Horde characters make up 58.6% of the US PvP ruleset in WoW: Forever on aotc.gg’s population tracker, against 41.4% Alliance, when we checked at 10:16 PM ET on November 8. A Blizzard developer said before launch that each ruleset is “aiming to be 50/50”. But aotc.gg is a fan tracker, two others show a much smaller Horde lead, and Blizzard has published no numbers of its own.
Three fan trackers put US PvP between 52% and 59% Horde
All three agree that Horde leads on US PvP. They disagree on how far:
- aotc.gg: 58.6% Horde across about 406,000 characters, the largest sample of the three, on November 8.
- Classic Armory: 54.2% Horde across 43,623 characters in its November 8 snapshot, after 52.6% of 41,620 on November 7 and 56.9% of 28,365 on November 5.
- WoWCensus: 52% Horde across 204,391 characters, from in-game /who samples, scanned November 8.
Outside US PvP they don’t even agree on who is ahead. On EU PvP, aotc.gg shows 56% Horde while WoWCensus shows 62% Alliance. On US Roleplay PvP, aotc.gg shows 55% Horde while WoWCensus shows 63% Alliance. The Classic Armory census we covered on November 7 had Horde at 54.5% across all rulesets, though its November 8 snapshot of 411,826 characters has that down to 50.4%. aotc.gg has Horde at 55% across all of the US.
None of the three counts players online, accounts or layers
aotc.gg carries its own warning on the page: “These numbers are not the live in-game population.” It says it is still scanning, so the figures “only cover the characters we’ve found so far.” It also can’t see anyone below level 10, because “Blizzard only exposes characters from level 10.” Its “Active last 7 days” figure is 100%, which tells you nothing in a game that launched on November 4.
WoWCensus says the same of its data: “Counts are observed characters, not players online.” So a 59% share of characters is not proof of 59% of the people in Ashenvale tonight. No tracker measures individual layers, which is where players actually run into each other.
Blizzard promised populations “closer together”, enforced by locks
Blizzard’s October 22 ruleset post says Forever “will include systems intended to help keep Horde and Alliance populations closer together”, similar to Season of Discovery, “where new character creation could be temporarily limited for a faction when additional balance support was needed.” On the PvP ruleset, an account can only have characters on one faction.
The stronger wording came on Episode 6 of the official WoW: Forever podcast, published October 29. Asked about faction locks on Roleplay PvP, a developer said the balance logic runs per ruleset and “each individual rule set” is “aiming to be 50/50.” A second speaker added that if it tips too far, “the majority faction will just be locked basically all the time.”
Blizzard’s support article says creation “will be temporarily restricted for the dominant faction” when one side is “significantly more dominant”, without saying what that threshold is. A Blizzard forum representative confirmed on October 29 that “Customer Support is unable to unlock this manually.” We found no Blizzard statement promising balanced layers or balanced numbers of players online.
Players reported Horde PvP both open and locked on November 8
Blizzard doesn’t publish the lock’s status, so the best evidence is players trying it. On the US forums on November 8, one player wrote “I just made a horde RP-PvP and horde PvP in my testing” at 1:40 PM ET, and another replied three minutes later: “I just tried to make a horde on PvP, says population imbalance.” Later that day a third said they and a friend had to roll on the PvE ruleset “because Horde is locked on the PvP server.”
Some players claim Horde players are using free trial codes to park level 1 Alliance characters and open Horde slots. One forum post describes it as “make a level 1 park it and never play it.” We could not verify this, and other players dispute it. Any such characters would be invisible to trackers that start at level 10, and Blizzard has not said whether its lock counts them.
Alliance players report camps in Ashenvale, others say zones look even
“My friends and I were literally camped in Ashenvale for over 45 MINUTES,” one Alliance player wrote on November 7, in a thread that has passed 500 replies. Another warned on November 8 that “literally every relevant zone is just mobile kill squads of Horde.”
Not everyone sees it. “I’m leveling as horde on PvP and I’ve seen a ton of alliance,” one r/classicwow commenter wrote. Requests split between keeping the lock on, lifting it, and adding faction login queues or layers balanced 1:1, and across eight faction threads on Blizzard’s forums, nearly 1,200 posts, we found no staff reply.
Blizzard raised dungeon kill XP 50% on November 8
One change Blizzard did make this weekend bears on the same complaint, since dungeons are one way to level away from contested zones. “Thx for nerfing dung XP,” one player on EU PvP wrote after describing being outnumbered in Shimmering Flats. Community manager Kaivax posted on November 8 that a hotfix at about 11:05 AM PST “increased kill experience in dungeons by 50%, so it feels better to go back in for more runs.” Blizzard did not tie the change to faction balance.
It follows two beta changes in Blizzard’s development notes: on October 1, dungeon quests were cut to “50% less extra experience beyond normal quest values”, and on October 8, kill XP in dungeons rose by “approximately 20%.” Blizzard’s next planned hotfixes on Tuesday, November 10 cover Hunter pets, Warlock Voidwalkers, Affliction Warlocks and Enhancement Shamans, with nothing listed on faction balance.
Current faction balance is 41% to 59% [A/H] on US-PVP
byu/eulersheep inclassicwow
