So let me tell you a little story of a Battleground that wasnt like the others.
It wasnt a BG you joined to finish it ASAP, it was a BG you played to push your faction forward.
While Other BGs were usually over in about 15 minutes, AV could last for Days. For alot of people, AV was actually the definition of the Alliance vs Horde War.
There was stuff to do no matter what you were into, you could do PvE content and help your faction, faming Items to buff your NPCs, summon powerfull Elite Bosses⦠Think what Blizzard promised with Warfronts (what they PROMISED, not what they delivered) and imagine that, but bigger and in PvP.
It was a great map, but I will admit that most people didnt really care much for it. It was a niche experience, something totaly different from the other content in the game. But it had a good and loyal player base who loved the special challenge the BG offered. It wast for everyone, but for those who loved it, it was the only content in the game that offered it.
And it was all fine, until the people who didnt like to play it noticed that there were some AV specific rewards and said āHey, we want that!ā and again, while we would have welcomed them with open arms, there was a problem, and that was the second part of their request: āBut we dont want to play this BG!ā
Let me put that in perspective:
Imagine WoW as a big school. 90% of the school loves to play Football. Its the no.1 sport and everything is based around Football at the school and there are about 20 Football clubs.
But there is a small amount of people on the school who absolutely love Basketball, and they have one Basketball club. Every Club hands out different T-Shirts for people who win games.
Now the Football players come and say āWe want to win the Basketball T-Shirts too!ā and the Basketball club says āGreat, come and play Basketball with us.ā but they say āBut we dont like Basketball.ā
So now they complain to the School board how unfair it is that they actually have to play Basketball to win the Basketball shirts, until the school board caves in and changes the Basketball club, so that it is still called Basketball, but they are no longer allowed to play games but only to do best of 5 Free Throws, so that the people who dont like Basketball can come in, win a T-Shirt and never give a damn about the Basketball club again.
This is what happened with AV.
It turned into a discussion between the 10% of the players who loved to play AV and the 90% of the players who wanted to FARM AV.
And Blizzard listened to the Majority.
The 90% already had everything else in the game, while the 10% only had this one BG, but Blizzard decided that the 10% were not important enough to have something the 90% couldnt farm like all the other content.
So they butchered AV, nerfed all the NPCs, removed most of them, removed most of the Objectives or made them not worth the effort, all to please the people who wanted to farm rather than play.
Theres a reason that after Blizzard started to nerf AV, the Meta became 2 giant Zerg waves that rushed the boss, because the people that now joined AV were not interested in the BG. They wanted to be done ASAP, get the rewards and leave.
And the Forums said āWell, you can still play AV, its still there, just play multiple times to get the old experience!ā but AV was gone. Sure, the name stayed the same, but other than that, the Battleground was gone. What we got instead was a competitive Raid, where you tried to clear an outdoor Raif faster than the enemy faction.
In the end, the people who just wanted to farm won over the people who wanted to play.
And that is a recurring theme in the history of WoW.
Blizzard stoped caring about the people who loved the game and catered to the majority, the casuals who wanted everything fast an easy. Classes were gutted and robbed of individuality to please the people who didnt like that they actually had to think about Raid setup, Dungeons became linear non-Challenging experiences, Group finders became a thing, Epics were literally given away for freeā¦
All to please the majority, who didnt really want to play the game at all, but just want to āfinishā it.