Many Alliance players have this impression that the Horde is constantly united, more cooperative, and generally understands how to play better than the Alliance does. Whether this is true or not is not something I myself can speak for, though I have heard my Horde friends say they have just as many clueless PvP people as the Alliance does.

So perhaps both factions can relate to Mendax's complaint that so many people seem to go into the battlegrounds with no idea how to win, and somehow fail to learn how, even in spite of playing a great deal and getting a lot of good gear. Their tendency is just to go in and lose over and over again, repeating the same old proven-to-fail methods for various reasons: possibly because they don't know anything better, possibly because they don't care anymore, and possibly because they've already identified themselves, their faction, or everyone else in their faction as born losers.

In any case, Mendax thinks that Blizzard should make the battlegrounds themselves reward you for better play, so that the game mechanics themselves encourage you to play in such a way that you're more likely to actually win. First of all, they could provide more honor for kills near contested objectives (such as flags or towers), and secondly, they could deny all bonus honor if you lose. His first idea quite interesting -- I like the possibility that the reward system of the battlegrounds could somehow teach you to play better in itself, if that's really possible. However, while I can understand his reasoning in removing all bonus honor gain for losing teams, I think this would just make the "losers" stop queueing up altogether. We might be happy to get rid of whiners, complainers and all them, but in the end would the increase the waiting time in between battles be worth it? And in any case, would the "losers" really go away, or would they just look for ways to get around the system?

WyldKard sent us this great piece he wrote over at mendax.org about building a better damage meter. DamageMeters is a pretty standard addon by this point, and considering that even Blizzard has started to include damage and healing figures in some battlegrounds now, players have generally agreed that tracking your healing or damage output is a fairly good way to determine your skill as a player.

Except that it really isn't. Wyld lays out a few reasons why, the most obvious being that one player outputting tons of damage doesn't mean your group actually succeeds. As a resto Shaman, I often get the short end of the stick on damage meters-- I do both healing and damage, so I never end up at the top of either list. Also, Earth Shield still isn't listed correctly even in the latest version of DamageMeters-- all of that healing, which I'm clearly responsible for, gets listed as the warrior's.

That's more of a bug fix, though (DM just has to get its numbers straight), and Wyld has bigger ideas in mind for damage meters.