Tigole Talks About New Plans For BG’s

Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) had a word with the World of Warcraft community as he posted a few thoughts in the official forums about the future of Battlegrounds. Below are the basic points of his post. You can read the whole post here.

1. More battlegrounds content over time

If this means more BG’s, it means more fun and more variety. If I’m a guy just farming honor and not much the marks, I can have that choice of doing the one I enjoy doing rather than be stuck with something I don’t really enjoy. But adding more BG’s also gives rise to another issue. More BG’s means more marks of honor to account for and farm. This also means that each additional BG will have its own holiday weekend, stretching the time when you’ll be able to see that holiday weekend again. If Lake Wintergrasp is a success, maybe more similar locations would be better than adding additional BG’s.

2. PvP shifting to being more BG centric

The arena tournament has changed the landscape of PvP since its arrival. It’s probably accurate to say that the introduction of the first daily quests was in response to the problem that arose from players respeccing back and forth between the PvP-arena specs and their PvE raid specs. But it isn’t for everyone since not everyone has the gear and the skill to excel in arena and not everyone enjoys it either. I hate the arena tournament since it’s a zero sum game, either you win or you lose and get rewarded or punished accordingly though your ratings. At least battlegrounds give you some honor and a mark even if you lose. I also hate arena since it’s something I can’t do on my own unlike BG’s where I just queue up and find a group just like that.

Tigole mentioned that PvP will be more about Horde vs Alliance, the core of what the game is about and that means more BG content.

3. Being able to queue up anywhere in the world

Being able to queue up from anywhere would definitely make things easier for hardcore and casual PvPer alike. Looking at how this matter evolved over time, first only being able to queue up at the BG’s actual location and then not at the battlemasters and then the plan to queue up from anywhere – that’s really a huge improvement. If you consider that Warhammer Online allows you exactly that (I was told by my brother that you can join their versions of battlegrounds with just a click of a button from anywhere), then WoW shouldn’t allow itself to get left behind.

4. Experience from Battlegrounds

This really isn’t a new concept. In fact we sort of were able to do it back in the days of the old honor system. Back in the day, the purpose of marks of honor were not for purchasing gear but for turning in for honor and if you weren’t 60 yet (the level cap at the time) also experience. I had friends who used to be able to level up just from doing battlegrounds and turning in these marks of honor back in the day. The new honor system doesn’t allow for the gaining of experience points but with nice plan to implement the idea, this could work out once again.

Now Tigole cautions that the community shouldn’t take the post as a promise but I really hope that at least some of these ideas will be implemented sometime.