A few days ago, Blizzard announced that they are addressing overall faction balance on PvP servers. To do this, they made it harder to create a character on the more popular faction on PvP and RP-PVP realms, most of which are Horde. In the most recent podcast episode, Josh Greenfield (Aggrend) recommends that players who are looking to roll on those most populous factions should "start making other arrangements." This likely indicates that this faction lock will be in place for a longer period of time.
We've kind of tightened it up a little bit. Unfortunately, that means if you haven't made a Horde character, you're going to want to start making other arrangements at this point because we kind of had to clamp that down.
Aggrend comments that one of the most important things on a PvP server is faction balance, and so they're super dedicated to maintaining that balance. Blizzard allows for a 10% delta typically on launch, and they've hit that cap currently. He also announced that they have recently checked the balance on a zone level and made some tweaks, so it should feel more fair on a zone level.
Lastly, he commented on the rumour that players were using Trial accounts or level 1 characters to skew the faction balance. Aggrend directly says, "That does not have an impact. That is not how the system works."
Watch Episode 7 of the WoW: Forever podcast:
