Part 2 of my comments on the Gamespy preview of Burning Crusade, on a totally different subject: PvP. If the information in the preview is correct, the current stupid honor ranking system will be abandoned, to the great joy of players everywhere. Instead there will be a much simpler system, where you buy loot with honor points and battleground tokens.
The advantage is obvious: It doesn't matter any more whether you PvP continuously, or you take breaks and do other things instead. Two people achieving the same amount of honor kills and battleground wins end up with the same amount of reward, even if one of them did his PvP in just one week, and the other took a month for it. You also don't see your PvP rewards diminishing because other players just played more than you in the same week. PvP becomes a bit like PvE, where you know how many mobs you have to kill to level up. Wonder when we get a honor point rest bonus. :)
To balance this good idea, Blizzard also makes a very bad change to PvP: Neutral towns in the new zones, which need to be captured in PvP to have access to the quests and vendors there. That looks good on paper, but is of course catastrophically unbalanced given the generally prevalent Alliance numerical advantage. The neutral towns will be in Alliance hands 80% of the time on most servers. Worst case scenario is that the neutral cities are so important that people start moving server, just so that they are on a server where their faction has the advantage.
It seems that based on the Warcraft RTS games, Blizzard still believes in WoW's strength as a PvP game. But in fact the WoW PvP is sub-par, and it is the PvE which is so great that it has attracted so many players. Neutral cities, where people are basically forced to do PvP to reach a PvE goal is not going to be popular.
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