Are battlegrounds dead, left to rot with AFK farmers and twinked assholes? There used to be enough up in the queue to get at least one almost anytime. Now, even though I'm Horde, and in a PVP-friendly cluster (Kil'jaeden, Blackrock, etc.) it can be a wait during primetime, and in the mornings? Forget about it.

I thought that the old, obsolete rewards were probably the biggest problem but upon reaching the range for Eye of the Storm even response to that is lacklustre. Twinks ruin every bracket except the top, and despite the hard crack downs on bots since the beginning, AFK honor leeches remain, even in maps where there are only 10 or 15 for Alterac. Cheaters have no remorse and there are millions more despite every million bans.

Arenas bother me for a couple reasons. The first is the inevitable tide of gear progression and superteams. While not a huge problem right now, when even the top teams are getting gear at a fair rate with the casuals, in the future when the top teams come into each match with the full loadout from last season's reward vendor and newer players are scraping by trying to stay above 1500 to get a piece every couple weeks, the problem is going to be greatly exacerbated. Along with Blizzard apparently caving to demand for uber-PVE gear again for Black Temple and Hyjal, its a mess for the people with heroic blues and quest rewards.

The second complaint I have about arenas is how closed and incestuous it is gonna make the good teams. Back when battlegrounds were king, every server had its A-teams, but many of those weren't guild bound. If by chance you end up running alongside them for a few matches over the weekend, you could prove yourself to be talented despite your gear, which may be lacking at one point. With arenas, which are small, insular encounters and people no longer joining battlegrounds very often, new talent is gonna be overlooked due to low ratings and no way for the pros/geared to evaluate the potential of that new talent since their PVP paths will not meet.

Arenas also promote the one thing I hate most about raids/the PVE game: class balance. 2v2 and 3v3 are probably always gonna be dominated by power combos like Warrior/Paladin unless Blizzard dramatically rethinks each classes' role, which I doubt for PVP. This leaves 5v5, which still has boundaries. Assuming Blizzard does what they say and makes every class viable in 5v5 arena, spots are still limited. Winning teams will always have a healer, a sponge, and a DPS, at the very least, which limits already (divided by the number of good teams with slots free still) the number of spots for populated classes. You're not going to see teams with, say, 5 warlocks or something wacky amongst the top tiers of the Arena, or so I speculate. This is in contrast to the fun/wacky games possible by the first-come-first-serve matching of the battlegrounds, where you could end up with 7 warlocks and 3 shaman and still come out on top or at least make lemons out of lemonade in a losing game and farm people lone-gunman style and come out with at least one mark and a healthy dose of honor. The arena, on the other hand, is A-game all-the-time, right-class-balance, win-everything-or-we-lose-it-all pressure cooker (not that anything is wrong with that when you need it, of course, but part of the relief of battlegrounds was that you could whup some ass OR, less seriously, have some fun to relax you from the serious, professional nature of the raid game.)

Blizzard has promised gear-matching, but by the time is implemented or a short while after, I think it will all be for naught. What is the point of selecting players appropriately for each other when there are only 3 games up during prime time and everyone is gonna get pooled into the same dump just to fill a game? Perhaps once a good idea, but at this point gear-matching is beyond saving battlegrounds, in my opinion.

This one is pretty simple:
Arenas = Epics
Battlegrounds = Blues
I wonder which one people will go for?

There are still level 70 epics available for battleground honor/marks at the champions vendor

...there are rewards for EotS?

Battlegrounds are still doing alright on my battlegroup, especially on weekends. There are decent rewards in the non-set epics and accessories. The combat pots are nice for raiding too. I don't really see a danger of battlegrounds dying, they seemed to have replaced world PvP as an outlet for casual PvP on my server (flying mounts ).

Well, most of the things you dislike about arenas -- serious competition, non-retarded gear progression, etc are what draws people to arenas and arose as a result of the problems people had with bgs. Not having a ton of games up might be a problem, but that have-fun-who-cares type of playing you seem to crave is what goes on in BGs currently.

As for being dead? AV is a huge mess and has been since it's inception and I personally cannot stand EotS. WSG and AB were fun, but we played the hell out of them and there's only so much you can get out of stomping PUGs forever and then finally getting a good game that ultimately turns into an hours long stalemate with each team having their flag stuck to an extremely hard to kill MT surrounded by healers.

The only things that would revive BGs for me would be the same things that you dislike about arenas -- proper team creation and matching/ladders + worthwhile gear pickups (there is a few already nice honor items, of course). That and more maps per BG type and more BGs period.

Well, the epic honor PVP set belts/shoes. There are no formal rewards like WSG/AB/AV (I hate to be snarky but I don't understand this oversight)

I understand you, and please note that I DO like that too. I want to be able to do the tough stuff when I want. My problem is that, if the downward trends in BGs continue, there won't be that choice anymore, it will be A-game-only raids and A-game-only PVP.

That doesn't make me any more hopeful, dude. World PVP was my absolute favorite and now its a vegetable. The 8 hours during the first Azuregos spawn and the time during the bug rush for opening the AQ gates on Mannoroth were my absolute *favorite* sessions in all of WoW. The chaos, the strategy and tactical thinking, the guild tensions... all unbelievable and amazing fun. Even the SS/TM Vietnam days were amazing.

I watched world PVP die, not being cared for. I watched as "fixes" were made, the Silithus and EPL goal systems. They did nothing. The Burning Crusade zones with PVP objectives there from the beginning? Maybe a spark for a couple days, now just something you might stop for riding by but nothing that attracts people doing other things. Now it is comatose and I am watching battleground PVP with all of the same inheritances dying in the exact same way and praying something will be done this time.

BGs seem to be fine on the weekends during the bonus honor. Fast queues, a ton of people playing.

There are a number of good things available from honor that you would be crazy to pass over. After this patch I'll be banking my double Goblin Rocket Launchers for the 2 minute medallion, and Talisman of the Horde, when the costs of those items gets reduced.

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As for choosing BGs over arenas, I also like to have towers, flags and so on to fight over, instead of just deathmatch for the sake of deathmatch. I think Eye of the storm is great, 20 or so minutes of constant combat. I'm interested in hearing why people dislike this battleground - you don't have a single mage holding the mill over 5 people, or a druid with the travel form speed set bonus ending the game in 10 minutes. Those kinds of things were my biggest gripes with Basin and Gulch.

Voted healthy, because, well, I am going to go play an eye of the storm or two now.

Honor points are still some of the best PvP items you can get, Arenas only covers 6 slots (Set/Melee Slot/Ranged Slot) while honor point stuff covers everything and can be mixed with Gladiator for 2 piece 35 Resilience bonus x 2 in 2.1 so you shouldn't ignore battlegrounds completely.

I'm not sure why people keep complaining about 2vs2 and 3vs3 class balance, Blizzard has specifically said they know it'll be unbalanced and prone to stacking thats the entire reason why you take a point reduction.

Having to play with the same people and have a limit of 6-7 is rather nice, it's far easier to get everyone on at the same time or learn how to work together rather then having 10-15 people who would burn out and all of those fun things. Really battlegrounds are incredibly boring now, all of the good teams have burned out there was some games that were amazing, fun, frusterating and a challenge but now you're mostly playing against pugs, raiding guild X or scrub teams.

Also, EoTS is terrible give me AB style node capturing.

It doesn't particularly matter if the normal BGs still provide a decent source of PvP loot at this point.

The problem with the Battlegrounds is that they are horribly stagnant.

Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch were released way back in June 2005(Yeah, long time ago when you say it out loud).

AV hasn't really evolved so much as it's degraded into what we have today a PvE race to see who can kill each other's general first depending on how often the enemy faction interferes. I actually liked the original concept of AV, it was an epic battleground, with objectives and strategy that could decide matches, the problem of course is that to take full advantage of AV you'd have to be in an organized group. Classic AV wasn't meant to be PuGed, and modern AV is just a joke in all honesty, with no direction or focus.

WSG hasn't evolved at all, it's the same BG we got back then, except at one point they made the rep grind easier, which at 70 is completely and utterly worthless. In addition if you're not in an organized group more times then not you will get rolled 3/0 and get no honor for your trouble. WSG is by far the most frustrating BG to PuG.

Arathi Basin was released in September 3 months later. AB is a pretty well balanced BG. It's very difficult to get 5 capped in a PuG, and it's a constant battle across the entire map to capture and retain nodes. On that same token these games last 20-30 minutes sometimes, that's longer then a game of AV which in some cases can be much shorter for close to 2.5x the amount of honor.

So we have the 3 above BGs, and we've had them for 1 1/2 or so years now. They're old, they've been done, they're boring, they're just not that fun anymore. To make matters worse Blizzard releases EotS when BC comes out, and instead of something actually original, fun, and different from the 3 BGs we already have available we end up with a hybrid of WSG/AB that's really not that original at all. So in total we have 4 BGs all together, 3 of which are pretty much interchangeable, and 1 that's not as epic as it was created to be, and kind of a PvE fest.

In that sense, yeah I think BGs are dead. I think Blizzard let them die, much like arenas they could have added or changed things or given different maps, or SOMETHING to keep them all fresh, but it all remains the same and now all the focus is on the arena, which to be perfectly honest, isn't that much better. I'm sure once 2.1.0 comes out with the 3rd arena we'll get 1 more arena map later and never see an update to arena maps for another 3 years. Far be it from me to tell a company they're screwing up, but if BGs are dead it's because Blizzard let them die.

They don't care about old/aging content.

Doesn't feel like it's been 2 years since battlegrounds have been added.

The main issue with the original AV was you were fighting NPC over players, it was certainly a challenge but you reach a point where you want to actually be able to make progress and not spend 10 hours fighting to make it past the bridge in DB.

It's not the hybrid part thats the issue, it's that they choose the worst things from each battleground and used it to make a new one, the capture method is a terrible idea since it makes it nearly impossible for a small group of people to capture a tower so defending becomes useless and it's just a giant zerg fest.

Out of curiosity, but what else could they have added? We have CTF, tatic based map and a who can kill the fastest...I guess they could have added some sort of objective type like Onslaught from Unreal Tournament 2004 but I couldn't see that being very interesting without multiple maps.

In our battlegroup (Bloodlust EU) bg's are far from dead. We get usually 4-5 eos, 1-2 av, 3-4 wsg and 3-4 AB going from morning to late night. Double or triple these numbers when there's double honor for that specific bg. When i multiqueue max wait time is 5 minutes or so ... It's a fun and relaxing diversion and as others pointed you can come up with some really weird raid composition that, while not the best setup to be efficient, can be tons of fun to play. (yesterday we ended up doing WSG with a semi premade composed of 3sp + 4 locks + 3 randoms ... i can just imagine their carrier screaming when the fourth death coil in a row hit him )

As I pointed out in my post further down, Arena VS BG I to hate the arena. It is too much forcing players to have one matrix or the other, warriors (once again) are needed and this time with palas. I hate people whining thatwe lost this AB/WSG cause they had more casters/ melee, healing w/e they had more than us. But in the arenas you don't line up with out a pala or warrior over 1650 and think you can win.



Now to the reason I quoted is that I wantyou to show me the Healing pvp gear I can buy at lvl 70, Sure I can buy, Kodohide bracers, Kodohide belt, and Kodohide boots, and everybody needs the lvl 70 2min PvP trinket. Rings, necky back other trinkets are all "useless" imo for healers, hell there is no weapon and/ or offhand.

[e]

I think that the way capturing nodes in EotS is the best, in AB you can have a rogue guard and keep him 2-3 ppl from capping w/o really fighting. In EotS it forces the defender to fight and not only to "safe play". I like it.

There are a zillion fun ideas that could be implemented. Use old Starcraft or War3 UMS maps. Tower Defense or Bunker Defense scaled down to a reasonable amount of players would be breathtaking.

If they wanted to keep things fresh they could have 4-5 maps and during the special weekend rotate back in the map that was out and rotate out the oldest map in the cycle, so that only 3 battlegrounds were available in one week, along with fairly good rep reward updates for each. This would add to the excitement of having to do something before it went away again, and finding something different instead of the same thing you take for granted every day.

Yes AV had horrible allies-biased design. I had hoped Azshara Crater, the next epic battle, would fix that and have awesome design but then they canned it. =(

I personally think the worst thing to happen to battlegrounds was to be able to queue for more than one at a time. (and leave one BG for another)

Nothing is worse than waiting to enter a BG only to find when you zone that the game is decided. (win or lose) Even general "thrash" of losing and gaining 2-3 people every 5 minutes is rough. You never know if something is defended because of the turnover.

I can count the number of fresh games I enter on one hand over the course of a PvP night.

Some items worth farming for, especially some of the gems with the reduced Honor cost come 2.1.

For me, I like AB and run that as a way to blow off steam or take a break from farming rep/mats/gold.

AV can be fun but not with 30 people and when it takes 8 hours to finish a game. I hate WSG these days and only do it when I need to (exalted with all 3).

EoTS seems to be like the worst parts of AB and WSG and it could be so much cooler but turns into a zerg fest with little need for strategy over sheer force.

Another reason the BGs seem so dead is because you rarely if ever see a full organized group rolling into one BG after another following a night of raiding.

Finally, the token system is all but broken. I have 100 of each BG and have deleted countless others.

Blizz should do any (or all) of the following:

Add updated rewards for each BG and add EToS rewards.
Allow tokens to be traded in for better pots.
Allow tokens to be traded in for recipes.
Allow tokens to be traded in for repairs.
Allow tokens to be traded in for Primal Nethers.
Allow tokens to be traded in for Badges of Justice.

And that wouldn't be to dumb down Heroic runs or whatever, just a way to do something with the damn tokens and possibly rekindle interest in the BGs.

And if not the badges/nether, allow the tokens to be used for Honor points. 50 tokens from each BG turns into 1k rep or something.

I think the battlegrounds are doing fine. It seems like the battlegrounds are floundering now, but we have to consider the expansion has still only been out for a couple months. Pre TBC, we were looking at people that had YEARS to get 60, and level alts on top of that. All that was left for them to do in the game was do battlegrounds. Now, people only have had a few months to do the same thing. Arena has definitely diverted a lot of people, but arena is not for everyone. I think as time passes, battleground traffic will pick up as more and more people get their mains, and later alts to 70, and reach that point where they don't have anything else to do in game but queue up. The honor cost reduction on rewards should also help considerably, as just going by "feel", I think the cost of items jumped a lot more than the rate of honor intake going from 60 BGs to 70 BGs.

Blizzard should add new well-designed and interesting battlegrounds. We've been playing the same stuff for roughly two years now, except for EotS of course - which is in my opinion pretty bad. I mean really bad.

Actually, there's quite a lot of things wrong with EotS. First, it is the very nature of how capping the towers / nodes / whatever works. It just doesn't. The capping system considers the faction holding the node to be those who has the biggest number of players in its vicinity. This leads to an ultimate zergfest - as long as you outnumber the defenders, but don't kill them, you'll get the node and the enemies will spawn who knows where.

This makes the classic stragegies from AB pretty much void. In AB you had to have some people guarding nodes and reporting consistently. Now you can ditch some player there, and leave the rest to the other players as even if the player can be crowd controlled in a multitude of ways - it doesn't help thanks to the capping system. So if you manage to station a holy paladin (lol) just healing himself for a full 2-3 minutes and not dying against one opponent, the base will remain yours. Although in the end this is a matter of taste, but personally I dislike such simplicity.

And the flag. Oh boy, the flag is so useless it's not even funny. You can pretty much ignore the players carrying flags - just get the towers and you'll end up making more points per minute than by running flags. Ideally it would be 2 towers per faction and the rest is trying to carry and run the flag. It just doesn't work either - people rather get stuck in the absolutely retardedly put graveyards and prefer to zerg the towers, instead of helping in carrying or assaulting the flag.

To be more precise with my point: the battleground is boring. There is little to no incentive to do anything - why go for the towers when you can go for the flag, which doesn't help? You could as well go for the towers since the flag is useless, but if the general concept of guarding towers fails, there's little else to do than just zerg mindlessly around in a big bunch against another.

AB and WSG and AV had a goal, something to motivate the players. Something to strive for, a clear way to win, EotS is just a bag full of crap gone terribly wrong. Also, what were the designers thinking when adding that retarded bubble thing, and especially that obnoxiously huge drop and slope there to cut everyones health into half? Does it serve any greater purpose? Do healers have to dismount and heal themselves, so their teammates can wait for their healers who are lagging behind because some designer got this absolutely brilliant idea?

EotS just doesn't have a goal, it's just a boring and awfully designed zerg-fest with people running around purple ruins. Hell, when you think about it, AB was about getting war supplies, WSG was about defending things on the either side, but EotS? Capturing ancient ruins? WHAT??? How about that, why not make a battleground in STV the sole purpose of which is to preserve the evil leper gnome poachers hunting GORILLAS, I guess that would be the kind of stuff that players really want to do.

Allthough I digress a bit, but I'd be really happy if Blizzard could come up with good and well-designed and original battlegrounds, instead of mixing two age-old concepts resulting in utter fecality, to say it "nicely".

They're an annoyance I have to grind to get gear to do Arenas with, because I can't get enough resilience anywhere else.

You're comparing casual bgs to the most competitive of arenas. You can have bad class balance, etc in arenas, you just won't win as much, until you're in a bracket where you can win about as much as you lose. You'll still get points this way, just not as much.

The same goes for bgs... if you're in an organized group with good class balance, you will get honor MUCH faster than going solo.

Look at it more from the play style... if you like small scale fights, with more coordination, arenas are for you, otherwise battlegrounds are the way to go. Comparing competitive subsets with noncompetitive... apples and oranges.

I still find battlegrounds quite fun, although I do agree with most of the complaints raised in this thread. However, I think the main deterrant is just the old time vs. reward problem. Some of the honour items have quite substantial costs if you're not on a server that runs farm teams. When you consider you can work towards an epic arena item for as little as an hour a week, stepping in to an arena afterwards seems a little unfair. There is still a fair number of BGs up at any one time (3-4 per type), but given this is across an entire battlegroup it's not really a large number.

In line with Randor, I also think some more diverse and interesting PvP rewards would be useful. Given how scarce craftable PvP gear is, why not have blue/epic PvP patterns as a reward for honour?

I've always felt arena was quite casual friendly, especially the smaller (2v2/3v3) brackets. I have very unpredictable hours these days, I just mail ahead to my 3v3 team and let them know when I will be free for a few games. It's not so much a time issue as it is finding people, but if you can find time for one five-man a week; you can find time to be in a 1300 rating 2v2.