Glossary: (for my non WoW friends)

Battleground aka BG is a special partof the game where players of one side play against players of the other, rather than playing against the computerized monsters/people in the normal part of the game. Where computerized monsters grant a player experience points, BG kills reward the player with Honor points, which can be used to buy items.

Twink- A player, who only does battlegrounds and doesn’t gain levels (WoW allows you to get to level 70) past certain points. lvl 19, 29, 39 mostly. These are the top level of each battleground level bracket (ie: 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, etc)

computer This weekend, I opted to spend some serious time in battlegrounds. Not just on my druid, but on my lowbies. I mostly did WSG since that’s the only one my little mage (16 at the time, 20 now) could do. I did enough to get her the ring, and I’m 15 tokens away from the lvl 20 trinket. I also did some on my Shaman. I mostly enjoyed myself, and made some observations.

First of all, in the 10-19 bracket, I noticed the teams work together alot more than they seem to at higher levels. At level 70, I see very little teamwork when I enter a bg. I don’t know what exactly causes this, be it alot of 70’s just working up honor to get gear (which is how I initially started out), or just something to pass the time. Either way, it would be a lot nicer to see the teamwork you see at the lower levels.

I also found some ugly in the 10-19, and 20-29 bracket. Now I’m NOT generalizing all twinks behave this way, I know many cool people that have little twinks and wouldn’t dream of acting like an ass. But several times on my mage between 16 and 19 there was some major verbal abuse by 19’s complaining about lowbies in their battleground. These battlegrounds were created for ALL levels of a bracket. Twinking wasn’t an original part of the game, it was something players came up with. And apparently some of them forgot that they started out on the low end of the bracket at some point. Yes, having people of the lower levels make it a bit harder, but why? Simple, the advent of twinking has filled these bg’s with top of the bracket players, in all the best gear (at that level) on both sides. So the average PvP’er in the battleground dies quite quickly, and isn’t very effective against the twinks on the other side.

One example of this that stands out was two consecutive Warsong Gulch battlegrounds on my mage, at lvl 16. In the first we were up against a speed hacker. What this means is, before the gates to our base even finished opening, there was an opposing player capturing our flag. He got in, grabbed it, got back to his base and captured it in less than 10 seconds. We reported it, then proceeded to win the bg. How? keeping mages at our base to freeze him in place, or randomly cast Area of Effect spells, he was an easy kill as he was lvl 10 and had no gear so a simple spell killed him. We won, against rather difficult odds, and the BG leader (a twink, lvl 19) had nothing but praise for our efforts. The very next bg, same bg leader, we were losing, and he proceeds to curse out the lowbies for F’ing up the battleground and not staying the F out, and making them lose.

Now I get that they put alot of time, and work, and gold into their toons, and they want their wins. But there is no excuse for abusing the lower levels of the bracket for entering a BG they have every right to play in. Until they decide to make 19, 29, 39 lvl only BG’s they’re just stuck with us noobs.

On the good side, I’ve lost alot of assumptions about bg’s. The main one being that the gear rewards weren’t any good for the PvE aspect of the game, where I spend most of my time questing, killing monsters. They actually are quite good for this at the lower levels. Especially since alot of the rewards for quests are pretty blah. But it’s left me with a dilemma.

My mage is 20, my shammy is 23. I have geared up my mage really well having hubby run me through various dungeons to get gear, and spending some gold on the rest. I still need to  do that on my shammy. But, I’ll still want to do BG’s. I could level them both to 29, and do it then, avoiding the drama. Or I can say “up yours", it’s an open bracket, and I’ll play if I want to”, rather than passively condone the “noob free bg” attitude by staying out.