Same-Faction BGs in Classic

[Holycow-uldaman]

O.O

@Kaivax

Here’s the plan:

• Starting tomorrow (Friday, July 2), we’re going to enable same-faction Battlegrounds.
• You’ll queue for BGs as usual, and the matchmaker will first try to make an opposite-faction match for you.
• If an opposite-faction match cannot be quickly made, you’ll be matched against a team from your faction.
• Rewards such as Honor and Reputation will be assigned as usual.

We’ve been thinking of these like military training exercises, and to help get that feeling across in-game, we’re testing putting masks and tabards on the team playing out of the enemy faction’s base.

Please note that same-faction play won’t be available for Alterac Valley, which was never hooked up for War Games and would be particularly awkward for the team that found themselves fighting alongside a great number of enemy NPCs.

@Kaivax

We’ll follow the action closely throughout the weekend, and with scheduled maintenance next week (July 6 in this region), we’re going to return the matchmaker to its regular configuration and analyze what happened.

When same-faction play goes live tomorrow, we’ll open a new feedback thread in this forum. After you’ve played some BGs, please come to that new thread and let us know how it went.

@Kaivax

Our configuration change to allow same-faction Battlegrounds is now live.

If you’d like to test it with us, please enter the Battleground queue in-game over the next four days, and then after you’ve experienced it, let us know how it went for you in this thread.

@Kaivax

We’ve heard a clear majority of players telling us that they preferred same-faction Battlegrounds after our first test. During that test, we saw the benefits of drastically lowered queue times and less unavoidable ganking in the outdoor world. However, there were a significant number of concerns registered on other related topics.

We noticed that players were dismayed when the system occasionally launched an Alliance vs. Alliance Battleground. We reduced the likelihood of that a couple of hours into the test, and we think we can do a little more there.

The quick queues revealed that a noticeable number of players were doing BGs in organized raids. This makes sense; the time it takes to form a premade is time well-invested for those players. But for the large number of players who choose to queue alone, there’s essentially no hope of winning the BG. There are a couple of ways we can try addressing this, and in this next test, we’d like to try restricting groups to a maximum of 5 players in all Battlegrounds. This should have the added benefit of allowing players who are in groups to quest while waiting in queue for Battlegrounds.

A major point of discussion was the perception that the faction a majority of players chose for their main character would see all players switch to it, unless we change the game to either reward the minority faction, punish the majority faction, or prevent players from choosing to play on the majority faction in the first place. As you can see (and has been discussed at great length here and elsewhere), most such changes that might come to mind would conflict with our stated goals above. Still, we’d like to see what happens when we place a reward for the minority faction into the game. Globally, the faction imbalance is small, but the trend over the last few months has been towards a lower BG participation rate among Alliance players.

We’ll plan to run the next test for a week, starting with weekly maintenance (tomorrow, Tuesday, July 20 in this region), by enabling all of the following:

• Same-faction Battlegrounds will be allowed by the matchmaker.
• The matchmaker will take a little more time to find an opposite-faction match than it did during the first test.
• Groups will be restricted to a maximum of 5 players when joining the queue.
• We’re adding an enlistment bonus for Alliance players who participate.

The enlistment bonus will be a repeatable Level 70 quest offered by the Alliance Brigadier General in any Alliance capital city or Shattrath. The quest rewards a Battleground win with a box of loot that includes an appropriate amount of consumables, crafting materials, and currencies/tokens.

We’re planning to end this test with scheduled weekly maintenance next week (Tuesday, July 27 in this region). We prefer having a clear beginning and end to it so that we can do more comparative analysis and take care as we decide what would be best for the game and players going forward.

We think it’s worth noting upfront that the most impactful part of this test should be the restriction on premades, and we’re going to be highly sensitive to how Battleground PvP feels for both players who usually queue up alone and players who would have otherwise formed raids before queueing. As before, we’re going to open a new thread here when the test begins, and we’ll be looking there for your thoughts on how the test went after you’ve experienced it.

[Bynir-dragonblight (Bynir)]

Genuinely surprised this is the route they’re taking. This doesn’t address the faction imbalance at all and actually upon reflection is likely to make it even worse - literally no reason (outside of personal preference) to play Alliance now especially if the larger community is already Horde for the overpowered racials. The world is still going to be largely red and Alliance players on PvP realms will likely continue to struggle.

[Oäk-bloodhoof (Oäk)]

Rofl the forums are going to be on fire today. Honestly impressed they did that.

[Holycow-uldaman]

@Bynir-dragonblight

Genuinely surprised

I’m shocked.

The Retail devs spent years/expansions implementing a partial bg-queue-time solution using mercenary mode (and maybe faction changes?).

The Classic devs are like… give us 1 month to permanently fix bg queue times.

O.O

[Ofman-dragonmaw]

Can retail get devs who care at all like classic has?

[Beijixiong-stormrage]

not even classic is free from horde favoritism good god

[Oäk-bloodhoof (Oäk)]

Feel like classic gets more attention then retail as well does anymore. Like almost all the classic changes they have done since its been out has been good 1s. Meanwhile here… 9.1 is worse then 9.0.5 lmao

[Holycow-uldaman]

I’m impressed that the Classic devs took such quick/decisive action. I know it’s a huge and controversial change for some players.

However, if this bg queue time problem were happening in Retail, I think the devs would have eventually acknowledged the problem, but then they’d probably wait a couple of months/years to see if the problem fixed itself. And if they made any changes, it wouldn’t be this drastic.

The Classic devs aren’t messing around. They’re roflstomping this bg queue time problem.

[Silverbolt-shadowmoon (Silverbolt)]

I like the lore reason they came up with Military training exercises. That’s smart.

[Zarrathus-sargeras]

If this stays then Alliance players will have no reason not to play Horde, outside of the lack of wanting to start over again.

This is also kind of a slap in the face to players who rerolled to help fix the imbalance.

This is not a fix, this is masking tape for a larger issue. Should be fun seeing 1 faction game in the future.

[Socked-skeram]

@Helena-wyrmrest-accord

What in the actual F*CK! It’s crazy that every time the Horde playerbase says jump, Blizzard’s response is always: “how high? Oh and we’ll make sure to land on Alliance mains!”

Its really shocking that a company is going to cater to its largest consumer base.

Wait, the opposite of shocking.

[Helena-wyrmrest-accord (Helena)]

@Socked-skeram

Its really shocking that a company is going to cater to its largest consumer base.

Wait, the opposite of shocking.

It should be shocking though, considering how much the Devs love to harp that the factions are an integral part of WoW’s DNA.

This solution totally contradicts that claim.

[Sthis-shandris]

Holy cow. I never thought I’d see the day, after 10 years of suggesting it. Looking forward to the change! I’ve avoided my horde bc toons just because if the queue times.

Edit: just went to the original post, my god. So much toxicity surrounding an obvious fix for a huge problem. Can’t make everyone happy

[Beijixiong-stormrage]

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people don’t want to see a repeat of what led to retail alliance being an effectively dead faction.

[Sthis-shandris]

Incentives for alliance to PvP also causes frustration. There was a thread against AOO every single time it was up in game all through BFA.

[Beijixiong-stormrage]

That’ll happen when the favored faction finally misses out on an advantage.

[Lightninjaqt-mannoroth]

@Zarrathus-sargeras

This is not a fix, this is masking tape for a larger issue

What kind of fix would you expect? They even acknowledged they know people dont want to transfer to Alliance

[Warzug-mankrik]

I mean, if it’s mostly Horde players paying the bills/keeping the lights on over at Blizzard then it makes sense to give them what they want and keep them happy

If anything, this whole episode proves (once again) that when the general public is loud enough on a particular issue and makes enough complain posts (see: the TBCC forums), Blizzard sometimes does cave.

Not always, but the fact they responded so quickly (around 1 month later?) to the sheer amount of Horde complaints is quite telling.

Here’s a reddit thread that blew up even faster than the official blue post, enjoy

https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/obrkzw/blizzard_testing_horde_vs_horde_and_alliance_vs/

[Warzug-mankrik]

It’s an official blue post, same-faction BGs are confirmed.

Go check out the TBCC forum

[Lightninjaqt-mannoroth]

@Airport-stormrage

Can you quote the part where they claim horde players “foot the bill”?

h ttps://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us