1.6 Leaked Patch Notes

[MongoJerry]

If I could see something mathematical that would prove this is going to improve the wait times for the alliance, I'd like to see it. Until then, I think this will just make things equally bad across the board.

While wait times will not be eliminated, this change will help the wait times in several ways:

1. First, there will be more open BG instances. Assume that there are always people waiting in all the realms to get in an instance now, in an inter-realm system, the server can take a lot of those waiting people and make several new battlegrounds from the waiting player pool.

2. Along the same lines, there are lots of low population servers that probably don't have any battlegrounds running on them. If players on those servers can suddenly play in the battlegrounds, that'll be more people to add to the general population of people playing battlegrounds and therefore there will be more BG's to choose from and be involved in.

3. The biggest factor, though, is that the inter-realm system will smooth out many bottlenecks. I've had situations (and I'm Horde no less) where I've had to wait an hour to get in a battleground instance, because there are so few BG's running and the Alliance just decided not to show up (I think most of the major alliance guilds were running Molten Core at the time). While an inter-realm system won't cure all wait times, I think it will cure the massive wait times. That is, it might not cure, say, 15 minute wait times, but I think it will cure the spikey hour or longer wait times.

Perhaps an example would suffice: Let's say that there are only enough players on a realm on opposing sides for two active Warsong Gulch instances. The players who managed to get into the instances turn out to be fairly evenly matched and the matches last for an hour and a half to two hours. Meanwhile, other players show up to join but they can't get in, because there aren't enough players of the opposing faction waiting to make a new instance and because the players of the opposing faction who do want to play in Warsong Gulch are already in long duration matches. The result is a spikey hour or more wait time. However, if there are many battleground instances available, then there will always be a mix of short 15ish minute matches and long duration matches. Even if there were twice as many Alliance trying to get into matches as Horde, that would be OK, because some of the Horde will be involved in short matches and Alliance players who are waiting can then play against them. There would be a constant flow of CTF matches that are starting and completing, so the queue would be constantly moving. Without an inter-realm queue, though, it's easy for bottlenecks to form.

4. If people can get into battlegrounds easier, more people will play in the battlegrounds.

5. Horde-alliance populations on servers aren't balanced, but it isn't always in favor of the Alliance. Again, this should smooth out problems due to particularly harsh player population imbalances on individual realms. Actually, on Tichondrius, I think Horde players are more interested in PvP, so even though Alliance slightly outnumbers Horde (It's about a 1.2:1 Alliance:Horde ratio). It appears that it's the Horde who has to wait more than the Alliance on Tichondrius.

6. I think this system would be particularly helpful for lower level battlegrounds, where it's rare to get into a CTF match if you're under level 50.