World of Warcraft: Forever PvP is very old-school on purpose. A recent Game Informer interview has confirmed the news that Blizzard is locking each character on the PvP ruleset to one faction. Horde or Alliance. You cannot have both horde and alliance characters on the new mega-server. That is how PvP realms worked at launch of classic too. If you wanted to play another faction you had to swap realms. Patch 3.2 opened both factions on modern realms. Classic dropped the lock just before Wrath. Forever puts it back on the PvP ruleset because there is no server list to hide on.
Warcraft Forever goes by rulesets for who you play with, not realms. Normal, PvP, Roleplay at launch. Hardcore later. You do not transfer off a stacked faction by picking "the other PvP server." There is one PvP bucket. If anyone can park an alt on the opposite team, that alt scouts STV, calls the raid in Discord, and walks back to the main. The lock is how Blizzard keeps that from being free.
Balance is the other half. The Deep Dive panel said Forever will use systems like Season of Discovery. On SoD PvP realms, when one faction ran away with the population, character creation for that side closed until the split recovered. Existing characters kept playing. New rolls on the fat side stopped. Forever has not printed the ratio. SoD is the template.
Skyborne does not dodge this rule either. Windshaper Skyborne are Horde. High Order Skyborne are Alliance. The new race is still a faction pick right at character creation. Cross-faction grouping stays off. Normal and RP rulesets were not described with the same one-faction sentence in the interview, so we will see how that rolls out.
The beta is today after the 10:30 a.m. PDT Q&A. Cap for level at the start is 20. The PvP ruleset character create screen is the first place this lock will be real. Ask in the stream whether the SoD creation freeze is on from day one or whether the first week is unrestricted while layers fill.
November 4 is still the live date. Ranked PvP and honor ranks sit in later design talk. The faction lock is a create-screen rule, not a bracket rule. Pick wrong and your PvP character lives on that side until you roll another one.
If your guild is 80 percent one faction, the lock does not fix your queue. It stops you from solving it with a scout toon. The SoD-style freeze is the tool meant for the population graph. Watch whether that freeze hits beta or waits for launch.
Are you rolling PvP Alliance or Horde first, knowing the other color needs a second character? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Continue reading on Gamefragger:
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World Of Warcraft Forever Is Confirmed For November 4, With Classic+ Beta Next Week