Exactly. I actually think they should consider bumping up the number of badges available from some of the Heroics to encourage people to run them more often, since it has worked incredibly well with KZ. I'm not getting Season 1 gear because its better than the rest of my gear, because it isn't better. I'm getting it only for my druid, and I'm getting it to have a PvP Resto set (I'm Feral).

Now that you can get punished for AFKing in BGs, hopefully they will continue to refine it and move onto the other top issues. The ones I can see are:

1) The honor grind sucks
2) Two teams playing at equal levels of each other are punished
2b) Premade queue skipping

1) The honor grind sucks
As everyone has provided the numbers for this. To go from zero to hero via BGs only takes a lot of time. I don't think it should be quite as easy as some people suggest, but the current pace is quite slow.

One solution I think would be to make the old level 70 blue PVP gear easily available in drop form. Have it drop from Drek and Vann? Make a new BG daily give out a random piece of level 70 PVP gear? Regardless of how they do it, the PVP blues aren't really that fantastic, but I could see it helping a lot with new blood trying to get into the Arena. And the level 70 PVP gear is hardly powerful in terms of PVE, so the PVE/PVP balance should not be upset.

Another solution would be to make the PVP gear available in more than one manner. One would be the current 10 token, 20X6 honor cost right now, as well as say, a 50 token with half the honor cost method.

2) Two teams playing at equal levels of each other are punished
2b) Premade queue skipping
There's no reason to ever try to play a competetive game other than for the sport of it. And most people playing are really going for max honor/hour ratio. But why should two teams playing a good game be gaining honor slower than a a premade who cross queues to avoid playing other premades? All it does is encourage a total bulldozing of pug groups to maximize honor gains as well as making PMs cross queue to avoid ever playing a competative game.

There should be a distinct difference between 2000-0 steamrolled game and 2000-1980 boy that was a close game. There should be a distinct difference between 3-0 but the other team had 30 flag returns than a 3-0 the other team just rolled over and died.

One halfbaked idea I had would be to give the winners bonus honor equal to what the current weekend BG bonus is. The losers would get a prorated honor bonus based on how much they "won" the game. So if you had 2/3 flag caps in WSG, you'd get 2/3 of the winning honor, while winners enjoy a full "bonus weekend" honor. And then of course, they'd tweak the bonus honor weekends to give additional honor.

I despise the people who go "Hurry up and lose the game so I can go get some honor" as much as the people who just AFK bot, but they do bring a valid point: there's no point in trying if it looks like you'll lose since you get nothing out of it. Always making a prize be available would help alleviate this attitude.

To solve the premade queue skipping, while mostly a symptom of bad honor rewards for equally matched games, perhaps make the queues for premades all linked to the leader. So the leader queues everyone for a game, as well as makes everyone join a game instead of individual people getting to go in and scout.

The BG punishment thread mentioned a matchmaking idea that I would like to poke at too. Instead of a rated arena style thing, how about just making each player have 4 additional ratings for each of the BGs. It starts the same as arena: everyone starts at 1500 and you gain or lose points based on a win/loss. The difference is how it's used. When you queue into a BG, the matchmaking systems references your rating rather than the highest ilevel of your gear, so it'll look for members and try to grab people so that the average rating of the teams are equal. This would make the games more fun since they're more evenly matched. It'd have to come in at the same time as the fix for punishing two equally matched teams for playing a good game of course.

End wall of text.

Copy pasted from my post in the AFK thread.

I want to see some kind of ranked battleground system. I would love it so that you can either queue solo and grind your way up, as it is now, with say the average honor from pugging any battleground being buffed to be between 1-2k an hour, and the competitive, ranked battlegrounds, where you play 10 games a week and get say, 10k honor with a 1500 rating. For Johnny Retard, the time investment would be about the same either way, but the more hardcore pvpers would gain gear at a faster rate. It's not like this would be particularly overpowered, given the fact that the majority of PvP gear is two seasons behind already, and there'd still be the whole token grind thing to contend with.

This would take care of so many issues in one fell swoop, including the whole premade versus pug thing. Obviously some of the battlegrounds would have to be tweaked for this, and honor/token costs would have to be adjusted somewhat, but I know that playing competitively with 14 (or 9) other players in battlegrounds would be a ton of fun compared to the long, hard slog that it is now.

This is actually almost exactly how it works now. In AB and EotS, you get honor for every 200 resources that you accumulate, so there is a big difference between losing 2000-0 and 2000-1800. In AV, I've seen the losing team earn the same amount of bonus honor as the winning team, due to the number of towers and GY's they had control of at the end. In WSG, you get honor for each flag capture, so losing 3-0 is zero bonus honor while losing 3-2 still gets you some.

I'm aware that you get some honor for losing less badly, but it's such a small token amount that people would rather give up instead of fight. Beardstorm's idea is much better, and I like it a lot.

Right now, I'd say at least half of the players doing BGs who are playing are just looking for mismatched games. If they join a game with a premade(even though half of the premades nowadays are complete pushovers), they just wait on the eots rock, hill climb in AB or just sit in the GY in WSG. If the other team scores a flag in WSG or gets a 2-1 cap in AB with 2 more claimed, they do the exact same thing.

Basically I'd just like to see more people playing the actual game instead of playing find the mismatch. They're rewarding people who pick on much weaker teams right now.

All I need is a timer on WSG and an option to never face a preform, ever. It makes half my team go afk.

The problem with ranked WSG/AB is that they are horrendously imbalanced, WSG expecially. If they made some rated WSG's, expect some cheese teams the likes of which you never even imagined before - literally a shitload of PI priests to keep the flag carrier up, a bunch of pom pyro mages to blow up the flag carrier, and maybe one warrior to put MS on. It would literally become a completely retarded game of turtling.

The problem you'll find is that the more you reward losing, the less incentive there is to win. If someone can sit afk (assuming they aren't deterred by the prospect of being banned and stripped of honor gear) and get virtually the same amount of honor as if they had won, while their team struggles to a near victory, then they will.

I like the idea of rewarding hard-fought close matches, but it's a difficult balancing act between doing that and incentivising losing.

Just to restate, my fear is that if you get nearly the same reward for getting 1700 resources as you would for actually winning, then who cares about winning? Might as well just half-ass your way to the epics.

I'd like to say that BGs are generally fun (imo), its really fun to unwind and just crack a few skulls after a nice raid. What I really object to is the honor grind that is really really really unfun, boring, unimaginative which is probably why the incentive to AFK is so strong, especially since about 150 resilience is really nice to have when starting arena. Whether it's required I'm not so sure but I can say that as a warrior I can really notice the difference between smashing a 0 resilience target and a S1 geared target.

Lookit: I think it's not so much about how much you get compared to fighting and losing by a small margin that determines BG participation, but it's when you can lose fast and earn more/the same as you do with fighting a close game and winning (which is the case at the moment, especially in WSG weekend) that you create an environment that favours AFK leeching behaviour. If you get almost the same honor for losing 2000-1750 as you do for winning, but you get a much smaller amount (see my post above) for losing 2000-100 then it should at least encourage people to fight and win a lot more since there is a honor incentive for doing so. Best outcome will be that it actually encourages people to raise their game - AV is a prime example where IMO the general community has improved its tactics a lot since the great zerg days.

I think a very simple way to help improve BGs is to have the rules of the BG displayed on the loading screens. I've given up on trying to explain to everyone that capping the flag in EotS with one tower will yield significantly lower points than if your team had three. I just can't expect everyone to have read the patch notes or go to the EotS page on the WoW website.

One of my first posts here on the forum, I hope it hasn't been covered.

With the knowledge that at the very least we will be getting 1 new battleground with the next expansion (whenever they decide to release that), there are some improvements myself and guildmates have talked about. Implementing a new items rewards system based upon damage done/effective healing/killing blows in either arena or battlegrounds (preferably both in some form) could be a good way to bring more players back into the game, and also keep afkers from being rewarded.