Why was it removed? I just came back to WoW, the last time I played was the Nzoth patch (Literally joined my friend guild, kill him than left the game again, so I might of missed its removal back than, cause it was during covid) and before than, MOP was truely the last time I’ve played
I use to enjoy the hell out of SOTA and was always happy to get it, now I’m forced to mostly play this Arathi Basin knock off from BFA, which I get at like a 70% rate when I queue up, talking of which, where is battleground blacklisting? Was that also removed or can I simply not find it?
SoTA was removed because it was the most blacklisted battleground. They also discovered that a lot of players were using blacklist on Epic battlegrounds in order to play the smaller ones, or normal BGs in order to play the larger ones.
So instead of BlackListing they just separated the queues into Epic and Normal. It’s done wonders for queue times, but many people would prefer to have blacklisting returned along with this new format.
It wasn’t balanced very well. You could get into situations where the attackers could literally win by simply moving faster than the defenders could. They would breach all the gates before you even got in range to attack their vehicles (and that’s not counting any defenders getting in your way).
On the flip side, you could also get into the opposite situation where it was impossible to make a push through a chokepoint, and by the time you went to the beach to grab more vehicles the game would be over.
I do miss it but I can see why it was removed. For me personally it was the most frustrating battleground to play with the highest chance of being a completely lopsided victory (or defeat).
I think, with shrinking wow population, Blizz is focused on shortening queue times. Bringing black listing back would negatively affect everyone’s queue times, not just the peeps blacklisting certain maps. So, I don’t think it’s ever coming back.
People didn’t like SOTA. It was probably the most blacklisted bg.
Yes, it was removed.
Experienced PvPers would block the bgs that their faction lost the most. (There used to be a website that collected bg stats.) New PvPers would end up in those bgs over and over because they had nothing blacklisted.