Is AV fun?

On average the quality of comments from readers of this blog who sign with some sort of name is much higher than the quality of the anonymous commenters. So it came to some surprise that my last post had an anonymous comment of surprising insight:

"I think it's telling that you didn't mention that Alterac Valley was fun (if it was), but instead focused on the reward side of doing it."

Telling it is, most certainly. But of what? It is no secret that I am personally not a big fan of PvP, so one could be tempted to conclude that it's only me doing PvP just for the reward. But then you'd still need to explain why the percentage of people playing PvP has constantly increased in parallel with Blizzard increasing PvP rewards more and more. So I'm pretty comfortable in saying that it's not just me, it is a large number of casual players doing PvP for the epics. Not because there is any "welfare" involved, but because you can do PvP without the organization of a guild. (Note that my priest, who is raiding, doesn't do any PvP, because he gets his epics from raids, and my guild is shorter in raid healers than raid tanks.)

So is Alterac Valley fun? For the first couple of times, yes, even for me. But the fun ran out long before I reached the 18,000 honor points, and that was mixing all 4 available battlegrounds to varying degrees. There are very few battlegrounds, far fewer than 5-man or even raid dungeons. Three of the four battlegrounds date back to summer 2005, the fourth was added with the Burning Crusade. Anyone who likes battlegrounds now knows the inside out. And while player behavior is somewhat unpredictable, over time there are certain repeating patterns in the behavior of groups in battlegrounds. So following Raph's Theory of Fun, I usually only have fun when I try something new: doing PvP with protection spec, or playing AV as premade.

So how about you? Do you have fun in Alterac Valley or the other battlegrounds? Or do you "grind" them for the rewards?