The Battleground Finder

I know I mentioned this only in passing, but the more I think about updating the current Battleground queueing system to work like the Dungeon Finder, the more I like it. Give me a battleground, any battleground, and if we win, I get rewarded. Losing the BG gets me nothing special, but winning the first one of the day counts as my daily BG quest.

Generally speaking, I don’t really care which battleground I do. (Yes, that even applies to the Isle of Conquest.) The daily quests help give extra incentive to some of the less popular battlegrounds, but the quest givers are in out-of-the-way locations in cities, whereas you can now queue from anywhere – fishing, at the Argent Tournament, questing, wherever. Back in the days when you had to talk to actual Battlemasters to queue for an instance, those out-of-the-way places were anything but — they were happening PvP spots! The War Room in Stormwind was where a lot of folks hung out, buffing each other as they waited for their chosen field to pop. You would pick up the daily quest as you queued, because it was right there.  What else did you have to do?

But now, queueing is completely separate from picking up the quests. I’d wager that even with the Arena point buff, fewer daily battleground quests are getting done now.

The introduction of the Dungeon Finder highlights this disconnect. I don’t think I noticed it when the Battleground Queues were revamped because the quests were an incidental bonus, a tip, a hey-thanks-for-playing, not a real reason for playing. This is a separate issue, where the rewards for playing battlegrounds are too low to drive people there. 1400 honor and a few gold? I won’t say no, but it pales in comparison to what you get in Wintergrasp. It’s not enough for me to take the extra time to hearth to Dalaran and run to the back of the Silver Covenant war room. On my level 19 twinks, it’s an even more inconvenient task.

But with the Random Dungeon of the Day, these small barriers are removed for picking up the daily. Queue up and you’re ready to go. Keep questing, gathering mats, whatever – when a group is ready, you’ll have a shot at getting your reward. The act of signing up for the queue signs you up for the daily. You are automatically rewarded for success.

A side effect of the Random Dungeon Finder has been to expose people to a instances they wouldn’t or didn’t run before. A Random Battlefield Finder would not only give people a chance to see new things, but address the population imbalances which exist in certain brackets of certain battlegrounds. This varies from Battlegroup to Battlegroup, but my canonical examples are Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch in the 50s bracket of the Ruin Battlegroup. Alliance had a slightly unfair advantage in AV, which led to the Horde not playing it, which led to a massively unfair advantage for the Alliance, which sent all the good Horde PvPers to WSG, which caused Alliance to stop playing it. Randomizing your participation can help correct this imbalance.

A Battleground Finder won’t solve all the problems affecting battlegrounds in 3.3. The rewards are still too low, even selling honor for cash. It’s easier to get battleground gear by running dungeons than it is playing battlegrounds. And, as much as PvE raiders, battleground enthusiasts are at the mercy of Arena nerfs that solve balance problems that don’t exist in our chosen realm.

But at least a Battleground Finder would put us on equal footing with 5-man dungeons again in terms of convenience, if not rewards.  It would be a start.