I stumbled upon the following Blizzard Poster's ("Blue") response to someone asking about the excessive queue times for those with exp turned off. Here's what he had to say:
Blizzard Entertainment
Zarhym
Blizzard Poster
* 18. Re: Blizz: Non-XP Battlegrounds 08/10/2009 09:16:08 PM PDT
Q u o t e:
All across the board people are complaining about the lack of games available to people with experience turned off, is anyone looking into this?
For a long time we've wanted to allow players to gain experience through Battlegrounds. One major issue with this though, is that we cannot have those players entering twink matches where they just get rolled over and over again, gaining virtually no experience. We don't want players who are participating in Battlegrounds while continuing their leveling experience on the same playing field as those who make the most of their character in a given level bracket and want to stay there.
If there are a lack of matches launching for those with experience gains turned off, it just shows that this isn't an exceedingly popular form of game play, at least not on some Battlegroups.
Q u o t e:
Have they thrown around the idea of pooling everyone with xp turned off into the same battlegroup ques?
Unfortunately, there are massive technical limitations that prevent this from being a viable solution.
Q u o t e:
I'm not asking for a solution in 5 minutes, but a blue response simply saying "we understand there is a problem" would be golden, and I wouldnt feel like we twinks are being ignored!
I wouldn't say we recognize it to be a problem. There are those who love to twink characters, purposefully trying to stay at a specific level with specific gear just so they're more powerful than the majority of the characters within at least 4 or 5 levels of them. Then there are those who wouldn't mind playing in a Battleground for fun now and then during the leveling process, particularly now that experience is offered. If Battleground queue times for twinks on any given Battlegroup are so long, I think it just goes to show what a small, niche form of game play twinking is.
As a company, we've never officially supported twinking. We've just been allowing it this whole time. Now with patch 3.2, we're technically supporting twinking by allowing players who aren't level capped to play in Battlegrounds without risking leveling up. The only fair way to do this though is to separate the twinks from everyone else, and thus you have whatever is left over in the twink queues.
Edit: What Crygil said too, because it sounded nicer and contained fewer words.
(The entire thread can be found here:
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Blizz: Non-XP Battlegrounds)
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