This is too popular, let's nerf it

Blizzard found a solution to everybody doing PvP: they nerfed it. Honor gain is now 30% less than before. In case you are bad at math, let me run you through this. If you previously gained 1,000 honor per hour, saving up for an item costing 7,000 honor, you needed 7 hours to get it. After the nerf you only get 700 honor per hour, 30% less. So now you need 10 hours to get that same 7,000 point item, which is 10 divided by 7 = 1.42857 times as much, or 43% more. Lowering the honor gain instead of raising the prices has the advantage for the players that it doesn't affect previously gained honor. It has the advantage for Blizzard that most people can't do math and think they need 30% more time to advance now, while in fact it's 43%.

Don't get me wrong, I think the new "cost", the effort needed to get a specific reward, is better balanced. And by making PvP less popular, the load on the servers will be reduced. But of course the way Blizzard got to this result was probably the worst possible: First overshooting in their goal to make PvP more popular, showing everybody that the servers can't handle this, and then slapping a big nerf on it, making everybody angry. Imagine Nintendo declaring that they found their Wii console being too popular, always being sold out at the current price, and so they'll increase the price by 43% from now on. If Blizzard had tested their PvP better and put the new cost structure in from the start, it would have been a lot better.

Another problem has turned up with the PvP reward system: Items cost a combination of honor points and BG victory marks. And Blizzard considers every victory mark to be equally valuable, thus for example the epic PvP mount costs 30 each of the three battleground victory marks. But as you get victory marks only for finishing a battleground, in reality the victory marks from the much shorter battlegrounds WSG and AB are a lot easier to get than the AV marks. That is especially annoying for the Horde, which due to AV geography strongly favoring Alliance there very rarely wins AV. In the time it takes me to get 1 AV victory mark, I can easily get 10 AB marks.

I believe the honor gain to be essentially equal for all battlegrounds, although I need to test that. But although I spent less time in AB than in AV, I already have far too many AB marks, over 40, while still only having 10 AV marks. People who do most of their PvP in AB or WSG complain that they are reaching the stacking limit of the victory marks, while still not having enough honor points to buy what they want. For me that is okay, I actually like AV, so I'll just do my honor farming there. But if you would much prefer the other battlegrounds and are forced to do AV to get the victory marks from there very slowly, I can see how that wouldn't be much fun. Maybe Blizzard should introduce some possibility to trade 3 victory marks of one type against 1 of a different type.