My experience of AV:
Part 1: alliance (on eu servers): Original AV. Absolute chaos. Bugs galore (yes giant tree guy who not only bugs out, but is super easy to kite into the horde pack for a swift kill). Lag through the whazoo. Never once did we win. Every AV was horde at stormpike and alliance dug in across the bridge. I loved every minute of it. Did i mention we never once won? We ONCE made it all the way to just outside the horde base. Once. There i finally discovered that land mines also existed in the game. Absolutely mind blowing stuff.
Part 2: Switched to US servers around 2006. Leveled up my horde rogue. Was so excited to finally win an AV! After reaching level 52 (no small feat), entered my first AV, charged to bal, watched the horde and alliance wave happily to one another across the field of strife. Killed bal, capped the towers, reached stormpike pretty much unopposed. Alliance win.
What the hell?
Part 3: Spent the next year listening to people say ‘ffs, just let them win’ any time someone tried to organise resistance. Was always one of the jerks volunteering for the defence and consigning everyone to a 30 minute grind. The horror! Won a few, lost most games. Over time the cave guardians multiplied and it was maybe 15 of us versus the 20 alliance who bothered to leave their cave and come out to play.
Part 4: TBC. Following keying misery dropped my rogue and leveled up this shammy on thaurissan (they wanted more alliance, i liked a target rich environment in world pvp), reached av again.
Only now horde were somehow winning again. The latest changes meant the horde cave was slightly closer. And with towers needing to fall (no more bugging out the warmasters), alliance were borked. Horde not only dropped those towers faster, but also recapped their towers. Alliance were constantly on the back foot and were lucky if the map wasnt entirely blue by the end of it.
Then they moved the cave back. I think this created a bit more balance. But by then its all a bit blurry. Anyways, point is, original av. Even later vanilla AV was a crap show. In fact it was miserable if you were horde.