As we expected the battlegrounds are now live to be shown at the upcoming E3. As we expected there are lots of fun problems:

Problem 1- Lack of Horde players leading to infinite waiting queues or deactivating/resetting battlegrounds.

Problem 2- Early reports give the lag at levels above the average Tarren Mill raid:

I’m seeing people just slide around, no walk animation or anything.

Its real fun.

From my direct experience the situation is rather bad. Not only the players slide around like frozen as per the comment above, but there are also many “invisible” players running around (I could see just the shadow) and lots of Unknown Entities hitting you. Especially the NPCs and monsters spawn/despawn right on your face and nearly always you cannot avoid to run on something till when it’s already hitting on you. Even if you are in a quiet zone of the BG you’ll notice the NPCs despawn just as they are a few feets away from you, so you can actually see in just a very narrow “bubble”.

Problem 3- Paladins with speed potions and vulnerability shield on are fun:

haha i saw something really funny when i tried the CTF Battlegrounds, a paladin took our flag, took his shield and a speed potion and we’ve never saw him again.

He did it three times in a row, and won the CTF battleground kinda lonely.

Problem 4- Mine fields and guards give you a 10% durebility hit. 15 minutes in the Battleground and I had my equipment completely broken. Nor enough money to repair it.

I’m already done with testing.

I wish I could have seen what killed me. I just kept dying to invisible “Unknown Entities”.

Problem 5- If you happen to log out while dead on a BG (or crash), you’ll enter a Limbo. You’ll have to walk out till a spirit healer to res and you will be locked out of every PvP instance.

Problem 6- If at some point one of the two factions is near to lose, it can organize to disconnect en masse, forcing the instance to deactivate itself for the lack of players and preventing the winning side to get the reward.

Problem 7- Most of the armor sets have been considerably nerfed of their PvP bonuses in order to directly separate the two systems (PvE raids for PvE armor sets and PvP raids for PvP armor sets). Obviously the players are ranting after having spent months to achieve gear that now lost the use it had.

Doubt 1- No mention of the effect of the old policy on these battlegrounds:

Repeated killing: you only get full CP for killing the same player once per day. The second kill on the same player on the same day gives 75% of the CP, the third 50% and the fourth 25%. Subsequent kills give no CP at all.

This will be particularly fun when paired with this:

Players may now see an “estimated contribution point value” in the combat log for an honorable kill. Note that this value does not take diminishing returns against the same player into account, and is therefore “estimated”.

So the battlegrounds may become just a trick to make players believe they are getting points when, instead, they are getting none (if not from completing the BG). A masterpiece.

Doubt 2- From the patch notes: “Dishonorable kills – gained by killing a trivial Civilian NPC – now has a negative impact on a player’s honor. Enough dishonorable kills will reduce a player’s rank all the way to zero.” Thanks for the notice, but maybe explaining the actual rule? How much is “enough”? What’s the size of the “negative impact”? What type of feedback the game will offer to let peoples know about this without reading the patch notes?

Notice 1- From the main page: “The current plan is for the public test to last several weeks to fully test all aspects of the upcoming Battlegrounds content.”

Notice 2- From the patch notes, a welcome new option: “Added a “Maximize” windowed video option which will maximize the game window and remove the borders for a fullscreen experience which allows popup windows.”

All for now. I had other things on top of my head by they seem gone.

Btw, the official downloader for the patch is here – I’m not sure if I’ll mirror the actual patch here.

Oh, and do not log off when you have the flag…