In a possible blow to those who had been blaming their open-world PvP woes on Blizzard in World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery, it may just be a case of playing in a disorganized faction.
Open-world PVP has always been a big part of Classic WoW, with the lower utility offered to each class when compared to Retail, an appealing system that rewards skill and knowledge. In Season of Discovery, the new Ashenvale PvP experience has been added to this formula, allowing for huge fights between the factions (when the servers hold up).
As part of this, Blizzard made the decision to balance factions on PvP servers actively for the first time. This was designed to keep the new activities competitive and prevent highly imbalanced servers further down the line, as many saw with the original Classic in 2019.
Now, some are complaining that they are being heavily outnumbered, with the developer quick to argue that this phenomenon is purely related to player cohesion.
Season of Discovery PvP servers are almost perfectly balanced
In a tweet reply to an individual complaining of being vastly outnumbered on the Chaos Bolt server, Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield confirmed the issue was simply a case of organization.
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Your realm is perfectly factioned balanced. If no one is showing up, your faction needs to organize, simply put. On my realm horde wins most of the time. They organize better. There’s no game imbalance, there is organizational imbalance and that’s not for us to step in and fix.
— Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) December 10, 2023
The response caused some debate online, with the layering technology (where players are on the same server but invisible to each other) further muddying the waters.
In a post sharing the tweet on Reddit, many were quick to commend Greenfield for his clarity in communication. One said, “Unironically the dev we need. Can’t wait to read 51389 more posts about how BGs are broken, devs are out of touch, and that hunters are simultaneously too good and too weak.”
Others pointed to the inherent advantage that Horde players actually have in Ahenvale, which is leading to a ton of victories for the faction on many servers: “On Crusader Strike US, Horde has won most events. I’ve only personally lost 1, probably 10-1 at this point. Having the flight path to Zoram and hearth at Splintertree is a pretty good advantage.”
Blizzard has attended to Season of Discovery more closely than any game in their history. Changes have rolled out at an expedited speed, with patches and hotfixes hitting the live servers regularly. Whether they can assuage some of these concerns moving forward remains to be seen.