Logging on yesterday, after the weekly maintenance during which PvP ranks are calculated, I found out that I had failed to reach the Sergeant's rank that I had wanted for my Horde priest. I just made it to Grunt, one rank below, but with over 90% of the points needed for the next level already. While I did more PvP than my last character reaching Sergeant, my guess is that cross-server battlegrounds have made PvP much more popular, and on the honor ranking relative scale that means you need to do much more PvP for the same rank. And of course you don't even know how much more is necessary to reach a certain rank. God, will I be happy when this stupid system disappears with WoW 2.0 aka the Burning Crusade expansion.
Well, I still want to be Sergeant, due to the 10% reduction of vendor prices, even if I am not sure whether I will keep that reduction in WoW 2.0. So my priest did some more PvP. To keep things interesting, I decided to do the quest which requires you to collect three honor marks from each of the three battlegrounds. That involved losing three long battles in Alterac Valley, winning an extremely short Warsong Gulch battle, and winning a medium length Arathi Basin battle. The advantage of doing the quest was a nice cash payout, plus over 2000 bonus honor points. I then played some more WSG and AB battles, having already done more than enough AV battles.
I'm now even more puzzled than when I asked why the Horde loses AV most of the time. I only lost one WSG battle, and that was with a Horde pickup group facing a single-guild Alliance group which was probably using Teamspeak, which is an immediate win condition. All the other WSG battles, Horde pickup group against Alliance pickup group, were won by the Horde, and often 3-0. The Horde also dominated all the Arathi Basin battles I participated in, I haven't lost a single one yet. So how can it be that Horde is so bad on one battleground, but wins easily on the other two? Why should the Horde be better at organizing small groups, and the Alliance at organizing big groups? I thought that maybe in WSG it would be the shamans in ghost wolf form being the best flag carriers, but actually due to my epic horse, bubble, self-heal, and psychic scream it was often me who was carrying the flag in the WSG battles I participated in. And in most cases that happened more or less unopposed, me just riding to the Alliance stronghold, grabbing the flag, and running back casting a few spells to protect myself from the few defenders. Boring.
In spite of winning, I don't like Warsong Gulch at all. There doesn't seem to be any strategy behind it, just people randomly running around until somebody grabs a flag and carries it home. And the WSG battles are just too short. Alterac Valley is better, even if I always lose there, at least there is something like a front moving back and forth, with people gathering at different battle objectives, and trying to balance attack and defence. But my favorite is probably Arathi Basin. It has just the right length of battles, a good number of battle objectives, and a good mix of offensive and defensive encounters. Unlike AV, the battle in AB can't really stall, somebody is always edging closer to the win. But unlike WSG the win always takes some time, because it is hard to keep control of more than 3 resource points.
I will do a bit more PvP with my priest, just to get the points I think I need to be sure to make rank 3. But as a long-term occupation PvP in its current form doesn't hold enough interest for me. Usually both sides are more or less unorganized, and individual encounters are decided more by who has more players at the location than by any clever tactics. As getting your fellow players to coordinate more is a nigh impossible task, the whole exercise is far too chaotic for me. Which still leaves me asking myself how to pass the time before the Burning Crusade comes out.
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