Battleground dilution

The upcoming patch 1.7 of World of Warcraft will add a third battleground at Arathi Basin to the game, a 15 vs. 15 battle where both sides try to gather resources faster than the other side. There are some "leaked 1.8 patch notes" circulating on the web, which might well be fake, but they announce another battleground at the Forlorn Ridge in Azshara. Even if this battleground doesn't come in patch 1.8, the Forlorn Ridge is obviously a site for a future battleground, it already has two entrances marked with Alliance and Horde flags. So the number of battlegrounds is definitely increasing. And I wonder if that is a good idea.

Now I'm principally all for adding content to this game. Blizzard's idea is obviously to retain people in the old battlegrounds, and get additional people to play in the new ones. But while that will most probably happen in the first weeks after the new addition, in the long run the number of players on each server interested in PvP might be constant. The problem with battlegrounds is already that they aren't available all the time, the bigger the battleground the rarer it starts. If you have 4 or more battlegrounds on offer, Alterac Valley will open only once in a blue moon.

Heartless proposes an interesting way to fix battlegrounds on his blog, clustering several servers together for the purposes of battlegrounds only. I don't know how easy or difficult that would be technically, but if this could be done, at least all battlegrounds could be open every day. At which point the second problem would kick in with full force: The fact that there are twice as many Alliance players as Horde players. The number of battlegrounds open is determined by the number of Horde players signing up for them. So even if you cluster enough servers together to have battlegrounds all the time, Alliance players will still spend only half of the time in the battlegrounds, and the other half of the time in a waiting queue. Blizzard said they are aware of the problem, but I don't see how they want to solve it.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link