The faction split is really horrible on Russian realms, but as I’ve mentioned in other threads, uneven faction splits are meant to frustrate people over time to reroll. It’s the convenience that keeps people from doing so.
As for the Russian segregation the way it is now has never made sense. It’s a haphazard attempt to placate the masses, while making it worse for everyone involved.
It also doesn’t make sense to include realms of other languages (not just the Russian realms, same goes for German, Spanish and French realms as well), in the matchmaking mix.
They were all given their own realms for good reason. It also doesn’t make sense to imply by design that they still need to use English in the battleground chat, when they clearly chose not to play on English realms.
So what you end up with is a social design that’s by design telling you to not talk to each other. It’s toxic, it’s counterintuitive, and it’s isolating in nature.
The battlegroups from vanilla at least made sense in the way that they separated the language’d realms to their own battlegroups. No German server was mixed with an English server, for example. The same later on, no Russian server was mixed with a German server. No French server was mixed with a Spanish server.
So on and so forth.
Then Blizzard decided to get high on censored and threw everyone in together for the sake of convenience, completely destroying what little was left of the healthy social design.
Many people seem to be against realm-only queues for some reason (even though it’s the best social design you can have, including its intended frustrations which serves to balance realms over time (years)), but the way it is now is as far from Vanilla as you can get.
Even the VANILLA battlegroups had split the language’d realms, keep that in mind. Sure, there weren’t any Russian realms back then, but there were French, German and Spanish realms even back then.
So for the sake of the social design. For the sake of the self-balancing mechanisms of the sociological effect of frustration, if they insist on xrealm, then they need to put in battlegroups like they were structured in Vanilla.