Blizzard released the second part of their preview about the battleground system that will be added to the game somewhere in the future with the aim to give some depth (and fun) to the PvP and also mantain the high-level players interested in the long run.

These are various highlights with my comments:

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Rest assured we do not plan to restrict Battlegrounds to the highest-levels of players, so there will be more accessible Battlegrounds for lower levels.

This means that they plan to add new battlegrounds for the lower levels once the system works and they have more time to develop new ones (aeons in the future).

We do have a cap on the number of people on each side that can enter a Battleground. Rest assured we want the two sides to be fairly matched. However, if you have to wait for your turn to enter the Battleground, you can still adventure in the rest of the game world before you are summoned to fight.

So they are instanced, capped by level and capped by total number. Plus they are capped/balanced to have mostly ‘even’ faction numbers.

In this case is the horde to have the advantage. Since they are outnumbered they’ll quickly get the access to the battleground, while the alliance will have to wait in a queue (but with the possibility to play somewhere else while waiting) before having the opportunity to play.

This works but we’ll hear a lot of complaints from alliance players on the most unbalanced servers. If the alliance outnumbers 2 to 1 the horde you simply won’t be able to play.

As the buildings are consumed by fire, you will finally gain control of the base, and control of the Battleground as well. At this point, your faction will have recorded a victory in the Alterac Valley Battleground, with a huge number of subsequent honor points being added to the honor pool that will then be distributed to all PvP combatants for the day.

So here I see something good. The honor is a “pool” of point common to the whole faction. Your aim is to conquer the opposite faction base.

For the PvP servers this “seems” good because it seems that the honor system doesn’t reward player-killing directly, nor it rewards player-killing out of this battleground, instead it seems to reward just the conquest of the opposite HQ. I wonder: the honor will then be something “flat rate” where basically all the players finish with the same amount of points? (at least between those that played in the same battleground session)

For the next few hours after your side scores a victory, the opposition will have no NPC troops to help them.

Few hours? How this works if there are multiple instanced sessions of the BG? So the BG doesn’t reset when the goal is accomplished? This may reveal that the BG aren’t instanced, they are capped. Basically there may be just ONE battleground. When you are done with the queue you will be summoned into that one battleground that exists on the server. This means that the server won’t create multiple battleground sessions and this also means that for the first week (and more) accessing the battleground may be a *miracle*.

From what I’m reading they have no way to boot the players out, no way to “refresh” the queue, so once you are in you may be able to play till you are bored. If each of those BGs can hold a maximum (and here I’m keeping the number high) of 100 players per faction you can imagine what could happen when the battleground will launch and everyone will try to access it.

The whining we are having now for the log in issues will be *nothing*. We’ll see.

The initial and repeatable quest you can acquire is to gain improved reputation with the main base fighting for your side. Horde players will be told to kill Alliance players, and vice versa.

The rest of the article continues to explain how the various quest work and their effect on the dynamics of the BG. All extremely interesting and way beyond all the current PvP models we have on the various mmorpgs (finally some goddamn interaction!). So all good and wonderful but they still don’t reveal how this reputation will work.

I believe that these quests aren’t a “one time only”. They are supposed to be repeatable. But at the same time I’ve never seen the reputation in the game change. You can increase it but it doesn’t go back.

So, maybe, they will have a system to let this reputation also decay with the time since it seems it will lead directly to a lot of power in the hands of the players. Catassing this system seems too easy and at this point Blizzard absolutely needs a major hook. If these battlegrounds are felt “completed” after a few days they’ll loose the replay value.

And this leads to:

In several weeks time, we’ll turn our gaze away from Battlegrounds and focus more on the new PvP Honor System, gaining ranks, and the bevy of rewards that awaits for those who engage in the honorable defense of their lifestyle against the encroachment of the enemy faction.

So no honor system, ranks and rewards for “several weeks”.

How they expect to retain players?

From my point of view this article holds both good hype and a dubious taste.