Hmm, that's a good point I hadn't thought of. Are most of the Australian/NZ players in their own guilds? Are there any servers that are on Australian time?

One of my primary reasons for preferring Arena's is simply that in the "random" PvP I do, I wastly enjoy the pairing system Arena's bring. When I arena, I'm always sure to have some ratio ranging from 3-7 ro 7-3. Often more balanced. And even when you do get steamrolled (faced 3 demonology warlocks yesterday, that was different), the time investment is much lesser.

Joining EotS in my BG, I think I've won one time. Not to begin on the whole alliance versus horde in BGs, but I'm tainted by it, and every time I join, I get the impression reinforced, and thus I can't really be bothered. A full BG may take anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour. It's a big time investment, which is simply not worth doing for a very depressing experience. So I don't bother. Even with the pretty decent awards that can be picked up.

Blackrock and Proudmoore are two release servers that were the "unofficial" australian servers, for servers on Australian time you have the oceania ones. IRRC all of the oceania servers except for Jubei'thos are in battlegroup9.

Battlegrounds are not dead, it's easy to get a queue, but in the sense that BG's are not for competitive PvP and have not been since TBC, BG's are definitely dead. Unless there's some sort of significant change in the rewards and queue system, it'll probably stay that way. Honestly, it's not that fun to roll PuGs all day and grind honor compared to Arenas, where you can queue up and get a challenge nearly every game.