I’ve just learned that come Cataclysm, battlegrounds will no longer be limited to servers from a particular battlegroup, but rather, a region. I mean… holy s**t!

From the Official WoW Forums:

We’re currently expecting both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup (within a region) for the launch of Cataclysm. So, players queueing from anywhere in north america (for example) could play vs players on any north american battlegroup, etc. This applies to all regions, not just north america.

Also, read this post over at WoW.com.

That is freaking amazing!

This means that queues will be popping like mad and we’ll have opportunities to encounter players from all of the battlegroups within our respective regions. I can’t wait!

For those of you that dabble in Twinkery, I have a feeling that this may do a lot to resurrect that subculture. When the battlegrounds were split between experience gaining and non-experience gaining, this dealt a heavy blow to the world of Twinking. It became near impossible to find a non-exp PuG. In fact, I’ve sat hours in the queue on various toons and have never once seen one pop since the introduction of that system. It pretty much forced all of the Twink players to migrate to one semi-active battlegroup (which I believe is Ruin).

However, with the ginormous pool of players to draw from, I think this change is going to breathe new life into Twinking. This change really excites me, because just the other day I was contemplating a transfer for my once active 19 hunter, but now I don’t need to! Provided this change goes through, I’m sure finding 20 experience_turned_off_players from all over the US will be no problem. Same goes for my 49 horde hunter… Come Cataclysm, I’ll finally be able to pit him against some of the other top 49s in the US.

This will also serve to address the issue of some battlegroups being imbalanced in terms of faction. Drawing from an entire region should help to balance the Alliance to Horde ratio and vice-versa.

Now… since x-server battlegrounds were the precursor to x-realm dungeons, this can also mean that we should expect to see the dungeon finder based upon region.

This is just completely awesome in so many ways!

Bring on the Cataclysm!!!