Testing Same-Faction Battlegrounds in Burning Crusade Classic

Hello, Battleground enthusiasts!

As soon as we saw Battleground queue times go way up a few weeks ago, we got to work on our options for addressing the situation. They’ve all been discussed here and elsewhere, as you know, and in addition to following your discussions closely, we looked at game history and data. What was most evident from all of your feedback was: players want to continue to play on their chosen side of the faction conflict, players don’t want to wait in long queues for BGs, and players don’t want a highly convoluted mechanism for getting into a BG.

To solve those issues as best we can, we’ve been internally testing a configuration where the War Games system is used to bring about Horde vs. Horde or Alliance vs. Alliance Battlegrounds from the regular queue, and we’re ready to test it in the live game. 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.

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.

Thank you!

395 Likes

Thank you sir

93 Likes

Should I get the popcorn ready?

33 Likes

Uh oh. LOL.

10 Likes

Nice
/10char

13 Likes

Thank you blizzard for implementing a fix in a timely manner that will almost assuredly fix the problem. I am for this change.

140 Likes

Awesome just in time for my cap and leaving the 69 bracket bravo blizzard 5 stars

16 Likes

Interesting. Not sure how I feel about this but we’ll see how it works out and if people think the shorter queues are worth the awkwardness of suddenly spawning in your enemy faction’s base. I know I’m gonna have trouble getting used to that.
I would kinda like if there was an option somewhere to disable this on a player-by-player basis for those okay with longer queues.

11 Likes

Sweet, let’s get some more QoL changes.

11 Likes

Nice! Now boost honor rates

46 Likes

Goodbye alliance economy…

167 Likes

Give alliance WARMODE, i cant play on open world

32 Likes

This is like the 3rd or 4th blue post on the forums regarding tbc. Genuinely impressed.

15 Likes

Hahaha

Somethings actually better for the alliance, they can queue faster…

Blizz: Fix it, fix it !!!

what a joke

169 Likes

This is awful. It’s only going to harm faction imbalance further. Horde chose Horde knowing full well they would have longer queue times, and that downside is erased.

I didn’t see you trying to fix player-created server imbalance when you opened free transfers off servers. You killed my first server, Skeram, then Incendius.

Ridiculous.

281 Likes

Very cool, kill faction balance even faster.

224 Likes

Actually chose the worst change possible, how are you so out of touch?

235 Likes

Good I was going to just quit 1 hour ques were not fun!

31 Likes

Well this is a Pandora’s Box if I’ve ever seen one.

44 Likes

Are you going to do anything to compensate the ally players that rolled ally specifically for better queues at the price of worse racials, or is this just an f u kind of scenario?

Or do we just need to now start crying to get something done, seems to be the way change works in this game.

202 Likes