HISTORY
Back in the day, <No Turtles> was a successful twink guild filled with level 19, 29, 39, and 49 twinks. We’d do 10v10 matches against other twink guilds in order to achieve a gear-neutral equally matched game. Those matches were fun as hell. We had to set up gear-equivalent games on our own, since Blizzard could not manage this service on its own. 70-pvp, then later 80-pvp end game play was plain bad. There was no easy way to play 10v10 end-game PvP with gear equivalency.

Twinks suffered a slow and agonizing death. First BOA was introduced. This forced people with twinks on remote servers to then make 80’s to support the twinks and get BOA gear. Next, Blizzard killed all twinks in summer of 2009 by turning on XP in games. This killed all twinks off. Sure there were a few organized games here and there on Nightfall, Ruin, and other servers, but it was 95% dead.

In late 2010, Cataclysm “fixed” the twink problem with merged battlegroups. However, they made it easier than ever to get good PVP gear, and then they set up rated battlegrounds. But, with Cata, they moved abilities all around, so for some classes, they don’t have the basic things they need for PvP survival until level 50+. (Mage has no frost armor until 50). This in a way kills 19-49 action, and usually, there are massively unbalanced classes (19-hunters and rogues!) that own certain levels.

The idea of gear-equivalent battlegrounds is ultimately why I got deep into Warcraft (manually creating the games before they even existed), and it still is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in WoW. But I am thankful that we now have rated BGs. 

RATED BATTLEGROUNDS
The current challenge is putting together a network of QUALIFIED players so that a good-quality rated BG can happen. I am currently on an RP-pve server, which means it’s harder than ever to get people to PVP.

On Cenarion Circle (CC), there are currently two PVP guilds: <PIMP>, <Cereal Killers>. The problem we have on CC, is that PvPers are now in separate guilds so that it’s harder to get a 10-man team going.

GOAL
The goal is to have a team of 30 to 40 solid arena-playing PvP’ers for rated.

CHALLENGES
1. Organizing Players. 1 or 2 or 3 RBG teams. How do we organize people from different PVE and PVP guilds into one rated team or keep them in separate guilds. Can we use chat channels to organize quality players vs a pvp guild.

2. Weeding out the weak. While many people want to PVP, that doesn’t equate to them having skills, or speed, or gear, or teamwork skills, or communication skills. Many things are needed to be a solid player. A big challenge is weeding out people that are too stubborn to learn new skills and become solid. There are too many people without mics, and too many people without good arena skills. These people do not belong in PvP (arena or RBG)

3. Inclusive or Exclusive guild or chat channels Being an inclusive guild, or an exclusive guild. Do you invite everyone, and see how they improve, and focus on Quantity? Or do you screen everyone and only include the top 10% players for quality? How do you kick people and under what grounds? How do you maintain quality?

4. Training. Automation of training needs to happen. Nobody wants to invest 10-20 hours training new people to have them leave the guild or quit WoW or whatever. There needs to be a way to spread PvP teachings quickly to the entire guild. I am using this web site to focus on training without building a specific guild for that purpose.

You didn’t become great at PvP overnight. It was a long journey. You learned 100’s of things from websites, practice, experience, friends, teammates, etc. You played several classes over time and know how to predict your enemies and teammates’ moves. Keeping this in mind, think about how you got started in PvP. Was it a good experience? Was the PvP guild nice or mean? Were you an isolated PvP player in a PvE guild?

Currently there is no guild on Cenarion Cirlce (CC) whose goal it is to teach all new members how to become good at arena AND dueling AND RBGs, etc… There is no organized PVP guild with an RBG team over 2200. There are a few people trying to make this happen.

conclusion: CC has not reached its potential in organizing quality PvP