Alongside the reveal for World of Warcraft’s new player-faction-versus-faction-focused expansion, Battle for Azeroth, the company is making a somewhat confusing move to coincide with the PVP-focused expansion: they’re removing PVP-only servers, as well as reworking how world PVP works.
The player-versus-player only servers are going away completely – news confirmed at this year’s Blizzcon. In their place servers will have the same rules that player-versus-environment servers have had, meaning you have to willingly flag yourself as PVP ready in order to fight other players.
Before, you could simply attack players in contested zones and automatically flag yourself (or willingly outside combat) – now you’ll only be able to turn PVP on in a capital city.
“Our ruleset doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense for how the game is right now,” game director Ion Hazzikostas said when noting the world PVP rules haven’t really changed since 2005.
Furthermore, you’ll only see PVP-flagged players in your game world if you flag yourself for PVP, meaning phased zoning will now take into account PVP status. If you play the game flagged as PVP, you’ll get new bonuses like extra experience, bonus reputation, and more while questing to compensate for the risk of open-world PVP.
There’s even new content planned like bounty hunting or assassination quests. Hazzikostas noted they’re “building a foundation to make world PVP great again,” hinting that more is planned for the world PVP update.
The overhaul of world PVP will come when Battle for Azeroth launches sometime later in 2018. You can read more about the new expansion here in our original report.
In related news, a vanilla-style version of the game, World of Warcraft Classic, was also revealed. You can read more about that here.
My Take: I miss the old days of vanilla World of Warcraft, as well as my days playing exclusively on PVP servers with PVP toggled on 24/7 while questing, exploring, or farming. It makes me sad this mechanic is going away, despite the fact that a lot of people I know never liked PVP nor did they like world PVP.
