When you go to Tol Barad, you can see the battle timer at the top of your screen giving the information…
- Time until next battle.
- Which faction is in control.
Or if the battle is in progress, it will just indication which faction is attacking.
Battles last 15 minutes. After a battle ends, the timer resets to indicate when the next battle will start. So if you’re in Tol Barad or on Tol Barad Peninsula, you can make a note of the time of the next battle to come back to fight it for faction control
However, if there is no one in either zone for 15+ minutes, the next player to enter resets the timer to 1:00:02, and control is random.
So if you show up to fight the battle at the time it was supposed to be taking place, you may find the next battle is not about to take place, and may even be an hour away. And faction control may have been changed.
I presume this is an artifact from the time at the beginning of Legion when battles were 10 minutes apart.
The timer needs to be fixed so that people can show up to fight the battle with the expectation that it will take place at the time indicated.