Blizzard Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield and Lead Game Designer Tim Jones revealed the PvP design direction for World of Warcraft: Infinite. The game will drive competition between the Horde and Alliance through limited resources, rare recipes, and zone objectives, and is considering encouraging both factions to attack major cities such as Stormwind and Orgrimmar.
World of Warcraft: Infinite will not use traditional server sharding, but players must still choose from three rule sets: PvE, PvP, and Roleplaying. The game will not offer an RP-PvP combination. To maintain faction balance, if a player chooses PvP and finds it unsuitable, they are expected to be unable to switch directly to PvE and will need to create a new character instead.
The team reviewed feedback from events in the Season of Discovery, such as the Battle of Ashenvale and the Blood Moon in Stranglethorn Vale, and noted that some capture-point or resource-gathering objectives did not meet expectations. This design will prioritize a lightweight, free-form approach close to the original game experience, avoiding excessive rules and preventing players from needing to repeatedly grind a single piece of gear to remain competitive in PvP.
For battleground matchmaking, full pre-made groups will be matched against other pre-made groups, ensuring that solo queue players do not face fully coordinated teams. The team aims to differentiate between grouping methods to prevent solo players from facing opponents with vastly different levels of organization.
Regarding corpse camping and harassment, the team prefers to retain the natural ebb and flow of the PvP environment, encouraging players to handle pressure by joining guilds or calling for allies. Developers will only intervene if such behaviors are abused or spiral severely out of control.