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Breakfast Topic: Have rated battlegrounds met your expectations?

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

When Blizzard announced the concept of rated battlegrounds, many players, including myself, were ecstatic. Only my old vanilla main has a PvP title, and I'd always wanted to try getting one on my druid. I imagined that we would queue for battlegrounds as usual, but that our ranking on the ending scoreboard would combine with our personal win/loss ratio to create our personal battleground rating. Over time, players would be separated by rating and would wind up in battlegrounds with others of similar skill. The way I imagined it, forming premade groups would be an advantage, but not a necessity for rated play.

Needless to say, that's not how things turned out.

I understand the reason why Blizzard requires full premade groups for rated battlegrounds, and I can see how very good players could wind up with a less than stellar personal rating due to unlucky battleground groups. Still, it's not what I had envisioned, and the fact that my favorite large battlegrounds like Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest are not represented is disappointing. Blizzard recently announced that it's eliminating the 15v15 bracket, making all rated battlegrounds 10v10, which might help groups that are scrambling to find enough players -- but will (at least for the moment) exacerbate the problem of battleground diversity. Blizzard plans to adapt other maps for the 10v10 bracket, but for now, the available rated battleground scenarios are much less numerous than normal, unrated battleground options.

Have you tried rated battlegrounds? Were they everything you'd hoped for? What do you think Blizzard could do to improve the system ... or do you like it just the way it is?