PvP

[KiloVictor]

It's not fun to be constantly outnumbered and that's really the issue with the honor system - unbalanced pops on the PvE servers.
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Bolty & svaughn had it right in another post, that PvP *is* the future of this game. I think the counterpoint is that population imbalance is the biggest threat to the long-term survival of the game.

Blizzard's objections notwithstanding, I think the survey sites (such as woworealms.com and wowcensus.com) are a pretty good representation of what's going on. If you're lucky enough to play on a blanced server, PvP can be great fun. But getting farmed and being unable to play your character is enough to turn off even the most ardently masochistic PvPers out there, and I would bet that if this continues, it will start to take a toll on Blizz's revenues.

My bet is that they are planning for the Battlegrounds to give all the high-level players a place to PvP without interfering with other characters as they level up. But AFAIK the battlegrounds will be instanced and will require even teams on both sides, so this isn't going to work if the factions aren't balanced. One faction is going to have a set of 60s sitting around bored 'cause they can't PvP in the Battlegrounds, and woe betide the lowbies of the opposite faction that happen to be nearby.

Maybe this will all be self-correcting, as the bored high-level characters start alts on the opposing faction to even the teams. That's the best outcome that I can see; it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

It's actually fascinating to see how things develop; it seems that Blizz has thought of a lot of these issues and has an approach ready to try, but it never quite comes off the way they planned once it goes live -- take the past statements about not needing active dishonour points in the system vs. recent comments about including an anti-griefing dishonour system in future as one example. Nothing seems to quite go according to plan, but it's really interesting to watch them trying to deal with the outcomes as the players get hold of the world and do unexpected things with it.

In fact, I have to say, I get almost as much a kick out of watching Blizzard trying to ride this tiger as I do out of playing their game. I think the folks there must be living through some interesting times. :)

Kv