No one can doubt that world PvP has been long dead in World of Warcraft. Also, PvP in general is slowly waning in WoW’s latest expansion Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard did take a step in the right direction with Wintergrasp and their other new battleground (BG) Isle of Conquest. To me, PvP has always been about War. I mean, this is Warcraft right? That was one of the many joys of World PvP; it was true Warcraft style of “zerging” the other faction’s town to try and destroy it and take it over.

When Battlegrounds were first introduced, they provided an incentive for people to play them as you could obtain gear, weapons, and mounts with honor points and marks of honor. Honor was obtained by you and your team killing the opposing faction, capturing a node/flag, or winning the battleground. Marks of honor are rewarded after each battleground is over, the losing team gets one and the winning team gets three. They also introduced ranks into PvP but this didn't last long as to get to the top rank you had to play consistently and hope you were the one picked when all honor was accounted for every Tuesday.

The battlegrounds that were out in Vanilla WoW were; Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley. Warsong Gulch (WG) and Arathi Basin (AB) were more like mini-games in terms of the way they were played. WG was a capture the flag type scenario and Arathi Basin was a capture the nodes game. Alterac Valley (AV) was very close to the RTS Warcraft experience. You had to capture and destroy the opposing team’s towers and kill their lieutenant and general in order to win the game. Many will remember AV games taking hours sometimes days for a side to win.

The Burning Crusade came and introduced one more battleground along with Arenas. The new battleground was called Eye of the Storm and was like a mix of WG and AB combined, and while fun, it never reached as much popularity as the first three BG’s did. Arenas were, and still are, a big focus in PvP. Only the truly skilled could compete, or more like the flavor of the month classes could compete. Most will remember a strong and dominant team was a Resto Druid/Warrior. They were almost unstoppable for a long while until they both got nerfed.

Then in comes Wrath of the Lich King with a world battleground called Wintergrasp and two other BG’s Isle of Conquest and Strand of the Ancients. Wintergrasp was extremely popular mainly due to whoever won got access to the loot piñata that is Vault of Archavon, which the boss inside has a chance to drop the current season and tier gear for all types of classes. Strand of the Ancients (SoTA) was a flop, as it was a King of the Hill type battle, and Isle of Conquest tried to recapture the epic Alterac Valley feeling with vehicles and destructible environments, but it flopped as well.

So now let’s get to the nitty-gritty. In order for anyone to obtain the high end PvP gear you have to do Arena. In order to be good at Arena, you both have to be skilled and have a good teammate or be one of the FoTM (flavor of the month) classes and enjoy the ownage. Do you see what's wrong here? There has been a lot of flak from the fan base that they simply just don't want to do Arena and want other pathways to the high end PvP gear. Right now, the path is this:

-Buy or craft basic blue PvP gear.
-Do Battlegrounds until you are blue in the face to buy the basic purple PvP gear.
-Do VoA twice a week and pray that the bosses drop some useful PvP gear for your class.
-Do Arena and pray that you don't run into players with better gear than you do and try to get your rank up.
-Rinse and repeat and buy Arena gear with Arena points.

Sounds simple enough right? The problem is that once you start doing Arena, it may take you weeks or months to be “geared” enough to fight other opposing teams. Blizzard has tried to fix their system by implementing a matchmaking system that matches you against other teams with similar ranks as you, but say you fight a team with the same rank, they could out gear you by a lot and simply steamroll you. Now losing is not fun, we all know that, but how does one raise morale if they are losing a good 75% of the time due to facing people who consistently out gear them? It is not fun! One could study their class and other classes and try to implement strategy, but if the other team just one to two shots you, then there is no fun in that, just pure frustration.

Eventually, if you are good enough, you can ascend the ranks and obtain the best PvP gear and only have to wait until the next season for the next set of gear. So why have Arenas become so unpopular?

Many people feel that a lot of nerfs and buffs to classes are due to Arena and they are right, Blizzard even admits that sometimes they have made changes to classes due to Arena representation of that class. Also, most feel that you cannot get far in arenas due to not having the right team or being the FoTM class. I think that we just need to bring the War back to Warcraft, even in the Arena.

Here’s my Arena idea: what if Arena mode was more like the Arenas of Roman Gladiators? Most can remember the movie Gladiator and the scene with Maximus facing off against two tigers. Can you imagine you and your team pitted against some giant dragon while the other team has to fight that same dragon as well? In order to win you would not only have to kill the opposing team but kill the dragon as well. Some may say, “Well the opposing team could hide behind a pillar and wait for your team to finish off the dragon!” To fix that Blizzard would have to make sure the dragon is attacking everyone on the field and does not have an aggro table and also immune to taunt effects. This would call for more strategy to be implemented by both teams and cause for much mayhem and chaos.

As far as Battlegrounds go, I know in Cataclysm they are bringing Rated Battlegrounds which is a step in the right direction and I think they are bringing in two more battlegrounds but I don't think there is any real info about them yet. They need to bring the war feeling back into the Battlegrounds. How does one accomplish this? Some examples would be old school Alterac Valley or Isle of Conquest but most people don't like this. Alterac Valley back in the day took too long and most people don't like vehicles so now we are stuck with a zerg rush of an AV and a 20 minute wait just to do one IoC.

So you, the reader; what would some of your ideas be? Go ahead and comment below and let me know! Please, we want to hear from you! My personal opinion to make Battlegrounds better is: Make them more war like. Gather reinforcements, build encampments, defend your base and general. Basically, make it similar to RTS Warcraft, but from the view of a soldier and the battleground leader could be the one making some decisions on how the base is built and have other people be assist.

Once again, the changes that await us in Cataclysm I hope will bring better changes to PvP and make the incentive TO PvP more prevalent. Come on Blizzard! Hurry up already!