Long talked about, mostly anticipated, and currently in testing for patch 2.1, the Battleground matching system aims to make the BGs more fair and fun for all. Twinks will be matched up against twinks, regular players against regular players, and at the higher level brackets, people in full T5 (or Gladiator, or what have you) should mostly fight similarly-geared people. It should also attempt to keep preformeds from fighting against PuGs. That's the idea, anyway. But how is it going to work? A few blue posts over the past couple days have given some interesting information:

• The matching system is pretty "lax" right now, since there aren't as many people playing the BGs as there have been at times in the past (due to the Arenas, is my guess). This means, in the interest of keeping queues short, people of fairly disparate gear will still get matched up against each other from time to time.
• Matching will be based on two factors: the size of your group and the quality of your gear. To prevent the obvious workaround of equipping bad gear and then swapping into epics as soon as you zone in, the system will look at all the gear you own and take the average quality.
• When you're in a group, the gear value used is the average quality of all the gear of everyone in your group.

In short, according to Drysc, When it's trying to find others to match you against it's going to take your gear number, and party size, and try to find other people/teams that fall within your same gear and organization level. If you're in greens and playing by yourself it's going to try to match you up with others that are in greens and playing alone. However, as the CMs continue to point out, the system would rather have you play sooner than sit out waiting for the perfect match-up, so you're not going to get a "fair" playing field all the time, or necessarily even most of the time.

One problem that occurs to me with the gear rating system: what's to stop you from "watering down" your gear quality rating by filling bank and inventory by filling them with trashy greens? That would bring your average gear rating way down, even if you had full epics equipped, and would seem to enable a determined twink to still stomp all over "regular" players. But maybe this is a fringe case, and it's more important to get the system to work for the majority of players who want to work within a system. At any rate, follow the cut for all the official info.

The battleground matching system we have previously mentioned is in for 2.1. However, the range of players it will pick and choose from is rather broad to match the amount of people playing in the battlegrounds currently.

There simply aren't as many people playing now, from say when the new honour system had launched, and we would rather get players into battleground matches sooner than have them wait around just to match them with the people they were probably going to be matched with anyway.

We'll be continuing to tighten up or loosen how stingy the matching is as the number of players in the battlegrounds increases or decreases, respectively.

Bottom line is that with enough people in queue you're going to see some better matching, but in the lower levels where there's generally already slim pickings the chance you'll see a twink every once in a while is probably pretty good.

Updates:

Drysc 03/05:
Basically when you queue it's going to check all of the gear you own, average out how good the gear you have is, and then assign you a number. This all happens "back stage". Invisible to you or me.

In addition it's also going to check how many people are in the party you queued up with.

When it's trying to find others to match you against it's going to take your gear number, and party size, and try to find other people/teams that fall within your same gear and organization level. If you're in greens and playing by yourself it's going to try to match you up with others that are in greens and playing alone.

It's not going to be completely accurate all of the time, or even most of the time because we would rather you get into a game where the matching is a bit off instead of making you wait a really long time until the perfect match finally queues up. It's going to help though.

The benefit is taking out some of the skewed match ups that usually just don't end up being fun at all, and trying to place players and teams in situations where they're at least close to each other with their items and organisation.

Nethaera 03/05:
The matching is going to be relatively forgiving so that BG queue time shouldn't be a problem.

Also, if your group is comprised of multiple armour sets of different qualities, it's going to work on an average (or at least should). So, you and your friends will still be able to play together and you won't have to worry about making sure everyone has the "right" gear to go into the battleground.

All the system should do is help balance out the disparities slightly and make things more fair between teams. There are no "Brackets" involved. You aren't labelled as being a part of a bracket, it's just an average of values weighted against others going into the battleground.

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