The North American battlegroups as we knew them are gone.
Instead of the old battlegroups, all players are part of one North American battlegroup for battlegrounds. (There are 4 subgroups for running random dungeons.) This change was announced a few months ago and should have a net positive effect for most players.
- If you were on the weaker (less populated) side of a battlegroup, you’re going to be paired with more people to be able to fill out BGs.
- If you’re on the more populated side of a battlegroup, your queues should pop quicker.
- If you’ve frozen your experience gain, it should no longer matter if you’re in a destination battlegroup – twinking in all brackets is theoretically viable again.
- Faction domination of a given BG/bracket will likely become very difficult, if not impossible.
For those of us who enjoyed instant queues before, I hope this doesn’t delay them. I’m sure there will be glitches over the next few days as they iron out a lot of the infrastructure issues, and hopefully Blizzard will shed some more light on the matching algorithms.
But in the meantime, we’re all in it together now. Play nice out there.
Let me know how things are going in the comments!
Cynwise's Warcraft Manual 
Aside from the Random BG thing giving me Failsong Gulch too damn often, it’s pretty nice. Queues went from roughly 4-5 minutes average to sub-30 seconds for me. (Shadow Council-A)
Oh I got really excited thinking that the Oceanic realms might be just playing against each other (crappy latency vs crappy latency ftw!)
But it looks like by March next year Bloodlust (US + Oceanic) could be paired up with other players on Whirlwind, Emberstorm and Vengeance. That’s a hell of a lot of realms!
That pretty much shot a chance of ever meeting Cynwise on the battlefield, but I guess if it hadn’t happened yet it there was a pretty slim chance it would anyway.
My queues last night were still 6+ minutes.
I think it’s astonishing that as much as I’ve run battlegrounds, I’ve only met 1 other person I know in them. I’ve had a few people whisper me, knowing me from the blog, but I’ve only ever run into @battlechicken in a match. Every other time I’ve been with people I know, it’s because I grouped up with them beforehand.
The queue time thing is interesting. Is your wait time on the Horde side, or Ally? (I assume Horde.)
yeah but now everyone ELSE has a remote chance to pop in with cynwise instead ;-).
This is a good thing, I can stop worrying that numbers I calculate apply only to my BG b/c we’ll all be together. Be nice to be able to twink again, I put a lot of effort into one and then gave up and levelled her to 80 when I sat in a 19 queue for 2 hours repeatedly with nothing popping.
I have to remember to be more vocal in all BGs so that folks have a shot of finding me. Sometimes I just want to get in there and do my job, which is silly – part of the job is bringing the team together.
I think the data implications of this change are veeeery interesting. I’d also love to see how the twinking brackets fare now.
Are you saying this change is live now? All the North American battlegroups are together?
That’s what the blues are saying, at least. Looks like there still might be some imbalance in the system, but people are definitely seeing different servers come up in their BGs.
I can now actually twink on my main server.. where I actually have money! Hmm, the possibilities..