Not-so WoW

WoW PvP Frustration — not coming from where you’d expect.
There’s some pretty cool stuff you can get for your character by gaining honor in the various PvP Battlegrounds in WoW. The battlegrounds work a bit like an Arena match in CoH, except you pretty much just sign up to play in ‘the next one available’ and get teleported there (with a confirm window in case you’re no longer interested) when it comes up. Everyone getting sorted into similar-level matches broken up as 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, et cetera.
So… these rewards you can sort of bank on your honor to get from the battle masters? There’s a really cool mount I’d like to get at level 60. To get it, I need 30 ‘honor tokens’ — denoting participation — from each of the three battlegrounds that someone who’s level 60 can participate in. The three BGs are Warsong Gulch (the first BG: a bog-standard capture the flag game on a smallish map), Arathi Basin (a really neat one where you try to capture and hold as many of the five resource-generating spots on the map as you can, for as long as you can, until one side or the other racks up 2000 resource-points), and Alterac Valley (which I know nothing about, since I can’t get there until level 51).
And honestly? I’m enjoying myself — otherwise not even the cool mount could keep me in their — playing against live players makes me a better player in PvE as well (and vice versa, I’ve found), and it’s actually really fun to fight people for awhile before going back to the content-driven quests. Also, I just I like seeing my ‘lifetime kills’ number go up. 🙂
So… where am I on the quest for the cool mount? I have all the 30 chits I need from Arathi Basin — it was the first Battleground I tried, and I liked it a lot, so I kept doing it. Each “win” got me 3 chits, so 10 runs in there got me all the chits I needed.
I have about a third of the chits I need from Warsong’s capture-the-flag. I started doing this BG later, plus it’s not as much fun, but I’m doing it. This part is also taking longer because Horde doesn’t WIN as much in this battleground (we tend to win most of the time in AB), and each match, which should be fast, instead takes AGES, and Losing only gets me one chit instead of three. 😛
Lee assures me that Alterac Valley is even cooler, combining the best parts of both previous Battlegrounds, so I don’t worry that I can get all the chits I need from there, before sixty.
The problem?
I just hit level Fifty, which means I get sorted into the next highest tier of combatants (levels 50-59). This has caused me two problems:
1. It takes ages for a Warsong match to start up in my new tier. I assume this is because people in the fifties are instead running in the AB or AV battlegrounds, having already gotten all the Warsong battle honors they need, and also probably fed up with running those matches.
2. At fifty, I’m the lowest level guy in any given match, while my average opponent is 8 or 9 levels higher than me and doing commensurately more damage (and taking less from me) — this means that even when I do get into a match, I’m getting wiped out in seconds when I actually go up against someone, and spend a lot of time running back to the fight from the resurrection point.
What I need to do is just wait until I get about five more levels, and then go back in. What I WANT to do is run Warsong until I get the 30 chits, so I never have to do it again, but at this stage, that could take as many as 20 more matches. 😛
Annoying.