In order to address issues we’re seeing with cross-faction PvP, we’re in the process of disabling the ability for cross-faction groups to enter the rated PvP queue. This will require that we re-start all realms.
We’ve been working on these issues as a priority, but we expect that the fix is going to take more than a few hours for us to develop, test, and deploy.
We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve got a fix and are ready to re-enable rated cross-faction PvP play.
I think random enforced mercenary mode for both factions in random BGs would shake things up more than people think. Alliance has so many undergeared alts queueing (both its own and a bunch from Horde) and it would do a lot of good to spread the distribution around.
I’ve lost close to 40pts on my rating due to the bugs we were having in rated battle grounds in a cross faction group. This included not being able to move from the starting spot until the timer started (would allow you to move and then reset your position, or even allow you to mount) and the rezing not working that I had to run back to my body to rez.
My brother is a programmer and he said it drives him crazy when people yell at programmers for something not working perfectly the first time. He says that in coding one tiny little thing can make the entire strand of coding go all spaghetti and it can be very hard to find the little gremlin hiding.
I’m in automated manufacturing and people always cry about how the machines always do something dumb and ask if the engineers even test it, the answer is yes they do… but something being tested for a short time in a controlled setting is different than how things work out in the real world when being used 24/7.