Blizzard is experimenting with changes to the PvP battlegrounds in Burning Crusade Classic. Soon you will be able to beat your own faction.
Even though the launch of WoW: Burning Crusade Classic was a few weeks ago and went mostly smoothly, problems have emerged in hindsight. The imbalance of player distribution among factions has drastically increased on some realms. Long waiting times in PvP battlegrounds are the consequence. Blizzard is testing a solution for this: battles against your own faction.
What is the problem? On many realms, there are significantly more Horde players than Alliance players. This has led to extremely long waiting times in battlegrounds. Especially Horde players can sometimes wait up to an hour before receiving an invitation – not great prospects for those who see PvP as their main activity.
How does Blizzard want to solve this? Currently, the developers are testing a new system. Horde players can compete against other Horde players in PvP battlegrounds, and Alliance players can measure themselves against other Alliance groups. Whether these fights happen cannot be influenced and mainly depends on the other players who sign up.
The system works like this:
- First, an attempt is made to create a “normal” battle, that is, Horde against Alliance.
- If this fails for a certain period of time, the matchmaking will instead find a group of players from the same faction and start a PvP battleground.
- From a story perspective, this is seen as a “practice fight”, as one side receives masks and tabards from the opposing faction.
- Honor and reputation gains work in these battles completely normally, as if you were really fighting against the other faction.
- By the way, the Alterac Valley is excluded from this system; it is not applied there.
Is this permanent? No. For now, this is only a test phase that is supposed to be active for about 5 days, that is, until Wednesday of the current WoW week. Afterwards, Blizzard plans to evaluate the collected data and see how the system has affected waiting times and player behavior. So it’s not yet “set in stone” that this change will be a permanent adjustment.
Alliance players are dissatisfied: In the official forum and the subreddit, the voices of most Horde members are pleased about the change. They are happy about shorter queues and therefore more PvP.
However, Alliance players see it differently. They are concerned about the identity of the two factions and fear that there will be no reason to play with the Alliance at all. The strong racial bonuses of the Horde have already led to more and more PvP fans switching to the Horde. If there are now fewer Alliance members needed for PvP, there are even fewer reasons to join the Alliance at all.
What do you think of this test? A good idea to reduce waiting times in PvP? Or a much too big change that breaks BC Classic?
