Meta > Friends > Lore. You can make whatever excuse you want about the faction you pick, but the real reason is that players were following the meta, and one faction was better than the WOW TBC Classic Gold other in PvP. The game should have disabling racial skills for factions in PvP prior to the release of the game, the imbalance wouldn't have been as severe.

The game's launch was about PvE, with some other exceptions. In the case of PvE, the influence of racial abilities was smaller than that of Paladin/Shaman for 40 players. The focus of this game is Alliance. Everybody knows how to do PvE, and it's easy to do at home. A plethora of guides and videos that make them simple however the most important "challenge" today is PvP and in the smaller group game the difference between Paladin and Shaman isn't as significant, however the differences in racials are very noticeable...and this is why Horde is now the meta faction.

It is absurd to think that one side has superior players than the other. Be aware of the steps involved in selecting either side. There is nothing that can stop someone from choosing one or the other side.

There are three main differences between a horde-based and an alliance player in terms of population, racial skills, and paladin/shaman. PVP is more popular with players who would rather play with the meta faction (horde). However, this is only an issue in comparison to the vast imbalance of population and the issues it creates.

My guild in 04 was rerolled to Alliance since Paladins were more powerful than Shaman and we were a PvE raiding guild. Because there were fewer players from the Horde side at the time of launch the guild was also more difficult to acquire quality Recuits. It had nothing to do with do with racial skills for PvE.

I'm not sure most players made up their minds to make a FACTION due to racial issues in vanilla. This wasn't the exact situation I experienced when I was younger. The Rank 1 friend I played with for a time decided to go with Tauren because the thought that they were cool.

No one said entirely this, but it's certainly not an accident the factions started out and ended up in the buy WOW TBC Gold manner they were...easily explained earlier. I'm not going pretend that it's just a matter of people wanting to play with their friends, that's ridiculous.