http://worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/

Very exciting news.

I'll get excited when I see a 10 minute AV queue, and not a moment before!

I've been waiting for this since battlegrounds came out. Very very excited

According to the picture at the top, shaman will be able to use swords as well!~

But yeah that is pretty cool, and I'm really excited to see the world PvP revamp. I guess we can expect a complete revision to the honour system as well?

Very interesting. I would love to have Shaman use swords.

World PvP should be interesting, with many realms with more allaince than horde.

Hopefully they disable trades in BG's, or else AV is going to become some kind of inter-server trading post.

Very excited about cross-server WSG though, and hoping that their is some kind of ladder or at least some matchmaking setup so we don't have to play PUG's all day. I can't complain because Shadow Moon is instant-queues for Horde from basically 12 PM to 4 AM, but I'd much rather play some decent teams than roll PUGs.

It's funny, I think about half our guild is the point that honor means nothing, it's just too much trouble to continuously queue up and hope for a challenging game. I'd really like some function that can match up teams based on winning percentage, or at least match preset team versus preset team.

Hopefully this World PvP development revives world PvP a bit, I guess it really depends how the Honor is and what rewards exist. If implemented correctly it could be a lot of fun though.

I am also interested in knowing if they will be dividing up random team and arranged team games, similar to warcraft 3.

that's a dagger. they draw all the weapons really big now.

Can someone explain to me how this will be a good idea?

From most of the census data I've seen, alliance is quite a bit more populous than horde overall. Won't this just compound the problem more for Alliance overcrowding in general?

For servers like Malganis, where Horde is more populous, I can see it as an improvement, but that seems to me more of an exception.

generally every server I've been on, Alliance had instant queues even if they outnumbered the horde.

It's not a perfect solution, no, but it smooths out the bad parts. On my server, it's rare to have AB up more than once a night. The horde simply refuse to queue for it, thinking they'll lose. Self-serving prophecy, because the game ends up being 15v5 pretty often. Joined with any server that has more AB and less WSG, we'll help each other out.

Then there's AV on our server. Depending on your luck as Alliance, you have either a 30 minute or a 5 hour queue time for AV. By combining a bunch of servers, AV is coming up more frequently, changing that to (guessing) a 2-3 hour queue time. That's only that bad if all the combined servers have an imbalance as awful as ours. Any server with a lesser imbalance lessens the impact, any server imbalanced on the other side will improve the situation.

So it's not a "OMG no queue times!" solution. But it will help the worst cases become better.

Me too. I've been chomping at the bit for this for a long time. Gives my WoW existence a whole new meaning =)

That has never been the problem. For example, I play on Tichondrius which is an active high population PvP server that has a nearly even population and yet the queues are still terrible. The problem has always been that the number of people queuing up for battlegrounds at any given time has been too small to allow for smooth queues with no bottlenecks. As it stands, let's say you have one WSG up. If that WSG lasts an hour because the teams are evenly matched, then the queue is an hour. That's a huge bottleneck. However, if there are 10 games running, even with faction imbalances, some games will be long and some will be short. The short games will allow the queue to move and get people into games. At the extreme end, there are the low level WSG's where there typically isn't enough people queuing up on both sides to have matches at all. Cross-server battlegrounds will cure this bottleneck and will allow games to be going on in all level brackets 24/7.

The problem of faction imbalance only comes into play when the population queuing up for battlegrounds at a given time is large enough to allow for a smooth queue with no bottlenecks. That hasn't been true for most of the life of battlegrounds, so cross-server battlegrounds fixes the primary issue that has caused massive battleground queues. Once cross-server battlegrounds are in place, then the issue of faction imbalance will become the problem that will need to be addressed. However, the situation will be far better than what we currently experience. One faction will basically have instant queues 24/7, which will be nice for them, and even the other faction (most likely Alliance) will experience healthy smooth queues. Sure, the Alliance might have to wait 10 minutes at times to get in a battleground, but at least they will know exactly how long they have to wait before they get in and they will know that they can still enjoy a game at three in the morning. I give kudos to Blizzard for recognizing the primary problem with battleground queues and taking the necessary steps to solve it.

Having to wait 5 or 10 minutes to grab a WSG will be about a million times better than the 40-60 minute queues we experience (ET Alliance) even during peak hours.

There are two teams on Kilrogg that steamroll everyone - CQ/Vanquish (led by Nimloth) and Temporary Insanity. I'm *really* looking forward to see how these guys do against other dominant teams. I wonder if Blizz will 'normalize' gear per se. I could see it being done either way, but I'd hope they wouldn't.

I'd be fine with there being "BG gear" that was based entirely on something like BG success ratios, but that's a hard thing to quantify. Probably they'll have to do something like bracketed BGs, in two forms:

Form A: Single queued, bracketed by sum of team ivalue (team has 10000-12000 ivalue only faces 10000-12000 ivalue, etc.)
Form B: Group queued, bracketed by sum of team ivalue (team has 10000-12000 ivalue only faces 10000-12000 ivalue, etc.)

The brackets would have to be wide enough to prevent queues from starving, but narrow enough to keep the games reasonably even-sided. Group form vs. single queue form is obvious.

But even if it was just the same old queues, only worldwide, I'd love it.

Here's a question: will it be cross ALL servers, or will they be "grouping" servers, so you get BGs across 5 or 10 servers?

i think queues by join-as-group vs pug are much more important than any bracketing by gear. i get so horribly bored rolling over pugs with a full team.

I remember hearing somewhere that it'll be clusters. I could be wrong though.

Wondering this myself. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's probably based on real world location. So servers at the same site will be linked.

I am looking for the the inter-server rivalries. It will definately add a whole new aspect to this game, that I am really interested to see happen.

In that case, cross-server battlegrounds will help your server tremendously, because the ratio won't be 3-1 anymore. And, bottlenecks probably hurt you as well.

As excited as I was when I first saw this post, taking a closer look at the wording would lessen that initial rush.

This would lead me to believe it may be divided up by clusters, or at the very least a lot smaller pools certainly than a continent wide pool. As a player from a PvE server whose PvP scene is near death on Kargath, I would hate to be grouped with other PvE or weaker servers. Granted, I may just be looking too far into a poorly worded post and we might just yet end up with a live scene.