Two World of Warcraft Classic Battlegrounds are being released ahead of schedule.
“Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley will open in WoW Classic simultaneously on all realms the week of December 10,” says Blizzard via a new forum post. “At the same time, Elemental Invasions will occur in Kalimdor, with Blazing, Thundering, Watery, and Whirling Invaders appearing in Un’goro Crater, Azshara, Winterspring, and Silithus respectively.”
For those who don’t know, Battlegrounds are essentially competitive multiplayer maps within the World of Warcraft universe. They allow people to queue into competitive matches that see Horde and Alliance teams compete to complete various objectives. Otherwise, the only way that players can boost their PvP rank is by participating in world PvP across the game’s sizeable map. While Blizzard doesn’t outright say so, it really feels like the problems with world PvP in WoW Classic are why they decided to release Battlegrounds ahead of schedule.
See, some of the best gear in WoW: Classic is locked behind achieving certain PvP ranks. At present, the only way to level your PvP rank is by killing players and NPCs in the open world. This leads to things like players killing important NPCs and camping high-traffic questing areas in order to level your PvP character. That also means that anyone (especially lower level players) traversing the world on PvP servers typically find it to be nearly impossible to actually get anything done.
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Battlegrounds should help address that issue by giving those players who are looking to raise their PvP rank space to effectively do so that doesn’t ruin everyone else’s time. While Blizzard suggested that WoW Classic would follow the original game’s content release structure, this marks the second time they’ve released content for the game ahead of schedule. In both cases, their decision to do so has been met by a largely positive reaction from the community.
Blizzard has also confirmed that WoW Classic‘s next major PvE content updates (Blackwing Lair and Darkmoon Faire) will be released in early 2020.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.
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