly because we did not like PvP and drama. Horde and Alliance leaving the PvP servers for other PvP servers have not really changed anything for us.
As PvP is 66:33 in favour of th Horde - has been since the sart, and I suppose will stay like this to the end of Classic, the balanced state for PvP servers is a transient state.
I play both Horde and Alliance, but I would never, ever dream of rolling on a PvP server.
I so much agree to this. And I choose PvE and the low-pop server with open eyes and free will. This is what makes me tick, but there’s no way I would enforce those choices on other players.
Indeed, you are more guilty of that kind of thinking, at least in this thread, than any other poster.
I didn’t play text based mmos, but I played Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call, both considered early "popular’ mmos, and player-killing was always a niche activity of sociopathic weirdos. The general attitude toward player-killing was expressed well in the aforementioned South Park episode, where the heroes become no-life shut-ins in order to get on a level of a player-killer.
And I don’t know what kind of DnD games you played, but the ones I play are purely cooperative affairs, where the DM creates a story that will engage and entertain the players, he doesn’t in any way play against them or they aren’t trying to beat the DM.
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Thanks, you were faster typing than me. I just type
agree
and delete what I was about to write. I too am an old D&D player 
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Choosing to play on a PVE server directly waters down the player base from a PVP standpoint. I don’t care about name-calling, but the decision to actively avoid PVP on the scale that it’s happening in classic has DIRECTLY impacted the experience, mostly of alliance players.
People are still arguing that “omg horde only gank”. Except, with a 50:50 players base, alliance didn’t queue BG’s as much as horde in s1 and s2 (which is a more fair experience).
Long Horde queue times? Alliance posting “lol serves you right for rolling the more popular faction, you deserve it, you’re a terrible person”. And this wasn’t one or 2, this was all over the forums.
50:50 player base still
Then when Horde Vs Horde was announced, the forums where filled with vitriolic alliance who thought it was a bad idea, and horde should “roll alliance if you want shorter queues”.
Then Blizz release the stats, horde Vs horde BG weekend: Short queue times, ganking reduced SIGNIFICANTLY (improving player experience, specifically for alliance players on PVP realms). Yes still, Alliance saying it’s bad and flaming the horde? Saying it Anti-Classic?
It reads like a car-accident in slow motion. it’s Trump-esque in it’s total lack of logic. But people still insist on the narrative of “horde bad, PVP bad”, then have these insane mental-gymnastics competitions.
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The DM is a player, creating obstacles for you to overcome. You both get satisfaction from it when it’s challenging and not easy. Everyone involved is happy. What happens when players do something unexpected? The DM adjust and goes with it, allowing for organic content.
PVP can be the same in MMO’s, yet people look at the opposite faction like a problem that needs to be solved instead of the potentially best content they could ever face.
On a personal level I think “PvP bad” that is why I roll PvE every time and why I would quit forced to play on a PvP server. I simply do not see any fun in ganking or being ganked, I’ll go so far as to say that it would totally ruin the game for me.
But I see and know that there’s people, and lots of them thinking PvP is fun. I have a son like that 
He also plays LoL which game I would never dream of touching.
The Horde / Alliance flaming I don’t like and never participated in as I as said play both with equal fun.
As for D&D its more like DM and players together writing a story. The DM kinda IS the world we’re moving in, not an opponenet to be overcome, but a dynamic part of the game.
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Giving ppl means to transfer characters, even paid ones, is one of the reasons why there are tons of servers problem
This has a lot of truth to it. I was originally on HW when Blizz for some inane reason enabled free transfers from the server. My guild decided to move to MR, so I followed with some of my characters. I like MR a lot don’t get me wrong, but I was very fond of HW, and Blizz’s stupid move did lead to HW practically dying, at least Horde side. The population was low to begin with, and this was the final blow.
That been said… I left some characters on HW, specifically characters that I had put some effort into and for which I therefore felt some attachment. Simply because I didn’t want to completely abandon the server and hoped that somehow it might be revitalized. I mostly play on MR now, but I do hop into HW sometimes.
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