Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft: Forever, says it'll get increasingly difficult to create characters on the busier side of the game's PvP (player versus player) rulesets. A community manager, Kaivax, posted it at 02:05 UTC on 10 November. For now, the busier side is the Horde in North America and the Alliance on European Roleplay-PvP.

Forever is a new version of World of Warcraft. Horde and Alliance are its two sides, or factions. A ruleset is the kind of world a character lives in, with its own rules. Blizzard pitches PvP as the one with more danger and open-world conflict, where players fight each other. Roleplay-PvP is another ruleset, for playing in character, and Blizzard's post counts it among its PvP rulesets. A region is the part of the world players connect from, like North America or Europe.

What did Blizzard change?

Blizzard says it has adjusted the character creation system. It now aims to look at the balance across each region's PvP rulesets as a whole, "rather than what may feel like snapshots of points in time." Its goal is to get the two sides as close to an even 50/50 as it can.

Which side is harder to make right now?

Blizzard says that in the short term, creating characters on the side with more players in each region will become "increasingly difficult". Right now it names two cases:

• North America, PvP rulesets: the Horde.
• Europe, Roleplay-PvP: the Alliance.

The post names those two and no others. Blizzard says these may flip to the other side as everyone settles and shifts. It says it knows it can be annoying when you can't start on the side you want while the limits are in place. It calls that a necessary trade-off for the ruleset's health in the long run, especially early on, while guilds, the player-run clubs, are forming and rivalries are growing.

How uneven is it?

Blizzard says the most lopsided case in any region is at about 55/45, and that's "not as close as we want it to be."

In a reply, Blizzard explains the number. It counts the players actually logged in, at every character level (how far a character has grown), over a set stretch of time. A player brought up trial accounts, a kind of account for trying the game, in the thread. Blizzard's answer: it looked into that in depth, and found no sign that trial characters made any difference.

Are crowded zones changing too?

Yes. A zone is one area of the game's world map. In another reply, Blizzard says that "earlier today" it lowered the number of players in various zones that were badly congested. It doesn't give a time, and it doesn't say how.

It made that an even bigger change on the PvP ruleset, after players said several places felt overcrowded. Blizzard says it'll keep watching how zones feel and adjust further if needed. It says the change will also go into its hotfix notes (its running list of small fixes to the live game).

Compared: what Blizzard said in September

Blizzard's ruleset post of 21 September said Forever would have systems like this. Here's how the two posts line up.

	The 21 September ruleset post	The 10 November post
The plan	Systems to help keep Horde and Alliance numbers closer together on the PvP ruleset	Character creation adjusted to better read the overall balance in each region's PvP rulesets
How	An approach like the one in Season of Discovery, an earlier Blizzard game season, where making new characters on a faction could be limited for a while	Creating characters on the busier side gets increasingly difficult
Which side	Not named	For now, Horde on North American PvP and Alliance on European Roleplay-PvP
One side per player	On PvP, make an Alliance character and you can't make a Horde one there, and the other way round	Not mentioned

So two different limits can stop you on PvP. The September one is about your own characters: one side per player there. The new one is about everybody's: the busier side gets harder to join. The Blizzard posts we've read don't say whether the one-side rule also covers Roleplay-PvP.

For which ruleset to pick, and who can play together, see our rulesets guide.

Our take

Our reading is that the system Blizzard promised in September is running, and that Blizzard has just retuned it to look at the bigger picture rather than a single moment. A 55/45 split doesn't sound like much. But we think lopsided fights, where one side badly outnumbers the other, are what drive people off a PvP ruleset. So we'd rather Blizzard acted at 55/45 than waited for worse.

If you're in North America and your group hasn't picked a side on PvP yet, our reading is that the Alliance is the easier door for now. That can change, and Blizzard says it may flip. Remember the September rule too: on PvP, the side you pick first is the only side you get there. So agree on one before anybody makes a character.