After playing in the new cross realm battlegrounds for the last few weeks I thought I would review my experiences. First off I think it is a good idea as queue waiting times have generally been reduced. There are and have bee some exceptions as time to get into Alterac Valley is back to over an hour to get in. Also the first weekend after the patch the amount of Warsong gulches in the 10 – 19 bracket was cut to only 2 battlegrounds this caused waiting times of an hour and a half to get in. The cross realm battlegrounds have both been a positive and a negative to the Alliance.
In the lvl 60’s battlegrounds as far as I know the Alliance have not won a single Warsong gulch as all the of the Hord we have battled are “Premades”. Previous to the patch the alliance were winning about 10% of battles in Warsong gulch on Khaz’goroth over all levels. In the level 10 – 19 Worsong gulch battlegrounds the Alliance has been winning about 70% of battles as in that bracket a majority of the Alliance and hord players are “Twinked” and most of them are regular players and know how play.
In Athari Basin the Alliance have improved their winning percentage for a low ~20% to nearly 50% as a majority of the battles were lost before because there were 7 or less alliance onto 15 hord. This has now been fixed as most battles are at least 14 versus 14.
In Alterac Vally the Alliance has also improved their winning percentage to about 95% over the previous 60% as most Alliance players have played it enough now to know that the only way to win is to race to the general and not “turtle” fighting the hord.
Overall I have found some major problems with the cross realm battlegrounds. There seems to be a big latency disparity between US players and non US players, this seems especially so on the weekends at times that both US players and non US players are on at the same time. I have found that at least from my perspective that most of the Hord players I have come across have been form the US and seem to hit me nearly twice as often as what I can hit them thus causing me to die more that I should. This is caused as I am in Australia and I am a long way from the server as all of the “Oceanic” servers are based in the USA (I believe somewhere in California). Blizzard really needs to move the “Oceanic” servers or created new ones in Australia or at least somewhere closer outside mainland USA. I do however understand that this will unlikely fix the problem as not all of the battleground groupings are even in the “Oceanic” area and so the lag may end up worse. There is also still the standard server lag problems that happen every night at about 8:30pm local time where the honor for the previous day is calculated. I did on 1 occasion get stuck in an completed Alterac Vally battle for over 40 minutes. I was unable to move or even quit World of Warcraft and ended up intentionally crashing the game to exit, I then had to wait in the queue for the next half an hour to get back in.
To conclude the new cross realm battlegrounds are an improvement over what we had before as some queues were well of 3 hours and are much shorter now. The winning percentages has both improved and gone down with the wider pool of players. The larger pool of players has also meant that you can meet new people but as they are new they are unknown in their abilities. My only hope is that the problems I have mentioned here get resolved sometime in the near future and look forward to the new battlegrounds that are going to be created with the expansion pack.
Glossary
Premades are a full raid of players who join the battleground queues as a raid, they tend to be very well geared (twinked) are from the same realm and guild and porbably are using Team Speak or Ventrilo to communicate with each other.
Twink is a miss used word, but in the game means a character who has as much of the best gear as possible with the best enchants on all of their gear. For example a level 19 Twink generally spend over 100g on items and enchants. They are generally created for the sole purpose to only do battlegrounds and a lot will never level beyond a point. All Items a Twink has will be at minimum all blue (rare) or purple (epic) and will be as close to their level as possible. A twink will generally be able to beat a player who 2 or more levels above them who is mostly wearing green items.
Turtling is the term given when in a battleground (mostly in Alterac Vally) where a Majority of Hord and Alliance Players spend a long time battling each other without gaining or losing much ground.