The cross realm battlegrounds, as I have seen them so far in Battlegroup 7 (I think, I don’t know…it’s got Hellscream, Blackhand, Alleria, Whisperwind, Goulash and like that), have been mostly as I expected, at least in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin.

We’ve gone from frequent Alliance losses in those fields to seemingly more frequent Alliance losses. The one thing I saw in WSG that I hadn’t really seen in months of PVPing, the blantant en masse encampment of the Alliance Graveyard by an apparent premade group from Blackhand. Seven of them, just wiping out Alliance rezzers. One of them was the guy with the Alliance flag. At that point, Alliance just stopped rezzing.

As far as losses in AB, I have seen a certain improvement. I don’t see us losing because 13 people are defending the stables from onslaught. It’s now pretty regularly the inability to grab and hold a third node.

The biggest incidence of seeing new things from other servers was in Alterac Valley.

When the lag finally improved from hitting my vanish, going to the fridge, grabbing a tasty Cherry Vanilla Doctor Pepper and returning to my seat just in time to see me go off in a puff of smoke (then immediately die), I got to see a wide variety Alliance strategies, depending, it seemed, on what server dominated the group make up.

On Hellscream, there seems to be a regular strat and pushing straight to Galvanagar, killing him, grabbing Iceblood Graveyard and pushing hard south, racing to to the end…and usually winning.

One of the first groups I got thrown into were all about the race to kill the general, and went straight for Drek, bypassing not only opponents and towers, but all the graveyards. I call this one, the Bush Strategy. Go straight fo the goal, have no plan and then get stuck when you start taking hits deep in enemy territory. While half the force pressed down to Frostwolf, Horde were actually capping stuff. Then everybody gets wiped by a bad run into Drek’s keep (didn’t see that comin’, huh?) and all wind up dumped back at Dun Baldar. At that point, it was just a slow turtling loss.

Another group insisted on making sure the Horde don’t get hold of Stonehearth Graveyard, generally forcing the Horde into a turtling position at IB and preventing decent advancement through Tower Point.

Beyond the strategy differences, the chat was…interesting. Some twits were complaining about every aspect of the BGs despite the fact that they had only been live for about 3 hours total and seeing the strain of 1000’s geeks trying to cram their way in. Once things have shaken out, the chat falls to some guy complaining about the inadequacy of players from a certain server. This guy is usually at the bottom of the kill chart and hasn;t assaulted a damn thing.

Well, thing about AV. It follows the Rumsfeld Paradigm. You gotta fight with the army you have. Even those guys from the Goulash server.