Arathi Basin

Now its time for some of the "whining" of the title. Since i stopped hardcore raiding in april, ive been focusing mainly on pvp. Now that unfortunately means PuGs which are painful. From my experience pvping on both factions, ive noticed the following things which seem to hold true across the board.

1.a) No one wants to defend. So the game starts, everyone streams out to nodes, the alliance tags the Stables, the LM and the GM. Now the guy who tags the Stables heads straight off to the Farm. So we end up with the alliance tagging the farm and the horde tagging the stables, thus games which should be fairly fast end up taking at least 30 minutes as we play musical chairs with the nodes.
b) On the odd chance someone does want to defend, its usually a healer. Which then leads to the rest of the map complaining about the lack of healing. Although i have to admit, im usually found shadowmelded at the Lumber Mill, lurking waiting for some little hordling to wander into my lair.

2. Why oh why oh why would anyone with less than 6k health at lv 70 choose to enter pvp combat. Now im not being particularly elitest, its just common sense from where im sitting. Why do something which must be so painful and frustating when pretty much everyone can 2 shot you. The side with the largest number of undergeared people, and its usually mages and druids will lose, its as simple as that so if you enter wearing completely scrub (sorry, but i love that word) gear you are letting the rest of your team down. Doesnt matter how good a player you are, although given the blue pvp sets easily available from reputation vendors, stam/res gems and enchants etc, i find it hard to believe good players choose to enter as free kills.

3. Communication. Now there are 2 types of battlegrounders. Those that keep giving updates, announce if nodes are under attack, inform people about the enemy strength at target nodes and so on and then we have those that dont say anything. You only discover if their location is underattack either when its capped by the other side or if you happen to be using something like Grid and you can see their health going down.

You can tell a lot about a PuG before the gates even open, does the mage make a table?, do the priests/druids/mages/paladins buff everyone? Is anyone talking in Battleground chat? If the answers to all those are yes, you have a good chance of winning.

In summary, communicate, defend (Nightelfs make great defenders, nothing beats shadowmeld) and communicate some more. Whether games are won or lost has nothing to do with racials, factions or Blizzard imbalance, but everything to do with the players taking part so if YOU lose all the time, maybe you need to fix something in your playstyle.