Massive Honor differences between battlegrounds:
The "honor per hour" you can potentially gain in a PUG is massively divergent depending on which battleground you are in. Even on EoS/AB/WSG weekends, I find that AV is vastly superior Honor when PUG'ing.

Fix:
1.) Every 5 (random number) minutes have each battleground give you 20 (another random number) honor to everyone inside. Why should a hard fought turtle WSG match that takes an hour net me less than 250 honor, whereas I can get 3 AV games in that same amount of time that will net anywhere from 900 (3 losses) to 1800 (3 600 honor wins.) This needs to be normalized badly. Is shouldn't matter which battleground you are in. If you are "PvP'ing the enemy" you should be gaining honor. If I am in one hour long WSG turtle, or two 30 minute Arathi Basin games, or four 20 Alterac Valley matches, or even 5 quick WSG games, I should be getting roughly equivalent honor. Yes, you should get more in AV/AB, since you are doing more matches and potentially winning (which should have a reward), but the current ~250 for that WSG, ~500-600 for those two AB's, or 900-1800 for AV is way, way too big of a difference.

(AB already has this mechanic. WSG would greatly benefit from it, and boosting/moving the honor to the clock tics of the 3 smaller battlegrounds would help bring them closer to the honor/hour you can get out of AV.)

2.) If a 'ticker' is not a viable solution, then move this honor to bonus honor at the end of the match. (This change would also promote people staying for an entire match, instead of 'Queue for AB/EoS/AV', play first 8 minutes of AB/EoS until AV queue pops and suddenly lose 4 of your teammates as they join AV.) This bonus honor could be something like <# of minutes in the battleground> * 6 (random number) for the loser, and <# of minutes in the battleground> * 8 (random number) for the winner. (This number could of course be tweaked very low for AV, which already gives the most honor, and very high for WSG, which is by far the worst battleground to find yourself in currently.)

Kill Honor:
On many maps, "guarding" objectives is highly important to winning, but detrimental individually. On EoS, I can guard the Blood Elf tower, and will only receive kill honor when it is assaulted. One game it may be a hot spot and I get a lot of honor from kills. Next game, it only gets assaulted once, and I get crap. Many times, it is more efficient on a personal level for me simply to go fight in the middle at the flag the entire match, win or lose. The Honor gained from being in range of the majority of the killing in the middle vastly outweighs the measly "win honor" at the end of an EoS. The same goes for Arathi Basin. Leaving lumber mill without any defenders whatsoever would be incredibly foolish. But what if lumbermill is only assaulted once in an entire match? That poor soul stuck as the guy defending it and calling out incomings gets terrible honor for that match compared to the roving response team that rushes to defend where the enemy is assaulting. Same thing for guarding graveyards/towers in Alterac Valley until they cap. Why is defending very strategic battleground points (which are required to win) so detrimental to your personal honor?

Fix:
1.) With the ability to now report /afker's, why can't we have zonewide honor gains for kills?
2.) If that's too "good", then how about making AB nodes, AV towers have a very small honor gain aura. Nowhere near large enough for people to want to actively all sit ontop of one for "large honor gains" but something like 10 (random number) honor every minute or so, so the people willing to sit there and protect them get at least some honor compared to the ones on the front lines getting all the HK's.

WSG:
For a PUG, this battleground is such a massive waste that I never, ever set foot in it. The chances of getting stuck in an hour long turtle and seeing my 1k+ honor/hour rate drop to under 300 honor/hour is just too great. AV, AB, and EoS all have mechanics that force the match to end. You have a hard limit on how long the match can go. WSG doesn't. This needs to be fixed. Badly. And the solution is right there in 2.3 AV.
1.) Make WSG use Resources. 150 (random number) resources per team. Capping a flag removes 50 (random number/3) resources from your opponent. (aka, 3 caps wins.) However, each kill also removes 1 resource from your opponent. TaDa! That 2 to 2 WSG turtle with everyone on defense magically is only X kills away from being over.
2.) Have flags automatically reset to their bases if they are not capped within 10 minutes of being picked up. (Yes, still a chance of an unending turtle, but better than how it is currently.)

Choice = Fun
One of the 'keys' to making Battlegrounds fun again is normalizing the honor gain in each. Once the honor/hour is comparable within 100-200 honor between the battlegrounds, people can then choose the one they personally enjoy the most and play that, instead of our current "AV is 3x more honor/hour than any other PUG option, so I either play AV's until I want to stab my eyes out, or I may as well go do something else because honor gain in the smaller battlegrounds is terrible."

Those are all positive and well put changes, however... I just can't see blizzard spending significant developer time/resources on making additional changes to 2-3 year old content which is what it would take to fix them properly.

Think of it this way: Upper Blackrock Spire, it's ~3 year old content, it's dead to 70's, only new alts run it maybe for gear if they want they can just skip it. I see no reason why these 2-3 year old BG's shouldn't be left to die out.

Given the length of the arena seasons so far, there's really no reason for the honor gear to not be on the arena vendors. It's just plain weird.

All I can think of is someone at blizzard has a hardon (is that too strong of word?) for AV and just won't let it die and RIP. Now wsg, there's some serious potential to revamp wsg into a competitive ladder but I digress.

The difference is that UBRS or any old world content does not reward max level characters any more or even characters beyond the instance level range, whereas the battlegrounds are a necessity for characters of any level if they want to increase their chances of success in the WoW PvP environment.

I think the fact that the latest patch included a massive revamp of the itemization for every old-world dungeon indicates that Blizzard is very much open to refining existing repeatable content. I believe very much that they would be open to revamping the BG's in the same way they have revamped the old-world 5-mans.

Furthermore, the fact that they just released a major revamp of AV leads me to believe they are willing to revamp the other BG's.

I have fallen into the "Gearing up an Alt for Arenas" trap. And its painful - either get ruined by everyone we meet in the arena until I have enough marks for a single piece of armour, or BG it to get the S1 set, whilst accruing points to get bits of S2 (Weapon/OH).

The sad thing is that whilst AV has a huge amount of side-quests (Ivus, Riders, Flightmasters, Mines, Upgraded guards et al) there is absolutely no reason to do them since its better honour/hour to just zerg down the map and hope you can drop the BossMob before the other team do. After a week of confusion when the AV patch hit, we are now back down to the standard 15 min battles.

Its not fun.

Adding an honour gain for Q's completed would be a step in the right direction I think. Maybe 75/quest (Irrc theres 9 Qs you can do). Also, I would suggest buffing the end bosses as well, but tieing their abilities/hp/damage to the "optional" quests, the more of them you do, the easier the boss is.

I personally think that one way of "balancing" the various battlegrounds would be to allow mark trading... I know that Blizzard is trying to encourage players to participate in all the battlegrounds but sometime, the requirements for certain type of marks is just obnoxious... Take the S1 pants, they cost 30 WSG marks, which you have to agree is a really painful amount.

Why not let us trade other marks for WSG. Make it a 50 to 1 trade if you want, but give me the possibilty to choose what game I want to play. I like AV, I really do, I can happily spend days in there and still enjoy it, but I can not stand the horrible grind that WSG is (and EOTS in a smaller way). For me, more often than not WSG is an hour spent with nothing except a few HK to show for it.

And I agree with some of the posters here, bring back quests for battlegrounds (cap this node, cap all nodes, summon Ivus, summon wolfriders, etc) - make it a daily if you want to increase variety - rewards could include generic honor points, gold, potions (btw, give us higher level potions - the current one don't even make a difference anymore) and in an ideal world a choice of marks (you complete the quest you can choose 3 marks of your choice).

Limiting the amount of spent in BG is also a good idea, it speeds up queues, and decreases burnout. WSG is the only BG without a time limit. If I was Blizzard I would include the reinforcements system in there too as someone mentioned earlier in the thread. No more 2h matches that don't reward you. You know when the game will finish and that has to be better.

As to the argument that it's not worth revisiting 3 year old content, I'd say (apart that they did it for AV and all the old dungeons) - they still expect us to participate in them to be able to gear for arean so improving the gameplay should be somewhere on their agenda (although with 2.4/WotLK coming, I'm sure they have a lot to do right now)

One of the best ways Blizzard made battlegrounds fun was leaving us the option to disable party chat.

They really, really need to make it so you aren't penalized for close matches.

I just played a premade-vs-premade AB and lost 2000-1970. It was a fun, competitive match. Just what Blizzard should be hoping for, and I had a reasonably good time playing it. The problem is, it was a 32 minute match, during bonus honor weekend, and at most I earned 380 honor from it (minus DRs which are probably significant). It was almost certainly better honor to immediately /afk out as soon as we saw it was a premade and then play 2 premade-vs-pug destructionfests in roughly the same amount of time that would have gotten us ~600 guaranteed honor.

We shouldn't be forced to choose between 'fun' and 'rewarding'.

For me, fun is the reward. I don't care if I didn't make much honor if I had a good time in the game. I don't even look at my honor tab anymore unless I'm checking arena points. In AV I spend all my time ganking back bunkers. I only do WSG if I at least have a healer because I'm a pro flag carrier and I think its fun. I never like AB because I feel like I'm working so hard against my own team and theres no fun way I can really help me team win. EotS can be similarly frustrating but when I convince people to just 3-cap and not worry about the flag unless its a free carry its a fun and rewarding battleground.

Then again I've got every piece of honor gear that I want and 80+ of every token so its easy to not care about honor per hour : \

I think one of the biggest reasons that BGs frustrate me is that my teammates receive equal rewards even if they aren't attempting to contribute to winning the battleground. Honor Kills are more of a "Quake" concept that does nothing except encourage wannabe-heroes to spend the entire match in midfirld farming kills.

There definately needs to be SOME kind of extra reward for helping, or at least attempting to help to, achieve the BG's goals.

Some possibilities would be -

* +50 (random figure plucked out of thin air) honor rewarded to the flag capper and anyone within an X amount radius

* Bonus honor rewarded for staying in proximity of capped flags in AB/EOTS

Anything that punishes people who are in it to simply ruin the BG or finish it as quickly as possible with as little effort needs to be done imo.

The obvious issue with your suggestion for wsg is that it punishs somebody that has escorted the flag carrier all the way across the map and died in the process or simply not been able to keep up at the end when a druid is carrying the flag and switched to cat to sprint up the tunnel. You would probably also see an increase in the hero mentality of people trying to run the flag rather than working together.

For your second suggestion, in AB this would lead to people sitting on the flags rather than helping in some cases and in EoTS you would see people deserting their node to go for the flag since they couldn't be sure where the flag carrier would take the flag.

I agree that something needs to be done to improve the teamplay in the BGs, but at the end of the day people will always try and work the system when there is something to be gained.

Maybe the solution would have been to reduce the benefits of stopping in the battlegrounds just for the honor, bring back the bugged amount for the pvp daily so that people can quickly get a chunk of honor if that is all they are after from them, better to have less people queueing for the battlegrounds if it means they actually want to be there for the fun of them rather than the rewards.

Another thing that could help matters would be an arena-style battleground, in all other games deathmatch and team deathmatch are at least as popular as the CTF variants so why not give the people that just want to run around killing people without the bother of an arena team what they want, most likely you would again reduce the numbers in the other battlegrounds, but again you should end up increasing the amount that are actually there to play.

This is the kind of thing blizzard should be thinking about when setting the honor gains in the BGs, the faster people can get the honor they need the faster the game can be played simply for the fun of it and in the long run people being geared faster leads to a more competitive average level of gear on your teammates/opposition in a PuG and more people actually being there because they want to rather than because they feel they need to be there.

Given that it's pretty much an intractable problem to distribute honor fairly throughout the battleground for people "doing their jobs" without also handing out free honor to afkers, I think they should make a radical change.

They should ONLY give win honor. Zero honor for kills, zero for "thanks for playing", zero for capping. Wins only. With that change, everyone will be playing "correctly", trying to win, not to min-max their honor games based on the honor distribution system. The goal will be to win, period. This, of course, will lead to most people playing premades, which can be difficult/annoying to create and maintain, but would up the overall challenge and quality of matches considerably.

And, because people will be spending more time finding and creating these premade groups, and to get the honor issue out of the way, they should put the daily BG quest back to 4k honor. Currently, I grudgingly play some BGs almost every day so I can get some honor, typically a couple hours playing terrible AVs for 2k-ish honor. Under my proposed model, I'd pick up the daily quest, ask around to try to find a good pre-made, and hopefully play probably no more than 5 games or so before I got a win, and could be done for the day content with my 4k honor.

Also (this is somewhat unrelated to my above suggestion), it would be great if rather than giving you the honor directly, wins gave you a "honor token" that you could turn in for honor, or for something like gold or faction if you enjoy playing the BGs but don't really need the honor. Even better, it would be great if these items were "account-bound" (a concept WoW really needs) so that you could help gain honor/faction for your alt classes that don't happen to be needed in the group that you're playing with.

This proposition is really not that much different than running instances. You don't just "queue for a heroic", you find/form a group that works, and if you don't complete the dungeon or down a boss, you don't get any rewards. I really think that this would up the quality of matches significantly, reduce the honor min-maxing that wreck game dynamics currently, and strongly curtail the grueling 10-or-more-hours-a-day BG sessions that people currently do on weekends for honor.

You should probably have a look at the topic about the new AV on this board to see what gaining zero bonus honor for losing does for the queue times of the dominant faction and your suggestion would result in the exact same thing happening.

I disagree, and have three differences/suggestions:

1. You can't do premades in AV, and therefore if you lose regularly pugging, there's not a whole lot you can do. Yes, you can simul-queue, but it's just too large of a game to effectively do full premades. Small premade groups can help, but it's too unreliable and often ineffective to really make much difference when half the raid is just in the game to min-maxing some honor. If it was all about winning, you'd see a lot more serious play.

2. Mirror the playing fields. I have no idea why this wasn't done from the start -- anyone with half a brain knows that differences will be exploited, and not evenly. The reason alliance is boycotting AVs is not just because they lose, but because they lose and feel like it's out of their control due to map imbalances.

3. There's not enough of a carrot for an eventual win. I wouldn't mind doing 4 AVs for 0 honor if the eventual win got me 4k honor.

Obviously my suggestion is most problematic with the current incarnation of AV because of its size and lack of pre-mades, but I don't think the issues are insurmountable, and I think it would work very well with the other BGs.

All your ideas seem firmly aimed at making the rich richer, the people that don't need the gear get cash if they don't need honor, while the ones that need the points to have a hope of competing in the future get nothing unless they get lucky and if they fail to get lucky for a few days in a row I wouldn't be surprised if most of those people just gave up completely.

The core problem, as I see it, is there is an incentive to end a battleground quickly, win or lose.

A hardfought, dramatic 3-2 WSG victory, nail-biting close 2000-1999 AB win is bad for you, in terms of honor/hour.

Close battles that can turn on a dime are fun and ought to have incentives via corresponding honor gains.

Blizzard should retool the honor system so that it encourages close, competitive fights, instead of penalizing them as it does now.

Right now if you can't win quickly, it is in your interest to lose as quickly as possible, both to get the next game (which you might be able to win quickly) and to get your loser's token that much faster.

Haha, after losing 3 ABs 2000 to 1900ish, i have to agree. I haven't had that much fun in PVP in a while. The honor gain? a bit above 1200 honor in 2 hours (early am queues included). Something is certainly wrong here. We're forced to choose between PVP fun and PVE honor grinding. Blizzard is actually shooting itself in the foot, if you ask me. Sure, the massive AV honor gains were justified in the days when it took at least 5 times longer to finish one AV. And oddly enough, it was a lot more fun, too. The feeling of breaking through a new node was something I haven't had in a very long time. Somehow, a battleground had several, gradual objectives, rather than the single, ultimate goal of winning it. That prevented them from turning into simple rushes, with little to no PVP.

Battlegrounds need to provide:
A) tangible incentives for competitive PVP play rather than 'rush drek' or 'let them win'
B) enough variety and complexity to not become dull
C) enough honor (and rep, if they ever decide to make old battleground rep useful again) gains to ensure a rather even distribution of players across the battlegrounds
D) more substantial honor rewards for the more tactical game mechanics (AB versus EOTS, for instance)

0 for HKs would be fine if the reward for winning a game was sufficiently large. Losing and getting nothing can be frustrating, but if the map is fair you're unlikely to lose 10 in a row with a competent group. Even if it takes ten AVs to win one for 4k honor, that's still more honor/hour than I'm able to generate right now. And in each match, both teams would be genuinely trying to win, rather than trying maximize their personal honor.

Ultimately you can't have it both ways. Either the goal is to win, or to game the system for personal honor. The only solution is to hinge honor gain on winning.

I want to specifically remove the honor system from my response, because it seems like its been discussed extensively enough already.

Instead, I want to just share some ideas i've been batting around about BGs and Arena, and address the OP question about how to make BGs more fun.

IMO, the largest difference between PVE and PVP is that PVE is challenging, while PVP is competitive. more specifically, PVE challenges the individual against "standardized" objectives, while PVP challenges the individual to compete with other individuals.

Put simply, PVE is a "game", while PVP is a "sport". It seems like a subtle distinction, but stick with me, I promise I have a point.

Not all sports appeal equally to all players, and the same applies to different forms of PVP in WoW. Each form of PVP in wow correlates somewhat nicely with popular sports:

2v2 arena is very similar to boxing- its very raw, and matchups can either be very fair, or very lopsided. success is determined by adaptability, patience, and knowing when to attack, when to defend, and when to retreat.

5v5 arena is more like basketball, in many ways- teams are structured very similarly to basketball teams, and success is usually greatly aided by properly identifying the most effective adversary and sucessfully shutting him down (while at the same time, ensuring your own star player has free reign).

WSG, to me, plays alot like american football. like football, an uneven matchup will quickly collapse into a landslide victory. like football, two well matched teams must play equal parts offense and defense. like football, you have to "carry" from the opposing teams "end zone" into your own. like football, you can't score unless you have exclusive possession. flag runners are like wide receivers or running backs. flag "holders" are like quaterbacks. base defenders are like linebackers.

Playing AB is kinda like watching 5 simultaneous hockey games. success is ultimately determined by forming as many number-advantage situations as you can... spamming the flag is like blocking the goalie. killing all the attackers and making them spawn somewhere else is like icing the puck. when you cap a flag while all the defenders are still trying to rez, its like you cleared the zone.

Eots and AV... well, they're kinda crap. and 3v3 arena was intentionally left out because i can't quite find the best corrolary for it, but i know its out there... it kinda feels like street 3v3 basketball, but it also kinda feels like fake tag team wrestling.

So, all of that sets up two relatively simple points that I wanted to make:

First, "fun" PVP experiences mirror fun sports. Have you noticed that there are no battlegrounds that play like bowling? If you want to come up with other ways to make battlegrounds fun, I suggest you look at other fun sports, identify the core aspects of the sport that are fun, and find a way to materialize that in WoW. maybe the reason that AV and EoTS are less fun is that they poorly coorespond to familar sports?

The second point is a bit more subtle. One major diference (in fact, probably the biggest difference) between PVP and real sports is that every single real sport has a well defined time limit, that absolutely must be reached. The winner is the team that achieved the game objectives the most times in the given time limit. the only value in the "win" is to the team- al individuals, on the winning team or loosing team, get all of their contribution counted in personal stats. how could this materialize in WoW?

imagine a WSG that was guaranteed to last exactly 20 minutes, with mandated flag resets every 5 minutes. instead of capturing 3 flags to win, the goal of the game would be to capture more flags than the opposing team in the time given. If there were pre-defined teams, then the system could track team wins and team losses. the system would also track individual contributions, though: total number of flag captures, total number of flag returns, total healing and total damage to flag carriers, etc.

Sure -- I like this, if winning will tripple my honor output. This would mean that I would only do bgs with 9/14 premade Gladiators for less time. This would help good players but jimmy the hunter will cry and quit his subscription because he won't be able to win enough matches to get his epics. I personally like this if the net honor gained went up, however if it stayed the same it would still require 30 some man hours for 3/5/4 capping whatever objective to get all the pieces it would not be as fun. In my opinion a five hour PvP session with fourty straight AB wins should reward everyone with 2-3 pieces of honor items, where as now one would scarsely get an item.

Compared to a guild clearing BT/HL in two days of raiding the amount of epics per hour of playing for steamrolling should be close to equal.

But really ---- anyone serious about PvP has all their slots in vindicator's or is not affected by the extra 3 stam, so the only way to lure competetive BG play is with extra rewards like arena does.

Like I mentioned earlier, one of the distasteful things that most people have with the BGs is that people don't *play* the BG. They just go in and zerg things as fast as possible. Remove the "honor" system entirely, its a failed system at this point. Replace it with BG Achievements - earn tokens by completing tasks inside the BG, much like the quests for AB and AV did by telling you to go cap a node or take a mine. Make the achievements varied enough so that a large number of things can trigger them.

Examples -
Be within 20 yards of a node that is capped or re-captured (before it goes to the other side)
Be within 20 yards of a flag capture in WSG or a flag pickup
Be in the top 3 healing done (perhaps with diminishing returns so that you can't just heal a warlock)

Take those achievements and award Marks of Achievement for them. PvP items would now cost those Marks at some rate that Blizz feels is appropriate. This would encourage people to actually perform the tasks that are expected in the game. Maybe you get 1-2 extra marks if you win, but 0 if you lose. which means you actually need to engage the enemy and participate in the game in order to earn any marks if you lose.

If the goal is to make BGs fun, remove the things that make it 'not fun' (the honor grind min/max) and replace it with things that *are* fun (requiring people to play by the rules in order to get rewards).