Judging by that thread, the list is a bit bias (Tich member perhaps?). However, TAO and Notorious do remain undefeated in both BG9 as well as in arranged matches on Test. Noto played Nurfed on test and won 3-0, 3-1 last week. Both TAO and Nurfed are superb teams, but their strategies and general approach to WSG are remarkably different.

Funny story, aside from TAO the only team ever to cap on Notorious's team was Nurfed.

From my limited experience in the queues, there's a lot more pug-stomping going on. The ability for organized teams to scout has been greatly improved, because all they have to see on the other side is a list of people from the same server. They can then hop their WSG team to AB and finish a quick game there. The PvP group in my guild sometimes complains of going the entire night without fighting a single organized team.

Also, that list is really Tich-specific. TAO and Notorious could easily be the best two PvP guilds around though. They scrimmaged against each other the months before 1.12 and are easily the top guilds on BG9. Also, Tich PvP is probably better overall than most other servers because of those two guilds- good opponents make people play better and learn more things. But I don't think that Tichondrius has 25% or whatever of the top 20 PvP guilds in the game.

hmmm, no. But I've also been busy the last few weeks and have hardly pvped outside of roaming BRM hunting.

Honestly, and this may have come as a shock, but I feel the x server bg's have been horrible. Its completely gutted the thriving PvP community that was on Gorefiend. We never get to see our rival guilds in BG's anymore, except by random chance. Entire nights we've queued up, we might get 1 remotely challenging game, and then its just pug stomping for the rest of the night. Its getting so old its not even remotely fun.

I wish that teams could enter an option to only play against other teams. That way we could guarantee an entertaining game instead of playing games with ourselves like "no rage or energy usage allowed", or "flag carriers must walk only" to make it interesting for us. My guild has never lost a single WSG since the patch, and we've pretty much all stopped pving because its just simply not fun to not be subjected to talented teams on a regular basis. I'm not even saying that we're that great of a team, but the level of competition is so rediculously lowered now that it has sucked the joy out of battlegrounds completely.

Additionally, our queue times on the alliance side, have actually gone UP. If you played at certain times of day, you could get a WSG every 5 mins, now its 15 mins at all times. AB 15 minutes as well, and it used to be damn near instant on holidays. I sit around so much longer now because of the queues then i used to.

also from a pure grinding experience to get high honor marks - the most effecient way to do it is to do a wsg graveyard camp. With the new reduced penalty to honor earned, the more pugs you force to afk from your griefing , the more honor you get, as fresh people zone in one after the other like lambs to the slaughter. Theres abosolutely no mechanic in the game that prevents it, and as the gms say, there's a pvp solution :(.

A team that did this camped once for three hours in the same game and walked away with 50k honor from just that one game. Its exceptionally lame and the neverending joining pugs make it work. Its just a massive design oversight.

Its been great for us. Pre xbg we might have ran 1 or 2 guild games a week when the queues crept down to 30-60 mins and now they happen 4-5 times a week. We get some hard teams from Blackrock and some medium teams from Tich and Frostmourne and Proudmoore. Australian Guild so these hard men from Tich dont seem to exist at 5am Server time. Pug and Organised Horde dominate Alliance Pugs in WSG a little less in AB and Allliance dominate in AV. Currently WSG instant - 1 min, AB 1-10 mins, AV 30-60 mins.

I love it, with the huge Alliance to Horde ratio on Proudmoore the queues were just painful before. I've started doing organized groups with some guildies with a whole range of skill, from never having PvP'd to some pretty good players. We join up with some Australians doing the GM grind and get them warmed up on HKs until their regular teammates come as we're passing out for the night.

It has really sparked interest within the guild, several people who never PvP'd before are now R8 and climbing. Quite amusing to have someone I was handholding through AB a few weeks back barking orders and passing me in rank.

Plenty of premades AFK out on us even though we're pretty average in the grand scheme of things. We can draw out a WSG except against the toughest premades so the pure honor farmers are better off choosing the other game than stalemating with us. I'd rather face some stiff competition than roll PuGs all day but the honor grinders don't always feel that way.

I've even ressurected a lvl29 toon as a sort of casual twink, although I didn't run the instances with a focus on PvP so I've only got AH gear available. Not enough time though...

1.12 was the best thing to ever happen to Australians PvPing. BGs in our prime time (outside Khaz'goroth/Frostmourne/Proudmoore/Blackrock) have been non-existent forever; suddenly, we have AV AB and WSG on demand at all times.

It was also the best thing to ever happen to Windrunner PvP. We have horrible population imbalance coupled with being an old, old server... all the serious PvPers on Horde side were long since exalted with everything (and probably had been rank 13 or rank 14 if they wanted to) and quit, and due to the lack of Horde pvp Alliance stopped queuing other than organised teams going for top rank, which meant any horde pugs trying to pvp just got stomped and didn't bother and blah blah deathspiralcakes.

We've suddenly got a thriving pvp scene again. A lot of people have come back just for the competition, even pugs seem to do well in AB, and AV seems to be about 40/60 (which is still better than how it was pre-TBC, when Horde tended to have people leave without replacement and inevitably lose by weight of numbers and gear). Lots of people who used to never pvp are suddenly rank 3, rank 4. People who used to like it but never able to get in are suddenly rank 6, rank 7, rank 8.

Also there's the whole meeting-new-people thing. I still see Windrunner alliance members occasionally, but not all the time. That's a good thing. New opponents, new friends.

So as an Australian PvPing on Windrunner, 1.12 gets double thumbs up. If only this had been in from the start...

Plus it's been a whole new world of Alliance to taunt in dwarvish when I put away the 2h and break out the Ironfoe (surely the most amusing pvp weapon in existence for a Horde player; there should be more things like it).

I don't know anyone on Windrunner who's against x-server BGs, anyway. I think the only people who would have reason are people who might now need more honor a week for rank 14, or people used to rolling with the same bunch of top-geared people in AV on their server who now have to fight alongside a bunch of people they don't know in greens and blues from new servers.

Our organized AB/WSG group hasn't lost one of the last 80 or so BGs we've been in. Not because we're good persay, but because we're paired with unorganized, ungeared PUGs.

The BG system was a failure doomed from birth, and the light at the end of the play to crush tunnel is tBC PVP.

An instanced PVP system will not work in WoW until 1. It's cross-faction, 2. It ranks players and chooses the BG players by those ranks and 3: Is cross-server.

Until those three conditions are met instanced PVP isn't very good, I've been saying it for two years now, and they're finally doing it with arenas.

It's my hope they implement the BG content with the tBC arena rules.

Since our cluster has so many new servers, you see some really bizarre things. For example: a 60 warlock with 2341 unbuffed HP. That's not a typo. In general I've discovered that most of the other servers on our battlegroup are populated by idiots, but the instant queues make up for it.

I'm hoping that the Burning Crusade arena turns out to be exactly what I envision it being: Warcraft 3 AT, since for all of the other faults of Warcraft 3, the matchmaking system was pretty damn good.

I don't know about 100%. After 3 intense 40-minute Group v Group WSGs in a row sometimes you just want to sit back and roll some PUGs. A preform about every 3-4 games is what I've been seeing in BG7, and that's just about right for me.