Cataclysm to bring region-wide battlegrounds
by Alex Ziebart 
Jun 11th 2010 at 9:00AM
How this managed to slip past us, we'll never know. Wednesday night, Kalgan (also known as Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton) hit the official forums to drop some news regarding rated battlegrounds in Cataclysm.
KalganWe're currently expecting both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup (within a region) for the launch of Cataclysm. So, players queueing from anywhere in North America (for example) could play vs players on any North American battlegroup, etc. This applies to all regions, not just North America.
Yes, battlegrounds will no longer be locked to battlegroups in the coming expansion. The pool of players to pull from is going to grow dramatically with this change, which can only be a good thing. It also has interesting implications for PvE content. Cross-realm battlegrounds came long before cross-realm 5-mans via the dungeon finder, so cross-battlegroup battlegrounds could potentially suggest that the dungeon finder will pull from the entire region eventually as well. With the Battle.net revamp and the incoming Real ID features, what realm we play on may become less and less relevant for anything but the guild we're in and which faction holds Tol Barad.
[via World of Raids]
Filed under: News items, PvP, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 5)
Sumadin Jun 11th 2010 9:41AM
This is most likely to prevent Battlegroups where one faction completly dominates the other one and to make sure that the top rated battleground-Guilds can face eachother.
elboricua1974 Jun 11th 2010 9:44AM
I certainly hope this fixes queue times. The stormstrike BG is heavily Horde dominated and queue times for horde are terrible. I once sat in queue for an hour for AV. I average 20 minute waits for even the random bg.
theRaptor Jun 11th 2010 10:17AM
An hour for AV is long? *coughsomeonestartedplayinginWotLKcough*
elboricua1974 Jun 11th 2010 10:34AM
I have been playing for 4 years now thank you. I am talking in the current environment. I came in for the tail end of vanilla and no I did not pvp then.
Puntable Jun 11th 2010 10:09AM
What happens when someone on an east-coast server is trying to heal a team-mate who is on a west-coast server? Worse yet, what about melee that can never get in range because of the lag between distant servers?
Target is not in range. Target is not in range. Target is not in range.
Davio Jun 11th 2010 2:20PM
Isn't WoW fairly trusting of the client for these things (compared to other MMOs)?
It does unfortunately allow gold sellers to drop corpses into words and mean that Warden is mandatory (for those absolutely paranoid of spyware).
Stiivi Jun 11th 2010 6:17PM
I'm healing West-coasters from Europe, and they seem not dying. Not only in BGs, in dungeons and raids as well.
theRaptor Jun 11th 2010 10:16AM
So Oceanics get screwed?
Only half of BG9 is oceanic. So either we get stuck in the oceanic "region" and have half the people to play against, or we get stuck in the US "region" and lose most PVP because 99% of the time we will be playing against US players with 30ms latency vs our 400ms plus (while currently that happens probably under half the time).
This is going to screw anyone who chose a specific realm/bg because of latency issues.
Utakata Jun 11th 2010 10:45AM
By your logic, we Canadians would have pretty skint Battlegrounds too. :)
I believe by region they mean the region the servers are based in, not the players. Thus anyone from *Australia, Canada or Peru will have access to same Battlegrounds as the good old US of A because thats where the servers are located for those countries.
*Note: To my understanding all Oceanic servers are located in the US.
Al Jun 11th 2010 3:23PM
You got upvoted for not reading the second part of his post?
SunGod228 Jun 11th 2010 10:34AM
I wonder how long before you can change pve realms like guild wars. That seems to be the only piece missing that would allow you to play with whomever you wanted (-faction limits of course)
0oom Jun 11th 2010 12:50PM
I think this still won't happen. What you are missing is that the economies on the different servers are very different. For example, check out the Horde AH prices on Ore on Uldaman vs. Area 52. (the 2 servers I am on) They are very, very different. In order to make that sort of change they would have to combine all of the economies into a single "global" economy, which is how GuildWars works.
SunGod228 Jun 11th 2010 1:09PM
Hmm good point. And I don't see them combining economies for several reasons.
1) supply would most likely outpace demand. And we know blizz likes people spending there gold
2) implementation. Instances and BGs are already on seperate independently maintained servers. If you assume all of a servers economy information is stored on the realm server there would be a lot of overhead to implement a global economy.
They could go the route of allowing you to 'visit' different realms allowing you to play and raid with friends but not allowing trades and the like, similar to dungeons. Then you would still localize a characters economy to there home server.
mltsandwich Jun 11th 2010 3:30PM
While on-demand server hopping wouldn't be practical, I would like to see the option of being able to LFD/BG queue with friends on your Real ID list.
jealouspirate Jun 11th 2010 10:46AM
PROS:
1) Shorter queue times! Very welcome.
2) These days, it seems most battlegroups are dominated by a particular faction, and people tranfer to be where their faction is best, exacerbating the problem. That should be eliminated, liking giving both Horde and Alliance about a 50/50 win/loss ratio.
CONS:
1) Only one I can see.. .and it's the same thing that happened with the LFD system. Shorter queues are very convenient, but it really guts the server community. The more stuff we do cross-anything, the less we'll get to know the people around us.
Stiivi Jun 11th 2010 6:25PM
^^ his. I created a quite nice list of nice people from dungeons before LFD system went live. Since then? Maybe one, that happened to be from the same server ...
Also it was easier to get to guild ... when I was guildless, people noticed that and they saw my play-style - I got invited. Now I have a priest which I would not like to join to my main's guild, because I would like to meet other people. I do not want to jump into random guild that is recruiting in chat, I want to join people I was playing with ... but most of the time I am playing with people where probability of meeting them again is very low and joining a guild on other server is impossible.
SpaceGoatPriest Jun 11th 2010 10:55AM
I thought Tom Chilton was Ghostcrawler?
Is Kalgan his alt? :)
SpaceGoatPriest Jun 11th 2010 10:57AM
Nevermind, I am an idiot.
Valt Jun 11th 2010 11:02AM
This is AMAZING news to European servers.
For example currently my battlegroup looks like this:
4 "ENGLISH" pve servers+3 pvp servers
13 GERMAN pvp/rp-pvp servers+3 pve servers
Needless to say we always get steamrolled because yes, pvp servers that actually share same language work much better than "we lost guis ur bunch of nuuubs". They actually use pvp gear versus pve server heroes with T9 gear and got tons of healers and always work in one zerg group. SoTa matches last 1 minute before they get to yellow gate and we take whole match to even get thro the beach.
But now.. maybe we can finally get english vs english realm battles? Maybe our random queue wont last 15 minutes (horde side has 15 min queue while alliance is INSTANT like tank in lfd tool).
Yeah yeah maybe I'm just venting but man this is so awesome change. In paper atleast.
I was REALLY worried how rated BGs would work because of they would be anything like our current battles why bother? Winning 2-3 out of 10 has no point.
Helicase Jun 11th 2010 11:20AM
"How this managed to slip past us, we'll never know."
I'm guessing it's because mmo-champion was down most of the day yesterday?