If you have just seen "This faction is currently unavailable on this ruleset due to population imbalance" (or "on this realm") while making your first WoW Forever character, here is the good news first: as of November 6, character creation is open for both Horde and Alliance on every ruleset, Normal, PvP, Roleplaying and Roleplaying PvP. We saw the same message ourselves on launch, and it cleared within a few minutes. This is what happened, what we did.
What we saw at launch
The launch itself went well. Realms came up, queues moved, and people got in. The one hitch we ran into was at the character screen: creating a Horde character on the PvP ruleset, we got the population imbalance message at the final step. Clicking Create again gave the same answer.
We closed the game and the Battle.net launcher, opened them again, and tried once more. After a few rounds of that, a few minutes in all, the Horde character on PvP went through with no trouble, and we haven't seen the message since. From what we can tell, we didn't really do anything to fix it; the time passing is what mattered.
What we think happened
During name reservation, which ran from October 27 to November 3, Blizzard limited new Horde characters on the PvP ruleset. Blizzard's support article on reserving a character name describes that limit: when one faction is significantly ahead, "character creation will be temporarily restricted for the dominant faction."
Our best guess is that some of that reservation-period setting was still in place for specific rulesets in the first hours of launch and was cleared soon after. That would explain why the message appeared for a while and then stopped for everyone, without anyone needing to do anything in particular. Blizzard hasn't said, so treat this as our read of it rather than the official story.
Blizzard's ruleset guide does say the PvP rulesets "will include systems intended to help keep Horde and Alliance populations closer together," so a pause like this could return if the factions drift far apart on a ruleset. If it does, it is temporary, and the same approach applies: wait a few minutes and try again.
If you still see the message
- Close the game and the Battle.net launcher completely.
- Open them again and log back in.
- Wait a few minutes, then try the same faction and ruleset again.
- If it comes back, repeat. For us, it took a few rounds.
A support ticket won't speed this up. The same support article says "Customer Support cannot help bypassing this restriction," and a Blizzard forum representative confirmed on October 29 that "Customer Support is unable to unlock this manually." Patience is the whole fix.
What's next for the data on this site
Everything on this site so far comes from the WoW Forever beta: more than a million characters counted across the test realms. That census is now a finished chapter, and we are archiving it as its own era so the beta numbers stay available for reference without being mistaken for live realms.
Over the next few days we are moving the site to Blizzard's official API for the live game. The goal is the same questions answered for the realms you are actually playing on: how the factions sit on each ruleset, which races and classes people are picking, and how that changes day by day. As that data lands, pages like faction balance will switch from beta to live, clearly labelled.