Blizzard is once again testing same-faction Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic, and this time, Alliance players will be receiving more rewards than their Horde counterparts.

　　Starting July 20 and running through July 27, same-faction Battlegrounds will once again be enabled on Burning Crusade Classic, with a few tweaks from the previous same-faction Battleground test. The maximum group size able to queue for a Battleground will be reduced to five, the matchmaking system will wait a little longer to find an opposite-faction match, and Alliance players will be able to complete a repeatable quest that rewards Battleground wins with a box of loot that contains various crafting materials, consumables, and currencies.

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　　PvP Battlegrounds are usually against the opposite faction, ie Horde vs. Alliance. But Burning Crusade Classic has a bit of a faction imbalance problem, with far more Horde players both in general and when it comes to participating in game's match-made Battlegrounds. That was resulting in massive queue times for Horde players that made acquiring PvP items almost impossible. The fix Blizzard came up with was to run a test over one weekend and see how having Horde vs. Horde Battlegrounds (or, in rare circumstances, Alliance vs. Alliance) would change the equation.

　　The result was near instant match-finding times for players, but Blizzard also found some other interesting pieces of data. Many players were participating in full premade groups, which when encountered by players who solo queued and weren't in Discord with their teammates, almost always resulted in a loss. Alliance players also weren't particularly happy. Being able to more readily participate in PvP has long been a perk of being a member of the Alliance, a perk Blizzard now looked to be removing.

　　Hence the new enlistment bonus. Blizzard says the trend over the last few months has been a lower Battleground participation rate for the Alliance, and these new rewards will be looking to increase that number.

　　"A major point of discussion was the perception that the faction a majority of players chose for their main character would see all players switch to it, unless we change the game to either reward the minority faction, punish the majority faction, or prevent players from choosing to play on the majority faction in the first place," Blizzard says in a forum post.

　　That being said, Blizzard doesn't want to dramatically alter the game, preferring to "emulate the design pillars and intentions of original Burning Crusade's game systems" and "address player concerns in a way that capture the spirit of the original design of the game.

　　"As you can see (and has been discussed at great length here and elsewhere), most such changes that might come to mind would conflict with our stated goals above," Blizzard says. "Still, we'd like to see what happens when we place a reward for the minority faction into the game."

　　Changes to Battlegrounds wouldn't be the only modern adjustments made to Burning Crusade. In addition to a paid level boost and a new mount, the game's content is also being rolled out in phases, differing from the original landmark expansion in a major way.