THE WOW FOREVER COLLECTION · DISPATCH · RESEARCH CHECKED NOVEMBER 9, 2026
Short answer: the PvP ruleset in WoW Forever leans Horde, and the Alliance players on it are loudly unhappy. The most-quoted fan tracker had US PvP at 58.5% Horde on Monday morning, though other trackers measure it as low as 52%, and none of them can see the layer you're actually standing in. Horde creation on PvP is still locked much of the time, a new thread claims players are getting around the lock with throwaway Alliance characters on trial accounts, and Blizzard hasn't said a word about any of it since launch. If you haven't picked a ruleset and you want to play Alliance, read the PvE section before you roll.
How the lock is supposed to work
The rules haven't changed since Blizzard announced them on October 22. On the PvP ruleset, Forever "will include systems intended to help keep Horde and Alliance populations closer together, similar to the approach introduced in Season of Discovery, where new character creation could be temporarily limited for a faction when additional balance support was needed." The developers said on the sixth Forever podcast that balance is tracked per ruleset and aims for 50/50.
Blizzard's support article on character creation, updated over the weekend, puts the two key rules plainly: "In the PVP ruleset, you cannot have characters of both factions simultaneously," and "if one faction is significantly more dominant than the other, character creation will be temporarily restricted for the dominant faction." It doesn't say how big the gap has to be or how long a lock lasts.
Since launch night, when "This faction is currently unavailable on this ruleset due to population imbalance" became the most posted error on the forum (we covered that in our launch night recap), the lock has opened and closed without warning. Players report getting Horde characters made at odd hours. One player in the "Do NOT roll PvP Ruleset" thread wrote on November 9 that it is "usually Horde locked" and that it took them 8 hours of trying on Saturday night. A volunteer forum MVP on the EU forums, not a Blizzard employee, told locked-out players that the locks "get auto adjusted based on if players join the weaker unlocked side" and open "at random times with no set intervals." That matches what players see, but Blizzard hasn't confirmed it.
What the trackers show
Blizzard publishes no faction numbers, so everything here comes from fan sites, and they disagree.
| Tracker | Region and ruleset | Horde share | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| aotc.gg | US PvP | 58.5% of about 406,000 characters | November 9, morning UTC |
| aotc.gg | EU PvP | About 56% of about 447,000 characters | November 9, morning UTC |
| Classic Armory | US PvP | 56.9%, then 52.6%, then 54.2% | November 5, 7 and 8 (via Output Lag) |
| WoWCensus | US PvP | 52% of about 204,000 seen | November 8 (via Output Lag) |
aotc.gg reads characters from Blizzard's armory data and says on its own page that its numbers "are not the live in-game population" and that only characters from level 10 up are counted. WoWCensus samples /who results, which is closer to who is online but only covers what its users see. Output Lag, which compiled the figures on November 8, found the trackers even disagree on direction in places: WoWCensus had EU PvP and US RP-PvP leaning Alliance while aotc.gg had both leaning Horde.
So the honest read is this. US PvP is Horde-majority by every count, somewhere between a mild lean and close to 60/40. The ruleset-wide number is also not what decides your evening. Layers are, and no tracker measures layers.
What Alliance players are describing
"The Faction Imbalance in WoW Forever PvP Is MASSIVE" went up on November 7 and had 541 posts by Monday morning. Its opening post, with 104 likes, describes a group camped "in Ashenvale for over 45 MINUTES" and argues that outnumbered Alliance players have stopped fighting back, so even fewer roll Alliance. The original launch-night lock thread, "This faction is currently unavailable", has passed 550 posts.
The same pattern shows up in smaller threads. One Alliance player at level 25 wrote in "Alliance on PVP servers" that they were killed more than 30 times in a night and "all progress has halted." The opening post of "Do NOT roll PvP Ruleset" (31 likes) says the Alliance starting zones are fine but "as soon as you leave, the game is almost unplayable," and recommends PvE. Several replies say they have already rerolled.
These are individual reports from players having a bad time, and the same forum has Horde players saying they're seeing plenty of Alliance. What they show is how layering turns a modest ruleset gap into a lopsided zone. We covered the mechanics of that in our layering and world PvP explainer.
The trial-account claim
The newest thread is the angriest. "Faction lock is being circumvented by coordinated discords" opened at 02:48 UTC on November 9 and passed 230 posts in under five hours. Its claim is that Horde groups are using Invite-a-Friend codes to make new accounts, creating Alliance characters on them to push the Alliance count up, then making their real Horde characters while creation is open and abandoning the Alliance ones. An EU thread makes the same accusation.
This is unconfirmed. Nobody has posted evidence beyond the description, the size claims in some replies are guesses, and Blizzard hasn't said whether trial-account or low-level characters count toward the balance check at all. If the workaround works, it would hit the per-account rule from the side. The PvP ruleset stops one account from having both factions, but a second account is a second account. Invite-a-Friend codes give free access from November 4 to November 11, which we covered in our Invite-a-Friend guide, so this would be a short window either way.
One detail cuts both ways. Because aotc.gg only counts characters level 10 and up, parked level 1 Alliance characters wouldn't show in its numbers. If the claims are true, Blizzard's own count would look more balanced than the tracker's, which would also explain why the lock keeps opening while players on the ground see so few Alliance.
The arguments
The forum has split into the camps you'd expect, and both have a point.
Keep the lock. The most liked replies in the big thread defend it. One warns that dropping it could push the only PvP megaserver to "a 90/10 Horde-to-Alliance population ratio." Another, with 38 likes, sums up the complaint as choosing a PvP server "knowing that imbalances are possible" and then complaining about it.
Unlock Horde. Players locked out argue they pay the same subscription and that PvP is a single ruleset, so being locked out means no PvP at all. Some say they'll cancel until it opens.
Fix it another way. Three ideas keep coming up: balance layers by faction instead of the whole ruleset, ban accounts caught gaming the lock, and make Alliance racials more attractive. The last one goes back to the final racial pass, which several posters blame for Undead Paladins and elves pulling players to Horde. The armory data fits part of that: on aotc.gg, Undead alone make up almost a quarter of all US PvP characters, and Undead Paladins are 7.9% on their own.
What Blizzard has said
Nothing since launch. We checked every staff post on the US and EU Forever forums from November 4 to Monday morning. Kaivax posted about Invite-a-Friend, hotfixes, the November 10 class tuning and the November 8 dungeon XP buff. Aggrend posted about boats and city population. None of those posts mention faction balance, and no staff member has replied in any of the faction threads. Going by Blizzard's own rules, the lock is working as designed. Whether the design is enough is the open question.
What to do
Already Alliance on PvP? Level with a group or guild, and use the busier starting zones and dungeons while the open world is rough. If it stops being fun, the PvE ruleset has the same content without forced world PvP (how Forever's rulesets and realms work). Rerolling costs your levels, so weigh that against how much you like world PvP.
Locked out of Horde on PvP? Try off-peak, or decide whether you'd rather play Alliance on PvP or Horde on PvE. Don't use someone else's trial account to game the lock. Blizzard hasn't said what it will do about that, and on a ruleset with one faction per account, it's the kind of thing that gets looked at.
Haven't rolled yet? Pick the faction you'll enjoy at 60 using the best race guide and racials page. If world PvP matters to you, Alliance on PvP is where the ruleset needs players, and the lock will never stop you rolling there.
Sources: Blizzard, Choose Your Ruleset in World of Warcraft: Forever (updated October 22, 2026); Blizzard Support, Cannot Create a New Character (updated about November 8, 2026); player threads on the US Forever forum, The Faction Imbalance in WoW Forever PvP Is MASSIVE (November 7, 2026; 541 posts when checked November 9), This faction is currently unaivalable on this ruleset due to population imbalance (November 4, 2026; 554 posts), Faction lock is being circumvented by coordinated discords (November 9, 2026), Do NOT roll PvP Ruleset (November 9, 2026) and Alliance on PVP servers (November 7, 2026); EU forum MVP replies in eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/640114 (November 6 and 7, 2026); aotc.gg, US PvP population and EU PvP population (checked November 9, 2026); Output Lag, WoW: Forever's US PvP is 59% Horde on one fan tracker, but Blizzard's target was 50/50 (November 8, 2026, including the Classic Armory and WoWCensus figures); Half-Baked Warcraft, WoW Forever faction imbalance: Horde creation paused on PvP (November 5, 2026); Kaivax, Issues Resolved for Invite-a-Friend Players (November 5, 2026).