WoW Forever: harder to roll the bigger faction on PvP

Blizzard has changed how WoW Forever decides when to limit new characters on the PvP rulesets. In a post on the official forums, community manager Kaivax said character creation now looks at the overall faction balance across each region's PvP rulesets, rather than at what he called snapshots of points in time.

The goal is a split as close to 50/50 as possible. According to Kaivax, even the most extreme case in any region is currently at roughly 55/45, which he said is not as close as the team wants. In the short term it will become increasingly difficult to create characters on the more populous faction. In Europe that is currently the Alliance on Roleplay-PvP; in North America it is the Horde on the PvP rulesets. Blizzard added that the sides may flip as players settle.

Kaivax admitted that it can be frustrating not to be able to start a specific faction at a given moment, but called it a necessary trade-off for the long-term health of the ruleset, especially now, while guilds are being founded and rivalries are forming. The post does not say how strict the limit is or how long it will last.

Answering players who blamed trial accounts for the gap, Kaivax said Blizzard looked into it in detail and found no evidence that trial characters had any impact. The 55/45 figure, he explained, counts the active logged-in population across all levels over a set period of time.

Before launch, Blizzard had already said that each PvP ruleset keeps its own faction balance and that it might restrict a faction that grew too strong. If you are still choosing where to play with friends, it is worth comparing the rulesets and settling on a faction before you log in.