When WoW first launched, population was heavily skewed to alliance over horde. At the time, horde was filled with "ugly" races with undeniably bad posture (orc, troll, forsaken, and tauren) so it was no surprise that many chose to be the "pretty" night elves or humans of the alliance.
What this meant for PvP was super-short queue times for horde and super-long queue times for alliance (since alliance had many more players filling their queues).
As a result, the average horde player played more PvP matches per hour than an alliance player, allowing them more opportunities to hone their skill. In addition, many alliance players who wanted to play PvP more switched sides simply to have a shorter queue.
This led to the era of horde PvP domination. Eventually cross-server matching solved this problem, but, for a good time, it was very noticeable.
I think SWTOR is in the middle of the same situation right now. When I started, republic was terrible at PvP. My team (solo queue) probably won ~25% of matches. My thought, at the time, that this was due to republic attracting a younger, more naive, playerbase while the empire attracted all the elite cool doodz (who, annoying as they are, are pretty damn good at competitive multiplayer). But I still played republic when I wanted to PvP since their queues are practically instant whereas my empire characters had to twiddle their thumbs for 5-10 minutes to get into a match.
But things seemed to have changed. Republic seems to be winning ~50-60% of matches I play now. There's more communication and more people playing combat healers and tanks. Have empire PvPers started coming Republic side for shorter queues? Are republic players getting better from having more practice?
Probably both, I guess.
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