Patch 3.2 was released in Europe on Wednesday 5th August, 2009 after being released one day earlier in the US. With it came many changes including the overhaul of the PVP Battleground system. At the core of the changes were three major new features:

1: By default players now “earn” XP in Battlegrounds when achieving the various goals of the battleground. (Thus endangering twink existence.)

2: Players can opt to turn off the gaining of XP on any character they own by paying a 10g fee to one of several NPCs located throughout the game. (Thus preserving twink existence.)

3: In battleground “matching”, players with XP gains turned off will only ever be allowed into games with other players with XP gains turned off.

On face value, the first two new features seem to add value to the game and to preserve the status quo for those players who have enjoyed twink-play in the past and would hope for that to continue. The last feature however, as feared and suspected prior to the release of patch 3.2, has proved thoroughly destructive in certain scenarios.

As noted in a previous post, my twink is a level 39 resto-druid. It was always fairly uncommon to see many twinks in a game, perhaps one or two being the most in any team. The fear was that this “twink vs twink only” idea would mean there would never be enough players to make a match has been born out.

It is now, at the time of writing, some three weeks since patch 3.2 was released and in that time, it has not been possible to get into a single PVP battleground. Admittedly, I have not been sitting still for three weeks waiting to get into a battleground but instead have been proceeding as normal, spending the majority of time in-game raiding.

However, it was always possible previously to jump onto Gosling after the end of a raid and let off some steam with a quick game or two in WSG or AB. Since the patch, nada, nil, nichts, nothing.

Most of the time, joining a BG queue (of which there is only ever one lifeless looking option available) reveals a predicted wait time of “Unavailable” and a real-world wait-time of “as long as you can bear to wait, and then some.”

Here at the towers, we’ve even logged in and left ourselves queuing for hours at a time whilst watching a movie or doing anything else around the castle ramparts while keeping a keen ear alert for the sound of a BG “popping” to absolutely no avail.

Following up our own personal disappointments within the group of people Gosling used to run through level-39 BGs with, a scan of the official forums reveals more evidence of the same problem being experienced widely across the wow-playing world.

There is no light currently in this particular tunnel. All advice from Blizzard gives no indication that matters might be relaxed to allow twinks and non-twinks to rub shoulders once more which is about the only way we can predict that the problem could be solved.

Certainly, the liklihood that a sudden influx of players wanting to join the “level-39 twink brigade” is surely close to flat-zero – who in their right mind would level and build a twink for a category for which there is no chance to play a game?

Of many disappointments, this is perhaps one of the ones that will have the longest lasting effect on those players for whom twink-BGs were a fun hobby in past times. We can’t comment here on what is going on in the 19 and 29 twink-BGs although the feeling is that they should be less affected given their greater accessibility and numerical levels of player activity. If any of you are running in twink-BGs now, how are you finding things post 3.2?

Strike 1 for Blizzard here though – a bad bad bad decision that has removed an enjoyable aspect of the game and has not replaced it with anything else of value.