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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

It makes me really sad that they are including Battlegrounds in WoW classic. There was a magical period from release date to the first Battlegrounds patch where people actually took part in large scale, world PVP. Guilds would get together and raid towns, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had in an MMO. If you wanted to do something, it took lots of planning and working together with people, not just clicking a queue button while you sit in Ironforge. I feel like the vast majority of people started joining post-BC and never experienced this, but it was amazing.

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They also will not experience the best part of Battlegrounds, which was server-only battlegrounds. Before cross-server battlegrounds (which Classic will have) you could make a name for yourself on your server via PvP. Everyone on my server knew of this gnome mage named Dewdrop. She was so good she had like 4 healers always on her in AV. She was always in AV and you knew to stay clear or get a group to try and gank her.

Once cross-server battlegrounds came out, never saw her again. Or any of the other people on the server we normally played against. It really ruined the community built up on our server, and was about when I stopped playing PvP.

I remember those days. It would have been a very different game if Blizzard had decided to incentivize that kind of world PvP instead of leaving it essentially pointless.

So much weird and cool stuff was possible in vanilla. I remember someone kited a Servant of Razelikh into downtown Stormwind. It could only be killed by activating some object back in the Blasted Lands, so a crowd of dozens of guards and PC’s who didn’t know any better just whaled on it for half an hour.

EDIT: Apparently this was not just for lolz as you could level up weapon skill on the thing. Neat!

Do you also remember the massive imbalances in world PVP? The majority of servers were significantly skewed towards one faction (my own was 3:1) which meant world PVP was super fun primarily for the overpopulated faction.

This is the entire reason battlegrounds were introduced - balanced world PVP was unviable on almost every server. It was one of the primary complaints about the game, and could even have resulted in the loss of the PVP orientated player entirely if it had not been addressed.

The new "War Mode" mechanics sound neat. It's an opt-in experience you set in a capital city, and then when you go out in the world you are in a _balanced_ shard of only others who opted in as well.

I recall the waiting times for Battlegrounds being so long (sometimes an hour and a half...) that there was constant battle around the barrens, stone talon, and ashenvale. Back then you actually had to show up to warsong gultch to get into the queue. Same deal for alterac valley with the constant fighting in tarren mill and southshore.

I'm not too sure about this, but I think this was also before the introduction of cross-server pvp for battlegrounds.

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