This week has marked my first foray into Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft – specifically, Alterac Valley. The setup of this particular BG is that the two sides – the Alliance and the Horde – are in a race to destroy one another’s strongholds and defeat one another’s non-player, computer-controlled leaders. You start at one end of an enormously long map and basically run straight at – and hopefully through – one another and try to complete your objectives before the other side.

I’ve been playing WoW for over a year at this point, and I had never tried Battlegrounds because, frankly, I had a prejudice against it. It seemed to me like it would appeal to a certain type of player I’d simply rather avoid: the power-gaming, twitch-centric FPS fiend accustomed to deathmatches and approaching it with the attitude that all the fun to be had consists of pwning n00bs. What drew me in, finally, was the fact that there’s some damned good gear to be gotten from PvPing, and I needed to gear up my Hunter alt if he was ever going to be worth taking to a real instance.

I would like to say that I was, with qualifications, very wrong about PvP.

I think it’s important to note those qualifications, though: there is definitely a “gankster” attitude present in BG. It is deeply chaotic. It is all about killing each other just as much as it’s about killing NPC objectives. That said, for the most part it surprised me with how much strategy and tactics could be found there.

  • There is one particular set of small outcrops over the valley, at one point of the map, where it is always useful to stand and rain death from above. The fact that people cannot see you on their screens, or don’t angle the game-camera such that they can see you, is an absurdly good tactical advantage.
  • A well-used pet can create tremendous chaos in a given exchange.
  • Everyone, on both sides, always ignores pets. This only adds to the chaos they can create.
  • Besides the real presence of n00b-pwning – and I am the n00best of the n00bs in battlegrounds, I assure you – there is also some genuine teamwork that happens. It’s largely spontaneous, because the chaos of BG does not lend itself to organized efforts, but in a way that makes the teamwork all that more satisfying when it does happen. The presence of a healer who actually heals is a pleasant surprise. The presence of a healer who will heal a pet? That’s like shitting a diamond the size of your fist: it hurts when your pet pulls enough aggro to start taking damage, but heavens, that healing is nice to see.
  • Almost everyone from Medivh I’ve seen in BGs has been a complete cock. Yes, yes, they were the first ones to open the gates. They are also pushy assholes.