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Details on the BG matching system
Long talked about, mostly anticipated, and currently in testing for patch 2.1, the Battleground matching system aims to make the BGs more fair and fun for all. Twinks will be matched up against twinks, regular players against regular players, and at the higher level brackets, people in full T5 (or Gladiator, or what have you) should mostly fight similarly-geared people. It should also attempt to keep preformeds from fighting against PuGs. That's the idea, anyway. But how is it going to work? A few blue posts over the past couple days have given some interesting information: The matching system is pretty "lax" right now, since there aren't as many people playing the BGs as there have been at times in the past (due to the Arenas, is my guess). This means, in the interest of keeping queues short, people of fairly disparate gear will still get matched up against each other from time to time. Matching will be based on two factors: the size of your group and the quality of your gear. To prevent the obvious workaround of equipping bad gear and then swapping into epics as soon as you zone in, the system will look at all the gear you own and take the average quality. When you're in a group, the gear value used is the average quality of all the gear of everyone in your group. In short, according to Drysc, When it's trying to find others to match you against it's going to take your gear number, and party size, and try to find other people/teams that fall within your same gear and organization level. If you're in greens and playing by yourself it's going to try to match you up with others that are in greens and playing alone. However, as the CMs continue to point out, the system would rather have you play sooner than sit out waiting for the perfect match-up, so you're not going to get a "fair" playing field all the time, or necessarily even most of the time.One problem that occurs to me with the gear rating system: what's to stop you from "watering down" your gear quality rating by filling bank and inventory by filling them with trashy greens? That would bring your average gear rating way down, even if you had full epics equipped, and would seem to enable a determined twink to still stomp all over "regular" players. But maybe this is a fringe case, and it's more important to get the system to work for the majority of players who want to work within a system. At any rate, follow the cut for all the official info.
