The State of Battlegrounds

I was grinding some honor this weekend so I can switch out my trinkets with a Medallion of the Horde and a Battlemaster’s trinket. The PvP daily for Sunday was Alterac Valley. I tried multiple times during the day to complete the daily, but every AV that I was in turned into a turtle with Alliance winning. I gave up after multiple games and tried playing some WSG and AB to get the marks that I need for turn-ins. We lost so horribly in both, that I gave up all together. The honor grind is bad enough without the current problems with BGs. This made me think about the current state of battlegrounds and how they can be improved.

I guess it isn’t really a matter of winning or losing. Sure, winning games technically makes your honor grind 1/3 of what it would be if you lost every game. I wasn’t in a preform, so I wasn’t going in *expecting* to win every game. The problem was that I had to wait 12 minutes for a que to pop and then we not only lost, but we dragged the loss out. The last WSG that I tried, the alliance had a Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, and a geared Prot Warrior. This would take a decent group of people to kill them, let alone a team of random scrubs. After a ton of turtling and losing the game because time ran out, it really got me thinking about the current state of battlegrounds and where it could go in the future.

Battlegrounds have come a long way

If you were around when battlegrounds were first introduced, you can remember having to run all the way to Ashenvale to play them (a particularly time consuming task for Alliance when the closest port was Darnassus). Those were the days that premades reigned supreme. If you were unlucky enough to play against one, your team didn’t stand a chance. At the time, many players were complaining about battlegrounds and how it took away from World PvP. Compared to today’s battlegrounds, those starting WSG matches did not even compare to how easy/fast/convenient battlegrounds are today. Whether you think that is a good thing or not.

Before arenas, battlegrounds were the only way for a player to get good PvP gear outside of raiding. It was for hardcore players only, nobody got GM without having 2-3 friends play on their account while they worked/slept/ate. For many people, it was a turn off because of the sheer amount of time required to get anywhere.

Cut ahead to today where battleground honor grinds is THE way for casuals to get gear. The current system is great because it opens up the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The downside is that it opens the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The same upside to the system is the same thing as it’s main downfall.

With all the improvements, I will outline some problems that I currently see and outlooks on fixing them.

Que Times

Depending on where you play and which faction you play as, these problems might not be existent or as noticeable. As it currently stands for my battlegroup, during peak hours of the day, a horde player can expect to wait in the que for 10+ minutes before playing anything other than AV. This has been a problem for a while. There does not seem to be enough horde players queuing for anything other than AV. I can see merging of battlegroups to fix the long que times, but this will bring up other issues such as lag and overpopulation of battlegroups.

The solution for this problem is a complicated one. It isn’t necessarily a problem with how queues work, it is more a problem of players not wanting to play battlegrounds. Blizzard needs to simultaneously keep working on the queues and somehow make Battlegrounds more worthwhile to those who take it seriously. With the announcement of rated battlegrounds, I can see an opportunity to take battlegrounds where they should be: A place for casuals to play PvP but yet not interfere with more serious PvPers.

Bad Players

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like the quality of the playerbase seems to be declining. It used to be a fairly rare occurrence that I would find a truly bad player and have a good laugh about it with my guildies. Now it is such a common occurrence that we don’t really even point them out anymore. We all know who I’m talking about; It is the warrior with spirit gear, or the hunter with the spec that looks like he closed his eyes and clicked wildly, or even the player who has decent gear/spec and still can’t seem to break 1000 dps. There is always the independent player who never seems to want to contribute to the team and the loner who tries to contribute but wants to do so by himself.

When you get stuck on a team with a bunch of bad players, it is frustrating. We’ve all been there. You are grinding out 62000 honor for your next Relentless offpiece and there are multiple people in the group who are going for their first deadly piece. In WSG, your team can’t seem to kill the FC who has one healer on him because everyone is just that bad. Frustrating to say the least.

Luckily, this problem should be solved with rated battlegrounds. Hopefully the low geared players will stay at lower ranks and will not end up playing the higher geared and skilled players. The change to battlegrounds in TBC where gear affected who you played against was a step in the right direction. Moving to rated battlegrounds is another great step.

Away from Keyboard

Over the history of battlegrounds, AFK’ing has been a problem. There have been many improvements to players combating AFK players in battlegrounds. We have the deserter debuff and AFK flagging as a result to the number of complaints there were of players in the AV grind. It seems like Blizzard has run out of solutions for this.

The first problem with the current system is that it takes too much effort from players to police the AFKers. You don’t always notice that player who AFKed in a spot that looks like they are participating. I am usually too into the fight and don’t want to take the time to look around for AFK players. The bright side is that if someone notices an AFKer and points them out, it is not hard to get them reported.

The second problem with the current system is that it doesn’t have very steep of a penalty. If a player is reported AFK over multiple battlegrounds and keeps doing that, then Blizzard will investigate and might ban their account for a short period of time. Really, that is no deterrence for the problem. The player still ends up taking up a slot for the remainder of the battleground match and in some matches can make a difference.

I think that the current measures would be adequate if two things were to happen: Battleground honor grinds need to be either shorter or more fun and the penalty needs to be steeper. If a players grind of 370000+ honor that it takes to get the season’s off pieces was more variant, I think people would AFK less. Also, if reported players had 1 minute to get into combat otherwise they would be removed from the battleground and given a 30 minute deserter debuff, that would stop many of the players who use a bot to AFK.

Future of Battlegrounds

I think anyone can get excited for the changes that are planned for battlegrounds in Cataclysm. I plan on being there and experiencing it all. For right now, we can just play together and make the best of the current system. So if you play on the Reckoning battlegroup and see me on my character Ferngully, be sure to give me a shout out (or a friendly /wave as I kill you if you are Alliance).