We don't have any plans right now to add a new Battleground in patch 4.3.

That isn't true. Mogging will work with PvP gear. You can even swap the look of PvP gear to PvE and vice versa.

Skirmishes are a weird phenomenon. When designing Cataclysm, we looked at the data and saw an extremely fractional percentage of the entire playerbase actively using Skirmishes. So with all of the other changes happening, along with BG War Games, we decided not to polish up Skirmishes and keep them in.

The last time we talked to the developers about it, they mentioned the possibility of these going back in to compliment War Games. But given they saw very little evidence to suggest coding for Skirmishes paid off for players, it seems a low priority.

I even ranted to Tom Chilton and Greg Street about this recently. For all the reasons it was wrong, I still loved losing all track of time while involved in an endless -- quite literally -- battle for AV. I loved doing constant suicide runs from SF graveyard on my gnome 'lock just to try and interrupt the Horde summons.

We haven't stopped talking about it. Part of the problem is Battlegrounds are incredibly scripted, to the point they're actually worked on quite a bit by our encounter design team. We need to keep working on new ways of developing Battlegrounds to improve their design.

But, to your point, it's doubtful AV 1.0 will be resurrected, and there's only so much tweaking we can do to try and improve the current one -- we'd be working on very old framework with AV. At this point, it'd probably be easier and produce better results if we started from scratch.

Based on my recent conversation with GC, he did mention in particular that a Resto shaman tweak needs to be made. In particular, he's prepared to get his nasty claws on Windshear.

He's gone for the day and I don't want to try and paraphrase our conversation, at the risk of sounding incredibly naive. ;p Besides, I don't want this thread to be dictated by class balance.

We can bring this up with the developers. It'd probably have to fundamentally function a bit differently from the Dungeon Finder and proposed Raid Finder though, otherwise a cross-realm random RBG Finder wouldn't differ that much from randomly queuing for a normal Battleground, aside from the fact your team can persist after a battle concludes.

We also spoke to GC about this again yesterday (we ping him about it a lot). He made it clear that there are no design issues or qualms about allowing this functionality. Instead, it's an issue of programmer bandwidth. Because of the way WoW was originally structured around accounts, followed by the introduction of Battle.net accounts, there's a technical limitation to allowing cross-realm BoAs which has to be overcome by our Battle.net team, not the WoW development team. At the moment that team is incredibly busy building out the Battle.net platform to expand its functionality for World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, and get Diablo III going.

We're adamant about making this happen. Unfortunately, I can't really give you a timeline and I know it's already felt too long.