The PVP changes introduced by Blizzard last week, which made it possible for powerful epic items to be acquired by anyone participating in the PvP battlegrounds, have unleashed chaos in the World of Warcraft. A “huge increase in Battleground activity” has taken place according to Blizzard. The PvP battleground servers have been overloaded and the players forced to experience massive lag and recurrent disconnections. There are reports of raids being called off because the raiders only want to PvP. Raid guilds are forming PvP premades instead of raiding. Even the economy is said to have been affected with those who usually farm goods for sale giving it up and turning to PvP instead.

As predicted here last week, many people are now strolling around with some Grand Marshal gear, and a general gearing up of the mass of the population is taking place. Blizzard’s response to all this? Some servers have been removed from the cross-server battleground system in order to deal with the lag issues. In this case, battleground contests would only take place among players from that realm. Blizzard has also introduced a huge nerf to the honour gained from participating in battlegrounds. This has been reduced by 30%.

The honour change has provoked howls of indignation from the player base, with some claiming that it yet again shows Blizzard favouring the members of elite raid guilds and screwing the little guy in the street who, with the recent patch changes, finally had a chance to get some decent gear, but now is having to face further constraints which will make that more difficult.